Cloud Atlas, A Novel Questioning Mitchell’s Avowed Lack of Commitment to the Real World
p. 285-296
Résumé
David Mitchell wrote his first two novels in an alien environment (Japan) and confessed that he failed to find commitment to the real world, preferring to recreate this world in a fictional universe. However, in his third novel, Cloud Atlas, the British novelist ruthlessly denounces humanity’s cultural decay, and various forms of commitment (whether political, ethical or aesthetic) seem to be unavoidable. In fact, Mitchell’s writing constantly rethinks the notions of autonomy and commitment, as he underlines their complex relationship and utterly involves the reader into his quest, making him interact with these two notions in the act of reading.
Texte intégral
1As he was living in Japan and writing his first two novels in an alien environment and away from where he belonged, David Mitchell confessed that he lacked ‘a sense of citizenship in the real world, and in some ways, commitment to it.’ To ‘compensate,’ he ‘staked out a life in the country called writing.’1 Cloud Atlas was written after leaving Japan, and looks much more committed than Mitchell seems to think, in the sense that it delivers a dark vision of the world and its future, expounding a harsh message against the excesses of modern society, as if commitment were unavoidable in the end.
2Cloud Atlas is ‘a book about predacity and predation,’2 underlining the fact that human beings can survive only by depending on others, and ruthlessly denouncing humanity’s cultural decay in the wake of Benjamin or Adorno. From a socio-historical context and a literary context or intertext, autonomy first looks unthinkable, for Mitchell resorts to various acknowledged subtexts as well as multivariate genres allowing a greater freedom in form, but also dependent on various pre-determined aesthetic codes, as his work seems to take an ethical turn, reviving satire in a novel way.
3Nonetheless, Mitchell’s approach is not didactic since he retains a detached attitude thanks to a skilfully built Russian-doll-like structure reminiscent of postmodern experiments, thanks to first-person narratives (surprisingly enough), also resorting to a dialect invented to circumvent the English novel’s obsession with style, and thanks to music as a metaphor for a new language through which Mitchell’s reflexive comments on writing emanate. The way he deals with ‘the world’ that he wants to ‘write’ in his novels (Mitchell 2004c) may allow the reader to rethink the ambivalent relationship of an admittedly mimetic novel to the world it copies.
4Mitchell focused on the postmodern novel during his graduate degree and says that post-modern writers brought him ‘the hunger to experiment, which was a hunger that informed my first three books to a significant degree.’3 In Cloud Atlas, six seemingly unconnected narratives hop from continent to continent and shift timeframes, ultimately bound together in a mirror structure. Each episode that had ended in a cliff-hanger manner in the first part is taken up in reverse order, decrescendo, in the second part, when the last and sixth strand of fiction (the central one) ends. Multiple narrators and nested stories depict a dark vision of the world and its future—Adam Ewing’s 18th century Pacific shipboard journal (which breaks off mid-word in the US edition), the letters of a bisexual composer in the 30s, a 1970s cheap airport thriller set in California denouncing corporative misconduct, the nightmarish memoir of a vanity publisher trying to escape an old people’s home, the interview of a cloned waitress on death row, and the testimony of a native islander witnessing the apocalyptic downfall of science and civilization. Each of Cloud Atlas’s sections seem to inquire into how to tell a story, how to transmit a narrative, which Mitchell calls ‘the secret architecture’ of the novel, ‘like the mechanics of the force that is keeping [a cathedral up].’4
5One may wonder how the writer may remain uncommitted when writing about predaceous relationships, how he can not take sides. As a matter of fact, one soon realizes that even though he doesn’t consider himself as a ‘great deep political thinker,’5 Mitchell’s commitment is inevitable. The aesthetic sphere is essentially political, especially if, as in Mitchell’s central part, ‘literacy has been snuffed out,’6 and the artist needs to take up the arms to find appropriate ways to denounce suffering and barbarism. Although he acknowledges that we’re living in ‘a consumer society in the process of consuming itself’ (Mitchell 2005b), Mitchell does not claim to teach lessons, and when critics pointed out that Cloud Atlas ‘is literature turned against the totalitarian world and repression, [...] [criticizing] the modern world as it is’ (whether the actions are set in the 18th century or in the future), Mitchell answered:
