Cloud Atlas 01 - Structure: Interlocking narratives

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So I think the most obvious starter is the question of CA's structure. @Apocryphal said the text is often described as a collection of stacking Russian dolls. What did people think of the structure?

When I was reading and got to the end of the first part, I actually asked myself if my ebook was defective, and spent some time checking that. Of course that would not happen if I had a physical book - the page format and numbers would have reassured me. Made me think about how the physical format matters. I like the movie ok (3.75 stars say), and I know that many of us have seen the movie, so I wonder what people thought of what that adaptation did to the structure, and how it might have evoked different responses from us. Likewise, does this structure have any relevance for the structure of roleplaying, and what adaptations would be needed?

One of the reasons I was looking forward to reading this was I am quite familiar with interlocking narratives in the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist context. Every text has a framing narrative, which provides evidence used by historians to produce a history of early Buddhism, as well as materials for a modern biography of the Buddha. Traditional biographies are too full of myth to be reliable for what we want to know nowadays. Then there are a great number of interlocking narratives that are used to explain the workings of karmic cause and effect, which entail the idea of rebirth and previous lives. Last in the Himalayan context there are interlocking narratives used to explain the development of a particular individual or Buddhist deity over many lives. They are sometimes extremely complex (or is it disorganised?) in how they leap from one narrative to another. What I have gotten from reading these is that connected narratives are a powerful way to evoke and educate an understanding of trans-personal motivation.

In CA the connection was that the protagonists had each read one of the stories, and thought about it, and wanted to finish it. What did people think about this (author's projection of hope onto the reader ;-) ? What did we make of the connection the various protagonists in these stories?

Comments

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    I enjoyed the structure very much - I hadn't been aware of it in Buddhist but studied it in connection with ancient near Eastern literature (mainly Egyptian and early Hebrew) where under the technical guise of chiasmus it is used a great deal. There are several theories as to why it was popular, among which are that it helps preserve transmission and comprehension of written material in a largely oral society, and indeed helps oral poets and bards to structure their performances in ways that entertain and interest their audiences. For example, it allows the same story to be narrated in longer or shorter form depending on available time and attention span!

    It is generally held that the most important aspect of the story (the moral or point of it, if you like) is to be found at the centre of all the concentric rings. The subsequent "unwinding" serves to underline the consequences of the major point, complete the various outer rings in a pleasing manner, and relax again into ordinary life. It is, in some ways, the opposite of the cliffhanger style ending of a lot of modern serialised storytelling. Some would argue (including me) that it reflects a very different view of society as formed of supporting rings around a central hearth, rather than hierarchical dominance rising towards a Leader.

    Be that as it may, it is a storytelling form that largely fell out of favour after the ancient and classical worlds, with a few key counterexamples deliberately constructed to use this technique - Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises shows some features of chiasmus, though his writings in general do not.

    So... what was David Mitchell trying to convey with this very overt use of the structure? One message might be that society is inherently repetitive, with a tendency to fall back into old patterns despite attempts to break away from it. So here, the protagonist of the outermost ring is determined to see society move towards a fairer and more equal mode, but the innermost ring shows us that despite everything this fails, and human greed leads ultimately to its own ruin. The last group attempting to live fairly and justly are about to be overtaken by disease.

    The film adopted a different structure, and rightly so, I feel. In a visual medium like film I'm not sure the chiastic pattern would have worked, whereas the parallel sequences did (for me, at least), especially with continual reuse of the same actors in each time-slice. It made overt and explicit the connections between characters (along with more foregrounding of the birthmark on each central character, which was mentioned only in passing in the book version). The ending was of course hugely different, presenting a message of ultimate hope and expansion rather than decline and (probable) ending. Both endings were plausible ones, and in an oral tradition one can easily imagine different narrators all offering a different interpretation of how things might turn out, simply by changing the innermost core of the tale. It's a multi-valued story, not a single-valued one, so I don't mind the divergence here between book and film.

    In passing, I also very much liked the interplay between history past and future), dream and music.

