Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
SubStance, Volume 44, Number 1, 2015 (Issue 136), pp. 92-106 (Article)
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c l i c k h e r e t o a c c e s s t h e e n t i r e d av i d m i t c h e l l s p e c i a l i s s u e
I
One of the striking generic features of the emerging field of Big His-
tory is a closing glance toward the future. Summed up by the title of Fred
Speir’s Big History and the Future of Humanity (2010), this generic gesture
shows up in the “Big History Project,” a free online course for secondary
schools, whose final unit is entitled “The Future” and features Henry
Louis Gates and Bill Gates offering their prognostications on the future of
the earth over the next 50 years (Big).1 The concluding chapter of Daniel
Lord Smail’s Deep History and the Brain, entitled “Looking Ahead,” offers
this final admonition: “The deep past is also our present and our future”
(202).2 The convention of turning back to the future can be explained, in
part, by the environmentalist origins of the field. Big History grows out
of the green politics of US sixties counter-culture, which first finds its
expression in projects like the Whole Earth Catolog and Earth Day. The
scale of Big History promises to bring into stark relief the environmental
impact of our species on the planet. In a cautionary note echoed by many
contributors to the discourse, Cynthia Stokes Brown opens Big History:
From the Big Bang to the Present (2012) by sounding on the negative eco-
logical consequences of human activity: “the actions people have taken
to keep their offspring increasing have put the planetary environment
and its life-forms in grave jeopardy” (xii).
As its title “What Now? What Next?” implies, the conclusion of
Brown’s study pushes the book’s historical narrative beyond the title’s
nominal temporal limits (from the big bang to the present) out into the
future. Offering the computer modeling of Meadows, Randers, and Mead-
ows’ The Limits to Growth (1972) as an appropriate scientific resource for
playing out possible “short-term scenarios” for humanity’s future, Brown
maintains that the best place to explore our “middle-range future” is in
works of science fiction like George Stuart’s The Earth Abides (1949), Walter
Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), and Kim S. Robertson’s trilogy Red
Mars (1991), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996). It is fitting that a
foundational text of the discourse of Big History should end in the realm
of science fiction. After all, as Stanislaw Lem suggests, science fiction, like
Big History, considers humans under the aspect of species-being (12).3
Indeed, Lem’s prescription for science fiction could just as well apply to
Big History: “to survey the whole human species in an extreme situation”
(13). This impererative could also describe the brief of David Mitchell’s
Cloud Atlas (2004).
If Cloud Atlas repeatedly signals its affiliations with such science fic-
tion standards as Ray Bradbury’s Farhenheit 451 (1953) and Russell Hoban’s
Riddley Walker (1980), the novel’s interest in Big History, specifically Jared
Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)—wittily bowdlerized in the novel
as “disease, dust, and firearms” (490)—is equally apparent. And it is the
presence of Big History in Cloud Atlas that will be the focus of this essay.
We will read Mitchell’s novel as a kind of thought experiment that asks
what would it be like to inhabit worlds that appear determined by the
kind of neo-Darwinism found in Diamond’s deep history. Mitchell’s novel
turns on a central agon between deep evolutionary imperatives that seem
to shape the fate of characters within the novel’s many fictional worlds
and certain countervailing possibilities that suggest that the human and
post-human actors in these worlds might transhistorically determine the
fate of our species and our planet. In staging this conflict, the importance
and critical resonance of Cloud Atlas lies precisely in the timeliness of
this structuring ambivalence. The novel’s concern with a transhistorical
predacity that drives human civilizations resonates with a broader con-
stellation of emergent discourses that explore the possibility of history
driven by imperatives that render the desires, intentions, and actions of
traditional ethical subjects of historiography—whether world historical
individuals, classes, or nations—nugatory. Not only Big History, but also
the concurrent trends in deep ecology, cognitive cultural studies, and
literary Darwinism—their manifold conceptual and methodological dif-
ferences notwithstanding—propose historical forces that subtend, resist,
or else challenge standard accounts of human agency. Michel Foucault’s
wager at the end of The Order of Things that man would be erased, “like
a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (387), would appear to find
its confirmation in the congeries of these contemporary posthumanist
discourses that aim to present the event-tide of that disappearance.
