In this way *Cloud Atlas* can be read as a text that is about both the nature of history and the nature of *literary* or cultural history, through an encapsulation in a quasi-archival form. As each narrative is embedded in a filed object and read or seen by characters in a subsequent time, the aspect of mediation through an archive becomes central. As Courtney Hopf has pointed out, in the case of each of its sections, Mitchell's novel encrypts the previous narrative in order to archivally preserve the historical events and generic codification within the form of a fileable object (a book, a video, etc.).92 The historical narrative itself is contained within the intra-actions between these intradiegetic objects. The generic form, however, is often contextually encoded. For instance, that Luisa Rey's narrative is a generic thriller is encoded in the paperback, pulp, series-bound airport-fictionstyle publication of "Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery." Indeed, it is the metadata of the *title* of this publication, combined with the technology of the codex, that encodes the generic history here, as though the narrative were an archive to be filed. *Mystery* gives a key to the kind of reader that will enjoy the work, while the "First Luisa Rey" clause indicates the serialized nature of this imagined volume and its conformance to the dynamic, protagonist-centered spy thriller. The term *half-lives* is a ploy by Mitchell to acknowledge the "halving" that occurs throughout the metatext's (*Cloud Atlas*'s) splicing technique.

The Luisa Rey subnarrative, then, along with all the narratives of *Cloud Atlas*, is produced as a discrete text by variegated techniques of archivization, including a focus on metadata and semantic contexts, alongside a set of linguistic techniques to which I will turn shortly. In the first place the history is presented to the reader as though it might be unmediated, so far as such a thing is possible: a quasi-realist thriller narrative. The text then moves to bind this "historical" element within a bounded book manuscript that can be read by Timothy Cavendish in a later narrative. Importantly, though, Mitchell encodes the generic formulation of the preceding narrative through the metadata of that "book" (primarily its title) but also from the broader intertextual resonances that this title can trigger and its proposed/assumed publication format. Finally, Mitchell inverts this structure and, through the play on "half-lives," changes this intradiegetic book object into a type of structural metadata for *Cloud Atlas* itself. As a description of *Cloud Atlas*'s narrative technique, "Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery" details the novel's own structure. Metafictive aspects can also be signaled through objects' metadata.

But this focus on notions of the archive runs more deeply and more explicitly throughout Mitchell's novel. One of the most striking of *Cloud Atlas*'s narratives is the unusual SF take on a bildungsroman on which I have here focused, where Sonmi goes from her slave-like existence to consciousness of the horrors of her race's existence. This finds its apex in the scene where Sonmi is shown her fellow fabricants being murdered and fed back to the rest of the slave population—a kind of grim fusion of *The Matrix* (1999) and *Soylent Green* (1973).

For the purposes of this chapter and my initial focus here on archives, the most important aspect of the Sonmi chapter is its interview format. Crucially, the entire tale is told through analepsis from an interview with the archivist. The archivist poses questions to which Sonmi responds. Although Mitchell has stated that this format is based on "gossip magazines" (see above), it is a curiously morbid type of gossip that would preserve the last words of a condemned prisoner. Instead, the section reads more like a journalistic witnessing or formal preservation of a being whose death has already happened but who just so happens not to have yet been executed. This is, in many ways, akin to what Roland Barthes sees in the *punctum* of a photograph: the way in which the time of life can leap out even after the instance of death, causing strange perturbations in the viewer's chronological perception.93

Mitchell's archivist, though, is doubly complicit in producing the event as much as recording it. In the first instance the framing and posing of questions in a specific way is designed to preshape Sonmi's narrative. By directing the conversation that will be recorded, the archivist has great power in mediating the past. In the second, more powerful sense in Mitchell's text, however, the archivist is also literally responsible for producing the event. For, as a member of Nea So Copros's ruling Unanimity faction, the archivist's interview is part of a conspiracy to try and then to execute Sonmi~451. The archival "footage" stored in Mitchell's invented medium of an orison is actually part of the unfolding reality and will be used as documentary evidence against the fabricant in the passage of future laws. And, of course, this approach has been seen in actual history. Totalitarian regimes, such as that which existed under Joseph Stalin, are notorious for manipulation of the media archive for political purposes in the present. Among the most famous of these, besides the removal of Trotsky from several well-known photographs that also feature Lenin, is the doctored image of Nikolai Yezhov (see figure 4), former head of the NKVD (the body that housed the precursor to the KGB). Indeed, it was central to Stalin's authority and future plan of action that those executed in the purges were never seen, on the record, to have had a central role in government. This precept, of course, was also well encapsulated in Orwell's seminal dystopian narrative to which I turned earlier, *Nineteen Eighty-Four*: "who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."94 As with Mitchell's future dystopia, manipulation of the official archival record can lead to a cementing of power in the present.