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    I liked the structure and think it was deftly handled, with basically a nod to the previous story. The first story ends mid-sentence, and Frobisher acknowledges this. As I mentioned elsewhere, are we supposed to read into this that the characters are reincarnations of previous ones? There’s not much hint of that in the book (maybe only when Luisa goes to the sailboat?) The film makes this more of a thing by recasting the actors.

    One does get the sense that we are all connected across time, and people who lived long past have a way of touching us today. Is this merely because we relate to their stories? Or is there more to it?
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    > @Apocryphal said:
    >, are we supposed to read into this that the characters are reincarnations of previous ones? There’s not much hint of that in the book (maybe only when Luisa goes to the sailboat?)

    But also forward in time in ways that are either precognitive or anti-causal, for example where Ayres says ‘I dreamt of a … nightmarish café, brilliantly lit, but underground, with no way out. I’d been dead a long, long time. The waitresses all had the same face. The food was soap, the only drink was cups of lather. The music in the café was,’ he wagged an exhausted finger at the MS, ‘this.’

    So not just reincarnation of past figures, but a more integrated weaving of past and future.
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    My Kindle copy of the book has a section by Mitchell talking about the film, the different medium demanding as different structure, the increased emphasis on reincarnation, etc.

    I found the structure of the book discouraging. The first half of the book was a sequence of setups with little resolution, which I found tough going. I very nearly gave up on the book. The second half was much better.

    As for the reincarnation part, I think there are hints that are generally too subtle, so the author resorts to stating it a couple of times near the end of the book. But in addition to the reincarnation, I think there's the more general point that all the stories are tales of repression and domination, and how people can and should challenge, perhaps defeat, those systems.

    (And that's as far as the book goes. It exhorts us to tear down the old, but doesn't offer any blueprints for what should replace it. It's about individuals rising up, not communities coming together. Is that a failing of the book? I don't think so, but it's an observation. Can we contrast this with Always Coming Home?)

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    @Apocryphal said:
    , are we supposed to read into this that the characters are reincarnations of previous ones? There’s not much hint of that in the book (maybe only when Luisa goes to the sailboat?)

    But also forward in time in ways that are either precognitive or anti-causal, for example where Ayres says ‘I dreamt of a … nightmarish café, brilliantly lit, but underground, with no way out. I’d been dead a long, long time. The waitresses all had the same face. The food was soap, the only drink was cups of lather. The music in the café was,’ he wagged an exhausted finger at the MS, ‘this.’

    So not just reincarnation of past figures, but a more integrated weaving of past and future.

    I was expecting to find something about re-incarnation (influence of explanations of the movie I guess) but found there was very little that seemed re-incarnational to me. All I picked up on were repetitions across some characters (like the birthmark), and a serial discussion of the stories in the same order they were presented to us that placed the characters in order for us, but I didn't notice any hidden trans-personal causal forces that explain personal motivations beyond environment and genetics. To be honest I was wondering why it was a talking point at all. @NeilNjae maybe there was something in Mitchell's discussion you mentioned that would shed a light?

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    @RichardAbbott said:
    So... what was David Mitchell trying to convey with this very overt use of the structure? One message might be that society is inherently repetitive, with a tendency to fall back into old patterns despite attempts to break away from it. So here, the protagonist of the outermost ring is determined to see society move towards a fairer and more equal mode, but the innermost ring shows us that despite everything this fails, and human greed leads ultimately to its own ruin. The last group attempting to live fairly and justly are about to be overtaken by disease.

    For the most part Buddhist previous life narratives start in the present with a question as to why something happened, go back in time to tell a story of some people in the past, which more (or less) maps onto the people in the present or events who are being asked about. Canonical stories often conclude with the Buddha just saying something like, "These people in the past (a, b) were these people in the present (C, D)." Sometimes they don't even seem to be the important people of the story. Also not much explanation. Later stories are often more moralistic, and provide explanations. And sometimes the story from the past is a well-known fable, whose moral judgment is clearly already known and expected to apply, but this is not always made explicit. And sometimes the stroies are positively creepy and immoral in what activities seem to be considered praiseworthy. But the significance of the stories is determined by the present, and the need for the story is to replace ignorance with knowledge.

