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Chaotic Narrative: Complexity, Causality, Time, and Autopoiesis in David Mitchell's Ghostwritten

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00111610903380170

1939-9138

Sarah Dillon,

Chaos, Complexity, and Education

ABSTRACT David Mitchell is one of Britain's foremost contemporary writers who is only just becoming the subject of academic attention. Focusing on his first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), this essay argues that the science of complexity provides a language with which to account for the novel's complex interconnecting structure. The novel is defined as an autopoietic system according to the theories of Maturana and Varela and its engagement with the issues of causality and time explored in relation to the work of Ilya Prigogine. The essay concludes that Ghostwritten is a complex narrative system that responds to the intimate connection between the macroscopic and the microscopic in the contemporary world. Keywords: autopoiesischaos theoryH. D. Ghostwritten interconnectionDavid Mitchellscience Notes 1. Reviewers tend to be divided between those who consider the interconnecting structure to be a weakness of the novel and those who consider it to be its strength. Sherri Hallgren thinks that the connections between the stories are never significant within them, whereas Jason Picone argues that “the connections that the reader draws among all these voices ultimately form the novel's core” (193). The Complete Review agrees with Picone, going so far as to say that “the sum is far greater than the parts (none of the episodes are good enough to be considered successful short stories).” This review states that “Mitchell neatly makes the transition from one section to the next, often with what appear to be inconsequential encounters and occurrences (or occurrences that are consequential in entirely unexpected ways). These transitions are, in fact, the most successful part of the novel.” 2. Amongst those to which Ghostwritten has been compared are: Richard Linklater's film Slacker (1991); Arthur Schnitzler's play Round Dance, written in the late 1890s; the contemporary novel House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski (all referenced by Miller); as well as Alex Garland's The Tesseract (1998) and Simon Lewis's Go (1998); and modernist episodic novels including James Joyce's The Dubliners (1914) and Samuel Beckett's More Pricks than Kicks (1934) (all referenced by Blincoe). None of these comparisons are developed in any detail and some, even at a cursory glance, are inappropriate—Slacker's structure of moving from one character to another, for instance, is monotonously linear with none of the complex interweaving found in Ghostwritten; a more interesting filmic comparison, although also less complex than Mitchell's novel, would be Gurinder Chadha's What's Cooking? (2000). Garland's The Tesseract provides perhaps the most interesting comparison given: its shared interest in causality—this manifests itself in such comments as “The moon orbits the earth. High tides and low tides come and go, the cause being gravity but the reason being nothing” (Garland 26) and in Alfredo's reasons for undertaking PhD research into Manila's street children, “And the answer, Alfredo knew, was going to be hard to express. If at all, it was going to be found in the statistics of cosmic distances, as bound to complexity as the light from that evening's sunset” (247); its subtle phrasal repetitions—compare the opening of “Black Dog,” “There was no bright colour in the room” (3), with the opening of “Black Dog Is Coming,” “The view outside the kitchen window was full of colour” (109); the reiteration of characters on scales of more or less significance depending upon which story they are in; and the name of a character, Uncle Rey, which recalls the title of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) from which the epigraph to Ghostwritten is taken. The Tesseract also indicates its link with science in its title—a tesseract is “a four-dimensional object—a hypercube—unravelled” (308)—and it functions in the novel as a metaphor for the way in which we only have access to an unravelled version of events, never to “the thing itself” (308). This accounts for the narrative structure of The Tesseract, which tells a certain set of events from the perspective of the different characters involved in them, a narrative technique that differs from that of Ghostwritten, which is more ambitious in its temporal and geographical range, evoking the global interconnection of vastly differing lives. 3. In particular, the repetition of a similar plot across the three stories of Palimpsest has encouraged critics to identify this plot and its protagonists with H. D. and the events of her life, particularly her experiences during World War I. For a more detailed discussion of the second two stories of Palimpsest see “Queering the Palimpsest: H. D.” in Dillon. 4. In “‘On the Fringe of Becoming’—David Mitchell's Ghostwritten” (2004), Phillip Griffiths employs the metaphor of the palimpsest in his analysis of the structure of the novel: Griffiths' essay attempts to mirror the complexity of Ghostwritten by bringing together a range of ideas from contemporary literary theory to account for it, including “Jacques Derrida's concept of différance and the trace structure of the sign, Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogic polyphony, Jean-Francois Lyotard's deconstruction of the grand narratives of teleological history and Manfred Pfister's differentiation between inter- and intratext” (79). While the ambition of this approach is not quite realized and while I would contest much of Griffiths' argument—not least his understanding of the relationship between literature and theory and his situation of Ghostwritten as a postmodern novel—it is an important essay in insisting on the necessity to pay academic and scholarly attention to Mitchell's work. 5. While reviews of the novel all comment on the interconnections and even enumerate some of them, no review has provided a detailed account of these connections that demonstrates evidentially the intricate structure of the novel. This is no doubt due to the spatial limitations of the review format and the daunting number of connections. Without in any way being exhaustive, I will detail some of those connections here in order to rectify this omission in current writing about the novel. 6. Connections between Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas include repeated characters, such as Denholme and Timothy Cavendish, Hester Swain and Luisa Rey, and repeated motifs, such as that of the comet. Saturo's reflections about the possibility of meeting his estranged wealthy father in Ghostwritten also anticipate the plot of Mitchell's second novel, number9dream (2001). 