David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Queer Posthuman

“I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’that kayak,” recounts Zachry Bailey in David Mitchell’s popular literary novel Cloud Atlas (2004). Bailey deciphers a transcendent form of human subjectivity in the skies above him: “Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ’morrow?”. This oft-cited quotation is central to the novel’s representation of the human, which sees iterations of humanity repeating across history, genres, texts and bodies to form an insistently and recurrently human whole. The novel thus imagines true human identity through nonhuman imagery; clouds, together with metaphors of water and comets, reflect a transcendent human identity unrestricted by bodily materiality.