Theo Dhaen

European Postmodernism:
The Cosmodern Turn

Postmodernism was the hottest item in literary studiesat least in the West, although
it also made a considerable stir in China, for instancefor approximately two decades, roughly speaking from 1970 to 1990, but has been far less debated, as far as
literature is concerned, since the end of the 1990s (Dhaen, (No) Postmodernism).
In many ways, it seems to me that Hans Bertens The Idea of the Postmodern, the first
edition of which appeared in 1995, marks the end of the debate on postmodernism
as a vitally alive and culturally dominant literary movement or current. Since then,
multiculturalism and postcolonialism, and latterly world literature, have taken center
stage in discussions of current literature. This is not to say, though, that postmodern
narrative techniques, or at least techniques usually associated with forms of postmodern writing as practiced in the movements heyday betweensay1960 and 1990,
do not continue to be used by contemporary writers. In fact, the same Hans Bertens
(Postmodern Humanism) just recently wrote an essay in which he argues precisely
such continuation, but in which he also indicates that these techniques are now being
put to different ends than was the case earlier. To stay within Bertens own terminology as established from his earliest writings on postmodernism (1986), these same
postmodern techniques now give expression to a different Weltanschauung. In what
follows I will demonstrate as much with regard to two recent European novels, one a

Theo Dhaen is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and
formerly at Leyden and Utrecht Universities, The Netherlands. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Recent book-length publications in English include
The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (2013), The Routledge Companion to World Literature
(2012), andWorld Literature: A Reader(Routledge, 2013).
Narrative, Vol 21, No. 3 (October 2013)
Copyright 2013 by The Ohio State University

272Theo Dhaen
very well-known work in English, now turned into a major motion picture, Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell, the other a little-known work by a Flemish author, Paul
Verhaeghen, published in Flemish in the same year as Mitchells novel, and translated
by the author himself into English in 2007 with the same title as the original Flemish
version: Omega Minor.
To begin with, we should note that no single narrative technique has ever been
branded as unique to postmodernism. Rather, what has come to define postmodernism, according to contemporary critical movements such as post-structuralism, is a
combination of any number of techniques that were seen as innovative and perhaps
even transgressive, especially with regard to all forms of referentiality, be it reference to some real reality as in realism or to a psychological reality as in modernism. Drawing on discussions by Leslie Fiedler (1975), Ihab Hassan (1971, 1975,
1980, 1987), Douwe Fokkema (1984, 1986), Allen Thiher (1984), Linda Hutcheon
(1988), Brian McHale (1987), David Lodge (1977), Alan Wilde (1981), and others,
and simplifying matters a great deal, I would argue, then, that the following features
are generally regarded as marking postmodernism: self-reflexiveness, metafiction,
eclecticism, redundancy, multiplicity, discontinuity, fragmentation, indeterminacy,
intertextuality, parody, the dissolution of character and narrative instance, the erasure of boundariesespecially between high and low, but also between genresand
the de-stabilization of the reader. If the list of works from which I have culled this
enumeration by now seems rather dated, this is because after 1988, the publication
date of Hutcheons Poetics of Postmodernism, there have hardly been any new technical discussions of postmodernism. Rather, following Fredric Jamesons 1984 Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalismitself largely dependent
upon Jean-Franois Lyotards La condition postmoderne (1979) and Jrgen Habermass subsequent reaction to Lyotard in his 1980 Frankfurt lecture, Modernity versus Postmodernity (published as ModernityAn Incomplete Project in 1981)
critical attention with regard to postmodernism has been directed to, precisely, the
Weltanschauung or worldview supposedly linked to this particular combination of
techniques. Jameson, following Habermas, and in contrast to Lyotard, evaluates this
worldview entirely negatively, denying it any critical purchase on the world because
of the supposedly free play of languagesometimes also labeled anything goes
to which it subscribes. For Jameson, postmodern literature serves as a symptom of
the disease afflicting our era: it is representative of contemporary society to the degree it represents the gap that obtains between reality and representation. In addition,
postmodern literature is complicit in the creation and perpetuation of this society: as
it does not succeed in re-connecting the reader to any underlying real reality, this
literature merely further ensnares him in the Baudrillardian simulacral universe of
late capitalism. Jamesons case in point is E. L. Doctorows historical novel Ragtime.
According to Jameson, Doctorow fails to bring to life the real history hidden behind
his intertextual fantasy signifiers (Jameson, Postmodernism 23).
For some time, Jamesons wholesale condemnation of postmodernism as devoid
of any critical potential due to its supposed lack of referentiality has been accepted as
gospel truth, regardless of Linda Hutcheons counterargument, in A Poetics of Postmodernism, that Jameson misjudges Doctorows Ragtime. In fact, an analysis of the

