The Idle Book Club 2: Cloud Atlas

[Gormongous]

This sort of exercises provide another layer of understanding of an oeuvre but, I feel, can never negate the author intent.

That's a really interesting analysis, but wouldn't you say it's possible for an author to misinterpret their own work? Say, their use of elements and motifs were intended to produce one meaning, but they are ineffective in this and much more effective in producing another?

[vimes]

That's a really interesting analysis, but wouldn't you say it's possible for an author to misinterpret their own work? Say, their use of elements and motifs were intended to produce one meaning, but they are ineffective in this and much more effective in producing another?

Yes, this is possible; and like you say, it's a misinterpretation, not a valid interpretation.

You can blame the author's for his failure, but I feel that - though I'm not entirely sure about this - that if the misinterpretation comes from a genuine lack of skills (and not, say, an active ploy from the author to pass for misinterpretation what is his true intent) or a gap in understanding that the author couldn't foresee, then you cannot give him credit for your reading, since in a sense he's not the author of what you understand.

The basic example of this would be to read a book from an author from a time distant enough, that the meaning of some words has changed: Kant talks about sentience in his writings, but the word is now use in a broader meaning today, after sci-fi took hold of it, than back then. If while reading Kant, you think that he refers to being able of self-awareness or consciousness, you'd be wrong, as he actually mean beings capable of feeling and experience.

This difference in understanding and thus interpretation cannot be the author's fault.

You'd be wrong in extracting that interpretation from the text; and that, even though his theory still made sense if you maintain this misunderstanding throughout.

[Scipio]

Hemingway insisted up to his death that his novels were just stories, with no greater meaning. Does that mean we should stop studying them, since the author's had his say?

I can understand a viewpoint that accords a sort of primus inter pares status to the author's opinions of their own work, but overall I find it a shockingly narrow definition of art that confines itself to the conscious intentions of a single individual, however central to the process of composition. The audience is a participant in any work, though more obviously in certain mediums like video games, and if I find a work inspiring or meaningful in a certain way, who is the author to tell me that I'm wrong? I'm the one experiencing their work, an event totally removed from whatever the author might have had in mind when creating it.

You'd think that George Lucas and Ridley Scott would have taught people by now that the author, however influential or learned, is just one among many in the collaborative effort that is the creation and interpretation of a work. The merit and meaning of the latter exist outside and separate from them, at least in part. Even more authoritative figures like Thucydides, Aristophanes, Virgil, and Livy can be analyzed in ways they would have found foreign and even abhorrent, yet give us crucial insight into them and their culture, of which they appear to have been more or less unaware.

Sorry, I hate people going off on Barthes like he's proposing intellectual anarchy. If the Thumbs crew wants to spend their time rolling into walls in Army of Two or laughing at out-of-date technofetishism in The Wizard, their enjoyment isn't somehow less valid because it wasn't the creator's intention. There's no "right" way to read a book, watch a movie, or play a game.

Yeah, pretty much. I think it's important to read 'The Death of the Author' as a purposefully antagonistic, playful, 2000 word sprint. Its unfair to Barthes to take it as the whole point, without considering his stuff like 'From Work to Text', 'Theory of the Text', The Pleasure of the Text - that said, I still find his more thought out points on the idea of the Author, disappearing into the writing and so on, problematic. Foucault's 'What is an Author' is (to me) a far more interesting and nuanced starting point for contemporary author theory.

On the subject of interpreting texts, I sometimes see pieces of criticism as being complete works in there own right, (I find this really hard to explain what I mean), so like Edward Said's reading of Mansfield Park is often dismissed as a mis-reading or a hatchet job or whatever, and I imagine that Austin was probably not thinking of the slave trade when she wrote it (although that's sort of the point), but Said's work still remains incredibly powerful to me, and it's pretty much all I end up thinking about when reading Jane Austen now, it sort of matters beyond if it was right or not.

Also, I was reading a couple of interviews with David Mitchell, and found that Cloud Atlas was partly inspired by If on a winters night a traveller which is, depending on my mood, perhaps my favourite book, I am pretty excited to start reading.

[Argobot]

Also, I was reading a couple of interviews with David Mitchell, and found that Cloud Atlas was partly inspired by If on a winters night a traveller which is, depending on my mood, perhaps my favourite book, I am pretty excited to start reading.

I can't believe I never noticed the similarities before, but it's so obvious now. I love Italio Calvino.

