The Atlas of Globalizing Fiction

Abstract

David Mitchell has written a famous novel about how to make a (geographically fragmented) novel out of fragments: the six life stories included in Cloud Atlas are implicit fictional networks, simultaneously concealed and laid bare. The novel offers ample room for six nested histories and their divergent styles; the result is a strange and rather ostentatious book, shaped like a ziggurat, and providing an almost didactic initiation into matters of style. In fact, David Mitchell offers an atlas of the globalization of fiction. The spaces and times of Cloud Atlas engender not only polytopy and polychrony, but also a theory of fiction. The atlas of worlds, zones, territories, topographies becomes a structure that constantly generates other worlds to be visited or narrated. Their very narrativity allows for the globalization of fiction.