The European Cosmodern Turn 273

same passage from Ragtime that Jameson used leads Hutcheon to the opposite conclusion (Hutcheon, Poetics 89). For Hutcheon, postmodernism precisely alerts the
reader to the problem Jameson raises, in that it enhances the readers awareness of
how language serves power, instead ofas Jameson claimsmerely subjecting him
to the language of power. I argued something similar in my Text to Reader (1983).
Ironically, Jamesons leftist and neo-Marxist-inspired negative evaluation of a supposedly normative postmodernism (because of its lack of critical commitment) was
matched, especially in the more popular press, by an equally negative rightist or conservatively oriented critique of postmodernism as undermining all accepted values
and norms (Yardley, Paradise Tossed).
If any combination of the techniques associated with postmodernism received
any positive evaluation at all, it was not qua postmodernism but rather as something
else. Writing in 1990thus, right at the end of what, following Brian McHales adaptation of Russian Formalist terminology (Postmodernist 6), we can now in retrospect
see as the era of postmodernisms cultural dominancethe Indian critic Kumkum
Sangari blasted postmodernism as it was then usually conceived for its Eurocentrism.
(We should follow Shu-mei Shih and Wang Ning in relabeling Eurocentrism Western-Centrism, with the center primarily comprising Anglo-America rather than
Europe itself). Postmodernism, according to Sangari, carries its specialized skepticism . . . everywhere as cultural paraphernalia and epistemological apparatus, as
a way of seeing (Politics 242). Just a year later, Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (Past
the Last) and Stephen Slemon (Modernisms Last) recognized what was implicit
in Sangaris statement, namely that, on the basis of narrative techniques alone, no
easy distinctions could be made between works issuing from the center and those
produced beyond the geographical boundaries of the West, also including works
produced by what Hutcheon called the ex-centrics of the West itself (Discourse
122). Because there is a good deal of formal and tropological overlap between primary texts variously categorised as post-modern or post-colonial, Adam and Tiffin concluded that it was only in the contexts of discussion in which they are placed,
that significant divergences between post-colonialism and post-modernism are most
often isolated (Adam and Tiffin vii). Stephen Slemon remarked in a similar vein that
Hutcheons analysis of intertextual parody as a constitutive principle of postmodernism resembles the post-colonial practice of rewriting the canonical master texts of
Europe, but with the difference that whereas a post-modernist criticism would want
to argue that literary practices such as these expose the constructedness of all textuality, . . . an interested post-colonial critical practice would want to allow for the positive
production of oppositional truth-claims in these texts (Slemon 5; emphasis original).
Hutcheon herself concurred, arguing that the post-colonial, like the feminist, is a
dismantling but also constructive political enterprise insofar as it implies a theory
of agency and social change that the post-modern deconstructive impulse lacks...
while both post-s use irony, the post-colonial cannot stop at irony . . . (Circling
183; emphasis original). Much the same arguments could be, and have been, developed with regard to the use of the same techniques as employed by minority writers,
or those generally falling under the label of multiculturalism in the United States,
or with regard to literary currents prevalent in parts of the world beyond the West