I regard Cloud Atlas as a taxonomy of oppression. In the six different short novels that make Cloud Atlas, individuals oppress individuals, groups oppress groups, corporations oppress employees, ethnic races oppress ethnic races, etc. [...] It is an illusion to think that politics is something that merely exists on the news. [...] So although I don’t regard myself as an explicitly political writer, maybe like George Orwell7, I think the fact is: if you write about the world with integrity you cannot stop politics entering your book. And the question is merely: do you do it directly or indirectly, by the front door or the back door. Mostly I’m the back door.8
6In a Darwinian scheme pushed to its extremes, Cloud Atlas’s characters prey on each other. Henry Goose, a malevolent doctor that slowly poisons Adam Ewing in the first section, puts it this way: ‘The second law of survival states that there is no second law. Eat or be eaten’ (Mitchell 2004a, 490). The young composer Robert Frobisher preys on his master, Vyvyan Ayrs, and vice et versa, Tim Cavendish quotes Solzhenitsyn (a critic of communist totalitarianism), and Sonmi explains how ‘corpocracy is built on slavery’ (Mitchell 2004a, 189), but how she, a mere ‘fabricant,’ started ‘ascending’ to become a thinking and independent being.9 Fabricants are ‘the enemy required by any hierarchical state [Unanimity] for social cohesion’ (Mitchell 2004a, 348). Ironically, in the last story, the surviving race that is the most civilized is called the Prescients and is black-skinned: Henry Goose’s order in the first section (‘Whites prey on darker hued cousins,’ Mitchell 2004a, 503) has been reversed, and the reader comes to the mitigated conclusion that ‘Savages and Civ’lizeds ain’t divided [...], nay, ev’ry human is both, yay’ (Mitchell 2004a, 303). The cultural decay (whether it is primitive savagery or corporate business) that Mitchell depicts shows that progress does not necessarily mean moving forward, but regression, as in so many other satirists’ eyes. Such a reductio ad absurdum is pondered over in the Zedelghem section, when Frobisher reflects upon the war and civilization’s decline: ‘science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilization drives itself to extinction’ (Mitchell 2004a, 444).
7In the wake of Adorno, Mitchell seems to shift from a critique of capitalism to a critique of Western civilization as a whole: the masses are just told the ‘tall stories they want to hear’ (Mitchell 2004a, 83), and the American corpocracy rules the world with HYDRA reactors regardless of potential radiation poisoning, when money and power are at stake in the Luisa Rey section. Sonmi’s world is a barren and lifeless version of the world if the HYDRA reactor had existed. Reason has become irrational and enlightenment has turned into ‘disaster triumphant.’10 This statement was made by Adorno and Horkeimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which they believe that culture and society form a historical totality such that the pursuit of freedom in society is inseparable from the pursuit of enlightenment in culture (Adorno 1947, xvi), thus entailing a concomitant failure if one or the other is doomed. Sonmi judges that her ‘corpocracy now smells of senility’ (Mitchell 2004a, 326), for she knows that societies cyclically decline and fall, then rise again (Gibbon’s work is mentioned as Cavendish’s ‘lavatory read’ [Mitchell 2004a, 153]), perhaps giving birth in turn to ‘a tyranny worse than the one it xpired’ (Mitchell 2004a, 327).11
8Cloud Atlas is the most political of Mitchell’s novels so far. It deals with globalisation and the excesses of capitalism, not unlike Michael Moore’s films, George Monbiot’s columns, or Naomi Klein’s No Logo; Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000).12 All the wrongs he describes do not sound so remote from the world we live in today, which is one of the arguments he relies on to explain how he came to write ‘feasible science fiction’: ‘all you have to do is take what’s here already, just take the present and exaggerate it slightly and you’ve got some sort of awful grotesque world’ (Mitchell 2004b). He thus points out the effect and use of a warped mimesis and acknowledges the fact that he is committed to describing the world that surrounds him (‘all composers draw inspiration from their environments,’ says Frobisher [Mitchell 2004a, 446]). This statement seems to contradict Roland Barthes’s conception of an autonomous novel (‘[L’écriture d’un roman c’est la] construction d’un monde autarcique fabricant lui-même ses dimensions et ses limites’13) but in fact, as Mitchell’s satire reflects the world he lives in, it also succeeds in creating a world of its own, a fictional world which engulfs the reader’s imagination to the last page and beyond, wandering over drifting clouds (the ones printed at the top of the book pages as in a flip book).
