A Linguistic Approach to David Mitchell's Science-Fiction Stories in Cloud Atlas

Abstract

This paper focuses on the language of the two science-fiction stories among the six stories that comprise Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas. "An Orison of Sonmi~451" and "Sloosha's Crossin'an' Ev'rythin' After", renamed 'Sonmi' and 'Sloosha' here for greater convenience. We aim at studying the extent to which the two craftily-carved languages, which are radically different both syntactically and semantically, give birth to completely opposed worlds. The highly-engineered language of the 22nd century in 'Sonmi' creates the image of a plentiful consumer society whereas the mutilated words in 'Sloosha' mirror a humanity which is only the shadow of its former self after the explosion of the atomic bomb. Yet, in keeping with the image of Deleuze's rhizome, the apparently diminished language of the middle story (Sloosha) seems to germinate again, finding its source in what is most natural and essential, while the other language actually produces an arborescent-like hierarchical society, leaving no space for imagination to grow. In Cloud Atlas Mitchell plays on intertextuality, his own distortion of the linguistic medium recalling other linguistic utopias such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker.