“This Time Round”: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism

 
Surprisingly little critical attention has been given to the recent outpouring of apocalyptic narratives by major literary figures.¹ What began as a trickle of serious eschatological fiction in the 1980s and 1990s has become a noteworthy literary phenomenon in the first decade of the new century, with the publication of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), and Douglas Coupland’s Player One (2010).² In these novels writers who enjoy the hard-earned imprimatur of contemporary canonicity have produced end-of-the-world scenarios that once were the near exclusive domain of genre science fiction.³
 
We probably needn’t linger long on why there has been a surge of high-literary apocalyptic texts. The increasing interpenetration of “high” and “low” literary forms in the postmodern era is well-documented. The visible traces of cyberpunk motifs in most contemporary canonical apocalyptic literature suggest that this variant of science fiction became a sort of literary gateway drug, introducing eschatological themes to the literati. Meanwhile, as Lois Parkinson Zamora, Warren Wagar, and Fiona Stafford point out, apocalyptic texts proliferate when times are especially troubled (11; 4; 87). The melting polar icecaps, “War on Terror,” reactor meltdowns, oil spills, and chafing among nations with nuclear arsenals have produced the sort of anxiety that could explain why major writers in the West would speculate on the possibility that human civilization will collapse or self-immolate in the too-near future.
 
But if why there has been a surge in highly literary apocalyptic texts may not merit extended analysis, how postmodern writers produce eschatological fiction does. Necessarily, given the range of writers who have recently produced apocalyptic novels, there are many answers to this question. However, some interesting patterns do present themselves in these writers’ work. While some subscribe to romantic empowerment through loss, others to a modernist, elegiac approach to the unraveling of civilization, and still others to a recognizably postmodern depiction of the fragmentation of subjectivity or even madness in the face of global change, almost all portray their protagonists as alone in the midst of cataclysm.⁴ Several texts imagine that genetic engineering or cloning will prove the final straw that breaks civilization’s back. Many draw connections between contemporary attitudes toward the aging human body and forms of environmental and socio-cultural degradation. A number imagine a post-apocalyptic era in which some form of post-human will inherit the earth. Cannibalism is both a metaphor and a material reality in virtually all of the texts. Many seem deeply preoccupied with the nature of time and how we might engage with time differently.
 
One text that includes all of these elements, but makes the latter questions concerning time especially central, is David’s Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas. The boomeranging arc of Mitchell’s novel, which travels from the nineteenth century to a near-future apocalypse and then backward to its historical starting point, helps to crystallize a question implied in much postmodern apocalyptic fiction: If a linear conception of time is contributing to humanity’s apocalyptic tendencies, why not revert to the cyclical understanding of time that structured human consciousness for millennia?⁵ Mircea Eliade poses this same question in his study of the philosophy of time, The Myth of the Eternal Return, which argues that the abandonment of cyclical ontology in favor of modern historicism has made Western subjects profoundly vulnerable to what he terms “the terror of history.”
 
In this essay, I use Eliade’s treatise to argue that Cloud Atlas depicts the risks associated with both linear and cyclical approaches to temporality. Mitchell takes the contemporary climate of global crisis as an occasion to weigh dialectically the affective, social and political resources that historicist and cyclical forms of subjectivity and ontology may provide in the service of deterring our collective annihilation. The novel deploys a series of complex tropes—aging bodies, trains, cannibals, clones, transmigrating souls, and religious icons—to examine the phenomenology of historicism. In the final section of the essay, I argue that Mitchell’s self-conscious play with the unstable relationship between history and genre comments on the potential formal investments in literature have to break us out of an over-determined relationship to historicism.
 

“The Paradise of Archetypes and Repetition”

 
Growing up during the cold war, David Mitchell was deeply affected by the threat of nuclear war, and several of his novels include apocalyptic elements.⁶ Yet Cloud Atlas has the end of the world at its heart: The first half of the novel presents a series of five interrupted narratives set in periods from the 1850s to the near future and culminates with a sixth, post-apocalyptic story set in the distant future. From this midpoint, Cloud Atlas then moves backward through the preceding five narratives, completing each and ending with the resolution of the 19^th century story.
 
As in much postmodern fiction, Mitchell’s novel complicates the linear notions of time that are central to a modern understanding of history. On the one hand, there is an historical sequence to the stories that comprise Cloud Atlas. The nineteenth-century story set aboard a ship is followed by stories set in the early 20^th century, then the seventies, then the present, and onward to a near future of cloning. In the first story, a guileless notary named Adam Ewing is poisoned by a conman while sailing from Sydney to San Francisco. In the second, set in Brussels, Robert Frobisher, a young, bisexual musical prodigy, both preys on and is exploited by an aging master composer while serving as his amanuensis. The third narrative, set in California, features female cub reporter Luisa Rey, who attempts to expose the corruption of a nuclear power company. In the fourth, an aging English vanity publisher, Timothy Cavendish, is involuntarily committed to a nursing home. In the fifth, Sonmi-451, a Korean clone created to work as food-court server, becomes conscious of her subjugation and joins an abolition movement. In each story, some reference is made to the previous one, so for instance the musician in story two finds the journal that comprises story one, and so forth. Yet no exposition is offered about how these narratives relate to the centerpiece of the novel, the account of Zachry, a young man living in a primitive community on Hawaii in the distant aftermath of a global nuclear apocalypse. The sequence invites us to infer and attempt to decode causality from the series of narratives: somehow the events taking place in each era may have, sequentially, or in the aggregate, created the conditions of global catastrophe. In this sense, the superficial fragmentation of the novel may belie a deeper, coherent structure, and, at least up to its midpoint, it could be argued that the novel has a linear and historical perspective. Yet such causality remains hypothetical, and the reader is left to contemplate how each story or set of circumstances may relate to the others. In this respect the novel rejects the more direct forms of cause and effect that are associated with linear history.
 
