Introduction: David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time

“In the same way that my novels are built of hyperlinked novellas, I’m sort of building what I’ve taken to calling in a highfalutin way the ‘uberbook’ out of hyperlinked novels, because I’m a megalomaniac, and I like the idea of maximum scale,” Mr. Mitchell said.

(Alter)

Oulipians are “Rats who build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape.”

—Raymond Queneau (Mathews and Brotchie 201)

“… and so on to the end, to the invisible end, through the tenuous labyrinths of time.”

—Jorge Luis Borges (119)

To date, David Mitchell’s fiction comprises six adventurously heterogeneous novels. Three are “cosmopolitan”¹ in scope and structure, composed of sections that skip freely around in time and space: Ghostwritten (2001), Cloud Atlas (2004), and The Bone Clocks (2014). There are two very different coming-of-age tales of teenage boys: Number9dream (2003), set in Tokyo, reads like a Haruki Murakami novel unfolding inside a video game; and the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green (2007), narrated by a 13-year old in the English Midlands. The historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2011) faithfully evokes Dutch contact with Japan in Nagasaki Harbor at the turn into the 19^th century, before turning into a romance-thriller.

Both within each text and across his corpus, Mitchell creates a complex dynamical tension by developing disparate stand-alone storylines and weaving these narrative threads into tapestries by turns intricate and fragile. His narratives combine linear and cyclical structures and temporalities in different ways, including having texts begin and end with sections told by the same narrator (Ghostwritten, Bone Clocks), bearing the same title (Black Swan Green), or returning to the same time period (Cloud Atlas). Mitchell’s narrative time oscillates between discrete succession and cyclic repetition: time may be broken into episodes causally connected in complete story arcs, or bent into concentric circles like the “infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments” (Cloud 393) that Isaac Sachs imagines in Cloud Atlas. Because his plotting is iterative and recursive, Mitchell’s books resist the sense of an ending and a beginning alike: Number9dream commences multiple times and concludes with a blank page; Cloud Atlas sections begin and end twice and there are arguably two ‘endings’ to the novel. In the apposite last words of The Bone Clocks: in Mitchell’s corpus, “For a voyage to begin, another one must end, sort of” (Bone Clocks 620).

The Bone Clocks makes explicit Mitchell’s project to integrate all his work into an “uberbook.” His corpus has become a labyrinth he is building by stretching and folding, expanding and filling it in, a creative process reminiscent of his childhood penchant for drawing maps and mazes on large sheets of cartridge paper.² Like Borges, Mitchell builds labyrinths composed in and of time as well as space. But Borges’s labyrinths are multicursal mazes of “forking time” and infinite possible worlds, whereas Mitchell’s uberbook maps out a unicursal labyrinth, a linear path whose twists and turns generate a non-linear, topologically embedded time.³ The metric of clock time and chronological history gives way to a narrative time composed of multiple timescales, from epiphanic existential moments in individual lives to spectral traces of tribal memory, from geological eons to an instantaneously networked globe. Characters and events “distant” from one another on history’s timeline are placed in proximity or echo one another uncannily across generations. These temporal crossings and contacts create a feeling of being “entranced, as if living in a stream of time” (Cloud 408), as Luisa Rey puts it when she hears Robert Frobisher’s “Cloud Atlas Sextet” in a record store. While there are many such traces of transmigration in Mitchell’s books, they do not seem to express a fundamental metaphysical or mystical conviction driving the text. They are more like epiphenomenal effects or logical outcomes stemming from the physical and philosophical laws of labyrinthine time and its meandering stream.

The unicursal labyrinth, considered as a conceptual diagram of time, twists linear time into a repetitious [End Page 4...