The data of Sonmi's interview must be put into a structured retrieval format if it is to be of any use. Metadata are needed for any archive: "structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource."95 But the metadata surrounding objects requires persistence of the referent if this function is to be fulfilled. If two different photographs are both archived under the same metadata, then the result will not be the ease of use of the information resource but confusion when different external resources refer to the metadata but have different objects beneath them. While many of Stalin's photographs were doubtlessly successfully altered and all traces of the preceding versions erased, the fact that the replacement versions did not, in all cases, manage to obliterate their antecedents invalidates the metadata around the photograph of Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Joseph Stalin.

Figure 4. Nikolai Yezhov is erased from history after his execution during the Great Purge. Public domain image under article 1281 of book 4 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation No. 230-FZ of December 18, 2006, and article 6 of Law No. 231-FZ of the Russian Federation of December 18, 2006.

The same can be said of Mitchell's text. For the reader, the political neutrality of the implied metadata around Sonmi's interview is compromised. The reader knows that the interview will be filed under a record that labels Sonmi a traitor and a dangerous insurgent, even though the entire "insurrection" was engineered by the city's ruling party. Furthermore, the reader also knows that the metadata will be lost and all original contexts obliterated. This is because, in the book's most futuristic (but also, as with Hoban's *Riddley Walker*, technologically regressed) narrative, Sonmi is worshipped as a god. In other words, while the preservation of a stable object is crucial for the moral and functional integrity of metadata, the preservation of metadata is also vital for the semantic richness of objects—a function that must otherwise be deferred to socially contingent hermeneutics (a close reading, perhaps).

This would be all well and good as an intradiegetic literary critical analysis of Mitchell's novel and the "Orison of Sonmi~451" subplot. There is an archivist, complicit in the manufacture of a stored and cataloged reality whose metadata degrades over time and which can legitimize thinking about the text in terms of archives: so far, so straightforward. Mitchell's text becomes more interesting, however, when we turn back to the textual variants differentiating editions of *Cloud Atlas*. For, deliberate or not, the archive of Mitchell's text is unstable. Indeed, between versions of Mitchell's novel there are significant textual differences, specifically in the Sonmi~451 section of the work. This yields an interesting set of interpretative possibilities, given the archival context of this section, and despite Mitchell's disavowal of the differences as mere "sloth and authorial innocence." Which version of the myth—*P* or *E*—is known to the characters in "Sloosha's Crossin' " who worship Sonmi as a god? The novel is, after all, about the failed transmissions of cultural artifacts—films, books, orisons—that contribute to fresh mythogenesis. Yet *Cloud Atlas* itself causes such proliferation among its own readers. Mitchell's own mythopoesis is plural from the outset.

Taking this textual variance that I have outlined and computationally visualized in this chapter, then, as an element of *Cloud Atlas* that should be *read*, signaled through the heaviest modifications occurring around the narrative pertaining to the archive, the first thing we might say is that the archive—the versions of Mitchell's novel and as with the case of Yezhov under Stalin—has been manipulated in order to present multiple "versions of the truth." It has done so in the context of the death penalty, in which the sovereign state has exercised its "right" to torture and execute for the reinstatement of its own legitimate power.96 In truth, the archive here, in the form of the holographic recording device (the "orison"), *is* the public display of the defendant's body. That this is explicit in the text through the rhetoric of a "show trial" (linking it to Stalinist Russia but also to sovereign power's display of the condemned's body) only strengthens the centrality of the pluralized and unstable archive as an instrument of state repression. What is perhaps curious is that Mitchell's future world should be so dependent on the forms of political rationality and legitimacy—sovereign powers and executions—that the principal theorist of such modes, Michel Foucault, believed were already waning. It is not only the "Sloosha's Crossin' " narrative that bears the hallmarks of a future time that holds within it the past but also "An Orison of Sonmi~451." I contend that it is not possible to read the intradiegetic context of Mitchell's novel, which focuses heavily on notions of archival storage and representation in different media, without a consideration of the transmedia ecologies of the editions of his own book.97