This essay is not interested in launching a rearguard humanist
defence of the traditional protagonists of historiography against these
post-humanist forays; rather our focus concerns what we perceive to be
the recrudescence of an unacknowledged individualism in the narratives
II
Our analysis begins with the ambivalence that seems to inform Cloud
Atlas’s relationship to its own present: on the one hand, a post-9/11 pes-
simism about the prospect of progressive change in a world increasingly
in the sway of neoliberal hegemony; on the other hand, a postmodern
optimism that all history is the proprietary inheritance of the present, and
that working through this legacy might free one from its determination
altogether. Far from a kind of textual unconscious running through Cloud
Atlas, however, this relation to historicity constitutes the very subject the
novel means to interrogate in both form and content. At least part of the
novel’s kinship with Big History resides in the way its seeks to recontexu-
alize the anthropocentric narratives of human time that have brought us
to a perceived moment of historical crisis. Big History’s attunement to
both smaller and larger scale temporal rhythms offers a way out of hu-
man history that seems, at once, seduced by the narrative of progress and
condemned to repeat the catastrophe that invariably follows in its wake.
Targeting the myth of progress, Cloud Atlas reads its 19th-century
expression as merely an alibi for man’s compulsive predacity. Indeed, the
outermost frame of the novel, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” with
which the novel begins and ends, is also its earliest temporal sequence.
Thus, what looks to an apostle of progress like Preacher Horrox as the
straight line upward of “Civilization’s Ladder” turns out to inscribe the
more fateful arc of a circle (487). The arch-villain Henry Goose speaks
power to the putative ‘truth’ of 19th century historiography’s myopic
representative: “Preacher, of all the world’s races, our love—or rather our
rapacity—for treasure, gold, spices & dominion, of, most of all, sweet do-
minion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous! This rapacity,
yes, powers our progress” (489). Through such craven and transparent
confessions, Cloud Atlas offers an imaginative performance and extrapola-
tion of the arguments put forward by Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and
Steel. Far from a civilizational advance, colonialism merely constituted
a refinement of the techniques of rapacity in order to take advantage of
utterly contingent sets of geographical factors.
The novel appears to agree in practice, if not in principle, with
Goose’s view that such instinctual determinism has been the engine of
human history; the “eternal return” of rapacity gives the lie to the teleo-
logical claims of progress. However, the problem with revealing the 19th
century ideology of progress as merely another example of the “eternal
return” is that it overlooks the historical and contingent (rather than the
biologically determined and necessary) relationship between the two con-
cepts. Walter Benjamin makes this point apropos of his own genealogical
survey of 19th century Paris:
The belief in progress—in an infinite perfectibility understood as
an infinite ethical task—and the representation of eternal return are
complementary. They are the indissoluble antimonies in the face of
which the dialectical conception of historical time must be developed.
In this conception, the idea of eternal return appears precisely as that
“shallow rationalism” which the belief in progress is accused of being,
while faith in progress seems no less to belong to the mythic mode of
thought than does the idea of the eternal return. (119)
While Nietzsche stands here as the apparent target of Benjamin’s esoteric
brand of dialectical materialism, Nietzsche’s own “untimely” interven-
tion on the domestication of “the Hegelian” in the interest of a cynical
narrative of progress represents a memorable antecedent to Benjamin’s
critique of such “Whiggish sentiments” (Mitchell, Cloud 508):
If every success contains within itself a rational necessity, if every event
is a victory of the logical or of the “Idea”—then quickly down on your
knees and up and down on every rung of the step ladder of “success”!
What, there are no more ruling mythologies? What, religions are
about to become extinct? Just look at the religion of historical power,
take note of the priests of the idea-mythology and their abused knees!
(Nietzsche 47)
In essence, Benjamin and Nietzsche are taking aim at all philosophies
of history that translate historical contingency into necessity. In such
instances, history is reduced to a script.
It is an open question whether Cloud Atlas escapes the historical
determinism it seeks to debunk in Preacher Horrox’s eternal verities by
re-naturalizing human history as the eternal reassertion of human pre-
dacity. In short, the novel risks replacing Horrox’s self-righteous faith in
progress with groundhog cynicism. George Gessert’s laudatory review of
Cloud Atlas exposes this latent conservativism in his reading of the novel:
Through this play with style, Mitchell explores the human condition in
enough different times and places to suggest patterns that transcend
historical circumstances. . . . Each [protagonist] leaves familiar territory
for the unknown and each encounters forms of murderous selfishness
that suggest something eternally dark about human nature. (425)
Or as Morty Dhondt intones to Robert Forbisher in the “Letters from Zedel-
ghem” section, “thus it ever was, so ever shall it be” (Mitchell, Cloud 444).
The uncanny sense of deja vu pervading the novel is, in part, a testa-
ment to the rich historical detailing of each section in the story. As a result
of Mitchell’s brilliant generic ventriloquism, each “period” reads like a
set-piece: a world at a particular moment (the South Pacific in the mid-19th
century; Europe between the wars; Southern California in the seventies)
is brilliantly realized, but feels like a hermetic monolith that is related to
the next chronological moment more through textual traces (a novel or a
birthmark) or narrative echoes than through any historical development.
