ABSTRACT
The publication of Ghostwritten (1999) established David Mitchell as an audacious, thrilling, and entertaining young British writer. Mitchell’s prize-winning first novel combines a wealth of intertextual echoes to a whole range of earlier writers, genres, and modes, as well as to a plethora of disparate socio-cultural, political, religious, and scientific disciplines. Divided into nine chapters and a short coda, and narrated in the first person by characters of various nationalities and cultures living all over the world, the novel sets the physical displacements of the characters against their own disparate idiosyncrasies, thus bringing to the fore the areas of friction and rupture taking place in our globalized world. The article seeks to demonstrate that Ghostwritten shares with Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and other members of the OuLiPo not only the love of games, puzzles, and language play, but also their programmatic attempt to reconcile C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’, and so, that the form, characterization, and ideology of the novel respond to the holistic and transcendent approach to human knowledge advocated since the 1980s in all areas of study, which may be said to form part of the shift towards the Transmodern paradigm.