The second aspect that is of interest here is the way in which the Sonmi narrative, so different between editions, clusters notions of "deviancy." Both editions refer to the Yoona incident as a "deviancy," and aberration that is to be punished in the highly regulated and hierarchical world of Nea So Copros. The archivist, for example, is also bound by hierarchy and is an extremely junior figure ("An eighthstratum archivist can't dream of getting such security clearance!" /"An eighth-stratum archivist wouldn't get such security clearance in his wildest dreams!").98 When two textual editions containing this narrative are vying for legitimacy, we are faced with the prospect of relativism and normalization: which text is deviant? Deviancy requires a dominant center, a hegemonic norm, from which to deviate. By removing this center and norm across editions, Mitchell metatextually (quite literally from "beyond" [meta] any single text) erodes the legitimacy of the future state of Nea So Copros, as "deviancy" is revealed to be a phenomenon that can only be relative to another core. Given that this future state (and clear reflection on our present) is based on slavery, this reading of textual variance is in keeping with the text's ethics.

So from the initial comparison of the version variants and the computational visualization of the rearrangements therein, I come here to a single conclusion, to which I will later return: a central point of Mitchell's novel that has received entirely insufficient critical attention is the role of the archive. *Cloud Atlas* is a novel that is *about* archives, and it is a book that is about fiction as an archival encoding process. In its textual materiality it is also a novel that *reveals*, rather than simply speaks of, the dangers but also opportunities of multiple encodings. It does so within the context of the authority of the state and the death penalty, which I have here argued have a parallel to *authorial* authority. This is, I believe, how we should begin to close-read the variant versions of *Cloud Atlas* and its microliterary history.

*Chapter 2*

## R E A D I N G G E N R E COMPUTATIONALLY

> Genre is as tricky to define as is the "archive." It is a cliché to note that nobody seems able to agree precisely on what we mean by *genre*. Is it, as Jacques Derrida once characteristically teased, the case that "genres are not to be mixed" and that "as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity"?1 Are genres part of rulefollowing practices conducted by writers, in which various conventions are internalized and reproduced according to shared Wittgensteinian communal undertakings?2 Does the study of genre succumb to Robert Stam's critiques of extension, normativism, homogeneic definitions, and biologism?3 Are our analyses of genre always ones of cyclicality and endless regression, seeking an origin for a practice that is defined by sorting into already-existent categories?4 (Yet, if so: whence these categories?) Do texts that play with genre in metafictional ways ask us to consider the structure of genre, as they once asked us to consider the study of history?5 Or is genre actually something more akin to what Lauren Berlant proposes in *Cruel Optimism* (2011), where she writes of conceiving of a moment from within that moment itself as "a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening in an extended now whose very parameters . . . are also always there for debate," an emerging social arrangement that provides "an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold"?6

Many questions and no consensus. For scholarly writing about genre is a genre of its own, particularly within fields such as speculative/science fiction into which I have not here even delved. I have written, thus far in this book, of Mitchell's multigenericity in *Cloud Atlas* and the ways in which theme and language begin to intersect to create a generic tapestry, all without defining *genre*. I do not and cannot here define *genre* in an adequate way to address its decades of study. We can, though, ask a smaller-scale question: what does it mean to "write as David Mitchell does in *Cloud Atlas*"? What distinctive traits might computational microscopy identify within Mitchell's writing and style that are invisible to the naked eye? What could such an analysis tell us about genre? As Ted Underwood has put it, computational methods can turn the lack of definition of genre to their advantage: "We can dispense with fixed definitions, and base the study of genre only on the shifting practices of particular historical actors—but still produce models of genre substantive enough to compare and contrast."7

One of the most basic things that we can do with computational techniques is to conduct an analysis of the most frequently used words in a text. That doesn't sound very exciting on its own, and such an approach has been the subject of critique and even ridicule, but it turns out that the subconscious ways in which authors use seemingly insignificant words is an extremely effective marker for authorship attribution.8 That is, most texts by the same author can be accurately clustered by comparing the distance between word frequencies within each work (on which, more below). I wondered, though, what would happen if I undertook such an analysis on each section of Mitchell's novel. Would the underlying—and presumed subconscious—elements of language change between sections? Or would we, in fact, end up with Mitchell's persona inscribed within these texts? A set of stylometric techniques can help us to answer some of these questions.