These narrative aporia are not the whole story of Mitchell’s formal experimentation in Cloud Atlas, however, since the second half of the novel reverses the chronology of the first. In a recent essay on David Mitchell’s fiction, James Wood observes that, “Mitchell is obsessed with eternal recurrence” (71). Indeed, through its basic structure Cloud Atlas invites us to consider how cyclical understandings of time might serve as a way out of apocalyptic events, since this is what the book itself enacts: put simply, as readers we come to the apocalyptic end, only to find that half of the book remains to be read. By the time we have finished the book, we have arrived back in the 19^th century, creating a sense of coming full circle: the apocalyptic end of civilization becomes the occasion for the beginning of a new chapter or phase of each of the stories Mitchell had begun earlier.⁷
 
To make an apocalyptic narrative cyclical might seem to fly in the face of a pervasive modern view of the apocalypse as the end. Frank Kermode, for instance, argues that it is the “sense of an ending” that gives apocalyptic discourse its allure, penetrating our stories and our selves in equal measure. In a similar vein, Fiona Stafford’s scholarship on the offshoot of apocalyptic narrative that she calls “last-of-the-race fiction” underscores that this modern form of apocalyptic thinking emerged as a linear conception of time eclipsed the cyclical one:
 

[o]nly when time is perceived as a line and change as irreversible can “the last” have any meaning. Ancient concepts of time as a great circle through which everything turned before regaining the original point for a fresh departure, [sic] offered little scope for absolute endings and last things. In such systems, any ending must also be a beginning, while the significance of individual events is qualified by thoughts of endless repetition—just as each winter is followed by spring, each sunset redeemed by faith in the dawn. The same does not apply to linear concepts of time, where the model is not that of the natural cycles common to a community, but of an individual life moving in one direction from birth to death. Here, events are unrepeatable and endings carry no guarantee of regeneration, so “the last” has a much greater significance.
 

(42)

For Stafford, the power of the narrative of last things depends on the ending supplied by a linear conception of history.

Despite the modern imbrication of the linear and the apocalyptic, David Mitchell is not the first author to generate a cyclical apocalyptic narrative. Indeed, it would be an oversimplification to understand the cyclical model of temporality itself as obsolete. In his history of time, G.J. Whitrow reminds us that “Nietzsche, who died in 1900, and the twentieth-century historians and sociologists Spengler, Pareto, and Toynbee all believed in the cyclical nature of history” (179). Tyrus Miller extends the list of modern scholars who have promulgated the idea of cyclical history in the form of eternal recurrence to include “Georg Simmel, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Karl Löwith, Mircea Eliade, and Pierre Klossowski,” as well as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida (281). We should not be surprised that Warren Wagar, in his comprehensive study of “secular eschatological fictions” ranging from the early nineteenth century to the late 1970s, demonstrates that many “modern stories of the world’s end” actually “curve back on themselves, in a pattern of cyclical return” (185).
 
Both Whitrow and Wagar, however, understand such a modern preoccupation with the cyclical as part of a despairing outlook. Whitrow remarks that for the thinkers he describes, to understand time as cyclical is to “feel the menace of time as much as its promise” (179). Wagar, meanwhile, maintains that cyclical apocalyptic narratives “reflect a conserving temperament” (185). He explains that in these texts we see that, “the world of the author’s experience does not end in his consciousness or in his loyalties. He does not escape its boundaries. The future he envisages is . . . an empty repetition, because he is firmly attached to the present order of things” (186). Whether in Spengler’s Decline of the West or in Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz, for Whitrow and Wagar the problem is that the writers see no possibility of the new—everything is always already old. In this preference for the possibility of the new, both scholars ironically reveal the imprint of the linear ontology about which they write with such authority.
 
To gain perspective on how the human-made catastrophes of the recent era could inspire Mitchell’s more hopeful deployment of a cyclical apocalyptic narrative, it is instructive to turn to Mircea Eliade’s meditation on linear and cyclical views of time, The Myth of the Eternal Return, which presents cyclical ontology as not only reemergent in the 20^th century, but necessary. A product of the horrors of the twentieth century, Eliade understands the modern, linear conception of time known as “history” to be profane and chaotic. It is for him “the blind play of economic, social, or political forces, or, even worse, only the result of the ‘liberties’ that a minority takes and exercises directly on the stage of universal history” (151). Secular historicism requires humans to endure “collective deportations and massacres . . . [and] atomic bombings,” with no sense that these events have any larger meaning or purpose (151).
 
Eliade argues that premodern societies embraced cyclical models of temporality in order to annul the “terror of history” by denying its existence. In his understanding of the “archaic ontology” he examines, ancient cultures derived their sense of reality from their creation myths. The cycles that gave shape to their lives involved the perceived repetition of these primal moments through rituals and ceremonies, in which they understood themselves to be embodiments of archetypal mythical identities: “an object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype. Thus, reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation; everything which lacks an exemplary model is ‘meaningless,’ i.e., it lacks reality” (34).⁸ By elaborating this vision of cyclical temporality, Eliade works toward defamiliarizing more modern conceptions of historical time, reminding readers that “interest in the ‘irreversible’ and the ‘new’ in history is a recent discovery in the life of humanity” (48). In the final lines of his book he reflects that, “modern man is irremediably identified with history and progress, and . . . history and progress are a fall, both implying the final abandonment of the paradise of archetypes and repetition” (162).
 
Eliade starkly lays out the distinction between the versions of subjectivity cyclical and historical ontologies produce. Because his sense of reality is created by adhering to archetypes, the man within traditional culture “sees himself as real, i.e., as ‘truly himself,’ only, and precisely, insofar as he ceases to be so” (34). On the other hand, “‘historical man’ . . . [is] the man who is insofar as he makes himself, within history” (ix, emphasis in original). Near the conclusion of The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade imagines a kind of debate that might take place between these two subjects:
 

In the last analysis, modern man, who accepts history or claims to accept it, can reproach archaic man, imprisoned within the mythical horizon of archetypes and repetition, with his creative impotence, or what amounts to the same thing, his inability to accept the risks entailed by every creative act. . . .
 
To these criticisms raised by modern man, the man of the traditional civilizations could reply . . . [that] [i]t is becoming more and more doubtful . . . if modern man can make history.
 

