Transcending the Postmodern

The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm

Susana Onega, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Susana Onega, Jean-Michel Ganteau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000060140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria moderna

Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm gathers an introduction and ten chapters concerned with the issue of Transmodernity as addressed by and presented in contemporary novels hailing from various parts of the English-speaking world. Building on the theories of Transmodernity propounded by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, Enrique Dussel, Marc Luyckx Ghisi and Irena Ateljevic, inter alia, it investigates the links between Transmodernity and such categories as Postmodernity, Postcolonialism and Transculturalism with a view to help define a new current in contemporary literary production. The chapters either follow the main theoretical drives of the transmodern paradigm or problematise them. In so doing, they branch out towards various issues that have come to inspire contemporary novelists, among which: the presence of the past, the ascendance of new technologies, multiculturalism, terrorism, and also vulnerability, interdependence, solidarity and ecology in a globalised context. In so doing, it interrogates the ethics, aesthetics and politics of the contemporary novel in English.

Part I
The Poetics of Transmodernity

1 The Transmodern Poetics of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

Generic Hybridity, Narrative Embedding and Transindividuality^*

Susana Onega

Introduction: David Mitchell’s Transmodern Poetics

Readers of David Mitchell’s fictional works agree that his third novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), constitutes his most accomplished example so far of an extraordinarily original and engaging form of creative writing that, while displaying clear postmodernist and visionary traits, somehow defeats any attempts at pinning it down within a concrete literary trend. Thus, while Scott Selisker describes Mitchell’s works as examples of “The Global Novel” (443–59), Richard Bradford places Mitchell in a trend he calls “The New Postmodernists,” characterised by “a brand of contra-realism so flexible and eclectic as to almost defy definition” (47). Bradford situates the emergence of this trend after the 1970s and describes it as a reaction to Thatcherism characterised by the tendency to attune “radicalism […] to the demands of the marketplace” (48). Accordingly, he asserts that, with Cloud Atlas, Mitchell “seem[s] to have traversed the long-established chasm between the world of perverse experimental writing and the reading public” (62). However, as Peter Childs and James Green rightly argue,

this misconceives, or at the very least, underestimates, Mitchell’s fiction. Mitchell’s novels do not merely rehearse the stylistic inflections of a domesticated postmodernism, as Bradford terms it, but rather articulate a complex response to the current material conditions of the world. (26)

Childs and Green illustrate their view by arguing that Mitchell’s first three novels,

Ghostwritten, number9dream and Cloud Atlas are palimpsests of competing voices and styles that cycle through disparate but always interlinked temporal and special settings. As globalization forges new patterns of human interaction, interconnectedness and awareness, the nested layers of stories within stories in these novels, and their mixing of different modes of reality, articulate the fluidity and multiplicity of contemporary relations and subjectivities. (26)

According to this, Mitchell’s first three novels express the fluidity and multiplicity of contemporary relations and subjectivities in our globalised world through the creation of palimpsests of competing voices and styles contained in disparate stories belonging in different modes of reality but linked temporally and spatially. Drawing on this, I will attempt to demonstrate that the poetics of Cloud Atlas offers an innovative and accurate response to the shift of cultural paradigm from Postmodernity to Transmodernity that, according to a growing number of sociologists, philosophers of history and literary critics (Aliaga-Lavrijsen and Yebra-Pertusa; Ateljevic; Dussel; Le Roy; Luyckx; Onega 2017; Rodríguez Magda), has been taking place since the 1980s.

In various essays (see the Introduction to this volume), the Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda has expressed her view that one of the clearest signs of this paradigm shift is that, for all its undermining of master narratives, Postmodernity has fallen prey to the opposed impulse to put together and globally join the scattered pieces of these grand narratives due to the virtual revolution of Information Society, thus facilitating the creation of a new Grand Narrative: Globalisation (28). She contends that the fluidity and connectivity of Information Society fosters a process of totality that follows a network-like model devoid of clear organisation, hierarchical structure or hegemonic centre, and that this fluid, interconnected, unstable social reality begs for a similarly fluid, “transborder” mode of thinking (30), capable of responding adequately to the new questions about the nature of reality and the validity and limits of knowledge arising out of this era of swift transformations and fluidity in which everything is interconnected. Mitchell’s novels may be said to offer an extraordinarily innovative response to these questions. His fictional worlds offer a multiplicity of perspectives and voices and are populated by a whole range of characters belonging to different races, nationalities, social classes and even species, and displaying striking cultural, political and religious differences. But, unlike those in multiculturalist novels set in our postcolonial, globalised world, Mitchell’s characters do not attempt to “write back” the Eurocentric experience of colonisation from the perspective of the colonised. Rather, as I argued elsewhere with reference to Ghostwritten, they

exist in a complex multiverse ruled by random and yet meaningful coincidences […] in terms that emphasise the multinational connectedness of individuals, history, memory, and culture while skewing the risks of totalisation and universalism [thus conveying] a transpersonal conception of self and world. (Onega 2019, 51)