The formal breaks between these stories signal transhistorical continuities
far more than they do the transitions and ruptures of historical change.
Like the mid-sentence break that leaves the opening “Pacific Journal of
Adam Ewing” quite literally “astraddle” (39) the rest of the interlocked
narratives, the breaks are a formal contingency visited, as it were, from
above, upon each narrative section rather than a development that is im-
manent to the stories themselves. Indeed, one of the most powerfully
uncanny features of the novel is the way that each section seems to be
translating or playing out in another context a scenario from another
time period. And for all of the spatio-temporal specificity of each story,
each section returns to the theme of predacity that sustains each in turn.
Whereas critics refer to the “Russian doll” nesting of narratives,
Mitchell’s own preferred figure is one of consumption: “the structure — in
which each narrative is ‘eaten’ by its successor and later ‘regurgitated’ by
the same — could mirror, and, with luck, enhance the overarching theme”
that might be identified by its properties: “the soul is a verb, not a noun”
is a proposition he advances in several of his books, as well as Cloud Atlas,
and the very notion of active transmission suggests an energy that might
slip from the husk of any deterministic present. An unapologetic spiritual-
ism thus floats above the experience of historical impotence; the various
iterations of the biologically driven narrative of human predacity play
out beneath clouds pregnant with the shapes of possible reincarnation. In
spite of the novel’s postmodern attempts to self-reflectively inoculate itself
against such “hippie-druggy—new age” insinuations it nonetheless puts
forward, each character bears the astronomical sign, a comet birthmark,
of a cosmic order far removed from the historical fray (357). Comets, we
should recall, are orbital bodies, and thus always return.
Such analogies seem to constitute a pastoral account of human his-
tory. If there is no alternative to global capitalism, as Margaret Thatcher
declared, then the imagination of the world before and after the passing of
capitalism—in which our very extinction may be taken as a logical predi-
cate—reserves for “deep history” the promise of an endpoint (if not an
alternative)—a natural history preserve, if you will. In what may be read as
a wry rejoinder to Thatcher, Fredric Jameson has observed that, “It seems
easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth
and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; and perhaps that is
due to some weakness in our imagination” (50). Something of this same
failure, we insist, attends this desire for a world without our presence,
or, in what amounts to the same thing, for a world that provides for the
soul’s safe passage even through endless cycles of that world’s creation
and destruction. As Slavoj Žižek pointed out in the context of so-called
“nature shows” on television: “this is the fundamental subjective position
of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze observing the world in the condition
of the subject’s non-existence . . . ‘The world without us’ is thus fantasy
at its purest: witnessing the Earth itself regaining its pre-castrated state
of innocence, before we humans spoiled it in our hubris” (80).
When Frobisher proclaims his longing for a “cloud atlas”—“What
I wouldn’t give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant inef-
fable?”(373)—the elegiac strain is not simply against old age, but against
the incessant mutability of the present. Benjamin points out the properly
historical dimension of this seemingly transhistorical desire, by locating it
squarely within the crisis of our capitalist present: with the idea of “eternal
recurrence,” “every tradition, even the most recent, becomes the legacy of
something that has already run its course in the immemorial night of the
ages. Tradition henceforth assumes the character of a phantasmagoria in
which primal history enters the scene in ultramodern get-up” (116). In the
uncanny light it sheds upon Cloud Atlas, “primal truth” may refer here to
either the ground of human predacity or the sky of the soul’s passage; in
any event, the necessity of Benjamin’s dialectical conception of history is
disclosed in the gap between them.
The novel’s brief sojourns in different historical periods and genres
begins to reveal its compensatory character, as if, like Zachry’s concept of
the “hole true” (266), the homophonic “wholeness” of the text were punc-
tured and the possibility of historical change itself were seeping silently
out of some undiscoverable hole in the fabric of the novel’s set-pieces.
