Cannibalising the Other: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and the Incorporation of ‘Exotic’ Pasts

Abstract

David Mitchell’s neo-historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) builds on the kind of historiographic metafiction found in postmodern novels like John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), while at the same time moving beyond these earlier forms. As Dana Shiller’s analysis of a work published as early as Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987) demonstrates, self-referential and meta-critical engagements with past historical periods and their cultural environment have been a feature of a certain branch of postmodern writing for quite some time.¹ When considering the state of literary writing almost one hundred years later, in the early twenty-first century, it is nevertheless noticeable that some writers address a particular culture’s past achievements and sins in a manner that demands very careful reading strategies. One aspect that features very prominently in such cross-historical negotiations is the question of empire and colonialism. Contemporary readers, living in a globalised world of neo-colonial contact and universal exposure to government-defined acts of terrorism, are invited to draw comparisons to their own political present and the manner in which power is distributed, and all too often forcefully reified, across the globe. In his novel, Mitchell manages to walk a fine line between exposing non-European cultures to the voyeuristic gaze of scandalous neo-imperialists — always willing to revert to historical clichés to further their own project — and making visible the crimes of the colonial trade system.