9The characters’ souls wander across the universe, endlessly reincarnated,14 like ever-changing clouds, but unlike an atlas which is fixed. The oxymoronic title of the novel is underlined by many characters, especially Zachry in the central section, as he escapes a land of barbarism: ‘Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be’morrow? Only Sonmi, the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’clouds’ (Mitchell 2004a, 308). Much like clouds that go on drifting, the narrative unravels in the manner of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, except that his sequence of narratives is interrupted and never resumed, while Mitchell places a mirror at the end of that structure. Calvino’s book is ‘absolutely one of the DNA strands of my book’s ancestry, for sure’ Mitchell says,15 thus emphasizing a seemingly impossible autonomy through ceaseless reference to tradition.16
10In fact, the book swarms with intertextual references. Jared Diamond’s tales of the Morioris is one of the subtexts of the first section. The Zedelghem section points at Melville’s Piazza Tales with Adam Ewing’s Pacific journey (Frobisher compares Captain Delano’s naïveté in ‘Benito Cereno’ to Ewing’s gullibility, or refers to Typee and the crimes imputed to Pacific missionaries). It also alludes to Emily Brontë (with Jocasta’s seduction game) or to Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (to highlight Ayrs’s physical decadence concomitant with Frobisher’s spiritual decay as his sextet slowly takes shape, as if feeding off human souls and passions). Tim Cavendish verges on madness like Caroline Rose in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters, and he feels like Irving’s Rip Van Winkle when he finally gets out of time-suspended Aurora House, a nursing home for the elderly (Mitchell 2004a, 383). ‘Sonmi 451’ echoes Huxley’s Brave New World and its doomed futuristic universe, and the whole book calls to mind Murakami’s surrealistic ambiances.
11Is there no truly original writing, then? Is the writer unavoidably trapped into denouncing the same old themes merely echoing what has already been written? Mitchell finds a way out by resorting to multivariate genres and ruling nothing out. The novel hovers from travelogue, to the fragment of an epistolary novel, via the whodunit genre or crime novel, the psychological novel or science fiction (a Blade Runner nightmare of replicants, something like Mad Max 3 on the ruins of civilization or like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings with the Kona tribe that looks like Orcs in the ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ section)—all part of the secret architecture of the novel. Genres are largely created and labelled by the industry (cinema, publishing world, etc.) to fit into a category, and Mitchell questions the distinction between science fiction and ‘literary fiction’ in a way. His view largely calls to mind Benjamin’s17 and Adorno’s criticism of the endless reproduction and consumption of art in the modern world as a means for ‘fettering consciousness. It impedes that development of autonomous independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves.’18 In the same vein, Mitchell tries to free his readers’ imagination by breaking away from generic codes (while at the same time being compelled to depend on them): ‘[genre] provides this readymade arsenal of motifs and allusions you can tap into, exploit, and play with’19 (Mitchell 2005c), but you also have to find a way to be original. The editor Tim Cavendish makes the following Barthesian statement20 : art is ‘the How,’ not ‘the What’ (Mitchell 2004a, 357).
12If Mitchell’s political commitment (although minimized in various interviews by the author himself) is undeniable, we can also see that he is trying to detach himself from the world he lives in, to experience this ‘lack of commitment’ he refers to as quoted at the beginning of this article, breaking free from conventions and codes, his only true commitment, if any, being to writing and literature.
13Structure is a device that is essential in Mitchell’s novel (an element that postmodern writers are fond of exploring, beyond plot, character, or themes). The architecture of the novel signals an aesthetic commitment which in turn reflects an ethic commitment to denouncing the dominant/ dominated relationship that rules the human world. Structure reflects such a phenomenon since the narratives are in a way consumed by the ones inside them: they become ‘a symbol of the theme’ (Mitchell 2005b), and the author steps back and sees how they work from the distance. ‘The idea of that structure has been knocking about in my head for years. I read about an Egyptian Goddess who gave birth to a pregnant daughter, whose embryo in turn was already pregnant and so on to infinity’ (Mitchell 2004b).