7. This type of causality is of course more popularly known, via James Gleick's account of Edward Lorenz's research, as the butterfly effect; see Gleick (9–31). 8. Porush notes that Porush concludes that “without a recognition of the powerful role the Butterfly Effect plays in human destiny, virtually every great novelist and dramatist, including Shakespeare, would have been out of business” (382). 9. Katy's comet-shaped birthmark links her with a number of the characters in Cloud Atlas who also bear this mark. 10. This sense of time is one of Niels Bohr's primitive concepts that are “not known a priori, but every description must be shown to be compatible with their existence” (Prigogine xv). 11. Berthold Schoene responds to this uncanny vitality in his chapter on Mitchell in The Cosmopolitan Novel (2009), describing how, in Mitchell's texts, “narration assumes quite literally a life of its own, developing an organic, cellular dynamic that serves to dismantle the neatly vertebrate telos and individualist focus of the traditional English novel” (99). Schoene does not describe the texts explicitly as autopoietic systems, however, but less rigorously as “intricate perpetua mobilia of interconnected vessels overflowing into each other, or filling up simultaneously like cells in a hive” (99). 12. Wolfgang Iser's assertion that literary texts are not autopoietic systems since they are not living fails to account for the way in which Maturana and Varela's theories cause us to redefine our understanding of what is living (17). 13. As Porush notes, “if we wander down the pathway pointed to by Prigogine's theories we might define mind as one of the most fertile dissipative structures, itself a product of the dissipative structuration of biological evolution and in turn a great progenitor of other dissipative structures, like technology and literature which extend its power and promulgate information” (384, n.1). The question of the origin of life also provides the link between Maturana and Varela's theory of autopoietic systems and Prigogine's theories, between, as Porush puts it, “Prigogine's theories of self-organization out of chaos and the cybernetic project to grow artificial-intelligence devices” (379), an intimate connection upon which Porush comments in passing but which he does not elucidate in detail. 14. David Mitchell uses the analogy of a child to describe his relation to his work: “Once you've written a book and had it published, it's like your offspring, and you remain interested in how it makes its way in the world. At the same time, you do feel an odd detachment in that it's beyond your control. I suppose it's like having an eighteen year-old who's starting to make his or her own life” (Mitchell, “Interview with Hogan”). 15. “The fundamental cognitive operation that an observer performs is the operation of distinction” (Maturana and Varela xxii). 16. As Maturana explains, by the operation of distinction, the observer distinguishes entity and background, although the odd consequence of this is that the operation of distinction severs the unity from this background. Operations of distinction produce new unities: In other words, a cognitive act produces a phenomenal reality. 17. In helpful imagery, Ira Livingston encourages us to think of what he renames “autopoetic systems” as “all edges, all interfaces” (83) since “an edge is an ongoing negotiation rather than a structure” (83). As in Derrida's refiguration of the metaphoric relation via Heidegger (see Dillon 48–52), for Livingston the stories would not preexist and then interact; rather, they are the product of interaction in the first place. 18. For an enumeration of the differences between autopoietic and allopoietic machines see Maturana and Varela (80–81). In summary, an allopoietic system is not autonomous, does not have individuality and is not a unity, since its “boundaries are defined by the observer, who by specifying its input and output surfaces, specifies what pertains to it in its operations” (81). 19. See Wolfgang Iser (17–18) for an application of this structure to a description of culture. Iser's ideas in section II “Perturbing Noise” of “Why Literature Matters” are drawn directly from William Paulson's The Noise of Culture (1988). They are applied to Ghostwritten by Griffiths who suggests that nonethe quasi-autonomous genre nutshell that is a Ghostwritten chapter is forced to jostle for position with the chapter presently activated by the reader's imagination and thus becomes an allomonous system dependant not only on the activated chapter itself but also on the reader's memory (a process which is repeated as the reader moves along the sequence of chapters, autonomous systems turning into allonomous ones as the reading process progresses). (94–95). 20. Livingston argues that language is also an autopoietic system since it produces its own components (79). 21. Prigogine and Stengers explain that “[a]t equilibrium molecules behave as essentially independent entities; they ignore one another. We would like to call them ‘hypnons,’ ‘sleepwalkers.’ Though each of them may be as complex as we like, they ignore one another. However, nonequilibirum wakes them up and introduces a coherence quite foreign to equilibrium” (180–81). 22. For one theorization of what a systems novel might be, performed specifically in relation to Don DeLillo's fiction and biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General System Theory (1968), see Tom LeClair's Citation In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (1987). Le Clair argues that “the ‘systems novel’ is a valuable new category that breaks up some of the artificial dualisms of current academic criticism—traditional and experimental, realistic and self-referential, modern and postmodern” (xii). Given the explicit intertextual links between Mitchell and DeLillo's writing—the epigraph to number9dream is taken from DeLillo's Americana (1971)—there is significant critical work to be done in the future on the connections between the work of these two writers, as well as on the relation between Mitchell's fiction and LeClair's theory. Note that LeClair references Prigogine and Stenger's Order Out of Chaos in his introduction, arguing that Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures “confirms von Bertalaffy's assumptions about the self-organization of systems, offers evidence of reversibility, effects a coexistence between quantum mechanics and biological science, and thus provides a touch of molecular-level optimism to a world that thermodynamics had conceived as necessarily entropic” (6). However, he does not go on to engage with Prigogine's theories in the context of close literary reading.