[tabmabbly]

About the 'Death Of the Author' I think there's a crucial difference between 1) what the author meant, 2) what the reader gets and 3) what the oeuvre tells in the context of its creation.

For the first part, I feel one needs to respect the author's intent: if he meant to leave his oeuvre open for interpretation, then any coherent interpretations that are bolstered by evidence from the oeuvre's content can be identified as the author's intent (see, if I'm not mistaken, 30 Flight of Loving).

But if the author meant to convey one thing or a finite set of things only, they you have to respect that what he meant was deterministic; even if he fails to convey it.

This doesn't deny the reader's subjective experience of the oeuvre (point 2), which yields a vision that can be coherent and valuable even if not in synch with the author's intent. But it would be misplaced to qualify it as a valid interpretation and promote it as the author true intent: if the author say it's invalid, then it is.

Those two vantage points are perpendicular to the act of analyzing the oeuvre in the context of its creation. From this angle, you are allowed to study subconscious processes, undetected influences or knowledge that could have influenced the author during the creation.

For instance, Victor Hugo had a clear political agenda when writing Germinal - but the way he came to writer about miners and what was the source of his information definitely gives insight into how writing Germinal positioned him in the society of his times; and what were the reason he took this particular stances.

Similar analysis can be done on, say, latent racism or allegories in Lord of the Rings: Tolkien has repeated over and over that he didn't put those in his books, but inferring from the life of the author and from his circle of collaborators, it isn't far fetched to say that those elements might have introduced themselves despite the author's intent.

This sort of exercises provide another layer of understanding of an oeuvre but, I feel, can never negate the author intent.

I agree almost completely with everything you said there. I actually had a line in my previous post about the author's interpretation obviously being the most valid line to discerning the author's intent, but edited out because I felt that bit was rather self-explanatory.

I think that everything gets muddled about when people start to assign levels of "validity" to the different tracks of understanding a work, as if the author's intent somehow reigns supreme over an audience member's reading, or the position of the work in the greater historical and social context somehow discredits an author's stated intent. They exist simultaneously as unique perspectives upon the work that are undeniable assets when stepping back and looking at the value of the work as a whole.

In fact, I find most art becomes that much richer when the different perspectives are in powerful disagrement. When an author created spoke to something in a specific voice, that was then transformed by society into something else, and that now at the modern listener's ear becomes something new entirely. That's the nature of a rich and living text.

That said, I'm a big fan of ambiguity in texts, so it can be a little disheartening for me personally to have the author to come forward and say "such and such was so" definitively.

[tabmabbly]

Yeah, pretty much. I think it's important to read 'The Death of the Author' as a purposefully antagonistic, playful, 2000 word sprint. Its unfair to Barthes to take it as the whole point, without considering his stuff like 'From Work to Text', 'Theory of the Text', The Pleasure of the Text - that said, I still find his more thought out points on the idea of the Author, disappearing into the writing and so on, problematic. Foucault's 'What is an Author' is (to me) a far more interesting and nuanced starting point for contemporary author theory.

On the subject of interpreting texts, I sometimes see pieces of criticism as being complete works in there own right, (I find this really hard to explain what I mean), so like Edward Said's reading of Mansfield Park is often dismissed as a mis-reading or a hatchet job or whatever, and I imagine that Austin was probably not thinking of the slave trade when she wrote it (although that's sort of the point), but Said's work still remains incredibly powerful to me, and it's pretty much all I end up thinking about when reading Jane Austen now, it sort of matters beyond if it was right or not.

Also, I was reading a couple of interviews with David Mitchell, and found that Cloud Atlas was partly inspired by If on a winters night a traveller which is, depending on my mood, perhaps my favourite book, I am pretty excited to start reading.

I completely understand what you mean about reading criticism as works in their own right. They can offer up such deliciously new ways of looking at texts.

[gregbrown]

A ton of great discussion here, and glad I snuck in before finishing the book to read it all! I've reached the back-half of the novel, and have enjoyed each of the stories so far.

Like Squid Division, I'd be very interested in what the Thumbs have to say about it as game designers/writers. I think one of the most successful tacks to take against Ebert and others that claim that games aren't art due to player choice—not to dredge that argument up again—is to point out that films and novels also encompass a multiplicity of experiences. One measure of a work's quality, in my opinion, is how many different perspectives it can encompass. My favorite films affect me differently each time, coming along with me as I change as a person.

