“A Multitude of Drops.” David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Subject between Space and Time

• Main Author: Albert Noémi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2019-11-01
• Series: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Philologica
• Subjects: subject; borderlessness; liminality; concertina; birthmark
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausp-2019-0004

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) presents its readers with a “borderless world.” This borderlessness concerns space and time, with complex and interweaving spatiotemporal planes. In this fictional world, the subject will serve as an entity that brings together disparate spatialities and temporalities through an intricate symbolic web that connects the subject’s body to the world it inhabits. Numerous versions of past, present, and future run in parallel, the actual and the virtual coexist, and the text folds upon itself. The novel operates a constant state of liminality, a state that will be embodied by the subject. Seemingly in a paradoxical way, the multiple liminal states identifiable in the novel convey the ultimate sense of borderlessness. It is exactly the work’s heterogeneity, its jumps through time and space, its interrupted chapter structure that lend it a special unity and coherence that erases both geographical and temporal borders. The novel’s structure goes into thematic depths and creates a bridge, a constant interplay between form and content, captured in the metaphor of the concertina. Consequently, Cloud Atlas creates a constantly shifting world where the only fixed entity is the subject and its comet-shaped birthmark.