Trailing Postmodernism: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Zadie Smith’s NW, and the Metamodern

ABSTRACT

This article examines David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004) and Zadie Smith's NW (2012) against recent theories of the post-postmodern. It argues that although both texts can be seen to be gesturing towards a reconstructive relationship with the absolute cynicism and scepticism of postmodernism neither represents a sustainable discontinuity with that late-twentieth-century mode. In this context, the essay challenges readings of Mitchell and Smith as representative of a metamodernism as that term is understood by critics such as Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin van den Akker, David James and Urmila Seshagiri. By referring to models suggested by Jean-Francois Lyotard, it suggests that the metamodern, as exemplified in the cases of Mitchell and Smith, represents a subsection of the postmodern rather than a clear break with it.

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Notes

1 See Wallace; Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.”

2 See Blincoe and Thorne.

3 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. It should be noted that I am using the English translation of Lyotard’s original 1979 La Contidion postmoderne: rapport sur le saviour, and recognise the inherent potential problems with translation in this context.

4 The use of the term “contemporary” needs to be clarified here in its specific use as a category of literary history. I use the sense of the contemporary here broadly as synonymous with the twenty-first-century, but also with the literary and cultural critic”s position of attempting to be able to stand outside of the moment in order to analyse current trends and significances. This latter approach corresponds to Agamben’s definition: “Contemporaneousness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it”. Agamben, 41.

5 See, for example, recent books and edited collections that in part historicize postmodernism as a late-twentieth-century concept: Postmodern Literature and Race, ed. Len Platt and Sara Upstone; and The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern British Fiction ed. Bran Nicol.

6 Potter and López, 3.

7 Kelly, “Beginning with Postmodernism.”

8 To push this narrative of critical paradigms forward, if the 1990s can be seen as postmodernism’s high point and incorporation into dominant and popular aesthetic practice, and the first decade of the twentieth century as a period when there have been a series of reactions, challenges and searches for its superseding mode, then the perhaps the 2010s might be seen as the decade when a renewed interrogation, interest in, and even nostalgia for postmodernism can be seen to be emerging.

9 Bourriaud; Childish and Thompson; Kirby; Lopez and Potter; Lipovetsky; Blincoe and Thorne; Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.”

10 Vermeulen and Van den Akker; James and Seshagiri.

11 Eve, 8. Eve offers a series of critiques of metamodernism as formulated by Vermeulen and Van den Akker most notably in what he argues is their misreading of Kant.

12 Several commentators and critics have challenged Lyotard’s position with respect to his distinction between narrative and scientific discourse, but few have discussed this particular aspect of his discussions of postmodernism. For critiques of Lyotard’s relativism see Eagleton; Habermas; Norris. For a critique of Lyotard from the position of the philosophy of science see Nola and Gürol.

13 Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” 81.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid. (italics in the original).

16 In a previous work, I discussed the 1990s as the decade which sees the emergence of a “popular postmodernism” that could no longer claim to represent any kind of avant-garde aesthetic radicalism: Bentley, “Introduction: Mapping the Millennium.”

17 Jameson, 13.

18 Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?,” 79.

19 Critical analysis of aesthetic practice, of course, is in the business of trying to identify, define, and categorise particular techniques that can then be associated with portmanteau modal terms such as realism, modernism, postmodernism. According to Lyotard, however, postmodernism is distinctive in that embedded in its practice is the very rejection of attempts to categorise and define, or in other words, to fix it as a set of stable practices – self-reflexivity is not only a description of its technique, but one of the key concepts by which it self-scrutinizes.

20 I have already discussed the relationship of postmodernism to various theoretical configurations of the post-postmodern in a previous work. See Bentley, Hubble and Wilson, “Introduction: Fiction of the 2000s”. In that essay, I identify three “ends” of postmodernism, only one of which can be understood as pertaining to a linear chronology; the others referring to the limits of its philosophical approach, and the concept of the “ends and means” of postmodernism in terms of its ideological and political aims.

