Abstract
This article appraises the debt that David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas owes to the novels of Russell Hoban, including, but not limited to, Riddley Walker. After clearly mapping a history of Hoban’s philosophical perspectives and Mitchell’s inter-textual genre-impersonation practice, the article assesses the degree to which Mitchell’s metatextual methods indicate a nostalgia for by-gone radical aesthetics rather than reaching for new modes of its own. The article not only proposes several new backdrops against which Mitchell’s novel can be read but also conducts the first in-depth appraisal of Mitchell’s formal linguistic replication of Riddley Walker.
Highlights
Everybody has a part in many overlapping stories and it isn’t always clear which one is your story
Within Mitchell’s Russian-doll structural premise, itself a mirror of the many sub-narratives of Riddley Walker and other postmodern fictions,1 the final diegetic layer is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape where the inhabitants speak a mangled, phonetically transcribed language much akin to the “Riddleyspeak” within Hoban’s novel
This inter-textual anchor is one that Mitchell himself confirmed in a pamphlet for the 2005 “some poasyum [symposium]” of The Kraken, the Russell Hoban fan club, where he wrote, Zachry’s voice is less hard-core and more Pacific than Riddleyspeak, but Mr Hoban’s singular, visionary, ingenious, uncompromising, glorious, angelic and demonic novel sat on my shelf as evidence that what I wanted to do could be done, and as encouragement to keep going until I’d got it right. (Mitchell, 2005)
Summary
Everybody has a part in many overlapping stories and it isn’t always clear which one is your story. It is no secret that Russell Hoban’s (1925-2011) masterwork, Riddley Walker (1980), is a strong central reference point for David Mitchell’s virtuoso, genre-shifting, six-part novel Cloud Atlas (2004), a fact often referred to in the notes of critical articles, but rarely explored in any detail (Edwards, 2011; Machinal, 2011; Stephenson, 2011).
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