Authorless narratives in Black swan green and Cloud atlas by David Mitchell

For the adult reader of Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, the first couple of pages might come as a slight shock. A quick scan of the book’s back cover will tell us that we are about to read the story of a thirteen year old boy in an English village in 1982. Nothing too challenging or unusual there, we might say. But it is not until we meet Jason Taylor in those first few pages that we begin to fully realise what we have let ourselves in for. Jason is our narrator in the first person, our sole access to the world of the novel, and his voice is plainly that of a child, with all the slang and verbal shortcuts of a child’s voice. There is no trace here of a mature, reflective narrator, tidying the narrative as they go, sanitising their younger self for our convenience. Instead, we are faced with a schoolboy, looking up at us and asking us to agree with him that he could not have done otherwise than to venture into his Dad’s office and pick up the phone, even though he knows he is forbidden to do so.

As we follow Jason through his house, into the village, down to the lake, we overcome any initial awkwardness, forget the age gap, and begin to see things as Jason sees them. Before long, the schoolboy vernacular of Jason’s narration becomes natural and easy, exhibiting Mitchell’s talent for making even the most unfamiliar voices accessible. However, readers familiar with his earlier novels, notably Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten, will know that Mitchell’s primary talent is in the creation through language of deeply convincing first-person narrators. Speaking about his methodology for character creation, Mitchell has described a process of writing letters to himself from his characters: “You use their language, not my language, because they’re writing a letter to me. Do that two or three times, and they’re kind of real enough to then stand on their own feet and talk.” Mitchell employs two such seemingly real characters to narrate the outer-layer stories of Cloud Atlas - ‘The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing’, framed in the language of an American notary immersed in the surreal wilderness of the nineteenth century South Pacific; and Robert Frobisher’s ‘Letters from Zedelghem’, composed in the voice of a down-and-out musician attempting to redeem his fortunes in interwar Belgium. Both Ewing and Frobisher have the advantage of existing in the historical past, unlike characters elsewhere in Cloud Atlas who are rendered unreal by their existence in the imagined future. Yet it is the profound accuracy with which Mitchell voices these two narrators that make their stories temptingly plausible, so much so that if we had encountered them outside the context of the novel we might easily have mistaken them for genuine historical accounts.

We may define an additional aspect to the realness of Ewing and Frobisher’s narratives, present also in other Cloud Atlas stories, which is that these narratives attempt to convince the reader that they originate not from an external author, but from the narrators themselves. This is undertaken through two related devices: (1) The presentation of the narrative to affect the appearance of a different medium, such as a journal (‘Pacific Journal’), a series of letters (‘Letters from Zedelghem’), an airport thriller (‘Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery’), and so forth; and (2) The reason for the narrative having been committed to writing, because it is a journal, a series of letters, an airport thriller, and so forth. Mitchell’s earlier, similarly constructed novel Ghostwritten employs neither of these conceits, and so while its nine narratives may be persuasive, they lack a logical explanation for why they should ever have been written down. However, in Cloud Atlas this anchoring of the narratives to physical media (in the case of five out of the six parts) is an essential feature of the novel’s unique construction, insofar as each narrative must pass to its successive narrative as a physical object in order to complete the sequence of interconnected lives.

In Black Swan Green, we gradually become aware that the chapters we are reading correspond to Jason’s poetic output over the year. Like the chapters, which follow the calendar months of 1982 (plus January 1983), Jason’s poems appear in the parish magazine monthly from January onwards (BSG, 182). We learn that some of these poems are entitled exactly as the chapters are - ‘Rocks’ in May’s edition, and from June, ‘Spooks’, tactfully renamed ‘Back Gardens’ to protect Jason’s identity (BSG, 1834). We may assume that Jason’s other poems follow this pattern, sharing their titles with the chapters to which they relate. Of all of Jason’s poetry, only a single line is explicitly recited to us -by Madame Crommelynck in ‘Solarium’: ‘Venus swung bright from the ear of the moon’, the fifth verse of ‘Back Gardens’, for which she reserves some of her sharpest criticism (BSG, 185). Yet, skimming back through ‘Spooks’, this exact line can be readily observed as Jason and Moran sit waiting on the graveyard wall (BSG, 166). At this point, we come to realise that Jason’s poetry is in fact interwoven with his narration of the chapters in Black Swan Green, and hence we must have been reading these poems unknowingly from the start. As such, Mitchell not only blurs our awareness of the boundaries between Jason’s narration and poetry, but also our perception of the fundamental layers between author and narrator, for if we now follow the trail of language used to tell Jason’s story, we might find that it leads not to the author, but back to Jason himself.

