Abstract
The breathless itineraries of David Mitchell’s novels Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas position them as books offering a globalized perspective. The novels both employ multiple narratives that—through a range of first person narrators, focalizers, and textual forms—proliferate stories encompassing myriad places and moments. The tales in these works intertwine and nest in one another, their formal links paralleled by spiritual bonds between characters: ghosts, reincarnations, and migrating spirits help bridge disparate story lines. These connections mean their individual stories cannot be read in isolation as an accumulation of different global viewpoints but must be seen as embedded within one another. If globalization views the planet as if from afar and stresses equivalence and exchange (especially through international markets), spirit, conceived here as the capability of some matter to transform itself, allows the world to be seen and surveyed from within. Moreover, the transfer of spirit between characters highlights their interconnections, even if these characters never meet. Consequently, these novels construct the concept of ‘world’ as a complex and dynamic phenomenological production, one echoing Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of ‘mondialisation’. In Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, world is thus discovered only through a confrontation with other beings. As this encounter cannot be staged through merely subsuming the other’s viewpoint, it is dependent on spiritual projection, on endeavoring to inhabit the perspective of another. Through this worldly panorama, Mitchell’s novels rework both the traditional association of novel and nation, as well as invocations of the spirit of a nation, so they can present a world that can only be known from inside material and located bodies, through spiritually entwined perspectives and stories.
Highlights
Ryan TrimmThe breathless itineraries of David Mitchell’s novels Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas position them as books offering a globalized perspective
This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, which is a journal of the Open Library of Humanities
Globalization differs from mondialisation or world-forming: the globe assumes autonomous subjects which are increasingly linked through exchanging goods and services in markets [], while a world is composed of mobile selves whose relation is shifting and mutually constitutive [, 109]; the globe entails the equivalence of exchange relations [54], whereas world employs a contingent equality [52, 71]; the globe is viewed from outside [27], a world mapped from within [42]
Summary
The breathless itineraries of David Mitchell’s novels Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas position them as books offering a globalized perspective. Non-corporeal beings (Arupadhatu, the noncorpum, and the Zookeeper in Ghostwritten) These spirits, though, embody Nancy’s world-forming by appearing in mobile narratives which chart a world from the inside, featuring spirits which—in moving between characters, places, and times—reveal contingent and intertwined selves. This simple interpretation cannot map the novels’ presentation of an interconnected world, a world linked by spirits who inhabit each major character in turn Through these international interweavings, Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas recast the customary association of novel and nation, a link forged in arguments ranging from F.R. Leavis’ nationalized tradition (1973: 1) to Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities (1991: 25–6; cf Barnard 2009: 207). Mitchell’s novels rework both accepted conventions of globalization and the traditional link between nation and the novel, through narratives linked by spirit, spectral connections allowing Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas to inhabit numerous intersecting lives so they might chart the world from within
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