ABSTRACT
Readers of David Mitchell’s fictional works agree that his third novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), constitutes his most accomplished example of an extraordinarily original 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” (2014, 443–59), Richard Bradford places him in a “New Postmodernist” trend characterised by “a brand of contra-realism so flexible and eclectic as to almost defy definition” (2007, 47). By contrast, Peter Childs and James Green convincingly argue 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” (2011, 26) and that “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). Starting from this premise, the paper will seek to demonstrate that the poetics of Cloud Atlas constitutes a formidably innovative response to the shift of cultural paradigm from Postmodernity to Transmodernity that is currently taking place in the Western world.
