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  • David Mitchell in the Laboratory of Time:An Interview with the Author
  • Paul A. Harris (bio)

The following interview was conducted by email from September 2014 to January 2015. I am grateful to David Mitchell for extending himself during a busy book tour marking the publication of The Bone Clocks. While email interviews lack a certain conversational spontaneity, the format proved fitting for this more philosophical and literary-theoretical exchange focused on the theme of time.

Paul Harris:

Thank you for agreeing to do this interview for the special issue of SubStance, “David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time.” Your fiction is mind-bending and thought provoking in all kinds of ways. One particularly fascinating aspect of your work is its treatment of time. I’d like to begin by asking if you have an interest in time as such – is time something that you think about, or are there ideas, images, or theories of time that you’ve been especially drawn to?

David Mitchell:

Thanks for the generous remarks in your question. Yes, time is a seductive thing to think about, even if my efforts feel rather doomed from the outset. You’ll know the quotable theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler: “Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than ‘time.’ Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time.” And that’s a respected collaborator of Einstein talking, so what chance does a grubby novelist have of locating any foggy glimmer of objective truth in this “dismaying” field? Wheeler didn’t mention consciousness in this quote, but surely it, too, contributes to time’s ineffability: consciousness is the prism through which we perceive time, yet consciousness is also unbottleable and theorem-resistant. So: while I like to think about time, I don’t expect to capture it in a net of thought, not only because I don’t have the mind of an eminent physicist (or even a philosophy undergraduate) but also because time would seem to be inherently immune to nets.

Time is a paradox-engendering thing, and not just the famous one about going back in time to kill your grandfather. I think that time is to us what the ocean is to marine life, only more so: time, the great enabler of being. Yet time is a slow-burning ‘decay bomb’ not outside us but within us, all the while transforming our newborn selves through biological [End Page 8] maturity into our senescent selves: time, the great dismantler of being. Time, famously, is what stops everything happening all at once (a quote often misattributed to Wheeler), yet isn’t time also what allows everything to happen in the first place? Sometimes it’s helpful to think of time as linear, such as when trying to grasp why the year 150 BCE happened before the year 87 BCE. English and Latin-rooted grammar is predicated upon time’s linearity, with the past perfect, simple past, present perfect, present, future perfect and future tenses lined up in a neat carnival procession. Yet time can also seem mighty circular, repetitive or phase-like for something allegedly linear, from orbits and seasons, to the life-spans of civilizations, to the deja vù you feel when confronted with the all-too-familiar fallout of one’s own repeated blunders – “Will I never learn?” Time is an ally: it allows us to exist, to allow free will to express itself. Yet time is also an enemy: ultimately, we die of it. The clock insists that time moves at a steady velocity, yet our minds insist that time speeds up during pleasurable activities yet drags during unpleasant or arduous or monotonous ones. What to make of all these contradictions? I don’t know: perhaps the best one can do is to relish time’s mercuriality, and see within it a kind of baffling beauty.

Fiction requires fictional time, otherwise all the story ‘happens at once’ and you have an inchoate mess, or a sixties-style ‘experimental novel,’ saints preserve us. Often, fictional time is merely a matter of B following A, as in this joke: “A skeleton walks into a bar and...

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