(155-6)

Eliade shows himself to be largely sympathetic to the latter view; convinced of “the transitoriness, or at least the secondary character, of human individuality as such,” he presents history and individuality as two destructive myths that reinforce one another.

 
At points, in his rejection of historicism, Eliade appears to yearn for a return to return in starkly apocalyptic terms:
 

There is also reason to foresee that, as the terror of history grows worse, as existence becomes more and more precarious because of history, the positions of historicism will increasingly lose in prestige. And, at a moment when history could do what neither the cosmos, nor man, nor chance have [sic] yet succeeded in doing—that is, wipe out the human race in its entirety—it may be that we are witnessing a desperate attempt to prohibit the “events of history” through a reintegration of human societies within the horizon (artificial, because decreed) of archetypes and their repetition. In other words, it is not inadmissible to think of an epoch, and an epoch not too far distant, when humanity, to ensure its survival, will find itself reduced to desisting from any further “making” of history in the sense in which it began to make it from the creation of the first empires, will confine itself to repeating prescribed archetypal gestures, and will strive to forget, as meaningless and dangerous, any spontaneous gesture which might entail “historical” consequences. It would even be interesting to compare the anhistorical solution of future societies with the paradisal or eschatological myths of the golden age of the beginning or the end of the world.
 

(153-54)

Eliade’s language here reflects his own conflicted view of a return to cyclical ontology. On the one hand, he characterizes a return to repetition and archetypes as a “desperate” and “artificial” act, leaving Western subjects “reduced to desisting from any further ‘making’ of history” (emphasis mine). Yet he also again invokes the language of paradise, imagining that such a future society might resemble a “golden age.”⁹

 
Despite being regarded by many as the greatest twentieth-century scholar of religion, as well as author of “the greatest modern work on arrows and cycles” (Gould 12), Eliade is a controversial figure (Allen xi). Recent revelations of Eliade’s affiliation with Romania’s Iron Guard and his apparent complicity with fascism and anti-semitism have inspired some critics to interpret his enthusiasm for anti-historicist, archetypal modes of being as part of a regimented hierarchical ideology.¹⁰ Even before questions were raised about Eliade’s political affiliations in Romania, his account of history was much debated.¹¹ Given Hegel’s oft-quoted claim that “the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom” (19-20), a denunciation of a Hegelian model of history could be construed as a blanket rejection of progressive political causes. Even scholars who celebrate the value of Eliade’s work concede the potentially reactionary implications of his anti-historicism (Allen 269-71).
 
Yet to a striking degree, Eliade’s thought resonates with that of left-leaning thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin.¹² In his emphasis on the wisdom of pre-modern, non-Western others, as well as in his critique of the Enlightenment view of progress, Eliade can as easily be placed in the vanguard of postmodernism as in the camp of retrograde traditionalists.¹³ Indeed, Eliade’s disavowal of linear understandings of history can give us a distinctive purchase on certain pragmatic contradictions within post-structuralism. It is a given in the contemporary moment that conventional notions of individual, unified subjectivity—what Ermath calls “the founding cogito“—have been deconstructed in the wake of post-structuralist theory’s influence (8). Yet Eliade’s anti-historicist critique of modern subjectivity lays bare the degree to which linear models of time continue to inhere within the post-structuralist model of subjectivity, since its fluidity is contingent upon an ever shifting historical context.¹⁴ This covert reification of linear time in turn complicates post-structuralism’s ideological critique of Enlightenment notions of progress.
 
The near-apocalyptic scale of the Second World War inspired Eliade to reexamine human understandings of time as a potential key to the future of humanity. He provocatively suggests that we need not think of the passage of time only in linear terms, but he also subtly acknowledges the costs in ideals of human freedom that might be paid for such a choice. Mitchell’s novel reflects in similar terms on the stakes of our understanding of time and history. The experience of Mitchell’s characters resonates powerfully with Eliade’s claim that while archaic subjects understood themselves as reiterations of mythical archetypes, the modern conception of history has thrust a sense of individuality upon men and women, begetting a terrifying emptiness. All of Mitchell’s protagonists are initially depicted as isolated individuals caught in the sweep of history, whether it is racist Empire-building on Chatham Island, the socio-cultural aftermath of World War One, the power plays of the emergent nuclear industry, the growing social contempt for the elderly, or the technological advances that have made human cloning a reality. Stafford emphasizes the ways in which Robinson Crusoe, as the first “sole survivor” in Western literature, reflects a shift from Christian Millenarianism, with its emphasis on a collective ending, to a modern, secular preoccupation with individual “problems of loss and post-traumatic experiences” (72). Interestingly, Mitchell figures all of his main characters as castaways, not only depicting them as solitary outsiders in their various places and times, but, in a text full of images of islands, presenting many of them literally dragging themselves out of the water onto islands to escape what Lutz Niethammer, paraphrasing Benjamin, calls the “catastrophic storm of history” (qtd. in Woods 115).¹⁵
 

“Souls Cross Ages Like Clouds Cross Skies”

 
Cloud Atlas‘s interrogation of historicism extends from its larger structure to the details of its separate narratives. The six storylines that comprise the novel’s five hundred pages are both thematically diverse and dense with recurrent symbolism.¹⁶ Within its multiple stories, as much as in its overarching form and characterization, Mitchell’s novel considers the terror of history. This is particularly evident in the sections entitled “Letters from Zedelgrehm.” Mitchell creates a jarring juxtaposition between this narrative, which is narrated by a bisexual book thief, modernist musical composer, and sometimes sexual hustler named Robert Frobisher, and its predecessor, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” which is recorded by a devout Christian and notary who is dutifully trying to deliver legal documents to the beneficiary of an inheritance in Australia. While there are some continuities even here—both men’s destinies are shaped by legacies, and both are at the mercy of older, more cunning men—the tone of the texts is very different. Adam sees the world through a stable lens of Christian morality. Frobisher, living in the still scarred landscape of post-World War One England and Belgium, no longer feels such certainty. He is haunted by the death of his older brother, whose own virtues have become, posthumously, the impossible standard against which his family measures him. His father is an “eminent churchman,” but he reflects, “Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I’ve stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again” (448, 75).
 
