“Gravid with the ancient future”: Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History

Casey Shoop, Dermot Ryan

SubStance, Volume 44, Number 1, 2015 (Issue 136), pp. 92-106 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2015.0011

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/577274

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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

“Gravid with the ancient future”: Cloud

Atlas and the Politics of Big History
Casey Shoop & Dermot Ryan

We ourselves shall be loved and then forgotten.

But the love will have been enough; all those im-
pulses of love return to the love that made them.
Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a
land of the living and a land of the dead and the
bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
(Thorton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey)

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

© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2015

92 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015
Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History 93

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

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of Big History, a respiritualized subjectivity that persists in spite of their

efforts to escape overly anthropocentric historical narratives. While history
is revealed as driven by biological, ecological, and geological processes
that function beneath or beyond any kind of deliberative human control,
we are invited to take comfort in the fact that as individuals, like the
victims of the collapsed bridge of San Luis Rey or perhaps George Bailey
in It’s A Wonderful Life, our “virtuous acts” might precipitate positive
outcomes of which we are unaware (Mitchell, Cloud 508).4 In any future
effort to map out this new discursive geography, David Mitchell’s novel
Cloud Atlas offers a timely literary staging of this impasse: iterations of
the biologically-driven narrative of human predacity in which “the strong
engorge[] themselves on the weak” (3) coexist with the promise of a tra-
nhistorical and transmigratory community that resists the will-to-power.
The novel’s efforts to imagine this new kind of community account
in part for the novel’s critical (if not also its popular) appeal. Berthold
Schoene cites Cloud Atlas as an example of an emergent fictional form he
dubs “the cosmopolitan novel,” giving expression as it does to Jean-Luc
Nancy’s philosophy of “the inoperative community,” a spontaneous and
momentary collectivity that refuses to circumscribe this collectivity into
a fixed identity or to subject it to a totalizing telos. According to Schoene,
Mitchell’s novel materializes “our consciousness of humanity’s global
being-in-common by writing onto the body of his protagonists the mys-
terious actuality and endurance of history” (116). Praising Schoene’s read-
ing of Cloud Atlas, Janice Ho accedes to his claim that the novel’s formal
innovations generate a cosmopolitan worldview that differs from that of
the more insular, traditional novel:
The multiple narrative threads . . . spanning different geographical
regions, different temporalities, and different casts of characters from
different walks of life, create “a communal web of the world” that is
drawn together into a fleeting composite, but which never rigidifies
into a reified totality. (359)
Ho argues that Cloud Atlas, in imagining such a “global inoperative com-
munity,” represents “an active agent aiding the formulation of a cosmo-
politan future” (358).
The persuasive power of the novel’s evocation of the “communal
web” can be accounted for, in part, by Mitchell’s acknowledgement of the
profoundly negative moment within current globalization in the figure of
Unanimity, the governing authority of corpocracy in the “Sonmi” chapter.
Unanimity is a regime so totalizing that it innoculates itself against insur-
gency by manufacturing and controlling its own resistance movement,
Unionism (348). While George Orwell’s 1984 provided a Cold War consen-
sus with the figure of the State as the logical terminus of totalitarianism,

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Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History 95

Mitchell’s novel offers our contemporary moment the corporation as the

ultimate telos of the totalizing logic of neoliberalism. Appearing in 2004,
Cloud Atlas captures the widespread sense of despair among progres-
sive and left constituencies in the wake of 9/11 and the so-called “war
on terror,” events whose unfolding marked both the rapid eclipse of the
global justice movements of the late nineties and the apogee of neoliberal
imperialism.5 This post-9/11 dispensation—explicitly referenced on a
number of occasions in the “Sonmi” chapters—may account for a certain
fatalism about the viability of collective action running through the text,
from the account of the Moriori to that of the Valleysmen.
At the same time, if collective action as the agent of progressive
change appears foreclosed by the revelation that Union is merely a front
organization to provide Unanimity “with the enemy required by any hi-
erarchical state for social cohesion” (348), the novel offers its readers an
alternative route to transformation through the form and transmission of
the testimonies that the characters compose or that are composed about
them—whether in the form of journals, letters, mystery novels, films,
“orizons,” or “yarnin’.” While individual characters may be powerless
to alter their immediate circumstances, taken together, their stories con-
stitute the transhistorical promise of something beyond them. In short,
Cloud Atlas proposes that the lives and records of courageous individuals
might add up to an ocean of hope. In bequeathing to its readers these
dubious instruments of salvation and offering this hope in the language
of familial patrimony—Adam Ewing considers “[a] life spent shaping a
world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit . . . as
a life worth living” (508)—Cloud Atlas channels the spirit of neoliberalism
as much as it represents a sobering indictment of its global instantiation.