In addition to Jason’s poetry, a more visible component of the narrative is the assortment of attached papers which we find peppered throughout Black Swan Green. We first encounter these in the second chapter of the novel, in which Jason talks at length about his stammer, personified by the inner-character of ‘Hangman’. Here, Jason shows us an excerpt from his abortive speech diary written on squared paper, plus ‘Hangman’s Four Commandments’ scribbled on lined paper, both in Jason’s own longhand (BSG, 36, 38). Later, in ‘Rocks’, Jason is ‘cutting out stuff from the newspapers and magazines’ to paste into his scrapbook about the Falklands War (BSG, 127), and so we find the Sun’s notorious ‘GOTCHA’ headline hailing the sinking of the Belgrano, and the Times headline: ‘Ceasefire agreed in the Falklands’, torn and pasted into the narrative (BSG, 125, 144). In ‘Spooks’, Jason gives us the anonymised note found in his pencil case: ‘thE GRAveyarD 8 tOnITe SpOOkS’ (BSG, 158), and in ‘Maggot’, he attaches the full Xerox found in Mr Kempsey’s cubby-hole (BSG, 269). The effect of these notes, clippings and inserts is to lend to Black Swan Green the character of a scrapbook, much like Jason’s scrapbook of the Falklands War, but with a greater scope to include the whole of Jason’s year.] As with Jason’s poetry, the use of this scrapbook material as a way of telling Jason’s story only furthers our sense that it may be Jason who is compiling his account and not an external author.

The aspects of Black Swan Green which we have discussed, namely the use of Jason’s poetry and scrapbook material within the narrative, prelude a moment in ‘Disco’, the twelfth chapter of the novel, in which Mitchell gives us his strongest indication yet as to how we might view the book and its origins. In ‘Disco’, we find Jason confined to the stationary storeroom as punishment for destroying Neal Brose’s calculator. He takes a fresh exercise book from the shelf and begins a poem which is ‘kicking’ to be written down (BSG, 331). However, the poem quickly morphs into ‘More of a . . . what? A confession, I s’pose’, and we are shown a section of this ‘confession’ in Jason’s longhand. Reading this, we can see that Jason has in fact written the first paragraph of the previous chapter of the novel, ‘Goose Fair’ (BSG, 307). Here, we are encountering Mitchell’s most explicit attempt to detach Black Swan Green from any sense of an external author and to persuade us that Jason is not only the narrator, but also the originator of what we have been reading.

It is certainly the case that Jason’s narration of Black Swan Green achieves an authorless quality comparable with the historical narratives of Cloud Atlas, detailed in our introduction. However, in Black Swan Green this illusive state is achieved through a more complex set of strategies than in the Cloud Atlas narratives, which we understand to be authorless entities from the outset. Instead, we experience a more gradual process of suggestion in Black Swan Green, whereby Mitchell gently undermines our belief in an external author at timely intervals throughout the narrative. This is effected through the introduction into the narrative of Jason’s poetry and scrapbook material, both of which we are invited to trace back to Jason himself, rather than to an external author. Finally, towards the end of the novel Mitchell confronts us with the bizarre spectacle, in the mode of an Escher mezzotint, of our fictional narrator, Jason Taylor, beginning to write an earlier chapter of the very real book in which we have been reading about the fictional narrator, Jason Taylor.

This is as far as Mitchell is willing to go with the conceit, but it is far enough that the reader may begin to imagine Black Swan Green as something other than a conventional novel -perhaps, as the edited diary of a significant year in the life of an English schoolboy; or a mishmash of poems, recollections and clippings distilled into a thirteen-part narrative; or a lengthy confession of secrets and perceived wrongs. Recall the two devices defined in our introduction with relation to the Cloud Atlas narratives: (1) The presentation of the narrative to affect the appearance of a different medium, and (2) The reason for the narrative having been written down. We find these devices similarly employed in Black Swan Green, but in quite a different way, so as to reflect the immaturity and indecisiveness of the child narrator. Hence, what the narrative is being made to resemble - diary, scrapbook, confession - remains unclear, as does Jason’s motivation for having written it down - out of guilt? As a form of catharsis? For fun?

In considering why Mitchell might have chosen to structure Black Swan Green as an authorless narrative, we may suppose that he wished to vacate the novel, in his role as author, to the extent that he has in order to boost the centrality and realness of its narrator, Jason Taylor. Equally however, Mitchell may have constructed Black Swan Green in this way simply because he can. A self-proclaimed “nerd at heart”, Mitchell revels in having Madame Crommelynck describe his profession (novelists) as ‘schizoids, lunatics, liars, petits Zeus' (BSG, 188) - indeed, the manipulation of the reader’s perceptions of author and narrator in this novel seems somewhat in line with this diagnosis.iii Yet, whatever Mitchell’s intentions, the peculiar effect of this structure is to keep Jason Taylor alive in a form of suspended irresolution beyond the last page of the novel. In this sense, Julia’s parting assertion to Jason that ‘it’s not the end’ seems at least partly addressed to us (BSG, 371) - a reminder that Jason is, after all, a David Mitchell character, and as such we are likely to meet him again in another story and another time.