Ghostwritten Uncertainty: Agential Realistic Narrativity and its New Materialistic Quantum Entanglements

This essay reads David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten within a framework of ontological entanglements, from Karen Barad’s notions of new materialism. In characterizing the narrative with agency, I seek to illuminate the ways in which narratives are uncertain and relative, shaped by and shaping those they relate with. I suggest that the principles govern quantum physics also structure narrative relationality and formation. By reading the ways Ghostwritten’s narratives entangle, my reading builds off new materialism’s notions of relational uncertainty in analyzing the disembodied spirit, known as the noncorpum, as the “ghost-writing” narrator in all nine narratives. Bridging quantum physics with narrative using a new material framework, this essay foregrounds Ghostwritten as a narrative that reimagines narrative structures and relations as animate, affective, and agential.