Knowing the complex formal structure of Cloud Atlas coming in, I was worried it would be too clever in pointing towards a singular interpretation—or at least, not rich enough to harbor side-stories compelling on their own. It has completely dispelled those worries, an incredible feat given the constraints he's working with and the tendency of pastiche to become sardonic or mocking. Very, very impressed.

A similar book that disappointed me along those lines was A Visit from the Goon Squad, a novel built out of interlinking short stories that ended up being a pretty damning pastiche of MFA tendencies. (I really, really, REALLY didn't like it at all.)

[Ride Rise Roar]

I agree almost completely with everything you said there. I actually had a line in my previous post about the author's interpretation obviously being the most valid line to discerning the author's intent, but edited out because I felt that bit was rather self-explanatory.

I think that everything gets muddled about when people start to assign levels of "validity" to the different tracks of understanding a work, as if the author's intent somehow reigns supreme over an audience member's reading, or the position of the work in the greater historical and social context somehow discredits an author's stated intent.

In fact, I find most art becomes that much richer when the different perspectives are in powerful disagrement. When an author created spoke to something in a specific voice, that was then transformed by society into something else, and that now at the modern listener's ear becomes something new entirely. That's the nature of a rich and living text.

That said, I'm a big fan of ambiguity in texts, so it can be a little disheartening for me personally to have the author to come forward and say "such and such was so" definitively.

While I generally agree with you I do feel that different interpretations carry different validity to some extent, I'd give much more credence to an interpretation thoroughly grounded in the text itself, or an interpretation that heavily concerns itself with historical or intertextual conditions, uncertain as they might be, rather than interpretations based on highly theoretical and abstract notions of comprehension, or only loosely connected to the text in question.

[Argobot]

A similar book that disappointed me along those lines was A Visit from the Goon Squad, a novel built out of interlinking short stories that ended up being a pretty damning pastiche of MFA tendencies. (I really, really, REALLY didn't like it at all.)

Wow, I'm kind of surprised that Good Squad disappointed you, but Cloud Atlas didn't. Personally, I loved both books, despite their "gimmicks." What about Good Squad made you dislike it?

[gregbrown]

Wow, I'm kind of surprised that Good Squad disappointed you, but Cloud Atlas didn't. Personally, I loved both books, despite their "gimmicks." What about Good Squad made you dislike it?

Goon Squad was a pretty miserable reading experience because I sort of went in primed by all the praise, and found a book that came off to me as MFA-pastiche. The linking element didn't even figure in what I thought of it, because I felt that most of the stories were very generic and trite in what they covered—the result of a writer who is so good at the mechanics of writing that she doesn't really stretch to cover anything particularly adventurous.

And the final straw for me was her awful, awful attempt at futurism towards the end, which is the same worry that's keeping me away from Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story: it's a way of heightening the most superficial qualities of today without making a substantive critique, or just making a really shitty and easily debunkable critique that also has the side-effect of cheapening how the characters move through the world as a result. Cloud Atlas was removed enough that I didn't take it as him really trying to say how the future would be—or rather, that he was creating this pocket universe specifically designed so he could tell the story that he wanted to tell, like Ted Chang's best short stories (or Borges, for that matter).

[Argobot]

And the final straw for me was her awful, awful attempt at futurism towards the end, which is the same worry that's keeping me away from Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

Haha, if the future stuff in Goon Squad bothered you, then stay away from Shteyngart! That book was a nightmare to get through, all of his 'critiques' of our tech-focused society were super grating.

[Chris]

And the final straw for me was her awful, awful attempt at futurism towards the end, which is the same worry that's keeping me away from Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story: it's a way of heightening the most superficial qualities of today without making a substantive critique, or just making a really shitty and easily debunkable critique that also has the side-effect of cheapening how the characters move through the world as a result. Cloud Atlas was removed enough that I didn't take it as him really trying to say how the future would be—or rather, that he was creating this pocket universe specifically designed so he could tell the story that he wanted to tell, like Ted Chang's best short stories (or Borges, for that matter).

That section is actually my least favorite story in Cloud Atlas. I haven't read Goon Squad and I also stayed away from the Shteyngart because of the exact same worry, so I can't say how they would have compared for me in reality. But in general I already don't gravitate towards sci-fi/futurism/whatever, and that stuff in Cloud Atlas wasn't super convincing to me. But as you say, it ultimately works I think because of how much it feels like a cog in the larger system rather than a future universe unto itself.

