(May, 2016)
In 2004, David Mitchell turned the world of contemporary British literature on its head with his novel Cloud Atlas. A sprawling five-hundred page narrative, described by literary scholar Berthold Schoene as “cosmopolitan” and “global” in scope, the novel addresses itself broadly towards questions of the largest scale. Through the lives of six protagonists, scattered across the centuries, Mitchell engages with human existence in a manner both intimate and removed, exploring and propounding on the forces and circumstances that shape our lives and extend beyond them. Deploying Cloud Atlas’ unconventional narrative structure, and the hesitant skepticism of the novel’s protagonists, Mitchell simultaneously gratifies and cultivates doubt, mobilizes a powerful critique of dehumanizing ideologies, and posits a metaphysics consistent with Becoming, affirming humanity in the face of the “ever-constant ineffable” of a world in flux. Through an analysis of Nietzsche’s notions of nihilism and eternal recurrence, and an examination of the novel’s “infinite matryoshka doll” model of time and human relations, Mitchell’s novel emerges as embracing change, creative and destructive forces, and the unknowability and inexplicability of a world that is not being, but becoming.
Cloud Atlas models this unknowability through the very structure of the novel, deploying six narratives, each (except for the first and last) cached within the others. The novel’s first section, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” takes the form of a diary written on a late-19th-century voyage from the Chatham Islands to California, which is interrupted mid-sentence by the following section, “Letters from Zedelghem,” where composer Robert Frobisher discovers the first half of Ewing’s diary in 1930’s Belgium. The novel repeats this cycle of narration, interweaving, and interruption as the book moves towards its middle-most section, or “navel,” before unwinding backward through the centuries, completing the interrupted narratives and returning to Ewing in the Pacific. As the reader encounters interwoven narratives in the text, the novel calls into question the substantiality of their truth claims through the reactions of the protagonists themselves, by the presentation of the narratives as textual and therefore mediated, and by their hinging on the novel’s “axial nadir and central turning point,” where the post-apocalyptic narrator proclaims uncertainly, “Most yarnin’s got a bit o’ true, some yarnin’s got some true, an’ a few yarnin’s got a lot o’ true.” For Mitchell, this uncertainty remains hopeful and generative rather than corrosive or undermining. Mitchell’s treatment of truth remains tied up with his treatment of temporality: in a metafictional statement of poetics, he writes, “the actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent.” He asks, “is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows — the actual past — from another such simulacrum — the actual future?” In doing so, Mitchell rejects a linear and facile understanding of time and truth, confronting the reader instead with “an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments,” with each present moment encasing and encased by other “nows,” wherein truth itself “hid[es] in imperfect simulacrums of itself,” forever present but forever “ineffable,” beyond our grasp.
Mitchell’s poetics of time and truth resonate strongly with Nietzsche’s theorization of Becoming, and the text’s consistent referral to and reconstitution of Nietzschean philosophy suggest that a Nietzschean analytical lens may offer a rich perspective on the metaphysics of Cloud Atlas. In The Will To Power, Nietzsche describes the “advent of nihilism” in western thought; a condition in which “the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer.” For Nietzsche, this profound meaninglessness arises not from a reality which lacks Truth, but rather from the very “cultivation of ‘truthfulness’” in western and Christian moral thought. Our attempts to freeze the world into intelligibility through reason have washed away the possibility of truth. In Nietzsche’s words, “we have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world.” Scholar Lawrence Hatab suggests that Nietzsche saw this failure in western thought as arising from a studied repression of destructive world forces, from a failure to affirm the “annihilating flow” of time. Hatab writes that, for Nietzsche, “the problem of Time is the problem of Becoming,” which manifests in “the ‘negativity’ of life which renders all things fragile, transitory, and in themselves meaningless.” Where nihilism arises from this ground of meaninglessness, Nietzsche would have us look beyond Becoming as problem, and instead embrace insubstantiality and impermanence through an affirmation of Becoming and a rejection of linear time and telos, or the notion of a static endpoint to Time itself. Time emerges, in this light, as cyclic, dynamic, and unified — themes which Cloud Atlas carries close to the chest, and which serve to undergird Mitchell’s philosophical and political project.