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

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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

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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”

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(Mitchell, “Genesis”). Which is to say, paraphrasing Woody Allen, that

the earth is a gigantic restaurant. History is a kind of metabolic system
in which each discrepant episode consumes the prior in turn so that the
“overarching theme” of predacity is powered to repeat itself through time.
In other words, the novel’s structure not only represents the domestication
of the experimentalism of Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler
(after all, each of Mitchell’s interrupted narratives gets taken up and
brought to some kind of resolution), it also reinforces the “overarching
theme” that “the weak are meat that the strong do eat” (503).
For all the forthrightness with which Mitchell’s novel may be said to
eat itself, it has not escaped what Benjamin, above, calls the “indissoluble
antinomy” it shares with the discourse of progress. In the post-apocalyptic
central section, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After,” the visiting
“Prescient” Meronym—whose very name (“part of something”) augurs
the cyclical return of the ‘civilized’ future she represents—may be said
to offer the novel’s rebuttal to Preacher Horrox’s view of “Civilization’s
Ladder”: “Human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed
it too” (273). To the degree that Cloud Atlas is structured in its very form
as the negation of the teleological view of civilization’s advance, it too is
waiting for a “dialectical conception of historical time” to be developed.
The appearance of the “eternal return” as counter-myth in an early
21st century literary work like Cloud Atlas should not be taken as merely
atavistic here. On the contrary, the “belief in progress” or “infinite perfect-
ibility” that Benjamin observed of 19th century historiography marks 20th
century history even more indelibly: “From a certain point onwards,” as
Alain Badiou has written in his attempt to conceptualize the 20th century
as a unit of philosophical inquiry,
[T]he century was haunted by the idea of changing man, of creating
a new man. . . . Creating a new humanity always comes down to de-
manding that the old one be destroyed. A violent, unreconciled debate
rages about the nature of this old humanity. But each and every time,
the project is so radical that in the course of its realization the singu-
larity of human lives is not taken into account. There is nothing there
but a material. (8)
As Badiou’s language makes clear, repetition continues to haunt the
description of these “old” and “new” projects of human perfectibility,
“each and every time,” like the shade of their still unresolved antimony.
In a way unintended by Badiou, we find a displaced prescription for
a “big historical” approach in his wording: “the singularity of human lives
is not taken into account. There is nothing but a material.” Big History, in
its ambition to unify natural history and human history “in a single, grand
intelligible narrative” (Christian 2), is also compelled to speak in terms of
human material—not, as Badiou has it, the unconditional repurposing of

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human material by various 20th century ideological regimes, but rather

“material” in the sense that enables translation between human and other
complex, naturally-occurring systems. The profound desire underwriting
so much of the current trend in Big History might also be said to reveal
itself precisely in the sound of the 20th century’s skipping record, the all-too
immanent refrain of the human as totality and, as it rounds upon itself,
apocalypse.
In spite of its temporal traffic into past and future, Cloud Atlas would
appear to affirm this bleak, late 20th century assessment: the century’s
promise of technological progress has only enabled “Nietzsche’s gramo-
phone record” (471) to spin in place at higher rpms. Mitchell hears in
the vicissitudes of history the same score of human instinct—call it the
“Cloud Atlas Sestet”—played with minor variations through scenes of
colonialism, environmental degradation, corpocracy, genomic manipula-
tion, totalitarianism, etc., so the music plays on. The novel describes one
character’s eyes as “gravid with the ancient future”(491), and this elegant
phrase ably captures the cyclical revolution of time’s record in the novel.
“The notion of eternal return,” Benjamin notes, “appeared at a time when
the bourgeoisie no longer dared count on the impending development of
the system of production which they had set going” (117). And while he
may have undervalued the way in which the “impending development
of the system” has depended upon engineering precisely such crises
of confidence throughout the 20th century, Benjamin again captures the
paradoxical way in which the slow creep of time in the narratives of Big
History might be the by-product of the dynamic of ever-quickening capi-
talist crises: the confidence to speak of all prior history is itself borne out
of a millenarian moment, when the future seems most dark.
For all its attraction to the idea of “eternal return,” Cloud Atlas also
registers a discomfort with its inherent complacency as a philosophy of
history. While the novel can draw some fine poetry from Robert Frobisch-
er’s dying declaration that “Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortes’ll lay
Tenochtitlan to waste again . . . the sun’ll grow cold again” (471), the novel
entertains the possibility of what Heather Hicks terms “a kind of ‘karmic
return.’” According to Hicks’s reading, Cloud Atlas weighs the resources
and risks attendant upon both teleological and cyclical understandings of
history and offers in its narrative structure an alternative to both. Hicks
sees in the resumption of earlier historical narratives after the central vi-
sion of post-apocalpse offered by Sloosha’s Crossin’, the suggestion that
each “character might improve the karma of coming incarnations through
their positive efforts, perhaps avoiding the disastrous scenario the cen-
terpiece of the novel plays out” (Hicks). In short, rather than comprising
the structural equivalent of the “eternal return,” these reprised narratives