274Theo Dhaen
but likewise not immediately fitting the postcolonial. One might think, for instance,
of Latin American magic realism, which I myself in 1995 saw as a mode of writing
that, in the terms of McHale and Hutcheon (Poetics), technically fit the criteria of
postmodernism while decentering privileged centers (Dhaen, Magic Realism). In
1994, I had already tried to gather these various ex-centric postmodernisms under
the neologism of counter-postmodernism (Dhaen, Countering Postmodernism).
Anglo literary scholarship, then, started to differentiate between contemporary
works by or on behalf of Western modernitys Others and more centric or mainstream works, on the grounds not of differences in narrative techniques but rather
of worldviews. At the same time, what until the early 1990s had been seen by European continental literary scholarship as disparate post-WWII developments in the
various national European literatures, expressing often dissimilar worldviews, now
increasingly came to be subsumed under the comprehensive label of postmodernism on the basis of narrative techniques shared with the centric American authors
and works for whom the label had been coined in the first place (Musschoot; Dhaen,
Bruges Group; Bertens and Fokkema).
In retrospect, we can see that, even if the centric forms of postmodernism in
the United States prior to 1990 were not as uncritical with regard to their contemporary society as Jameson thought, their critique largely limited itself to what Hutcheon defined as de-constructive. I myself proposed that postcolonial and multicultural counter-forms of postmodernism instead aimed to be re-constructive in that
they not only critiqued but also proposed alternative histories, societies, worldviews
(Dhaen, Post-Colonial). Both these postmodernisms, though, centric and excentric, expressed at one and the same time an utterly relativist and at the same time
egological worldview, to use a term of Christian Morarus. Centric postmodernism
captured the extreme loneliness of the normative Western, and especially US, individual ego. Multiculturalism and postcolonialism countered with narratives of a collective ego. Both, though, upheld a fundamentally narcissistic and therefore relativist
position: rooted in individual or collective essentialisms, they each affirmed his/her/
its story, its own truth, which is to say no-truth. To these postmodernisms, Moraru
opposes the concept of cosmodernism, which he sees as the worldview expressed by
the newer American fiction using postmodern techniques.
For Moraru, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 initiated a turn to cosmodernism,
which he sees as marked by the concept and practices of relationality (Moraru 3).
Drawing upon the vocabulary of Heidegger, Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and also
leaning on the ideas of Levinas, Moraru sees contemporary cosmodern literature as
forsaking the politics of identity in favor of a recognition and acceptance of alterity.
This implies a new form of humanism, not one ruled by the imposition of one idea
of humanity on everyone, but rather a recognition of the other that is not implicated
in any will to rulea relation of non-hierarchical difference. At the same time, cosmodernism also involves the recognition of each individuals, each groups, each nations connectedness to the rest of the worlda relation of with, as Moraru calls it. In
all this, we clearly also hear echoes of the recently renewed debate on cosmopolitanism (Appiah; Beck; Breckenridge et al.; Brennan; Robbins; Dharwadker; Walkowitz)