[Gormongous]

I liked the Sonmi 451 section for its sparse but interesting character arc that was equal parts familiar and alien, more than its fitful genre qualities. I liked the Sloosha's Crossin' section a good deal less, mostly for reminding me of a youthful attempt to read George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. I simply cannot stand it when I'm forced to spend more time parsing a text than processing it.

[seamus2389]

I loved the twist in Orsion part two, it floored me and totally knocked that particular story up an order of magnitude in my estimation. It is also the only story where the truth of it is shown to be not truth within the story itself. It reminds me alot of 1984 and it's kinda like Mitchell updated '84 to include that the problem of environment going to hell due to endless wasteful consumption to keep power structures. Like '84 it's not a realistic future cause it's meant to be a mirror on present.

In comparing The pacific journal and after I fell they are mirrors of each other with the difference being the Journal being told from the point of view of the more advanced visitor while Sloosha is told from the point of the native Zach/Atuna. In both cases a more peaceful tribe is taken over by a more violent one with escape being to leave with a more advanced/different culture. I wonder if we read Meronym journal (anyone else see how her name is an anagram of memory just add an n) would it read like Adam with her changing her view of Zach when he saves her life like Atuna saved Adams or is she more enlightened.

The soap in Sonmi reminds me of the role that tobacco in the 2nd half of journal with both being sold as part of a the religion called consumerism. Both stories have power structure's that depend on forced consumption of goods for the structure to maintain itself. Finally both have slavery in the guise of religion.

Did anyone else find the change in spell'n kinda annoy'n ?I know Mitchell is just doing what other books in the that genre have done but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Henry pretty much quotes the title of guns, germs and steel being what is responsible for taking over the world but in Sloosha it's disease that nearly destroys the more advanced civilization.

Journal, Sonmi and Sloosha are clearly connected in it's dealing with power structures specifically slavery. I found those three to have the tightest fit. I kinda want to say Half-life, Ordeal and Letters deals with writers/creators but it is a stretch. Does someone have a better connection between those 3?

Half life connects into the power structure model except it ends better than the one before but in the end the world goes to hell in a handbasket anyway, a small tactical victory in a lost war.

The ending of letters reminded me of the Sense of an Ending and the only real question according to Camus.

A line among many reminds me the Sense of an Ending is "Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present".

It will be interesting to see if the podcast will compare the two books take on memory and it's malleability. If Sense does it on the personal sense than I would say Cloud Atlas does it in the historical sense.

Overall the more I read what people here wrote about it and thinkwrite about it myself the more I apprecaite the care that Mtichell puts in to making these different/sepearte stories fit into this collective whole.

I thinking I have been wondering is why Hawaii/Honolulu as the destination in Sonmi/Journal and the setting of Crossin. What about Hawaii/ the pacific in general has Mitchell so interested ? The frontier that "civilisation" was brought to?

On a weird personal note the other 2 books clubs I am part of are all in the process of reading this book incl an SFF one which should make for interesting comment reading. Also Mitchell lives about 30 mins drive from where I live which is even weirder. Why him and Anne MccAffrey live here I don't know but it's kinda cool.

[Argobot]

I thinking I have been wondering is why Hawaii/Honolulu as the destination in Sonmi/Journal and the setting of Crossin. What about Hawaii/ the pacific in general has Mitchell so interested ? The frontier that "civilisation" was brought to?

YES! I noticed the repetition of Hawaii as well, and I really want to know what it's supposed to mean.

If you accept the idea that all the characters in the book are the same soul, then I guess having Hawaii as a leitmotif makes sense. Ewing starts off in Hawaii, and his 'soul' doesn't return until the Sloosha section, at the end of the narrative's timeline. Mitchell is fond of this kind of symmetry in his books, and I find it all rather entertaining. Maybe a little obvious, but still good.

[gregbrown]

Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm episode about Cloud Atlas is typically excellent, and I'd highly recommend it! The way he describes the way your perceptions are altered by what you're reading—or in his example, right after you visit an art museum—is incredible.

Fuck, I need to listen to more Bookworm, even if it means putting up with the grimace-inducing theme music they adopted a year or two back.

[lalilulelulz]

The structure of the chapters breaks down in the middle. Up until that point each subsequent viewpoint has a character which experiences the previous viewpoint in 2 parts. But when we get to Zachry, he doesn't understand Sonmi's language, and on top of that he doesn't hear her story in 2 parts.