14As in Lorenz’s law on how a butterfly’s wings stir distant storms, Mitchell toys with the repercussions of what looks like a detail in one episode on the next, detaching himself from his text, as well as retaining control from afar of course. Circulating objects, signs, ideas, names, tighten the narrative threads and have unexpected repercussions on the following section of the story. Each part anticipates on the next: for example, Cavendish imagines that his life will be turned into a film that Sonmi actually watches, and he starts editing a novel entitled Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, the title of the novel’s third section.21 In each section, the main characters all have a comet-shaped birthmark that mysteriously seems to impinge on their destinies, and they seem to remember having had it in another life, too, through eerie flashbacks or flash forwards that they cannot control.
15In fact, Mitchell sees writing as a sort of escapology out of the rules he has set for his books (Mitchell 2004c). He thus tries to remain constantly autonomous from the literary codes and conventions imposed by the novel, challenging the main variables of structure—chronology, point of view and voice upon which we will concentrate here.
16Cloud Atlas is pervaded by a multiplicity of voices which give the feeling that the characters speak autonomously, with their own voice, as the author retreats surreptitiously at the back of the stage. Mitchell says that when you write in the first person to pace the unfolding of prose, the narrative seems limited to the narrator’s perception, but when the narrators comment on the structure of the novel reflexively, they allow the reader to step back from what he is reading. For instance, Frobisher finds Ewing’s book in Zedelghem and writes: ‘Something shifty about the journal’s [Ewing’s] authenticity—seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t ring quite true’ (Mitchell 2004a, 64). Adam Ewing’s journal is a torn-in-two book within the book, a mise en abyme which reflexively underlines the structure chosen by Mitchell for his own book. Sometimes, the narrator steps back from the character, and the first person turns into third to express emotions as a playwright would in stage directions (‘Anger sparked in Timothy Cavendish like forks in microwaves’ [Mitchell 2004a, 159]). Zachry apostrophizes his listeners (and us as readers) to attract their attention on the unravelling of the plot and how details influence its course. At the end of this section, Zachry’s son comments upon the authenticity of his father’s yarn: ‘Most yarnin’s got a bit o’ true, some yarnin’s got some true, an’ a few yarnin’s got a lot of true’ (Mitchell 2004a, 309), questioning the relationship between fiction and reality.
17In order to explore such a relationship, Mitchell constantly strives to find new forms of language. Music is one, and the dialects he creates are others, to try to circumvent the English novel’s obsession with style. He denounces a corrupted merchandized vocabulary, using a language already branded to replace the actual word: ‘to nikon’ with no capital letter is used as a verb, ‘a starbuck’ is a coffee, ‘a ford’ a car, ‘a sony’ a computer, ‘a disney’ a movie, etc. The vowels preceding the ‘x’ are dropped, there are onomatopoeic adjectives and verbs, words condensed together, neologisms and archaisms in the central section especially. The narrator speaks in a sort of hybrid language, a primitive and powerfully alive dialect with echoes of our own time, as if the HYDRA reactor had exploded and ‘liberated it from the grammatical shackles that used to stifle it,’ a big bang illustrated by the loss of the <w> in the word ‘whole’ now turned into a ‘hole.’22 The sixth tale is ‘vernacular, the spoken method, the most ancient and probably the last of all human means of transmitting a narrative’ (Mitchell 2005a). Pastiches of other writing styles abound (e.g. Hoban’s post-Armageddon patois in Riddley Walker) and the whole novel is pervaded with a relieving sense of humour which is ‘the ovum of dissent’ (Mitchell 2004a, 188) according to Sonmi: humour is a way to free oneself from fixed generic or stylistic codes by debunking them.
18Each form of language is associated with a set of characters who wander from one book to the other: like ‘actors and actresses who are hectoring screenwriters for work,’ in order to get out of ‘literary limbo’ (Mitchell 2005a). Frobisher is ‘a possible future for Jason [in Black Swan Green] [—] kind of an overly sensitized young man in the arts’ (Mitchell 2006b), or Jason a possible past for Frobisher: ‘It gives things a poignancy to [...] subvert the emotional connection with the character in one book with the former emotional connection with the character in another one’ (Mitchell 2006b). Mitchell’s books are bi-directional, with a sense of controlled movement that is reinforced a) thanks to the mirror structure; b) thanks to characters circulating from one novel to the next with increasing ‘realness’ (Mitchell 2006b) because the reader is familiar with them.