The European Cosmodern Turn 275

and of Edouard Glissants potique de la relation and tout-monde (Glissant, Poetics and Toute-monde).
Moraru is specifically concerned with American literature, but when we turn
to European literature, we see a similar development. A recent European book on
Reconsidering the Postmodern carries the telling subtitle European Literature Beyond
Relativism (Vaessens and Van Dijk). Hans Bertens, in the aforementioned article in
press, sees contemporary American writers such as David Foster Wallace, in Infinite
Jest (1996), Jonathan Safran Foer, in Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Michael Chabon, in The Yiddish Policemens Union (2007), Mark Danielewski, in House of Leaves
(2000), Philip Roth, in The Plot Against America (2004), but also European writers
such as Nicola Barker, in Darkmans (2007), and Paul Verhaeghen, in Omega Minor
(Flemish 2004, English 2007), using unquestionably postmodern techniques, but doing so without foregoing referentiality or, to be more precise, probing the tipping
point between referentiality and non-referentiality, but finally coming down on the
side of referentiality. Combining the best of both worlds, that of tradition and that
of the postmodern, Bertens concludes, they have deliberately created a postmodern
humanism (Postmodern Humanism 27), where we may take the latter term as a
version of Morarus cosmodernism. This is particularly true, Bertens feels, of those
of the novels he lists, by Foer, Chabon, Roth, and Verhaeghen, that refer to the Holocaust, an event, Bertens claims, that does not allow for the kind of irony that is usually
associated with classic centric postmodernism. As I am here specifically concerned
with European literature, I will initially concentrate on Verhaeghens work, and then
turn to Mitchells Cloud Atlas, a novel that is not concerned with the Holocaust but
insists on a similar cosmodern postmodern humanism.
Both Omega Minor and Cloud Atlas have an impeccably postmodern pedigree.
Verhaeghen in his book plays an intricate intertextual game with Thomas Pynchons
Gravitys Rainbow (1973), often considered the epitome of classic postmodern fiction. There is the actual mention on page 272 of Pig Bodine, a character that initially
appears in Pynchons first novel, V. (1963), reappears in Gravitys Rainbow, and recurs
from then on in almost all of Pynchons subsequent novels. But in fact, Gravitys Rainbow throughout serves as palimpsest for Omega Minor. The opening paragraphs of
Verhaeghens novel read like both a reference to and a parody of both the opening and
closing paragraphs of Gravitys Rainbow. In the final paragraphs of the latter novel,
a Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound,
reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t
(887). In Omega Minor, A lightning bolt hurls upward in a blinding curve of pristine
white, the laws of gravity suspended for a quarter-second (11). In the earlier novel,
the rocket is about to explode and kill all the people in the movie theatre (but never
does, eternally suspended at the novels end). In Verhaeghens novel, it is a blob of
human semen that ascends to then fall on bare and barren skin, all spermatozoids
about to die, half a billion mouths that never were . . . the demise of a world population (11). These 23-chromosomes make the room in which they are ejaculated
echo with a silent howl. Gravitys Rainbow opens with a screaming [that] comes
across the sky, the sound of an incoming V-2 rocket (3). Both novels are largely set

276Theo Dhaen
during WWII and inside Germany. In Gravitys Rainbow the labyrinthine plot gradually telescopes in to a search for a mysterious rocket and the firing of that rocket containing a human sacrifice, the male lover named, not inappropriately but with shocking irony, Gottfried (Gods peace). In Omega Minor the semen belongs to Goldfarb,
a German physicist who has been involved with the design and manufacture of the
atom bomb in Los Alamos during WWII, and who near the end of the novel will set
off a nuclear device in the center of Berlin that will destroy the entire city, turning it
into Berloshima. These are just some of the countless ways in which Omega Minor
imitates, shadows, and doubles Gravitys Rainbow, as are the novels use of sexual escapades associated with the production and impact of war devices, zany poems and
songs obliquely commenting upon the characters actions, sudden shifts of narrative
instance, and a sprawling cast of characters, some of which read like carbon copies
of Pynchons. Take, for instance, Goldfarbs mother Margarete, a Jewish actress who
flees Hitlers Germany for America just in time and there ends up in pornographic
movies, uncannily resembling Margherita Erdmann in Gravitys Rainbow, also a pornography star.
At the same time, Omega Minor has a plot and characters all its own. Alongside
the story of Goldfarb, there is that of Paul Andermans, a Flemish psychology student
on a research stipend in Berlin in 1995, who becomes the victim of a neo-Nazi attack
on the metro, and finds himself in the same hospital room as Jozef De Heer, a survivor
of the Nazi death camps. Upon his release from the hospital, Paul starts writing down
De Heers life story as recounted by himself. Additionally, there is the story of Hugo
and his girlfriend Nebula, the former a skinhead who turns neo-Nazi under the guidance of the old Nazi Liebenfels. However, in this novel nothing is what it seems, as
Mahadurga the fortuneteller informs the blonde French graduate student who comes
to visit Goldfarb, intending to bed the latter in return for a letter of recommendation.
She protests when Mahadurga says that Goldfarb will soon be making love with a
smoking-hot brunette: Impossible! It must be a blond! But of course the blonde
turns out to be dyed, and a brunette after allMahadurga herself, whom Goldfarb
makes fierce love to before heading for the bed of the blonde/brunette French student
anyhow. Similarly, Nebula turns out to have used Hugo only for the sake of getting
closer to the skinheads and neo-Nazis about whom she is making a documentary
film, PanzerFaust. In fact, she ends up as Paul Andermans girlfriend, and it is she
who discovers that De Heer is not a Jewish death camp survivor at all but rather the
ex- and now neo-Nazi Helmut Hinkel, Hugos control through the mediation of Liebenfels, and formerly a death-camp guard who assumed a Jewish identity after the
war to escape persecution. If, however, we should conclude from this that Hinkel/
De Heers experiences as recounted to Paul Andermans are all invented, we would be
wrong again. In fact, they are all borrowed from the memoirs of real concentration
camp survivors, such as Primo Levi, Gerhard Durlacher, Jorge Semprn, and Eli Wiesel, as well as dozens of others, such as Viktor Klemperer, who suffered under the Nazis because of their ethnic origins or political convictions. It might seem a risky, even
impossible, strategy, Bertens points out, to confront the Holocaust, or virulent and
violent anti-Semitism, while making use of a postmodern poetics (16). Verhaeghens
awareness of these risks is confirmed, according to Bertens, by his inclusion, among