This contrast between faith and a modern, secular world view is made especially evident when Robert, having read the first half of Adam’s journal, muses enviously on “happy, dying Ewing, who never saw the unspeakable forms waiting around history’s corner” (460). Adam’s innocence and religiosity, underscored so powerfully by his name, are contrasted with the waywardness and despair of a man who lives in the shadow of twentieth-century history. In this light it is particularly appropriate that Frobisher’s final undoing is effected by his love for a character named “Eva,” who precipitates his fall into suicide. The contrast between Ewing and Frobisher serves as a powerful iteration of the desolation produced by the “terror of history.”
 
This sense of the treachery of a linear conception of time is reinforced in the “Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.” In this case, linear time is examined through the lens of modern understandings of the aging body and mind. Cavendish is in some sense an older version of Frobisher, another Cambridge-educated Brit on the run from creditors, whose sexual indiscretion—in this case an affair with his brother’s wife—is the apparent motivation for his incarceration in a rest home. The vehicle for this meditation on the linearity of aging is a long and tortured train ride on the British rail system. The train ride, like Cavendish’s life and the memoir he produces, is full of false starts, interruptions, and failures. Overall, the decay of the British rail system and the metastization of its bureaucracy, along with the corruption of the landscape through which Cavendish travels, become the occasion for a narrative of decline. Britain and Cavendish’s aging body are both well past their prime, a message highlighted by Cavendish’s repeated references to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “Oh, aging is ruddy unbearable!” Cavendish reflects. “The I’s we were yearn to breathe the world’s air again, but can they ever break out from these calcified cocoons? Oh, can they hell” (168). The ambivalence of this rumination suggests the tension that runs through this section of the novel, for while the transformations brought to the body by age are undeniable, the meanings that are attached to them are highly malleable.
 
The prevailing episteme in Cavendish’s England is brutal contempt for the elderly, and Cavendish’s subjugation to a linear conception of time becomes graver still once he arrives at his destination—a facility he believes to be a hotel where he gratefully “checks in,” only to discover quickly that he has been involuntarily committed to a nursing home. At this point, Cavendish’s account of aging as a microcosm of time’s arrow takes on a prophetic—if not quite apocalyptic—tone that is at once poignant and absurd:
 

Behold your future, Cavendish the Younger. You will not apply for membership, but the tribe of the elderly will claim you. Your present will not keep pace with the world’s. This slippage will stretch your skin, sag your skeleton, erode your hair and memory, make your skin turn opaque so your twitching organs and blue-cheese veins will be semivisible. You will venture out only in daylight, avoiding weekends and school holidays. Language, too, will leave you behind, betraying your tribal affiliations whenever you speak. . . . Only babies, cats, and drug addicts will acknowledge your existence. So do not fritter away your days. Sooner than you fear, you will stand before a mirror in a care home, look at your body, and think, E.T., locked in a ruddy cupboard for a fortnight.
 

(180-81)

In Cavendish’s blackly comic account of aging we see the ravages of a secular, linear conception of time that has no larger meaning or purpose—an ontology that constructs the aging human body exclusively as a site of decay and shame.

 
While the sense of hopelessness that Mitchell associates with “time’s arrow” is palpable in these sections of the book, in several sections he presents cyclical ontology as similarly confining. The novel opens with a mystifying image: the conman Dr. Henry Goose scouring a beach on Chatham Island for teeth cannibals have left behind, teeth he plans to secretly convert into dentures for his nemesis, which will in turn lead to her public downfall when he exposes that she “masticates with cannibals’ gnashers” (6). At first this opening gambit merely baffles: how could such a bizarre tableau set the stage for what is to come? Yet the scene draws attention to Chatham Island as a site where “the strong engorged themselves on the weak” (5). As we will learn, Henry Goose is himself deeply committed to a personal philosophy of predation: In his guise as a doctor he will later poison the narrator, Adam Ewing, in order to rob him, while also casually attempting to poison his mind with his racist views. Already, his plan to use the teeth of an earlier conflict between weak and strong in order to empower himself against his wealthy former employer suggests the cyclical nature of violence, which is a central preoccupation of Mitchell’s novel.
 
In fact, the stories that follow are a sorry register of greed and exploitation, and a meditation on the will to power. The weak are poisoned, cuckolded, blackmailed, assaulted, imprisoned, enslaved, and, ultimately, eaten in a system of organized cannibalism by those with more cunning and power. The conclusion of the novel includes the repeated mantra of its first predator, Henry Goose, who explains to his victim, “The weak are meat the strong do eat” (489, 503). As the fabricant Sonmi-451 concisely states, “My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only ‘rights,’ the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful” (344). The emphasis in these passages on the cyclical perpetuity of oppression and violence raises the most obvious question about embracing a cyclical ontology: wouldn’t such an understanding of time simply calcify the brutality humanity has shown itself capable of, rather than opening the way for positive change?
 
Mitchell subjects this question to another level of magnification in the first and last events he chronicles. He provides many signs that the distant future in the Pacific narrated in “Sloosha’s Crossin an’ Ev’rythin’ After” recycles the conditions of the 1850s when “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” takes place. In the 1850s the Moriori, peaceful icon-worshippers who believe that to murder is to forsake one’s soul, are viciously subjugated and enslaved by the more warlike Maori tribe. ¹⁷ In the distant future of “Sloosha’s Crossin'” Zachry’s community, peaceful icon-worshippers who believe that to murder is to forsake one’s soul, are viciously subjugated and enslaved by the more warlike Kona tribe. In each story, a single member of the defeated tribe survives: in “The Pacific Journal” Autua (a character whose chiasmic name playfully gestures to the structure of the novel, and, perhaps, of time itself) ultimately rescues Adam Ewing from the clutches of the murderous conman Henry Goose; in “Sloosha’s Crossin,” the narrator Zachry alone leaves Hawaii for Maui after the Kona’s assault. The reproduction of barbarity that these narratives manifest suggests that to endorse a cyclical notion of temporality is potentially to celebrate socio-cultural regression.
 
