Fearful and Shameful: Affective and Ethical Reactions to Modernity in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

Abstract

ABSTRACT As Heather J. Hicks suggests, recent post-apocalyptic fiction has engaged with modernity and its perceived problems. Frequently read alongside or even categorized into this emergent genre, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) recycles and yet appropriates its conventions to create small fissures in the predominance of negative feelings about modernity in our imagination, without falling for the temptation of utopian solutions. Indeed, Mitchell focuses on our affective responses to modernity, fear, and shame, most notably in Ewing’s and in Zachry’s episodes. Translating affective, personal, and even physiological experiences into a trans-historical and planetary narrative, Cloud Atlas attests to the ubiquity of fear and anxiety about the consequences of modernity and the shame of our own powerlessness and inaction. However, the novel also attempts to break the hold of such negative feelings in small ways; at important points, the rule of fear and shame collapses into what I call “minor ethical moments”. This paper, then, seeks to understand this affective and ethical dimensions of Mitchell’s text that have rarely caught critical attention and, I argue, distinguish it from the grand narrative of the end time often evoked in the emergent genre of post-apocalyptic fiction.