ABSTRACT
From his first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), David Mitchell’s fiction has returned to matters of space, spirituality, and the purpose of narrative. Mitchell’s latest novel, Slade House (2015), extends these thematic foci and is built around the text’s eponymous house, whose very existence in London, alongside the ontological status of its undead inhabitants, remains highly speculative. Mitchell’s novel draws from various popular genres, including detective fictions, fantasy tales, and cyberfiction, to address how contemporary culture relates to history, to questions over identity, and to ethical issues in a post-religious age. As such, Slade House resonates with the very tension within Postmodern paradigms of writing that has spawned Transmodernist aesthetic discussions by critics like Enrique Dussel, with whom he shares a politically motivated interest in the power of religiosity as a path towards individual and social liberation. This essay reads Mitchell’s novel through the trope of its central building, arguing that the non-existence of this virtual or purely spiritual house, its non-place, provides Mitchell with an opportunity to invest the place with the projections of its visitors, thereby revealing a deep-set desire on their part for what Postmodernism had proclaimed to be mere simulacra, lost narratives, or mere spectacle.