This interrogation of cyclical ontology continues in “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.” While linear time is compared to a hellish ride on British rail, the epistemology of the “life cycle” is presented in equally grim terms. On the night Cavendish arrives at Aurora House, he avows that, “In the morning life would begin afresh, afresh, afresh. This time round I would do everything right” (173). In a parody of rebirth, when Cavendish awakes, he discovers that he will now be treated as a helpless baby. At the hands of the Aurora House staff he is slapped, scolded, spanked, and threatened with having his mouth washed out with soap. After he has a stroke, he is spoon-fed and diapered. Cavendish’s body becomes a palimpsest of linear and cyclical narratives, both of which can be deployed by the institutional apparatus of the nursing home to deny him agency and to strip his life of meaning.
 
Yet it is the cyclical worldview explored in “Letters from Zedelghrem,” Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence, that is depicted as the most treacherous. Composer Vyvyan Ayrs is a devotee of Nietzsche who intends that the final masterpiece of his career, a “cyclical, crystalline thing,” will be titled “Eternal Recurrence” (79, 84). Taking his new mentor’s lead, Frobisher reads Also Sprach Zarathustra and feels such a profound resonance with the philosopher’s work that he remarks that it is as though “Nietzsche was reading me, not I him” (63). When Frobisher completes what he views as the best musical composition he will ever write, it is not surprising that it is to Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence that he turns to defend his decision to kill himself:
 

Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortés’ll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again. Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities. . . .
 
Once my luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet. Such elegant certainties comfort me at this quiet hour.
 

(471)

Frobisher appears liberated here from the depression and mental instability that assail him. Yet his youth and the extremity of his act invite a reading of Nietzsche’s much debated notion of cycles as a destructive alternative to history’s “unspeakable forms.”

 
While the novel’s obsession with temporality is largely expressed as a critique of both linear and cyclical ontologies, it also explores the potential benefits of each. In broad terms, the novel does assert the possibility of historical progress. For instance, while barbarity appears more severe in Zachry’s distant future, the pinnacle of civilization also seems higher.¹⁸ If Zachry and Autua are indeed doubles, then Meronym and Adam are as well.¹⁹ Adam, a white American, is for much of the nineteenth-century narrative depicted as naïve and racist. Meronym, on the other hand, is a black clone who is part of a small number of technologically advanced survivors of a global nuclear war. She is portrayed as far more sensitive and culturally sophisticated than her predecessor, Adam. In fact, Meronym, whose name means “a word denoting the mid point of two extremes,” shows great respect for Zachry’s archaic culture, even as she wields remarkable technology (“meronym, n.”).
 
This technology in turn brings us to yet another level at which Mitchell’s treatment of linear-time-as-progress must be considered. While much of Mitchell’s novel appears critical of scientific and technological change, especially as it is depicted in the contemporary era of the “Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” and the near future of “The Orison of Sonmi-451,” it is the absence of much of this technology that signals humanity’s “Fall” in the post-apocalyptic section of the novel. In Zachry’s world, people die at 50 because of the lack of medical science and technology; they possess only primitive tools; they are subject to the brutality of barbarians; and they live in a state of profound ignorance. Such changes for the worse also, implicitly, celebrate the idea and material expressions of linear progress as they currently exist.
 
Meanwhile, the novel illustrates the potential advantages of a cyclical ontology in its depictions of reincarnation. Gradually revealing that Robert Frobisher, Luisa Rey, Timothy Cavendish, Sonmi-451, and Meronym have identical birthmarks, Cloud Atlas suggests they share a soul that is recycled across time. The book’s title in part refers to this notion of reincarnation; as Zachry reflects:
 

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.
 

(308)²⁰

The novel itself, then, serves as a “cloud atlas,” charting the movement of one soul across its several stories. While Zachry ultimately kills the Kona warrior who has attacked his family, he hesitates because he senses that “If I’d been rebirthed a Kona in this life, he could be me an’ I’d be killin’ myself” (301). This sense of identification with an other, of the interchangeability of identities across time, brings into focus how a cyclical ontology could enable a positive departure from the self-interested conventions of individualism.

 
Ultimately, in a novel preoccupied with both cyclical and linear forms of temporality, it is the “Orison of Sonmi-451” narrative that lingers longest on the problems and potential posed by each ontological position. On one level the sf-inspired clone narrative seems to function straightforwardly as a critique of the potentially dehumanizing telos of contemporary genomics research. The fabricants are treated with no mercy: they are regarded as non-human, forced to work brutal hours in conditions that often would be fatal for non-modified humans. Sonmi-451, whose name plays on Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, is a “server” at a fast food franchise and is required to work nineteen hours a day for twelve years. In Mitchell’s future, the treatment of clones is emblematic of a more pervasive dehumanization of the “corpocratic” regime, which construes its population as “consumers” rather than “citizens.” Most conspicuously, the term “soul” has lost its spiritual connotations and now refers to the identity/bank chip implanted in each consumer’s fingertip. In the denouement of the Sonmi-451 narrative, we learn that fabricants are slaughtered at the end of their term of service and their bodies “recycled” to feed other fabricants as well as consumers.
 
In bald terms, the practice of cloning Mitchell depicts represents everything that is dangerous about a cyclical view of time. As Sonmi-451 herself explains, “Fabricants have no earliest memories. . . . One twenty-four-hour cycle in Papa Song’s is indistinguishable from any other” (183). There is a linear element to their experience—all fabricants mistakenly believe that when their service ends, they will reach “Xultation” and be “transformed into consumers with Soulrings” (184). Yet in most respects, clones embody the archetypal model of identity associated with cyclical understandings of time. Endlessly reproduced and trained to perform the same tasks in perpetuity, the fabricants literalize the notion of eternal return. Indeed, Sonmi-451’s existence as a reproduction of a “stem-type” recalls Eliade’s analysis of the ways ancestors in some cultures serve as analogues of archetpyes. He reflects that, “The transformation of the dead person into an ‘ancestor’ corresponds to the fusion of the individual into an archetypal category. In numerous traditions… the souls of the common dead no longer possess a ‘memory’; that is, they lose what may be called their historical individuality” (46-7). Anticipating a likely criticism, he continues,
 

As for the objection that an impersonal survival is equivalent to a real death (inasmuch as only the personality and the memory that are connected with duration and history can be called a survival), it is valid only from the point of view of a “historical consciousness,” in other words, from the point of view of modern man, for archaic consciousness accords no importance to personal memories.
 