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the Holocaust authors whom he cites, of (Binjamin) Wilkomirski, a Swiss writer who
in 1995, the same year in which Omega Minor is set, published his alleged war memoirs, which later turned out to have been likewise borrowed from other peoples reallife Holocaust memoirs. Wilkomirski, moreover, was a pen name for someone who
even in real life, like Hinkel/De Heer, went by an assumed name, in his case that of
his adoptive parents. Yet for Bertens, all this is proof of Verhaeghens ultimate appeal
to referentiality, a feature that Omega Minor shares with Foers, Roths, and Chabons
novels. Even though these novels inevitably draw our attention to their status as artifact, Bertens argues, we cannot not see them as referential. . . . We know that antiSemitism and the Holocaust are historical and we know of the unimaginable suffering
they have caused in the real world (Postmodern Humanism 16; emphasis original).
While I would not disagree with Bertens as to the role played by referentiality in
Omega Minor, I do not think that this is the real difference between it and a classic
postmodernist text such as Gravitys Rainbow. In fact, Pynchons novel is also replete
with references to real historical events and characters, ranging from Wernher von
Braun to the allied raids on Peenemnde, and to real mathematical and scientific formulae. At most, and of course this is part of Bertens argument, the difference resides
in the degree of reality of the Holocaust, which is greater than anything Gravitys
Rainbow refers to, although it seems to me that some of the horrors recounted in the
latter novel also qualify as real enough. And to swerve for a moment from the direct
comparison of Omega Minor and Gravitys Rainbow, the extinction of the Herreros
in German South-West Africa by General Lothar von Trotha before WWI (which is
described in detail in V., but which is referred to also in Gravitys Rainbow) is hardly
less real or, in our age of heightened awareness of colonial violence, any less shocking.
The real difference, I think, lies in the twist that is given to referentiality and,
more precisely, in cosmodernisms avoidance of the indeterminacy that from Ihab
Hassan on has been considered an essential criterion of classic postmodernism. Verhaeghen does not end Omega Minor as Pynchon ends his Gravitys Rainbowor for
that matter, as he does his other classical postmodernist works such as V. and The
Crying of Lot 49 (1966)on a note of uncertainty and suspension, leaving the reader
guessing as to what finally happens with the characters and the plot. Instead, Verhaeghen uses the typically postmodern device of metafiction to reflect on the meaning
of the Holocaust, and of literature, and of literature about the Holocaust, when he has
De Heer comment, The story is simple. People murder people. When we hide that
simple fact behind a veil of awe, when we drape the events with the color of mystery,
when we mask the reality of Auschwitz, then we make the whole episode unthinkable,
impossible to comprehend, an aberration of history (509; emphasis original).
At the end of the novel, Paul Andermans is revealed to be the author of the text
that the reader has just perused, including, therefore, those parts that are told by
Goldfarb and other characters in their own voice; moreover, he shares his first name
with the novels real author, Paul Verhaeghen, while his last name means the other
man, suggesting that he serves as alter ego to Verhaeghen. Andermans comments
that My childish belief in literature as light entertainment is long gone. We cannot
change the course of the world, but what we can do is rework the text until it creates
the illusion that the world indeed has changed, or that at least part of it has become