19Mitchell argues that
music is an excuse for me to write about writing without writing about writing. Really, everything I could say about music is also true for art in general.... there is kind of a taboo that I’m not totally immune from about a writer writing about writing. You get accused of incest. Or even of self-gratification, if you do so. However, if you write about music, then you’re freed up from that taboo. [...] Writing is a kind of music. A sentence is a musical phrase that your eyeball can hear. Words are musical notes that, again, your eyeball can hear. Not a sound, but a nuance. (Mitchell 2006b)
20Metafictional comments are made through musical metaphors reflecting upon writing techniques. Besides, Mitchell’s use of language often resorts to music as a new language to express what words can’t say.23 Frobisher’s ‘sextet for overlapping soloists,’ the Cloud Atlas sextet, mirrors the structure of the novel: ‘piano, clarinet,’ cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order’ (Mitchell 2004a, 445). The language used to describe Frobisher describing music (the making of it, the listening to it) is the language of someone who really engages with music. The music that Mitchell refers to never is the kind of automated popular music that generates standard reactions. Ayrs’s musical aspirations are purely selfish, ‘hankering after immortality’ (Mitchell 2004a, 81), whereas Frobisher’s compositions allow him to transcend such egocentricity and achieve universality, the one of clouds. Frobisher has to pay the price for his artistic freedom, and has no choice but to fight with his own weapons: ‘Aucun artiste n’est capable par lui-même d’abolir la contradiction entre l’art déchaîné et la société enchaînée; tout ce qu’il peut faire, c’est contredire la société enchaînée par l’art déchaîné...’24
21Mitchell finds a way to unshackle his writing by insisting on the musicality of words. In the Zedelghem section, Frobisher evokes the barbarity described in his brother’s letters which were ‘hauntingly aural’ so much so that the alliterations used by the narrator to transcribe them conjure up savage war noises: ‘Later conversations add the scream of horses, cracking of frozen mud; buzz of aircraft; tanks, churning in mud holes; amputees, surfacing from the ether; belch of flamethrowers; squelch of bayonets in necks. European music is passionately savage, broken by long silences’ (Mitchell 2004a, 442). The semi-colons emphasize the broken rhythm of a sentence that sounds like a machine gun. The use of each word is crucial and determines the mood of the reader.
22The chaos and barbarism wrecked by the war relentlessly come back to wipe out the surface of the earth, and Eva de Crommelynck, daughter of the late composer Vyvyan Ayrs, explains in Black Swan Green that recurrence is at the heart of Robert Frobisher’s music, just like it is at the heart of the novel, with various clues springing back to the front of the stage from one section to the next.
