Cannibalism, Colonialism and Apocalypse in Mitchell’s Global Future

The beginning and end of history

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a novel intent on blasting open the classical unities of time and place. On publication in 2004, its unusual structure made it a talking-point for reviewers and readers alike. It was an unexpected crossover hit, winning critical acclaim and also finding popular appeal.¹ For a novel with clear global ambitions, the decision to begin and end in the often overlooked and liminal region of the Pacific Islands, rather than in the culturally and economically more dominant spheres of Europe, America or Asia, is no accident. In this essay, I suggest that Mitchell’s novel can be read as a (re)staging of the perennial conflict between Hobbesian and Rousseauian conceptions of nature and humanity’s place within it. I will argue that Mitchell’s use of cannibalism as a trope for savagery raises questions about the myths of progress and linear time that underlie Western thought. This mythological aspect at the heart of Western culture is echoed in the novel’s temporal structure that resembles an ouroboros, the snake or dragon eating its own tail, which Jung so aptly suggested functions as an archetypal symbol of both destruction and renewal.

Mitchell’s novel is structured like a Russian doll, with the reader progressing forward through a series of interrupted narratives, and then, after a pivotal middle section, methodically working back through the narrative plots in reverse order. Within the novel there are two temporal movements that make the first and last (sixth) narrative sections special twins in a set of telescoped time. In terms of chronological story-time, the narrative progresses forward through history, from the mid-19^th century seafaring account of “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” to the post-apocalyptic future described in “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After.” These two sections frame the novel. But with the reversal of time effected by the novel’s nested structure, its discourse-time has the reader looping back to an end-point within the 19^th century. There is thus a neat symmetry between the two sections: the first section in the story-time, “The Pacific Journal,” also becomes the final section in the discourse-time. The final story-time section, “Sloosha’s Crossin’,” becomes the heart of the book when viewed within the discourse-time. These first and final sections therefore constitute the past and the future, confounding linear time by positing an interrelationship of past and future configurations of human society.

The novel’s six narrative strands are told by six different individuals, each in a separate geographic location and historical time period, and using different generic conventions. The circular structure of the overarching narrative suggests that the post-apocalyptic future will be marked by a regression of mankind to a Hobbesian state of nature. By situating the narratives of Adam Ewing from “The Pacific Diary” and Zachry from “Sloosha’s Crossin’” within the Pacific region, Mitchell implies that human history both begins and ends here.

The novel ranges across a vast geography between these two sections. Following the elliptical structure of its discourse-time, the narrative in Cloud Atlas shifts from the Pacific Islands to Europe to America to Europe to Asia and back to the Pacific Islands. However, when viewed in terms of its story-time, the novel ultimately plots a simple transition between the two vector points of the Chatham Islands (“The Pacific Journal”) and Hawaii (“Sloosha’s Crossin’”). This is in fact a magnification of the original journey undertaken by Adam Ewing, the first protagonist, as he travels on board a ship from the Chatham Islands to Hawaii. The novel’s international scope is therefore compressed into a relatively small distance, firmly located in the Pacific region.

By using the Pacific Islands as an anchor point in Cloud Atlas, Mitchell exploits certain stereotypes and ingrained tropes within Western culture regarding aspects of civilization and primitivism. In the 18^th century, the Pacific Islands represented the last frontier for European colonization and expansion. Explorers such as Samuel Wallis, James Cook and Louis Antoine de...