Hicks has suggested that the novel puts forward an anti-historicist sensibil-
ity in self-consciously offering its readers archetypes rather than historical
agents: “This deployment of literary/cultural archetypes and invocation
of literary icons suggests that Cloud Atlas is less about how individuals
can become historical agents in order to derail our momentum toward the
apocalypse than about how literary genres provide us archetypes to resist
the ‘terror of history.’” But Hicks, like the novel she reads so deftly, stops
short of elaborating just how such readerly resistance might proceed; it
remains an article of faith all the more elusive since, as she concedes, “the
reading of the narratives—or even the viewing of visual media [by the
novel’s characters]—has little or no effect on the unfolding of events.” If
the many readers within the novel are not galvanized to resist by what
they read, it is unclear how our own self-conscious position above and
outside the “hole true”—wherein literary archetypes shuttle like souls
across the sky—guarantees the novel as a site of resistance. Hicks’s
claim for readerly resistance in Cloud Atlas defers finally to the familiar
postmodern notion, termed “historiographic metafiction” (5) by Linda
Hutcheon, in which narrative techniques self-consciously emphasize
their own conventions and textual indeterminacies in order to expose
the aporias in historical representation itself (5).6 Zachry’s story—the
central narrative episode and the only unbroken one in the novel—may
be said to acknowledge just what escapes from the text by ending with
a performative invitation to the reader: “Sit down a beat or two. / Hold
out your hands. / Look” (309). In being asked to peer into the “Orison of
Sonmi”—a device whose meaning and function have changed between
stories—we are here interpellated directly into the process of historical
transmission and interpretation. As N. Katherine Hayles puts it, “At once
a prayer and a technology, the orison bequeaths to us, readers who have
the context the Valley people lack, the urgent necessity for imagining the
strategies that will open for us and our descendents a different kind of
future” (61). One might suggest that “the urgent necessity for imagining
the strategies that will open for us . . . a different kind of future” designates
the proper sphere of the novelistic imagination itself. By pointing toward
the exteriority that “you” open within its pages, Cloud Atlas signals both
its awareness and desire to escape from the formal logic that nonetheless
structures and contains its narratives.
We trace this paradoxical desire back to the Big History that colors
so much of the philosophy of history discussed, but also played out in
Cloud Atlas. If, as David Armitage has suggested, Big History’s desire to
synthesize evolutionary and human history together into one grand story
is fundamentally “inhospitable to questions of meaning and intention so
central to intellectual history” (494), its attraction for Mitchell is perplex-
ing. On the one hand, Cloud Atlas would seem to agree with the operative
assumption of an author like Jared Diamond that all societies, and (by the
logical extension of evolutionary biology) individual members of those
groups, seek to enhance their power through the exploitation of available
resources. On the other hand, and in spite of all the apparent geographic
and historical diversity this Darwinian contest has produced, Cloud Atlas
seems to worry quite actively about the problem this poses for the agency
and ethical responsibility of its characters. As if to ease the atmospheric
pressure of this dilemma, and to unbind the novelistic imagination from
the bio-evolutionary explanations which push ever downward into the
genes and the fossil record, the promise of reincarnation rises above the
novel’s bleak record of predacity. And yet this spiritual plane seems
equally to remove “questions of meaning and intention” from the realm
of history – the very realm and those very questions that Mitchell’s novel
is so determined to trouble. What strikes us finally about the deadlock
between these two mutable-immutable quotients, the instinct and the soul,
is their secret complicity to ratify the present that is, as Dwight Eisenhower
is reputed to have said, “more the way it is now than it ever was.”
University of Oregon (Shoop) & Loyola Marymount University (Ryan)
Notes
1. See also Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They
Reveal About the Future (2011), and Deep Time/Deep Futures, a 2013 symposium.
2. David Armitage distinguishes between Big History which is “universal history that is
coterminous with the universe itself, drawing on the findings of cosmology, astronomy,
geology and evolutionary biology” and Deep History that delves only into human past
(494). For the purposes of the paper, we will consider all history that expands the scale
of human history to include include the evolutionary origins of mankind as a form of
Big History. In other words, we would consider Deep History, as defined by Armitage,
as simply a subset of Big History.
3. Lem turned to science fiction as a writer “because it deals with human beings as a
species . . . [a]t least, it should deal with the whole species, and not just with specific
individuals” (12).
4. Mitchell has elsewhere referred directly to the influence and explanatory power of
Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey: “Then I read The Bridge of San Luis Rey at university.
It’s a glorious thing, packed with ideas for other possible books. Wilder’s novel is an
attempt to explain why a certain group of people died when a rope bridge collapsed in
Peru—to locate meaning in randomness. It’s an essay in fiction about causality” (“The
Art of Fiction”).
5. For two brilliant accounts of these developments, see David Harvey’s A Brief History of
Neoliberalism (2007) and The New Imperialism (2005).
6. The ready cooptation of the postmodern rhetoric of social constructivism by far right
political agendas in recent decades—e.g. Karl Rove’s now infamous slight of the “reality-
based community”—ought to make us skeptical of any easy claims for its status as a tool
of progressive “resistance” or else Cloud Atlas encourages its own readers in the uncritical
dispensation of belief. In any case, Hicks’s hope that genres may serve archetypes of
resistance needs fuller elaboration.
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