278Theo Dhaen
less impenetrable (461). This finally leads him to posit, after the explosion, when
he and Nebula are suffering from its after-effects, a total cancer blooming in them:
Film, book, Art.
We have a choice.
We humans have a choice. We can take up our roles in the drama of life. In
doing so, we stand a good chance of discovering ourselves . . .
The downfall of the planet, the downfall of the universethe coming
downfall of all that is or will be has become so painfully apparent to us. Artistsor so they saytake the pain of that knowledge upon themselves. . . .
The more we learn about our rape of the planet and about the insignificance
of our horrific deeds in the grand scheme of the universe, the more we suffer.

What can a man who is no artist, and yet dares to look that cruel reality in the face, do? Large-scale destruction is one possible responselargescale destruction is the only deed that can still make some impact in the
consciousness of the masses. Philosophers try to develop ways of interpreting existence, but that is not enough. Our obligation is to change the world.
(687)
Goldfarb, who was not an artist, chose the path of large-scale destruction. Paul and
Nebula, who are artists, choose, respectively, book and film. And though they themselves will die, they end with the opposite act with which the novel opened, notably
with Goldfarbs sterile ejaculation:
We make love, with a delightful tenderness and the utmost gravity at the
same time. For we make love. Real, honest, earnest love; forever-and-a-day
love; love like a fugue with an ever-increasing number of voices.

We love each other, Nebula and I, with a measure of care and solemnity
that is born from insight. We know it nowits official: The world will go on
forever. There is no end.

There will never be an end to the world. Never an end. (691; emphasis
original)
Goldfarb and Nebula are two sides of the same personality, both world-changers,
both sharing in the myth of Shiva, the destroyer-creator, the tiny g*d whose image is carved on Nebulas loins, the g*d whose image in bronze stood hidden in a
niche in Goldfarbs office (687). In Mitchells Cloud Atlas all major characters share
a birthmark that resembles a comet, making them all incarnations of the same essence or identity returning through history and, in two of the six interlocking stories
that make up the novel, in the future. Mitchell uses a regressive-repetitive structure,
with the first part of his novel containing five stories, seemingly unrelated, each of
which breaks off at a crucial point. The sixth and central story in the book, Slooshas Crossin an Evrytin After, the only one to be uninterrupted, is set in an unclear but obviously fairly remote future, and on one of the smaller islands of Hawaii,
where a primitive tribe is visited by some vastly more advanced anthropologists/