23All sections end on a circular pattern, in a sort of chorus, to take up a musical term: Adam Ewing fights against the ‘the many-headed hydra of human nature’ (Mitchell 2004a, 509), which appears again in the Luisa Rey section under the guise of the HYDRA reactor, but his combat is endless, for when you cut one head, another one grows back, and another, to infinity. Frobisher has a Nietzschean faith in ‘indelible truths’ and things starting all over again, ‘for an eternity of eternities’ (Mitchell 2004a, 471). Luisa Rey feels the atoms of Frobisher’s story coming to life within her. Tim Cavendish announces his return ‘one bright dusk’ (Mitchell 2004a, 387). Sonmi knows that the declaration of rights she drafted to free fabricants will trigger a larger chain of events. Indeed, in the following section, Meronym, a Prescient, possesses the orison or egg that holds a sort of hologram of Sonmi who became the god of Zachry’s tribe, worshipped postmortem. The reader thus slowly enters a fictional universe that the author carefully controls: his books are written ‘with one eye in the reader’s head’ (Mitchell 2005b). The reader is helplessly committed or corrupted in a way, because he took a glimpse of the past/ present/ future in the first halves and has no way out of reading the second half but to see these fragments hanging in his memory, making no sense if their other half is not read. Having had a glimpse of past, present and future events, he is thus compelled to read more, his imagination having already been fertilized by the seeds planted in the first parts of the novel.25
24Mitchell’s work redefines the notions of autonomy and commitment, putting limits to commitment (as Adorno suggested after Auschwitz): although being tormented by the modern world’s issues, his real commitment is an aesthetic one to form (even if his last novel, Black Swan Green, is a very straight book in terms of structure, and each chapter could be an independent extractable short-story). The British novelist has given a lot of thought to writing and what it is to be a writer, feeling alienated from the real world (being in a world of one’s own), but also committed to it (because drawing inspiration from it). A few years ago, he confessed that he would have said: ‘I write because I find it fulfilling to create a world that does not exist. You get to be God. Writing is a kind of mental illness: megalomania, multiple personality disorder – you hear voices in your head and you split yourself into different personalities.’ Now, his perception is a little different: ‘The purpose of writing is to learn how to become a better writer,’ losing the division between work and life, like a religious vocation (Mitchell 2006a) which can also be fatal. For instance, Frobisher’s flaw is to die because he is engulfed in creation, and commitment to the extreme is lethal in Mitchell’s novels: ‘only music matters to me now [writes Frobisher]. Music clatters, music swells, music tosses’ (Mitchell 2004a, 468). Committing suicide seems to grant the ultimate autonomy in death: ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet holds my life, is my life’ (Mitchell 2004a, 470), and the artist is reborn through artistic creation, as his sextet’s structure and tones pervade the whole novel, and as the clouds drift off the page like our imagination does.
Notes de bas de page
1 ‘Japan and my Writing, ’ author essay, Bold Type,
www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1100/mitchell/essay.html, www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1100/mitchell/essay.html, circa 2000, website last visited April 4, 2008, circa 2000.
2 ‘Apocalypse, maybe, ’ interview of the author by Melissa Denes, The Guardian, February 21, 2004c, books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0, , 1151644,00.html, website last visited April 2, 2008.
3 ‘A Kind of Music, ’ interview with D. Mitchell by Stephen Schenkenberg, May 25, 2006b, www.popmatters.com/books/interviews/mitchell-david-060525.shtml, website last visited April 4, 2008.
4 ‘Secret Architectures: A Conversation with David Mitchell Conducted by Nazalee Raja, ’ 2005a, http://trashotron.com/agony/columns/2005/05-16-05.htm, 3-4, website last visited April 4, 2008.
5 ‘David Mitchell—the Interview, ’ BBC Nottingham, February 2004b,
www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/culture/2004/02/david\_mitchell\_interview.
shtml, www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/culture/2004/02/david\_mitchell\_interview.
shtml, website last visited April 2, 2008.
6 ‘David Mitchell: Books and Writing, ’ interview by Ramona Koval, Radio National, February 20, 2005b, www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1303370.htm, website last visited April 1, 2008.
7 Sonmi, the futuristic heroine of the fifth section, refers to Orwell ironically calling him an ‘Optimist.’ David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (Random House: New York, 2004a) 211.
8 Interview with David Mitchell, meeting with the author at EMPiK Megastore Junior, Warsaw, Poland, April 7, 2006a, www.britishcouncil.org/poland-interview-with-david-mitchell.htm, website last visited April 4, 2008.
9 Her whole story in fact turns out to be a set-up, ‘a theatrical production’ to warn ‘purebloods’ (human beings) that they should carefully maintain their domination over fabricants if they do not want to be overruled (Mitchell 2004a, 349).
10 Dialectic of Enlightenment opens with a grim assessment of the modern West: ‘Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant.’ T.W. Adorno and M. Horkeimer, eds. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947; Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002) 1.
11 Sonmi is a clone genomed to stand for 19 hours on end in an underground fast-food restaurant. She genuflects to the dollar, worships the company logo (‘our beloved Logoman’ [Mitchell 2004a, 185]), a hologram which looks like a caricature of Ronald McDonald, and dreams of retiring in Xultation, ‘a sony-generated simulacrum’ (Mitchell 2004a, 344)—and a slaughterhouse for useless fabricants too. Meanwhile, for the pureblood consumers who live overground, spending is compulsory: ‘Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime’ (Mitchell 2004a, 227).
