Digital Transcendentalism in David Mitchell’s <em>Cloud Atlas</em>

Abstract

life of man is a self evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles (1841)1All the great books in the world are but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied images of the soul.-Herman Melville, Pierre (1852)2Near the end of The First Luisa Rey one of six largely separate stories that make up David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas, an antinuclear activist named Margo Roker awakens from a coma at the precise moment when Bill Smoke, the hired thug who beat her into that coma months before, is shot and killed in another part of the city. Punctuating the expected, and gratifying, poetic justice of the hit man Bill Smoke's death and the revival of his innocent victim is, less expectedly, a recitation of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1857 poem Brahma. time of these narrated events is marked twice in concurrent sections so readers understand that the figurative rebirth of Margo Roker and the death of Bill Smoke occur simultaneously during the reading of Brahma. As Margo lays in her hospital bed comatose, Hester Van Zandt, another antinuclear activist, reads the poem aloud to her. Hester is interrupted when Margo regains consciousness; nonetheless, the first three stanzas are completed at the bedside of the victim:If the red slayer think he slays,Or if the slain think he is slainThey know not well the subtle waysI keep, and pass, and turn again.Far or forgot to me is near;Shadow and sunlight are the same;The vanish'd gods to me appear;And one to me are shame or fame.They reckon ill who leave me out;When me they fly, lam the wings;I am the doubter and the doubt,And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.1Emerson's poem functions at this point in Cloud Atlas as an emblem of poetic justice, each stanza enlarging comprehension and perspective, moving beyond human figures (slayer and slain) and categories of perception (distance, shadow, and vision) to surpass even fundamental conceptual categories themselves. As will become clear in the argument to follow, dramatizes particularly well the novel's own ambition for innovative brands of narrative comprehensiveness. Of course, we might be tempted to circumscribe the kind of gimmicky, mystical, causality that has slayer and slain linked instantaneously in a kind of cosmic entanglement to the demands of Mitchell's imitated genre, the thriller a la Dan Brown or Tom Clancy.4 quick terse prose of the Mystery, written in a style suggesting such popular fiction, prioritizes kinetic movement and plot coincidence over deep characterization and formal experimentation. This might lead one to argue that Emerson's transcendent, comprehensive figure of Brahma merely lends high literary gloss to the vulgar poetic justice via surprising coincidence that is virtually de rigueur for this type of genre fiction (and indeed proves central to solving the Luisa Rey mystery). But the karmic entanglement and cosmic comprehension that Brahma names extend beyond the Luisa Rey chapters and can be seen to undergird the entire structure of Mitchell's novel, and this despite the fact that the other five stories are written in different settings and styles that do not, with respect to genre, necessitate such narrative shape or resolution.I will argue in what follows that David Mitchell's novels, particularly Cloud Atlas, express a notable brand of contemporary transcendentalism linked to new media forms that I will call digital transcendentalism. Mitchell's formally ambitious and innovative novels, this is to say, possess features relevant to accounts of recent shifts in contemporary literary production-for instance, as a means of understanding the place of the novel in the age of ubiquitous new media and of literature's role in the persistence of religion (both weak and fundamentalist) in the contemporary period, giving rise to descriptions of the present as a postsecular age. …