Mitchell mobilizes Nietzsche’s rejection of telos as a generative means to draw trans-temporal connections between characters, but also as a powerful critique of capitalism, colonialism, dogmatic religion, and organizing logics of race and gender. In every section of the novel, Mitchell confronts the reader with utilitarian and instrumentalist logics which enslave, degrade, and dehumanize, all in the name of telos — goals or ideological endgames such as “Progress,” “God,” “Civilization” or “Business.” Nietzsche’s rejection of telos, and of the possibility of completing a trajectory towards such goals, already suggests the foolishness of such a unilinear focus, yet Mitchell demonstrates not only the inanity of these goals, but the process of self-destruction that binds itself to their pursuit. The novel’s fifth section neatly demonstrates this critique of telos, where Sonmi-451 exists as a “fabricant,” or human clone who serves “purebloods” as a waitress at a futuristic McDonald’s. She is a slave under the “corpocratic” system, where each morning she awakes and prays to her “Logoman,” reciting the “Six Catechisms,” before working all day to ultimately imbibe a sedative made from the recycled organs and proteins of other slaughtered fabricants. The earth is on the verge of collapse, pushed to the brink of habitability by the insatiable corpocratic lust for resources. Mitchell offers a scathing indictment of the ways in which ideological formations use and dispose of individuals in the service of their teleological trajectory; capitalism, inflated to dystopian proportions, relies on an unflagging impulse towards efficiency, and subsumes everything and everyone beneath the cannibalistic requirements of economics.
For Mitchell, economics need not be blown to imagined and futuristic proportions to be toxic, but rather seems to function alongside colonial and racial discourses throughout the novel, coercing human beings into the service of telos. In Adam Ewing’s trans-Pacific voyage, he encounters a colonial British missionary who elaborates his theory of God and civilization: “It is Progress that leads Humanity up the ladder towards the Godhead. No Jacob’s Ladder this, no, but rather ‘Civilization’s Ladder,’ if you will. … Our own century shall witness humanity’s tribes fulfill those prophecies writ in their racial traits. The superior shall relegate the overpopulous savages to their natural numbers.” Here, Mitchell knowingly invokes the same racial and civilizational discourses that have led to countless genocides — genocides perpetrated towards achieving one such unattainable end, “Godhead,” or telos. Though Mitchell’s criticism of this logic becomes apparent in his portrayal of the self-satisfied, sermonizing missionary Horrox, Mitchell’s protagonist, Ewing, fails to react against these statements. Instead, Ewing can only express the doubt that, “maybe the Indians of the Societies & the Chathams would be happiest ‘undiscovered,’” rather than break from the conventions of his times entirely to denounce Preacher Horrox for his corrosive close-mindedness.
In fact, Mitchell presents all of his protagonists as necessarily circumscribed within and bound by the social conventions and ideological formations of their times. Timothy Cavendish, of the novel’s fourth section, demonstrates the prejudices of his era with racist and sexist remarks, and even the innocent, Adamic Zachry of the novel’s middle section expresses xenophobia and a pathological distrust towards the “offlanders” that arrive in his people’s village. Theorist Louis Althusser offers a mechanism towards understanding this kind of delimitation or closure in the form of the concept of “Ideological State Apparatuses,” or ISA’s. He describes ISA’s as, “a certain number of realities which present themselves…in the form of distinct and specialized institutions,” including but not limited to the ideological structures imposed by religion, education, family, media, politics, and culture. Mitchell’s novel spans centuries, and each protagonist remains conditioned by the “realities” particular to the ISA’s of their time, even though this means that Mitchell’s protagonists are frequently complicit in the very structures the novel critiques. Schoene perhaps put it best when he wrote, “individuals [in Cloud Atlas] emerge as the carriers of the creative and destructive flows that together constitute the world. … [They] are not initiated into global circulation; they are in fact what initiates, propels and perpetuates this circulation.” In this sense, Mitchell acknowledges the malleability of ideology — the intimate experiences of his protagonists emerge as not only irretrievably influenced by ideology, but also capable of transforming it. Adam Ewing’s radical decision to become an abolitionist at the novel’s end demonstrates the power of individuals to act and to transform global structures, even within delimiting circumstances: “What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”
The circumstances that condition each of Mitchell’s protagonists give their narratives energizing context, and also serve to keep them skeptical of the novel’s over-arching unity as it is presented in each section. The interweaving of narratives in Cloud Atlas, and the metaphysical connections implied by these trans-temporal resonances, manifest as a “recrossing,” or an “intimacy,” noticed yet doubted by each of the novel’s protagonists. At these moments of intersection between narratives, the protagonists become aware of an uncanny familiarity, and react with a well-conditioned cynicism which simultaneously serves to undercut the reality of this uncanniness, and to call attention to the reader’s own skepticism about so forceful a connection. Cavendish, in his unknowing following in the footsteps of Luisa Rey, “[flings] away the sensation of having lived through this very moment before,” prior to escaping from a nursing home. In another moment, he writes of Rey’s story when he encounters it as a book manuscript, “one or two things will have to go: the insinuation that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example. Far too hippie-druggy-new age.” Mitchell deploys moments like this one self-deprecatingly, to be sure, but also as a means of calling attention to and reinforcing the novel’s over-arching metaphysics, even in the face of skepticism from both reader and protagonist alike.
