The Genre Spaces of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas

Given Cloud Atlas's broad historical scope and inventive use of genre, it is unsurprising that much of the critical work on the novel has focused on the text's relationship to historicity and the social functions and implications of storytelling. This article attempts to complement such observations by (re)considering David Mitchell's text in terms of space and, in particular, Henri Lefebvre's theories of social space. It is my contention that each of Cloud Atlas's six narratives is constructed around a unique representation of space intimately connected to both the unfolding of events within the narrative and the various modes of capitalist and non-capitalist production it depicts. Beyond simply offering an additional lens through which to contemplate the novel, this emphasis on space also serves to further considerations of the ethical orientation of the text. Ultimately, I argue that, along with Mikhail Bahktin's observations about the functioning of the novelistic chronotope, assessing Mitchell's novel in terms of Lefebvre's spatial theories demonstrates how Cloud Atlas's juxtaposition of different genres serves as a potential site for ethical mediation not unlike Jurgen Habermas's notion of discourse ethics.