(47)

The parallels are obvious and chilling between this ancient understanding of the “impersonal survival” of archetypes and the view in Sonmi-451’s era of endlessly reiterated “stemtypes” who, at least according to “popular wisdom[,] . . . don’t have personalities” (187). This sense of fabricants’ redundancy permits (post)modern consumers, with their “historical consciousness,” to be indifferent to the fate of the fabricant. As Sonmi-451 explains, “To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, . . . but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you believe we have none” (187).

 
Sonmi-451’s “ascension,” or coming into consciousness, disrupts this sense of repetition, instead suggesting that “even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snow-flakes” (187). The ascension underscores the degree to which “An Orison of Sonmi-451” is committed to exploring the tension between a cyclical understanding of the world, with its fabricated, archetypal identities, and an action-driven, linear narrative that reframes Sonmi-451 as an historical subject. After her ascension, that linear narrative follows Sonmi-451 through her apparent recruitment by the Union rebels, builds to the revelation late in the story that her escape has been contrived by the Unanimity government to further divide consumers from fabricants, and ends with her emergence as a “martyr” who creates a set of Declarations that will ultimately change the course of history. In this plotline, we see a forceful valorization of a notion of historical subjectivity as the most hopeful means of escaping from the cycles of brutality that Cloud Atlas recurrently depicts. When the revolutionaries first attempt to enlist her in their cause, she tells them, “I was not genomed to alter history” (327). Yet after the members of Union show her the slaughter of fabricants, she makes a series of proclamations that self-consciously position her as an historical subject:
 

That ship must be destroyed. Every slaughtership in Nea So Copros like it must be sunk. . . .
 
The shipyards that build them must be demolished. The systems that facilitated them must be dismantled. The laws that permitted the systems must be torn down and reconstructed. . . .
 
Every consumer, xec, and Juche Boardman in Nea So Copros must understand that fabricants are purebloods, be they grown in a wombtank or a womb. If persuasion does not work, ascended fabricants must fight with Union to achieve this end, using whatever force is necessary.
 

(346, emphasis in original)

Both Sonmi-451’s call to action, and the ways she is situated here to resemble both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X (“using whatever force is necessary”), foreground the ways that this section of the text identifies linear history with the possibility of necessary change.

 
Balanced against this ostensible commitment to an historicist model of human identity, the Sonmi-451 section also reasserts the book’s fascination with reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. When Sonmi and her professed protector Hae-Joo Im encounter an ancient statue of Siddhartha, Hae-Joo Im explains that he was “a deity that offered salvation from a meaningless cycle of birth and rebirth. . . .” (329). Later an abbess explains to Sonmi that Siddhartha is “a dead man and a living ideal. The man taught about overcoming pain, and influencing one’s future reincarnations” (332). On one level the martyr Sonmi-451 and Buddha are doubles in the text—her ascension itself is the fabricant equivalent of the Buddhist state of Enlightenment. Her Declarations, moreover, promise liberation to other fabricants from the “meaningless cycle” to which they have been subjected.
 
Yet the references to Buddhism also evoke a more traditional, spiritual version of reincarnation, based on a model of karma. Eliade explains:

[T]he Indians quite early elaborated a conception of universal causality, the karma concept, which accounts for the actual events and sufferings of the individual’s life and at the same time explains the necessity for transmigrations. In the light of the law of karma, sufferings not only find a meaning but also acquire a positive value. The sufferings of one’s present life are not only deserved—since they are in fact the fatal effect of crimes and faults committed in previous lives—they are also welcome, for it is only in this way that it is possible to absorb and liquidate part of the karmic debt that burdens the individual and determines the cycle of his future existences. According to the Indian conception, every man is born with a debt, but with freedom to contract new debts. His existence forms a long series of payments and borrowings, the account of which is not always obvious.
 

(98-99)

Were we to understand Mitchell’s invocation of transmigration as inspired by the principles of Buddhism and karma as Eliade presents them, then Meronym, the most “enlightened” of the characters, is still paying for the misdeeds of Sonmi-451, Timothy Cavendish, Luisa Rey, and Robert Frobisher, and the price is to live in a wrecked world. Such an interpretation also provides one way of understanding the overall structure of the novel. To some degree the second half of each of the stories suggests ways each character might improve the karma of coming incarnations through their positive efforts, perhaps avoiding the disastrous scenario the centerpiece of the novel plays out.

 
While the complexities of Buddhist spirituality are beyond the scope of this essay, it should be clear from this brief account that it possesses both cyclical and linear elements. Even as souls transmigrate, enacting a cycle of existence, they are also moving forward toward freedom from this state of embodiment. In its stories, Mitchell’s novel seems to enact a similar balance between investments in historical and cyclical ontologies. After the post-apocalyptic midpoint of the novel, the second halves of Mitchell’s five narratives unspool in markedly linear form. In sections full of swiftly narrated action scenes, all the characters escape from one form of confinement or another.²¹ Through the course of these events, the novel also affirms the possibility of historical change. Adam vows to join the abolitionist movement; Frobisher creates an enduring work of art; Luisa stops the construction of a dangerous nuclear reactor; Cavendish overcomes his own xenophobia to collaborate with a Scottish patient in the rest home; Sonmi-451 becomes a martyr on behalf of all fabricants. As these descriptions suggest, these characters in part overcome the terror of history, not through cyclical thinking but through various gestures toward community. Only Frobisher remains isolated and arguably succumbs to the terror in his suicide. The final words of the novel, which imagine each individual action as a drop in the ocean, affirm this sense that acts of individual change can become collective historical transformations.
 