This has repercussions to the Sonmi section as well, because no-one in the higher section experiences her story in 2 parts, the split in her story is artificial instead of based on the next piece of narrative. For example, the split in the Cavendish story is due to Sonmi seeing only part of the movie, and being interrupted, then seeing the rest before she dies. Whereas the split in the Sonmi story is not explained as Zachry or Meronym experiencing her story in 2 parts.

This isn't really a criticism, I'm just trying to work through for myself whether this matters in some way. I guess the way I see it, this hints that splitting each story into 2 parts is just a storytelling device used by Mitchell and isn't meant to actually convey any meaning to the world.

they kind of do experience two Sonmi stories sonmi the god and sonmi the prisoner, I think this huge diffidence simaler to the difference between sonmi the replicant and somni the revolutionary.

[Chris]

Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm episode about Cloud Atlas is typically excellent, and I'd highly recommend it! The way he describes the way your perceptions are altered by what you're reading—or in his example, right after you visit an art museum—is incredible.

Fuck, I need to listen to more Bookworm, even if it means putting up with the grimace-inducing theme music they adopted a year or two back.

I listen to it every week and the precise presses required to skip past the unbelievably awful theme music are utter muscle memory for me at this point.

[Fuzzy Dunlop]

I listen to it every week and the precise presses required to skip past the unbelievably awful theme music are utter muscle memory for me at this point.

This looks like something I'd be interested in listening to. How spoilery is the podcast? Would you recommend finishing the book discussed before listening, or does it more recommend books to you that you might want to read?

On another note, I just finished Cloud Atlas about an hour ago, and I really liked it! I think that's all I'll say for now, I need to let it sink in some more before I attempt to write something even half as intelligent as the discussion going on in this thread.

[gregbrown]

This looks like something I'd be interested in listening to. How spoilery is the podcast? Would you recommend finishing the book discussed before listening, or does it more recommend books to you that you might want to read?

You can listen to that Cloud Atlas episode to get a sense of what he goes over and how shallowly he dips his toes into spoiler territory. Silverblatt is a lot more interested in the themes of each story and his reading experience than going over specific plot-points, and his show is great for discovering what books to read. You'll get more out of it if you've read the book, of course, but Silverblatt is such an incredibly good interviewer that the episodes are fantastic even if you haven't.

[SuperHarman]

Will need to collect my thoughts and maybe go back to this a little. I read it about a year ago, loved it and have a lot to say about it, will probably e-mail them through.

[seamus2389]

Is there any other book podcasts worth listening to besides the bookworm ?

[Chris]

Is there any other book podcasts worth listening to besides the bookworm ?

Sean and I are both big fans of the Slate Audio Book Club, which is the biggest influence on ours probably. I also really enjoy the New York Times Book Review Podcast, which is a mix of news, author interviews, and other reporting, and the BBC World Book Club, which is a monthly author interview podcast.

[Fuzzy Dunlop]

Ok, as I said yesterday, I enjoyed this book very much. I agree that one of its biggest strengths is that all the characters feel so believable. I was surprised at how quickly I was being drawn into each new story, and world, despite the previous one ending sometimes abruptly.

There was, however, some things that I could have done without. As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, the spelling used in the Sloosha's Crossin' section felt a little too much to me. Maybe because of English not being my first language, but to me it was just an extra barrier to break through before getting to the actual story being told. Once I got used to it though, I became engrossed in this story as well, it just took a while longer.

I also agree with the whole birthmark thing. I feel that the other loose connections between the storys was much more interesting, and would have sufficed for me. David Mitchell, however, cleverly sort of comments on this criticism himself, using the Timohty Cavendish character editing The First Luisa Rey Mystery:

"One or two things will have to go: the insinuation that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example. Far too hippie-druggy-new age. (I, too, have a birthmark, below my left armpit, but no lover ever compared it to a comet. Georgette nicknamed it Timbo's Turd.)"

Similarly, he also comments on the whole structure of the book, via Robert Frobisher describing his Cloud Atlas Sextet for Sixsmith:

"In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late..."

I found this very elegantly done, without breaking the fourth wall.

[Argobot]

David Mitchell has an article out on the experience of having his book adapted into a movie: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/magazine/cloud-atlas.html?gwh=

The article itself is really short and Mitchell seems genuinely pleased with how the film turned out. I'm still wary of seeing it however, and this quote especially, seemed a lot more sinister than I think Mitchell intended it too: "When I try to recall how I imagined my vanity-publisher character, Timothy Cavendish, before the movie, all I see now is Jim Broadbent’s face smiling back, devilishly."