Finding Stories to Tell: Metafiction and Narrative in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas

Abstract

Though David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas was only published in 2004, critics have already written a number of articles and book chapters about this work. The complex structure and numerous ideas Mitchell explores lend themselves to viewing the novel through a variety of critical lenses, leading to more articles than one might expect on a novel less than a decade old. Thus far, though, people have been writing on subjects such as the novel's comments on environmentalism, genetics, or cloning, while others focus on Mitchell's view of history. Whenever the novel's structure is discussed, critics spend most of their time identifying Mitchell's literary inspirations or discussing the story-within-story structure as little more than a postmodern trick. However, Mitchell uses metafiction and intertextuality differently than those who have come before him, using such devices as a way of forcing the reader to consider the importance of narrative in one's life and in the world, in general.

KEYWORDS:

• David Mitchell
• Cloud Atlas
• metafiction
• intertextuality

Notes

1 Colum McCann, TransAtlantic (2013).

2 David Mitchell, ‘Secret Architectures: A Conversation with David Mitchell,’ The Agony Column, Bookotron, 16 May 2005. Web. 2 June 2013.

3 Julie Morere's chapter, ‘Cloud Atlas, A Novel Questioning Mitchell's Avowed Lack of Commitment to the Real World’ in Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Literature lays out a number of references to other authors and works, including Melville, Wilde, Spark, Irving, Huxley, and Murakami (Julie Morere, ‘Cloud Atlas, A Novel Questioning Mitchell's Avowed Commitment to the Real World,’ in Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Literature, ed. Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Montpellier, France: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2010), 285–96). Similarly, Louise Economides in ‘Recycled Creatures and Rogue Genomes’ compares the various stories to Waugh, Chandler, Kesey, Burroughs, and Mary Shelley (whom her article focuses on), among others (618–19). Heather Hicks, in ‘“This Time Round”: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism,’ goes even further and says that the more Mitchell plays with narrative, ‘the less these characters seem like individuals and the more they appear to be repetitions of archetypes derived from the history of Western literature,’ adding Defoe, Isherwood, Orwell, Hoban, and Atwood to those mentioned by other critics (Hicks). Jeff Turrentine in a review of the book mentions Anthony Burgess and Kingsley Amis, adding that Robert Frobisher is ‘the unmistakable ghost of Paul Bowles’ (Jeff Turrentine, ‘Fantastic Voyage,’ The Washington Post, 22 August 2004, Web. 2 June 2013). In her review, Hephzibah Anderson mentions Mitchell's making ‘reference to the likes of Alice, Huck Finn and Emerson like old acquaintances, and draw[s] from Greek myths, 1001 Nights and Hans Christian Anderson’ (Anderson). Even Mitchell says each section has a model: Ewing-Melville; Frobisher-Isherwood; Luisa Rey-generic airport thriller; Cavendish-Cavendish (he appears briefly in Ghostwritten); Sonmi-‘gossip magazines in which a rather gushing hack interviews some celebrity bigwig’; Zachry-Hoban (‘Q&A: Book World Talks With David Mitchell,’ The Washington Post, 22 August 2004, Web. 2 June 2013.).

4 Heather Hicks, ‘“This Time Round”: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism,’ Postmodern Culture 20.3 (May 2010).

5 I am fully aware that every technique we label as ‘postmodern’ has been used for centuries. However, the term has come to be used as a shorthand reference to those techniques that became popular during the 1960s and 1970s (primarily).

6 Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979).

7 Daniel Green, ‘Metafiction and Romance,’ Studies in American Fiction. 19.2 (1991): 229–42.

8 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1984).

9 ‘Le Conversazioni 2006,’ YouTube. Google, 26 May 2007. Web. 17 June 2013.

10 David Mitchell, interview with Adam Begley, The Paris Review, 2010. Web. 2 June 2013.

11 Sam Leith, ‘A Literary Houdini,’ The Telegraph, 24 February 2004. Web. 2 June 2013.

12 David Mitchell, ‘Apocalypse, Maybe.’ The Guardian, 20 February 2004. Web. 2 June 2013.

13 David James, ‘Integrity After Metafiction,’ Twentieth–Century Literature 57.3&4 (2011): 492–514, Academic Search Complete, Web. 2 June 2013.

14 John Barth, ‘Tales Within Tales Within Tales,’ 1981. The Friday Book (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1984), 218–38.

15 Robert Frobisher does not tell a story; instead, he creates a sextet, but, as I will discuss later, Mitchell often uses music to talk about writing.

16 Cela Wallhead and Marie-Luise Kohlke. ‘The Neo-Victorian Frame of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: Temporal and Traumatic Reverberations,’ in Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth Century Suffering, ed. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 217–52.

17 Hephzibah Anderson, ‘Time and Emotion Study,’ The Observer, 28 February 2004, Web. 2 June 2013.

18 Jo Alyson Parker, ‘David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas of Narrative Constraints and Environmental Limits,’ in Time: Limits and Constraints, ed. Alyson Jo Parker, Paul André Harris, and Christian Steineck (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010), 201–18.

19 David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (New York: Random House, 2004).

20 Louise Economides, ‘Recycled Creatures and Rogue Genomes: Biotechnology in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas,’ Literature Compass 6.3 (2009): 615–31.

21 ‘A Kind of Music: Interview with David Mitchell,’ PopMatters, n.d., Web. 2 June 2013.

22 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).