Despite the anxiety the text expresses about repetition in its treatment of cloning, it is also sameness—the experience of an archetypal identity—that strengthens each character. Through reincarnation, which they experience as déjà-vu, Mitchell’s characters achieve a sense of solidarity with their other selves across time. This spiritual understanding of repetition is amplified by several references to iconography and idolatry in Cloud Atlas. In an enigmatic passage near the opening of the novel, Adam Ewing plunges into a hole and discovers “First one, then ten, then hundreds of faces,” faces that prove to be dendroglyphs generated by the now nearly extinct Moriori (20). Mitchell returns to the notion of idols, or “dead-lifes” as Zachry calls them, in the “Sloosha’s Crossin” section (261). Meronym asks of the Valleysmen’s icons, “Is icons a home for the soul? Or a common mem’ry o’ faces’n’kin’n’age’n’all?” (258). One of Zachry’s tribe responds that, “The icon’ry . . . held Valleysmen’s past an’ present all t’gether” (258). These references call to mind Eliade’s discussion of the relationship between archetypes and ancestors, but they also resonate with Derrida’s discussion of spectrality in Specters of Marx. In Tim Woods’s gloss on Derrida, “History is an irrepressible revenant . . . , living-dead which haunts the present, since causes demonstrate a ‘posthumous’ historicality and materiality, a ‘living-on’ or survival after the death of the original event, demonstrating a more powerful life in its spiritual presence than its corporeal absence” (116, emphasis in original). For Woods, Derrida’s insistence on the impurity of history converges with Benjamin’s insistence that historicism must be replaced by “the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one” (116-17; Benjamin 79).²² As I now want to suggest, the form of Mitchell’s novel further elaborates on this challenge to historicism in its invocation of literary icons.
 

“In the Mind’s Mirror”

 
This essay has thus far focused on the content of Cloud Atlas without giving significant attention to its form. Ultimately, however, the complex form of Mitchell’s novel is essential to understanding how cyclical and linear notions of time, and their attendant versions of subjectivity, figure in his engagement with contemporary eschatology. When, at a recent reading, I asked David Mitchell about his political goals for his novels, he stressed that he thinks of himself more as a stylist than an “idea man” (“Thousand Autumns”). Such an assertion seems too modest: his books to date have shown themselves deeply committed to a range of questions and ideas about power, history, capitalism, terrorism, and other major contemporary issues. In another sense, the assessment rings true, for what is most dazzling about Cloud Atlas is the seemingly effortless way in which Mitchell shifts from a nineteenth-century romance on the high seas, to a decadent modernist tale of polymorphous sexuality and artistic intrigue, to a trim, commercial 1970s thriller, to an absurdist contemporary memoir, and finally to two sections of very elaborate futuristic science fiction.
 
It was Mitchell’s ability to segue from one of these genres to another with such apparent effortlessness in Cloud Atlas that initially drew raves from critics. Yet a number of critics have also been disoriented—even, perhaps, disturbed—by Mitchell’s ability to shuttle in and out of these narrative modes. One critic remarks, “The way Mitchell inhabits the different voices of the novel is close to miraculous” (MacFarlane). Another characterizes Mitchell as “a genius,” but goes on to say that his “virtuosity too often seems android” (Bissell). In his interview with Mitchell, Mason writes, “If there has been one consistent criticism of Mitchell, . . . it has been that his virtuosity is mere ventriloquism, a capacity for imitation that suggests he lacks originality” (Mitchell, “The Experimentalist”). This critical ambivalence reminds us that while many writers cover vast sweeps of time through either continuous or episodic narration, few tailor their narrative forms to the various moments in time they are exploring via narrative voice, focalization, style, and genre.
 
To be sure, such a literary enterprise is rare in part because of the sheer labor involved in developing the various techniques required to make each genre and style seem authentic. Other writers may also have eschewed such a montage of period pieces because of the profound contradictions such a production entails. The very authenticity of each section is exploded by its proximity to another equally authentic piece performing another time period. We are not permitted the sense of immersion typical of the historical novel. Instead, we are jarringly shuttled from one period to another. In their neo-formalist work on genre, Scott Black et al. maintain that
 

form is arguably one of the key ways for readers and writers to access and participate in history. Writing, reciting, or perhaps even silently reading an Horatian ode upon a local skirmish inscribes a history (public and political); so too does drawing an event—possibly the same event—into a history of subjective experience by rendering it with Petrarchan blazons or morality-play derived monologue.
 

(8)

From this perspective, Cloud Atlas enacts a sort of time travel. But not, precisely, historical time travel. Mitchell’s ability to capture moments in time through style and genre could, indeed, be said to suggest that those time periods were distinct, and that our recognition of them is predicated on this distinction. That is, the shifting styles and genres themselves index the linear passage of time. However, Mitchell resists this understanding, destabilizing the historical implications of the various genres by breaking them up and reversing their order. This highly visible manipulation denudes his genres of their temporal specificity.

 
The self-conscious, metanarrative devices Mitchell includes in Cloud Atlas also make the artificiality of the various “historical” narratives conspicuous. In the second narrative, Robert Frobisher finds the first half of Ewing’s published journal when he rifles through Vyvyan Ayrs’s book collection, looking for valuable volumes to steal and sell. This discovery serves as the first disclosure to Mitchell’s readers that he intends to denaturalize the stories we are reading and treat them as constructed narratives. Mitchell goes further, having Frobisher doubt the provenance of the journal. He muses:
 

Ewing puts me in mind of Melville’s bumbler Cpt. Delano in “Benito Cereno,” blind to all conspirators—he hasn’t spotted his trusty Dr. Henry Goose [sic] is a vampire, fueling his hypochondria in order to poison him, slowly, for his money.
 
Something shifty about the journal’s authenticity—seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t ring quite true—but who would bother forging such a journal, and why?
 