12 Around the time he was writing ‘Somni 451,’ he was reading Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation; The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001), and got interested in the effects of the fast food industry in the States.
13 Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953) 25.
14 Reincarnation takes the same soul to different bodies, a symbol of the universality of human nature, one way to make the book whole (though Mitchell confesses he doesn’t believe in it).
15 ‘A Literary Houdini, ’ Telegraph, February 24, 2004d,
www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/02/22/bomitchell.xml,
www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/02/22/bomitchell.xml,
website last visited April 4, 2008.
16 Later in Black Swan Green, Eva de Crommelynck refers to Eliot and notices: ‘the poem is a raid on the inarticulate. I, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, agree with him [Eliot]. Poems who [sic] are not written yet, or not written ever, exists [sic] here.’ David Mitchell, Black Swan Green (2006; Random House: New York, 2007) 147.
17 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 217-251.
18 T.W. Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered, ’ New German Critique 6 (Fall 1975): 12- 19, 19.
19 ‘Silver Daggers and Russian Dolls - David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, in interview, ’ interview of the author by Shane Barry, March 2005c,
www.threemonkeysonline.com/threemon\_article\_david\_mitchell\_cloud\
_atlas\_interview.htm, www.threemonkeysonline.com/threemon\_article\_david\_mitchell\_cloud\_atlas\_interview.htm, website last visited May 5, 2008.
20 ‘Le texte est un tissu de citations, issues des mille foyers de la culture.’ Roland Barthes, ‘La Mort de l’auteur’ (1968; Le Bruissement de la langue, 1984) 63-69, 67.
21 Cavendish is one of the numerous ‘personnages-lecteurs’ of the novel, a category defined by Gérard Genette in Nouveau discours du récit (Paris: Seuil, 1983) 93-104. Frobisher finds Ewing’s logbook, Luisa Rey reads Frobisher’s letters to Rufus Sixsmith (he is a key character as onomastics show, since his report seals the fate of humanity: he is the ‘smith’ that welds the ‘six’ parts of the novel together), etc. None of them are naïve readers, since their metaleptic comments constantly try to outsmart the narrative scheme of an ontologically superior narrator, reminding the ‘real reader’ (Genette’s extradiegetic ‘lecteur réel’) of the status of the book as artifact.
22 For a more thorough analysis of language at work in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, see Sandrine Sorlin’s article, ‘A Linguistic Approach to David Mitchell’s Science-Fiction Stories in Cloud Atlas, ’ A Journal of English and American Studies 37 (2008): 75-89.
23 ‘But if the right words existed the music wouldn’t need to, ’ says Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck (Mitchell 2007, 152).
24 T.W. Adorno, Philosophie de la nouvelle musique (Paris: Gallimard, 1962) 115.
25 At another level, the reader is involved when the various narrators try to coax him into supporting them or identifying with their ordeal, using the second person pronoun (‘you’) and gentle terms à la Swift (‘You can see it, can’t you, dear Reader?’ [Mitchell 2004a, 179]). The reader is also caught in the whirl of breathless action scenes (reflected by the abundance of semicolons) and he can’t put the book down sometimes, as he is totally caught in the act of reading, especially in scenes of escape (e.g.: Luisa Rey’s, Tim Cavendish’s or Sonmi’s).
Auteur
-
Julie Morère
EA 741, University of Nantes
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
À la rencontre de la différence
Traces diasporiques et espaces de créolisation
Robin Cohen et Olivia Sheringham Elise Trogrlic (trad.)
2020
L’androgyne dans la littérature britannique contemporaine
Métamorphose d’une figure
Justine Gonneaud
2020
Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean
Cultural and Literary Perspectives
Markus Arnold, Corinne Duboin et Judith Misrahi-Barak (dir.)
2020
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 1
Diasporas and Cultures of Migrations
Judith Misrahi-Barak et Claudine Raynaud (dir.)
2014
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 2
Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy
Sarah Barbour, David Howard, Thomas Lacroix et al. (dir.)
2015
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 3
African Americans and the Black Diaspora
Corinne Duboin et Claudine Raynaud (dir.)
2016
Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature
Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier (dir.)
2013