The text’s abiding metaphysics, though undoubtedly ambiguous, seems to lend itself to interpretation through the Nietzschean concept of eternal recurrence. The text invokes this concept explicitly in Robert Frobisher’s final hours, when Frobisher derives comfort from the “elegant certainties” of eternal recurrence before he kills himself: “Rome’ll decline and fall again. Cortes’ll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later Ewing will sail again, Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again … you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again. Nietzsche’s gramophone record.” For Hatab, eternal recurrence consists in a “radical affirmation of Time and Becoming — everything, all aspects of existence are worthy of eternal repetition, in the same way. … There is an infinite time and a finite number of events; therefore events, having run their course, will repeat themselves and so on.” The text demonstrates this “repetition” through the moments of uncanniness or intimacy that are shrugged off by its protagonists, and through its consistent rejection of telos. Telos, as a signifier of a “final state” of the world, towards which linear time and “Progress” might be aimed, demands rejection because “if the world aimed at a final state, it would have been reached.” Instead, the world must be accounted for as it is in each instantaneously fleeting moment, without reference towards a goal or destination which does not, and cannot exist. This “now”-ness resonates strongly with Mitchell’s poetics of time as “an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments,” with the past and future as nothing more than simulacra of “smoke, mirrors + shadows.”
Mitchell complicates a purely Nietzschean understanding of Cloud Atlas’s metaphysics through insinuations that many of his protagonists are in fact reincarnations of each other. Ewing, Frobisher, Rey, Cavendish, and Sonmi all bear the same comet-shaped birthmark, as does Meronym, the “offlander” from the novel’s middle section. Though Mitchell never concretely confirms or denies that his protagonists’ “souls cross ages like clouds cross skies,” the uncertainty that he delivers the reader instead remains rich with profundity and possibility. Upon hearing Robert Frobisher’s Cloud Atlas Sextet, Luisa Rey becomes “entranced, as if living in a stream of time. ‘I know this music,’ she tells the store clerk.” This strange “knowing” appears again and again, as blurred and confused memories between protagonists, as strange flashes of “jamais vu,” as shared behaviors in different characters. Whether these moments constitute evidence of reincarnation is unimportant. What is important is that, in the words of Schoene, “Humanity’s heritage throbs in all of us, at all times, however vaguely and intangibly.” Mitchell seems to offer us a place in the unified whole of humanity, bound across time by eternal recurrence, by the inescapability of circumstance, and by the creative and destructive forces that operate in each moment.
Each character in Cloud Atlas, however entrenched within the modes and ways of being of their time, nevertheless seems to grasp towards this larger whole, to reach beyond themselves. Luisa Rey asks herself, “are molecules of … Robert Frobisher’s hand, dormant in this paper for forty-four years, now swirling in my lungs, in my blood?” Her answer, in the text’s characteristically uncertain manner, is a simple, “Who is to say?” No character presumes to be sure about the metaphysical whirlwinds that shape the world, yet each is acutely aware of their own location within the precise context of their times, and inextricably connected to the world of their times. Mitchell’s characters remain in the world because they are constitutive of it, and, in keeping with Cloud Atlas’ play with Nietzschean tropes, exercise their will to power within each section. To exercise this will is to seek to expand, to seek more from experience, and in the novel this is often portrayed as dangerous: a character remarks to Frobisher, “Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out.” For Nietzsche, this cannot matter: “Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnarled, enamored.” The quality of expansiveness that characterizes the will to power is an affirmation of creation and destruction — it is amoral, untethered to an end or goal. Sonmi’s persistence in writing her “Declarations,” even when she understood she would be executed provides a powerful example: she “[saw] a game beyond the endgame.” The expansiveness of this will, seen operating in each of Cloud Atlas’ narratives, establishes eternal recurrence — expansiveness, as joy, wants eternity. It desires the forever repetition of creative and destructive events, the spinning cyclicality of Time, the constant push of Becoming. And in the midst of this churning, Mitchell’s protagonists ask “why,” seek answers, and partake in this churning itself, as they Become and pass away with the flux of all things. In his novel, Mitchell offers us a fleeting, blurry image of ourselves, swirling in a world that we are at once wholly a part of, and at the same time wholly subject to. We are caught in its ebbs and flows, in the arisings of circumstance, in the particularities of our lives. Yet rather than get lost in the banal intricacies of the structures, of the goals and inducements towards telos that we are constantly confronted with, Mitchell asks us to hesitantly and hopefully take the long view, and wonder whether this has all happened before, and how many times it will happen again.
WORKS CITED:
Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh, GB: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 5 May 2016.
Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas: A Novel. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1967. Print.
Hatab, Lawrence J. Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence: The Redemption of Time and Becoming. Washington, D.C.: U of America, 1978. Print.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” Marxists Internet Archive. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 May 2016.
Collected Writings of Nolan Bishop 