    Mitchell doesn't seem to be doing this. There does seem to be modern historical world-building going on, with the stance that most people are foolish and dangerous to the enlightened. The idea that ordinary people could be dangerous to the hero protagonist makes no sense at all. The significant danger and foolishness all come from inside.

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    @NeilNjae said:
    I found the structure of the book discouraging. The first half of the book was a sequence of setups with little resolution, which I found tough going. I very nearly gave up on the book. The second half was much better.

    I'm with you there. I kept going, but I wondered how much I would be able to keep in mind when I got back to the story later. And I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't already been told that there was a repetitive structure. But then I started to think about how we channel surf, and thought that might be what is happening.

    As for the reincarnation part, I think there are hints that are generally too subtle, so the author resorts to stating it a couple of times near the end of the book.

    Agree, and I do think it makes the book weaker. Also see my reply to @RichardAbbott .

    But in addition to the reincarnation, I think there's the more general point that all the stories are tales of repression and domination, and how people can and should challenge, perhaps defeat, those systems.

    (And that's as far as the book goes. It exhorts us to tear down the old, but doesn't offer any blueprints for what should replace it. It's about individuals rising up, not communities coming together. Is that a failing of the book? I don't think so, but it's an observation. Can we contrast this with Always Coming Home?)

    I found the stories were really all variations on this theme, and that was what made them fit together. The other stuff was nice, but the meat and potatoes was the sense of injustice and victimhood, and the question of justified violence. I found the end kept the moral imperative at a distance from the reader.

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    @Apocryphal said:
    One does get the sense that we are all connected across time, and people who lived long past have a way of touching us today. Is this merely because we relate to their stories? Or is there more to it?

    I felt in this book that mostly it was the author touching us, rather than the characters, but that's probably better discussed while focusing on each individual story.

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    The book is six short stories, sharing a theme, and written with an unusual structure. Would it have worked as well had the stories been written as separate stories? Did the interlocking actually add anything?

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    @NeilNjae said:
    The book is six short stories, sharing a theme, and written with an unusual structure. Would it have worked as well had the stories been written as separate stories? Did the interlocking actually add anything?

    I don't think it would have worked - each story in isolation would not (I think) have been interesting enough to stand alone. Maybe the one exception is the Sonmi section which probably would have held together even if you didn't have the others - and, frankly, the link back to The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish was fairly weak, so there felt like a gulf between the past and future tales.

    I would see the links between the narratives as a written equivalent to the motifs which unite different movements of a piece of classical music (or individual tracks within a more modern concept album) into a single work. Which brings us back to the Sextet - as a piece of music there would have been musical phrases, key changes or whatever that made it a unified thing rather than a set of unrelated objects. So I would see the book as a written version of the music which we never actually get to hear... though Luisa Del Rey does, and presumably Robert Frobisher also, though I don't expect any of the others got the opportunity to.

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    I did like the structure. I didn’t know about the structure beforehand, and I wondered why the middle section was so much bigger and “complete” (but was it really, without what came after?). I was not uninterested in the first, partial stories, and licking them back up after the complete middle story did heighten the experience for me.

    I also thought of the chiastic structure of some Hebrew and Greek writings, my particular exposure being the Jewish and Christian scriptures. And everything @RichardAbbott has yo say about the chiasmus strikes a chord with me. Regarding the moral at the center of the X (chi in Greek), I wonder whether these interlocking stories overturn Goose’s Two Laws of Survival. It seems that indeed the weak are meat regardless of individual protagonists’ actions. I’ll be thinking about @NeilNjae ’s comment about the difference between individualistic and communitarian morals quite a while; that comment enriched my reading a lot.

    As soon as I finished the book, I watched the movie. I wondered whether anyone who hadn’t read the book could conceivably understand the motivation behind some of the characters’ actions without having first read the book. (I can’t think of an example at the moment, but maybe one will come to me later.)

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