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This article explores the interplay between two seemingly contrary impulses in David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas: the mythopoeic and the postmodernist. Specifically, the article focuses on the novel’s postmodernist refiguration of the biblical myth of deliverance. Merging its biblical messianism with Nietzsche’s trope of Eternal Recurrence, the novel arrives at the figure of the eternally recurrent messiah. This article argues that the novel’s enigmatic leitmotif—the comet birthmark—serves as a symbol not only for Cloud Atlas’s recurrent messiah, but also for its interpretation of the biblical messiah as iterable, in the poststructuralist sense. The article concludes by identifying the novel’s postmodernist mythopoeia as an instance of metamodernism.

English

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Fulltext

C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings

The Iterable Messiah: Postmodernist Mythopoeia in Cloud Atlas

This article surveys four cognitive strategies readers unwittingly use as they “concretize” the fictional worlds they encounter in fictional texts. The strategies are: the application of the “principle of minimal departure”; the use of “scripts”; the use of generic literary conventions; and the use of “theory of mind.” The article demonstrates that these strategies are “interpretive” in that they entail the use of various kinds of knowledge from outside the fictional text in order to enable the reader’s immersion in the fictional world. Most interestingly, the reader carries out these strategies entirely unawares. The latter part of this article focuses on the peculiarities of reader response that make such a phenomenology not only possible, but necessary.