Of Memory Boxes and Rhizomatic Structures: Strategies of Empowerment in David Mitchell's 'Über- book'

David Mitchell's novels are tightly interwoven. Recurring characters and motifs, experimental narrative structures and a playful exploration of different media of expression, genres, times, spaces and, possibly, an entire metaphysics, are at the heart of what the author himself calls his 'Über- book'. In this essay, Windberger uses two different frameworks to make sense of Mitchell's arguably empowering strategy of creating larger narratological structures from short narratives connected by recurring characters and tropes, namely Aleida Assmann's concept of the memory box and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's model of the rhizome. With their underlying function of conserving and transmitting memories and stories, memory boxes can be seen as tools of empowering both discourse and reader, which is why they lend themselves to exemplifying how Mitchell's individual narratives can be read as artefacts contained in a Matryoshka doll of memory boxes- the Über- book. Since Assmann's framework does not do justice to the non- hierarchical structural patterns inherent in Mitchell's works, Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the rhizome is also employed, offering a model to explain how the intratextual connections in Mitchell's works are independent from hierarchical patterns and thus become empowering in their own right. Contextualising Assmann's and Deleuze and Guattari's theories, Windberger establishes that Mitchell's oeuvre resists understanding through the lens of a single framework- its complex net of interconnected stories, characters, times, and spaces calls for a multiplicity of readings and interpretations.