The European Cosmodern Turn 279

ethnographers, descendants of the survivors of what must have been a nearly universally fatal destruction of earths civilization in a fairly remote past. The story is
told by an old native who relates how in his youth he used to live on a larger island
where he and his tribe were attacked and enslaved by another tribe, and how he was
rescued by one of the anthropologists/ethnographers and brought to the smaller island. In an epilogue, after the narrator has died, his son casts doubts upon his fathers
tale, calling most o Pas yarnins . . . jus musey duck-fartin, although he also says
there may have been some truth to them, because in his fathers belongings they
found a silvry egg what he named orison in his yarns (324). This, in fact, is the
recording device used to tape Sonmi-451s confession in the story immediately preceding Slooshas Crossin. Sonmi-451 is a fabricant, or clone, in a future society
extrapolated from the model of present-day North Korea, but also with telltale and
uncanny resemblances to a completely consumer-oriented Western society, down
to the fast-food restaurant where Sonmi-451 originally works, closely resembling a
McDonalds. Fabricants are kept drugged and in a state of servitude, until at the end
of their serviceable life they are recycled as food for other fabricants. Sonmi-451 is allowed to develop some sort of consciousness of her state, and to emancipate herself,
only to find that she is being used by the regime to demonstrate to ordinary citizens
the dangers of uppity fabricants. The other stories concern a mid-nineteenth-century
American notarys voyage home from a remote island, as recorded in his Pacific
Journal, which is read by a British composers amanuensis living in a remote village
in Belgium in the early 1930s, whose letters to a friend are read by a female journalist in 1970s California investigating the friends suspicious death, whose story is
read by a third-rate British publisher, whose own story is turned into a movie that is
watched by Sonmi-451. The novel opens with the Pacific journal story, proceeds to
the amanuensiss story, the journalists story, the publishers story, Sonmi-451s story,
Slooshas Crossin, and then works its way back in reverse orderSonmi-451, then
the publisher, then the journalist, and so onwith the various links being revealed
in the second half of each of the stories. Each time, too, the reality of each of the
stories relative to the stories in which they are nested is questioned. This procedure,
as well as Mitchells explicit modeling of his novel on Calvinos If On A Winters Night
a Traveler (which for European literature is about as exemplary a classic postmodern
work as Gravitys Rainbow is for its American counterpart), leaves no doubt as to
Cloud Atlass postmodern lineage in terms of narrative technique.
With Cloud Atlas, the aspect of referentiality never even comes into play: everything here is clearly fictional. And yet this novel too shares in the cosmodernism or
postmodern humanism of Verhaeghens Omega Minor. Even if no true historical
events are evoked, the violence of man toward man that all the fictions of Cloud Atlas relate, whether at the individual, societal, or racial level, are sufficiently known to
us from real history. Violence in Cloud Atlas ranges from the greed and ecological
waste exposed in the journalists story, to the psychological abuse of the elderly and
vulnerable that stands out in the publishers story, to the racial enslavement, discrimination, and even genocide illustrated in the Pacific journal story, to the class discrimination that rules the amanuensiss story, all the way to the degradation and death that
Sonmi-451 and her kind suffer and the violence, both tribal and global, that shapes

280Theo Dhaen
the Sloosha story. What is also never in doubt is that all six stories of Cloud Atlas are
meant not only to make us aware of the persistence of human evil throughout human
historypast, present, and futurebut likewise to mobilize us to engage in combating such evil. This becomes clearest at the very end of the novel, when Adam Ewing,
the American notary, concludes his Pacific journal with:
My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially
at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles
through an unhurried eternity. My thoughts flow thus. Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises &
falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits
no rules; only outcomes.

What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.

What precipitates acts? Belief.

Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the minds mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of
confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought
into being, & historys [oppressors, racists, and murderers as portrayed in
the novels pages] shall prevail.
[...]
If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe
divers races & creeds can share this world . . . peaceably . . . if we believe
leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of
the Earth & Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am
not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. (52728; emphasis
original)
As his own act of awareness and engagement, Ewing decides to join the ranks of
the abolitionists upon his return to the United States.
Omega Minor and Cloud Atlas are undeniably postmodern in their use of narrative techniques. Yet acts of belief such as advocated in these two novels were hardly
imaginable in classic postmodernist fictions. In fact, they run against the grain of
classic postmodernism. They also differ from multicultural or postcolonial counterpostmodern works in that they do not advance any specific group or racial identity.
Instead, they affirm the humanity of all humankind on a non-hierarchical, non-denominational, non-discriminatory basis, which also sets them apart from the traditional humanism that tended to universalize Western ideas of mankind. As such, they
underwrite a truly cosmic humanity appropriate to our new age of planetarity
(Spivak, Death).

Works Cited
Adam, Ian, and Helen Tiffin, eds. Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism.
London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991.

The European Cosmodern Turn 281

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W. W. Norton,
2006.
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