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represent a “karmic return,” a return with progress. In a similar vein,

Jonathan Boutler has argued that the text is held in a kind of suspension
where loss is preserved because it is repeated, but always with the pos-
sibility of being worked through to anticipate an alternative future (133).
Thus, while Cloud Atlas suggests that to dig beneath the sands of
time is to see how old teeth are fitted for new mouths, it remains simul-
taneously interested in the possibility of how genuine historical progress
might proceed. On just this question, the novel complicates the schematic
opposition between form and content we drew above: in each narrative
content becomes form for the one that succeeds it, transmitted as material
(journal, letters, pulp novel, film) to be consumed, interpreted, and poten-
tially transformed by (and transformative for) its inheritors. If Cloud Atlas
cannot resolve the “indissoluble antinomy” it shares with narratives of
progress, if it cannot break the deadlock that we have argued structures
its relation to late 20th century history, it is nonetheless alive to the pathos
of this unrealized possibility. For all the insistence on the score of human
instinct that runs through the text, there is the hint of a counter-refrain
that plays across the narrative sections.
For Mitchell, the will-to-power may govern the course of events in
each narrative moment—the strong engorge themselves on the weak at
every level of social complexity—but linguistic drift and the contingencies
of narrative communication suggest that the transmission of this recurring
message may go awry. There is the possibility that the continuity might
be broken. In the novel’s fifth section, this potential becomes a matter for
explicit political theorization as the dissident clone Sonmi~451 is inter-
viewed about her burgeoning revolutionary consciousness. Sonmi exposes
the fundamental insecurity of power in her world, which must violently
and continuously re-inscribe itself in order to perpetuate its authority—
within this repetition there is always the possibility of difference: “I was
often shocked to hear new words fly from my own mouth, gleaned from
consumers . . . A dinery is not a hermetic world: every prison has jailers
and walls. Jailers are ducts and walls conduct” (188). Sonmi will later
read Plato’s Republic, but she already understands intuitively here the
insurrectionary danger of music against which the philosopher inveighs:
language travels in spite of the filters and surveillance—one cannot close
one’s ears. Sonmi later describes a genetically engineered butterfly in
this pertinent way: “Their wings’ logos had mutated over generations
into a chance syllabary: a small victory of nature over coprocracy” (328).
The medium of language, as a field of signification at once mutable and
persistent, carries all of the fragile and promissory hope of the novel’s
titular metaphor, a cloud atlas, from which the storms of the future might
be forecast and their disasters averted.

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Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History 101

