Imagining the World and Its End: Ambivalent Globalization(s) in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten

British author David Mitchell is undoubtedly among those contemporary writers who best capture the complexity of contemporary experience, in novels whose very structure mirrors the fabric of globalized human life. Yet his portrayal of our twenty-first-century world and its changing conditions is, more often than not, ambiguously pessimistic, demonstrating his unease as to the current excesses of neocapitalism.¹ Such anxiety has led to significant choices in terms of themes, structure, genre, and language in most of his novels. This article analyzes some of the thematic and structural decisions in Mitchell’s first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), insofar as they participate in his ambivalent portrayal of the globe as at once inescapably doomed and yet possibly and conditionally salvageable. It first focuses on Ghostwritten’s circular and cellular structure as that which makes the book a “novel of globalization” (Rohr, qtd. in Annesley 124) and gives human excesses their new and problematic global scope.² It then proceeds to a thematic analysis of the chapters themselves, focusing mostly on the opening chapter and related coda, as I will argue that the entire novel hinges on them. Finally, the article attempts to uncover the uneasy sense of urgency and foreboding that saturates the novel, and emphasizes the extent to which cellular and circular apocalyptic narratives can help renew our sense of agency in a globalized world.

Ghostwritten’s cyclical structure has already been widely noted; indeed, this is perhaps the most striking characteristic of the novel. Subtitled A Novel in Nine Parts, its chapters hop from east to west,³ before a tenth part, the coda, brings us back to the start, to the east, and completes the circle with that question that already started the book: “Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?” (Ghostwritten 3). But if one were to only take the macro-level into account, this circular structure would only be visible once one has read the coda, which is not the case. The stories already announce the circularity, each internally mirroring the form and then criss-crossing it, tracing different patterns and routes along which motifs, images, words, and characters can travel. Within “Holy Mountain,” for example, at the micro-level, one can notice returning sentences: near the beginning, a boy and a girl play a radio and “suddenly a woman’s voice is on the path, singing about love, the southern breeze, and pussy willows” (118). Near the end, the tea-shack lady witnesses a show up the Holy Mountain in which “a man was singing! Singing about love, the southern breeze and pussy willows” (146). More significantly, after she is raped by the Warlord’s son, the young girl recounts how

In the misty dusk an old woman came. She laboured slowly up the stairs to where I lay, wondering how I could defend myself if the Warlord’s Son called again on his way down. “Don’t worry,” she said. “The Tree will protect you. The Tree will tell you when to run, and when to hide.” I knew she was a spirit because I only heard her words after her lips had finished moving, because the lamplight shone through her, and because she had no feet. I knew she was a good spirit because she sat on the chest at the end of the bed and sang a lullaby about a coracle, a cat and the river running round.

(Ghostwritten 117)

Later in the story, the girl has grown into an old woman, and when the news of Mao’s death has just reached her, she says:

I climbed to the upstairs room, where a young girl was sleepless with fear. I knew she was a spirit, because the moonlight shone through her, and she couldn’t hear me properly. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “The Tree will protect you. The Tree will tell you when to run, and when to hide.” She looked at me. I sat on the chest at the end of my bed and sang her the only lullaby I know, about a cat...