The Sound of Silence: Eschatology and the Limits of the Word in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

“We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.”

-- Mitchell, Cloud Atlas 347

It should come as no surprise that the Wachowskis elected to adapt David Mitchell’s 2004 tour de force Cloud Atlas into a film. Like Mitchell’s works, the Wachowskis’ 1999 film The Matrix is a part of a contemporary trend in which artists and writers such as Angela Carter, Paul Auster, and Salman Rushdie engaged in postmodern discourse, themes, and techniques without necessarily subordinating itself their visions to a postmodern worldview.¹ Mitchell received an M.A. in 1987 from the University of Kent in comparative literature focusing on the postmodern novel, and his first three novels employ the themes and problematic tensions raised by the theory dominant during the rise of continental philosophy in Anglo-American graduate programs during the 1980s and 90s.² Cloud Atlas engages theory ranging from overt metafictional winks, such as Timothy Cavendish’s disapproving mockery of “flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices,” which “belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory” (150), to more subtle uses of popular postmodern metaphors apparently drawn from the theory, as when Henry Goose poisons Adam Ewing with a fake medicine, thereby literalizing Derrida’s riff in “Plato’s Pharmacy” on Socrates’s claim that writing is a pharmakon, a word that means both “cure” and “poison” (75-9). Like the theory it interrogates, such engagements necessarily front language, speech, and writing as central thematic concerns. Mitchell’s work is systematic in its logic, self-consciously employing a kind of neostructuralist aesthetic, wherein the novels enact a series of tensions that provide a formal structure, distinct from Levi-Straussian structuralism, insofar as the author is aware of the binaries as useful heuristics rather than as necessary universals. As Mitchell told Adam Begley concerning a later work, “Black Swan Green is carefully structured—like all halfway decent books” (“David Mitchell”) and this structure is essential to his project. In this essay, I will use Cloud Atlas as a case study to demonstrate how David Mitchell’s novels explore the problematics of language using a systematic binary logic, resisting the Derridean deconstruction made popular in Of Grammatology, by employing a Lacanian parable about the origin of humanity as a perpetual and cyclical fall into language (a site for both individual and collective fracture), a necessary and universal Fall that repeats from generation to generation until the cycle begins again. Hoping to transcend this dependence on discourse, the novel depicts a world in which language fails to capture the real, moving from the text to the voice, finally collapsing this binary into a hope for presence, for a look that would move beyond the limits of the word.

Prelapsarian Idles and the Fall into the Symbolic Order

In the second half of “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” the final chapter of Cloud Atlas, traveling notary Adam Ewing tours the Polynesian island Raiatea until he comes across a Methodist settlement’s church, in full psalmody and billowing smoke. At first thinking the church is on fire, Ewing enters to the tune of fifty natives’ hacking coughs, while they relight their pipes. Talking with a white settler named Wagstaff, he learns that he has entered the “Nazareth Smoking School,” headed by a preacher, who also happens to be an itinerant tobacco trader. Ewing listens to the headmaster’s sermon, delivered in the patois of “Antipodean Cockney”: “So it came to pass, see, Saint Peter, aye, ‘im ‘oo Mistah Jesus called Sweeter Peter Piper, he cameth from Rome an’ he taughteth them hooky-nosed Jews in Palestine what was what with the Old Baccy, an’ this is what I’m teachin’ you now, see” (482). Equating tobacco with the Old Testament (the “Old Baccy”) and New Testament Word of God, the headmaster hopes to impart the “New Baccy” as both an ideological and physical dependence in the natives as a form of social control. As Wagstaff explains: “You must understand, sir, your typical Polynesian spurns industry because...