But even here in the “chance syllabary” of a butterfly’s wing or

the cloud’s shifting shape, the hope remains quite elusive. Mitchell’s
metaphors swerve away once more from the capacity of human culture
to effect this change and again to the intentionless evolutionary drift of
Big History. The enormously large time scale on which evolution occurs
makes the promise of mutation rather slim consolation and a mechanism
recalcitrant to human agency. If, as we have argued, the allure of Big
History is symptomal of a desparate desire for action coupled with the
inability to think in terms of organized collective change at the end of
the 20th century, and that the reemergence of “eternal recurrence” is itself
an expression of this crisis, such metaphors are deeply revealing of the
novel’s ambivalent sense of possibility.
This ambivalance gets its clearest articulation in Adam Ewing’s
imagined exchange with his father-in-law at the novel’s conclusion: Adam
wants to embrace the possibility that his actions can change the world for
the better; his father-in-law asserts the inevitablity of the “natural . . . order
of things” (508). On the one hand, readers realize that the two transnational
institutions cited by the father-in-law as most impervious to change—U.S.
slavery and European colonialism—have been consigned to the dustbin
of history (at least in their most explicit forms). On the other, the novel
offers only the volunteerist individualism of Ewing as the model for how
such huge social and systemic transformations occur:
History admits no rules; only outcomes.
What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts and virtuous acts.
What precipitates acts? Belief (507).
While it would be easy to dismiss this as the philosophy of history of
one of the novel’s characters (and its most naïve one at that), Cloud Atlas
repeatedly suggests that the major historical changes that it is charting
depend on the kindness of strangers. If we are surprised that Adam
pledges himself to the Abolitionist cause, “because [he] owe[s] [his] life
to a self-freed slave” (501), we should note similar and equally significant
acts of voluntary kindness propel the novel’s larger cosmic narrative. In
his recourse to the power of individuals to enact systemic change, Ewing
rehearses the problem of intention and agency in Big History as it turns
toward the future.
While the calls to action in works of Big History are often eloquent,
they are as paralyzing as they are urgent. The very clarity that the scale
of Big History claims to offer stands as a genuine impediment to identi-
fying the precise source of the problem and developing an appropriate
response. When the human species is the problem, it is hard to assign
responsibility beyond the familiar targets of population growth (with the
attendant neo-Malthusian intonement of the tragedy of the commons)

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102 Casey Shoop & Dermot Ryan

or industrialization (which those in the Global South have read as the

familiar and hypocritical refrain of a North that has already outsourced
its industrial base and wishes now to ration and regulate what was
originally the source of its prosperity). On a more pragmatic level, these
environmental jeremiads offer very little guidance on the institutions and
collective actions needed to change course from the eco-apocalypse that
they claim is rapidly approaching. Like Ewing, we are invited to pledge
ourselves to a cause rather than a movement.
Adam Ewing plays out this crisis for us. Ewing closes his narrative
and the larger novel of which it is part by redeeming the cynical response
of his father-in-law to his proposed activism: “your life amounted to no
more than one drop in a limitless ocean!” “Yet,” Ewing rejoins, “what is
any ocean but a multitude of drops?” (509). The difficulty here lies not
simply in Ewing’s naïve sentimentality, of which the novel has given us
many prior examples, but rather in the way the metaphor once again re-
moves human action from historical time. There is, first of all, the slippery
nature of the word “drop” here: Does it function in Ewing’s formulation
as an event or merely a quantity? In other words, the metaphor veers
close to rendering time into space. Human lives, rather than drive a his-
tory, form a substance: their actions comprise the drops that make up an
ocean. The metaphor of the ocean that closes the novel, like the image
of the cloud atlas that gives the novel its title, acknowledges the protean
nature of human history but risks translating that history into a substance
that simply changes form.
Indeed, for all of Ewing’s progressive desire to work for the cause
of abolition, the efficacy and meaning of that action are finally dissolved
in the oceanic feeling that is bigger than all of us. His journal ends with-
out the heavy sense of moral responsibility, of consequences weighed, of
choices irremediably altering the course of his present—on the contrary,
it does not seem too much to assert that this metaphor offers him absolu-
tion from just such an historically binding sense of ethical obligation. His
conscience is made light at the thought of the ocean’s multitude of drops.
Appropriately, the novel does not represent Adam’s involvement (if any)
in the historical social movement which was abolition.
“If doom is written in our natures” (508), a prospect that Cloud Atlas
replays across past and future, then the possibility of genuine change is
not a question of history at all but rather of belief. Cloud Atlas might be
said to put its faith in the etymological guarantee of metaphor to ‘carry
over,’ in which the tropological limit to be crossed is always the defined
spatio-temporal situation of any historical actor. The name for this trans-
migratory capacity in the novel is, of course, the soul. And Mitchell seems
keen to preempt the category mistake of thinking of this soul as an entity

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Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History 103

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

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104 Casey Shoop & Dermot Ryan

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

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Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History 105

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

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106 Casey Shoop & Dermot Ryan

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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