21 Vermeulen and Van den Akker, 5–6.

22 The artist Luke Turner has also suggested the oscillatory nature of metamodernism: “Movement shall henceforth be enabled by way of an oscillation between positions,” Metamodernism // Manifesto, http://www.metamodernism.org/, (2011), Accessed 26th May 2017.

23 Vermeulen and Van den Akker, 5.

24 James and Seshagiri, 87.

25 Ibid., 89.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 93.

28 I’ll discuss in greater detail the appropriateness of James and Seshagiri’s categorization of metamodernism with respect to NW in greater detail in the third part of this essay.

29 James and Seshagiri, 93.

30 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), 11. The classic example of complicitous critique is Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber which celebrates the narrative power of traditional fairy stories whilst alerting the reader to the patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes conveyed in traditional iterations of the genre. It should be noted, however, that Hutcheon also suggests that there is movement beyond the postmodern in work produced in the later parts of the twentieth century, see the epilogue to the second edition the Politics of Postmodernism where she notes, “Let’s just say it’s [postmodernism] over”, Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (2002), 165–6.

31 It should be noted that although the two main texts I discuss in the essay are by British writers, each is responding to a set of global and cosmopolitan contexts that reach beyond national boundaries.

32 Bradford, 64.

33 Ibid., 67.

34 McMorran.

35 Childs and Green, 26.

36 Ibid., 24.

37 O’Donnell, 15.

38 See, for example, Hopf; O’Donnell.

39 Hopf, 111. The point Hopf makes about Cloud Atlas chimes with Patricia Waugh’s observation about the effects of metafiction as a narrative strategy on the reader generally: “Metafictional deconstruction has not only provided novelists and their readers with a better understanding of the fundamental structures of narrative; it has also offered extremely accurate models for understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems;” Waugh, 9.

40 In many ways, this could be identified as a modernist interest in the parodic relationship between literary articulations of a heroic past and a debased and bathetic present. I have in mind here Joyce’s Ulysses as perhaps the clearest example of this distancing between a heroic intertextual template (Homer’s myth) and the quotidian experiences of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedelus as they wander around a post-lapsarian Dublin.

41 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism.

42 Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 64.

43 The use of anachronisms in literature to reveal a character’s particular relationship to the past is a fascinating and emerging area of literary criticism. For a ground-breaking discussion of this area (in the context of Early Modern literature) see Munro. Munro, in particular, identifies the way in which the use of archaisms in literary texts can undermine temporality, a point that is especially resonant with Mitchell’s use in Cloud Atlas.

44 In terms of anachronism, it should be said that it would be unlikely that Ewing, writing in 1849, would be aware of Melville’s work, given his most well-known narratives are not produced until the 1850s. Indeed, the reference to “Benito Cereno’ that comes later is of a text not published until 1955, five or six years after Ewing’s recorded travels.

45 Rousselot, 4.

46 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism.

47 Ibid.

48 Edwards, “Utopia, Transmigration and Time in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas,” 185.

49 Edwards, “Microtopias: The Post-Apocalyptic Communities of Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse.”

50 See Williams’s model of the negotiation between dominant, residual and emergent discourses identifiable at any one moment in time of a culture: Williams.

51 Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 341–2.

52 Edwards, “Utopia, Transmigration and Time,” 185.

53 Hopf, 118.

54 Boxall, 212.

55 Shaw, 45.

56 Braidotti, 2.

57 Lodge; McCarthy; O’Neill.

58 Smith, “Two Directions for the Novel,” 71. This essay was originally published in 2008 in the New York Review of Books.

59 Ibid., 84.

60 See, for example, Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism; McHale; Waugh.

61 Indeed, in an interview, Smith has explained that the novel took her seven years to write, which suggests that work on the novel and the essay overlapped. “Zadie Smith Interview: On Bad Girls, Good Guys and the Complicated Midlife’.

62 James and Seshagiri, 89.

63 Smith, NW, 3.

64 Ibid., 87.

65 Although, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the description of these novels as realist is reductive. See Bentley, “Form and Ideology in the Fifties Novel”.

66 See Moretti.

67 Hall, 277.

68 Smith, NW, 183–4.

69 Ibid., 281–2.

70 Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 529.

71 During, 83.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Keele University.