Subject: [NABOKV-L] fulmerlog:Nabokovilia in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas
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Nabokovilia in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas

Blog: fulmerlog
Post: Nabokovilia in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas
Link: http://www.fulmerford.com/2012/09/nabokovilia-in-david-mitchells-cloud.html

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Below (at somewhat tedious length, I fear) are some comments I made at the recent Auckland conference regarding Nabokov, David Mitchell, and Cloud Atlas:


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                David Mitchell is the author of five novels.  He has not infrequently been compared to Nabokov and to Pynchon.[i]  Like Chabon, he has been generous and overt in his praise of VN.  Here’s a bit of the interview in The Paris Review’s series “The Art of Fiction” (the series which, in 1967 included an interview with Nabokov conducted by Herbert Gold):
 
INTERVIEWER
Ghostwritten contains an invaluable piece of advice for writers: If you’re trying to finish a book, steer clear of Nabokov—he’ll make you feel like a clodhopper. Was this from bitter experience?
MITCHELL
Yes, his combination of barbed intelligence and incandescent imagination is pretty humbling. And what a vocabulary! I used to read Nabokov with an X-ray on, trying to map the circuitry of what he was doing and how he was doing it.
Lolita is an act of seduction. This is a lovable rogue, you think, this Humbert Humbert. How interesting life is in his company! Then there’s a place where, toward the end—and this is one of the most chilling scenes in English literature—he realizes that Lolita has lost her magic. She’s not the pliant young fairy she once was. But it’ll be OK, he thinks, because I can have a daughter through her and start all over again. That’s when you know you’ve really been had here—this Humbert figure is a damaged, dangerous piece of work, and you’ve been riding along happily in his car for a hundred and fifty pages. Somebody call the cops! [ii]
 
                In an interesting “coincidence” Mitchell, we learn in another interview, is a synesthete.[iii]
                Cloud Atlas is a stunningly structured novel.  Indeed, Mitchell has remarked that he wrote the novel by first imagining the structure, then, as it were, filling in the blanks with plot and character!  That structure is basically a series of 6 stories, beginning here in the Antipodes – indeed, in the Chatham Islands east of New Zealand, in about 1850, moving to Belgium in 1931, the USA in 1975, England around 2011, Korea in 2200 and Hawaii sometime around 2400.  Each of these six sections breaks off in mid-narrative, moving startlingly to the next.  Indeed, the stories abruptly stop in mid paragraph sometimes.  But then, having worked his way from past to present to future, Mitchell turns his narrative around and works back, resuming each section where he left it, until he ends back in the mid 19^th century with the original tale.  It gets considerably more complicated.  Each section is written in a different style, with a different narrative voice:  some epistolary, some third person, some first person, some diary entries, etc.  The narrators are heroes, rogues, men, women, a gay wastrel of a composer, a cloned slave laborer, a post-apocalyptical near-savage survivor.  There is some possibility that some of the stories, which are all rather compelling narratives, are not actually (within the world of the fiction) “true” stories, but perhaps fictions within fictions; tales invented by characters in some of the other tales, or by someone else we never meet.  So, for example, the narrator of the fourth story, who is a vanity press publisher, reads the manuscript of the third section, and decries it as lamely artificial. 
                And, finally, it becomes increasingly clear as one reads the novel carefully, that each of the six protagonists is, in some sense or another, a reincarnation of his/her/its predecessor.  So, for example, the woman reporter investigating a nuclear power plant in 1975 has a vague memory of the music written by the composer in Belgium a half-century before.  In these ghosts and migrating spirits, there is, perhaps, something of the Vane sisters and Hazel Shade.
                Several of the most important characters in Cloud Atlas have a Nabokovian complexion.  I’ve mentioned the Kinbotian Robert Frobisher, a gay composer, spurned by his aristocratic family, who has a tendency to look down his nose at most members of the lower classes upon whom he unfortunately depends for support.  Tim Cavendish, the vanity press publisher is another Humbertian deeply flawed character, who tends not to see his own flaws and folly, as he blithely reinvents the world around him to conform to his prejudices and idiosyncrasies. 
                It seems to me, though, that Mitchell’s most Nabokovian trait is his ability to construct a narrative which is, flamboyantly and self-consciously, a fictional narrative, and yet is at the same time humanly engaging, even compelling.  The characters of Cloud Atlas are flawed spirits, and they come to us in a literary structure which constantly reminds us of its artifice and fictive character, as, for example, Pale Fire.  And yet, Mitchell makes us care about them, what happens to them, what happens to their worlds, even as we recognize that those worlds are built of words, are conjured out of airy nothing and given a local habitation and a name by the imagination of the artist.