(64)

Why indeed? Here Mitchell draws attention to the artifice of his novel by flagging its literary debts and exposing its concerted effort to “forge” the form of a historical journal.

 
These metafictional gestures continue. Frobisher’s own narrative is told through letters that are saved and read forty years later by his former lover, Rufus Sixsmith, a character enmeshed in the cover-up at the nuclear power station which is the focus of the Luisa Rey narrative. The Luisa Rey story turns up in the form of an unpublished manuscript sent to publisher Timothy Cavendish, who reads and edits it. Cavendish’s story is in turn made into a movie, which enchants the fabricant Sonmi-451. Finally, Sonmi-451’s narrative takes the form of a digitally recorded interview that is discovered and viewed by Zachry.
 
These metafictional elements become an occasion to raise various questions about literature and literary form. From an historicist perspective, they can be read to comment on the role the loss of the written word may play in global collapse. The sequence of forms Mitchell parades before us reflects the large-scale cultural shifts that may take us from the era of personal journal and letter writing, through the heyday of literacy with the flourishing of bestsellers and newspapers, on to film, then computerized images, and then, after the Fall, back to pre-modern and non-literate forms of communication. In this sense, the architecture of the book hints at the prophylactic value of writing in our neo-apocalyptic times.
 
It is unclear, however, why the apparent dissolution of literacy matters in the larger narrative, since the reading of the narratives—or even the viewing of visual media -has little or no effect on the unfolding of events. While the various sections can be read to suggest that predatory actions snowball and carry us inexorably toward an apocalyptic outcome, the literariness of the book complicates this interpretation. Locally, the literary texts have little effect on the action in the book—reading Ewing’s journal does not change Frobisher’s conduct, nor does Luisa Rey’s encounter with Frobisher’s letters. Cavendish thinks of Luisa Rey when he escapes from the nursing home, but there is little suggestion that the thriller narrative actually inspires his bid for freedom. Sonmi-451 feels empathy for Cavendish’s plight in “The Ghastly Ordeal,” but watching the film does not change her views, which are already formed. Zachry’s encounter with Sonmi-451’s testimony affects neither his conduct nor the disastrous events that unfold in Hawaii.
 
More than historicizing literature, then, the constructedness of the stories complicates a historicist understanding of the novel as a whole. The events that take place in the various narratives are not “real” events—they are stories, encountered by characters in other stories. Postmodern literature, of course, is full of historical narratives that explode conventional understandings of history, a phenomenon labeled “historiographic metanarrative,” by Linda Hutcheon, and more recently “metahistorical romance” by Amy Elias. Much has been said about the ways postmodern narrative techniques emphasize the textuality of history, and its undecidability. Mitchell is certainly concerned with these questions, especially in “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” where he offers a lengthy meditation on the ways power can undermine our access to the “actual past” by overlaying it with images of a “virtual past” (389-90). This section allows for a Baudrillardian interpretation of the book, in which Mitchell, despite attempting a serious meditation on our trajectory toward apocalypse, becomes caught in an unreal vertigo of literary conventions. In this reading, any “real” vision of our problems or their potential solutions is obscured by a wall of pre-existing cultural images—what Baudrillard calls simulacra, and what here take the form of literary genres and conventions that determine their own content.
 
It is also possible to perceive Mitchell’s text’s affinity to a more considered anti-historicist position. The young American man on a voyage; the sophisticated, bisexual British wit; the spunky female American reporter; the cynical, involuntarily incarcerated prisoner of a facility for the aged and impaired (at the mercy, no less, of a soulless head nurse); the beautiful, rebellious clone; the scrappy survivor caught in a post-apocalyptic landscape—the more audaciously Mitchell plays with literary styles and genres, the less these characters seem like individuals and the more they appear to be repetitions of archetypes derived from the history of Western literature. Indeed, Mitchell conspicuously pays homage to Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ken Kesey, Russell Hoban, and Margaret Atwood, among others. 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.” Here we might reconsider critics’ charges that Mitchell “lacks originality” and credit the ways he possesses what we can call “origin/ality,” a thoughtful regard for the origins of contemporary literary forms that becomes a deeper comment on the problems of contemporary historicism. While an historicist perspective suggests that by conforming to preexisting archetypes, we compromise our individuality, autonomy, and freedom, Mitchell’s novel, in terms that resonate with Eliade’s thought, suggests that we might do well to invest ourselves in older, larger stories.²³
 
Such cyclical understanding of temporality and subjectivity is, of course, ultimately a matter of belief—a word that figures crucially in both Eliade’s and Mitchell’s work. Eliade raises the issue of belief through its expression as faith at the conclusion of The Myth of the Eternal Return. He explains that at the moment when “the horizon of archetypes and repetition was transcended,” Judeo-Christianity introduced “a new category into religious experience: the category of faith” (160, emphasis in original). Eliade continues: “Faith, in this context, as in many others, means absolute emancipation from any kind of natural ‘law’ and hence the highest freedom that man can imagine: freedom to intervene even in the ontological constitution of the universe. . . . Only such a freedom . . . is able to defend modern man from the terror of history” (160-61).
 
Whereas Eliade understands belief as a means to a subjectivity unburdened by the terror of history, Mitchell associates belief with the construction of a sustainable world. At the conclusion of Cloud Atlas, he offers the following meditation:
 

What precipitates Acts? Belief.
 
Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s 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. . . .
 
If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.
 

(508, emphasis in original)²⁴

Mitchell’s novel implicity adds to this series of propositions that if we believe both events and selves are old as well as new, we may invest ourselves in both in a less destructive fashion.

 
We have arrived where we began—with the suggestion that particular models of time and subjectivity may bear on whether the human species endures. Eliade formulated his anti-historicist critique in the wake of the cataclysm of World War Two; David Mitchell explores the limits of historicism in a contemporary eschatological context. In Cloud Atlas, a variety of characters, figures, and events represent the risks and possibilities of a cyclical Weltanschauung. The form of his novel, which is both highly original and profoundly derivative, recapitulates this tension. Ultimately, it is only right that Mitchell leaves us going in circles.