In other words, Mitchell’s imaginative response to the gnoseological demands made by the shift from Postmodernity to Transmodernity involves a move beyond the bounds of what Gerd Bayer acutely describes as “the Enlightenment ‘invention’ of individuality” (345) and towards a transpersonal mode of being requiring “an integrative or holistic approach that considers not just the intellect, but the whole embodied person situated in local and global community, ecosystem, and cosmos” (Krippner xvii). The world(s) inhabited by these characters coexist in parallel present moments and form part of a multiverse ruled by the principle of endless potentiality of Chaos Theory. My contention is that this transpersonal conception of self and world is crucial for the understanding of the difference between the postmodernist poetics of multiculturalist and postcolonial fictions and the transmodern poetics of Cloud Atlas.

The fact that Mitchell’s third novel is entitled Cloud Atlas already evokes the structuring principle of Chaos Theory, inaugurated by Mitchell Feigembaum’s study of the structure of clouds in 1974 (Gleick 3). But, given Mitchell’s interest in Eastern cultures, it also evokes “The Cloud Gate Dance,” the oldest known dance in China. In a striking example of serendipity, choreographer Lin Hwai-min created the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre in Taiwan in 1973 (Lin n.p.), one year before Feigembaum initiated his study of dynamical systems in New Mexico. Lin’s extraordinarily complex and innovative performances develop through the blending of Western dance with Eastern ontology in what is perceived by viewers as a haphazard and disconnected way requiring an emotional response from the audience (Warnecke). The fact that the ultimate truth conveyed by these plays is revealed though a process of epistemological unravelling and displacement demanding the emotional involvement of the public provides a significant model for the transmodern poetics of Cloud Atlas. In the following pages, I will analyse Cloud Atlas from the relational perspective and the logic of potentiality provided by Chaos Theory, using the structure and logic of the palimpsest as an interpretive device capable of articulating the transmodern poetics of the novel. My working hypothesis is that, put together, the structure of embedding, the generic hybridity and the emotionally charged and apparently disjointed contents of Cloud Atlas generate a process of epistemological unravelling and displacement that allows Mitchell to transmit allegorically an overall final truth about the human condition in our post-traumatic transmodern age.

Generic Hybridity, Narrative Embedding and Transindividuality in Cloud Atlas

Overtly, the structure of Cloud Atlas is very similar to that of Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). It contains six – instead of ten and a half – apparently unrelated stories referring to widely different times and places and belonging in various literary and non-literary genres, clogged with metafictional echoes to canonical works that function to undermine their historicity and foreground their constructedness. However, this impression of disconnectedness is soon called into question, not only because the stories are linked by recurrent motifs foregrounding relations of power and greed, but also because the titles and characters of the earlier stories reappear in the later ones, while the stories themselves are interrupted and continued in reverse order in the second half of the novel, thus setting into question the temporal progressiveness of the six stories, which apparently run from the nineteenth century to a post-Apocalyptic future. Thus, the first story, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” is abruptly interrupted in the middle of a sentence, coinciding with the end of a page (Mitchell 2012, 39) in what seems a printing flaw, and continued at the beginning of the last section of the novel (475), so that the two split halves of the journal constitute the all-encompassing external frame of the other, similarly split, stories, with the last one, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rithin’ After,” occupying the centre. Christopher A. Sims has described this story as “the only unbroken section of the novel” (181). However, it is also divided into two parts, even though they are separated only by a double blank space with a line in the middle (Mitchell 2012, 254). While this division reveals the perfect symmetry of the novel’s Matryoshka doll structure, the difficulty in spotting it creates an effect of indeterminacy similar to that produced by the Oulipian game on the number 9 played by Mitchell in Ghostwritten (see Onega 2019, 51–52), comparable to the hidden dimensions in String Theory. This effect of indeterminacy is enhanced by the fact that some of the characters in Cloud Atlas also exist in earlier and/or later novels by David Mitchell, thus conveying the idea that they belong in the same fictional multiverse, as the writer himself acknowledges: “each of my books is a chapter in a sort of sprawling macro novel. […] I write each novel with an eye on the bigger picture and how the parts fit into the whole” (Mason n.p.).

Apparently, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” situates the beginning of Mitchell’s alternative history of the world at the height of colonisation and imperialism as it is the journal kept in the mid-nineteenth-century by a notary during a business trip on board a merchant ship, the Prophetess (Mitchell 2012, 17), from Australia back to San Francisco. However, this chronology is deceptive as the journal includes the story of the Moriori, the first inhabitants of Chatham Isle, called by them “Rangiauria” and revered as mankind’s birthplace (32). The Moriori had lived in isolation for millennia (11), so that their language lacks a word for “race” and “Moriori” simply means “People” (11). The subjugation of these “noble savages” ruled by “imperishable peace” (12) by the violent and cannibalistic Maori provides the essential predator/prey leitmotif around which the six stories develop. As Mitchell noted in an interview, Cloud Atlas is “a book about predacity and predation […] individuals preying on groups, ...