As the name implies, computational stylometry is the use of computers to measure (*-metry*) the stylistic properties of texts (*stylo-*). Stylometry, as a quantifying activity, has a long and varied history, from legal court cases where the accused was acquitted on the basis of stylometric evidence, such as that of Steve Raymond, through to authorship attribution.9 In the latter case, as charted by Anthony Kenny, the discipline dates back to approximately 1851, when Augustus de Morgan suggested that a dispute over the attribution of certain biblical epistles could be settled by measuring average word lengths and correlating them with known writings of St. Paul.10 From this humble beginning we are now at the point where it is claimed that computational forensic stylometry can "identify individuals in sets of 50 authors with better than 90% accuracy, and [can] even [be] scaled to more than 100,000 authors."11

In terms of a background to stylometry, a significant breakthrough, or at least a key moment of success, took place around 1964 with the publication of Mosteller and Wallace's work on the set of pseudonymously published *Federalist* papers of 1787–88, which were pushing for the adoption of the proposed Constitution for the United States. Mosteller and Wallace analyzed the distribution of thirty function words (articles, pronouns, etc.) throughout the *Federalist* papers and managed to come to the same conclusion of authorship as other historians, based in this case on statistically inferred probabilities and Bayesian analysis.12 As Patrick Juola frames it, there are several reasons why this corpus formed an important test-bed for stylometry: "First, the documents themselves are widely available . . . , including over the Internet through sources such as Project Gutenberg. Second, the candidate set for authorship is well-defined; the author of the disputed papers is known to be either Hamilton or Madison. Third, the undisputed papers provide excellent samples of undisputed text written by the same authors, at the same time, on the same topic, in the same genre, for publication via the same media." In Juola's words, "a more representative training set would be hard to imagine."13

If the *Federalist* papers represent a significant success for stylometric authorship attribution, there have also been some disastrous failures. In the early 1990s a series of criminal court cases turned to forensic stylometry to identify authorship of documents (for example, Thomas McCrossen's appeal in London in July of 1991; the prosecution of Frank Beck in Leicester in 1992; the Dublin trial of Vincent Connell in December of 1991; Nicky Kelly's pardon by the Irish government in April of 1992; the case of Joseph Nelson-Wilson in London in 1992; and the Carl Bridgewater murder case).14 Indeed, it is frequently the case that court trials turn on the authorship of specific documents, be they suicide notes, sent emails, or written letters.15 These specific cases, however, all relied on a particular technique known as "qsum" or "cusum"—for "cumulative sum" of the deviations from the mean—which is designed to measure the stability of a measured feature of a text.16 The only problem here was that, almost immediately, the cusum technique came under intense scrutiny and theoretical criticism, ending in a live-television broadcast failure of an authorship attribution test using this method.17 Despite this failing, specific stylometric techniques remain available as evidence in courts of law depending on their academic credibility and the jurisdiction's specific laws on admissibility.18

The other most well-known case of failure in the field of stylometry occurred in the late 1990s, when Don Foster attributed the poem "A Funeral Elegy" to William Shakespeare using a raft of stylometric approaches.19 The attendant press coverage landed this claim on the front page of the *New York Times*, and the community of traditional Shakespeare scholars reacted in disbelief. When Foster refused to accept traditional historicist arguments against his attribution, stylometric work by multiple groups of scholars pointed to the seventeenth-century playwright and poet John Ford as the far more likely author of the poem, which Foster eventually accepted.20 While, as Juola points out, "this cut-and-thrust debate can be regarded as a good (if somewhat bitter) result of the standard scholarly process of criticism," for many scholars it marked the sole interaction that they have ever had with stylometry, and the result could only be a perception of notoriety, braggadocio, and inaccuracy.21

That said, in recent years there have also been some extremely successful algorithmic developments for detecting authorship. Perhaps the best known of these is the 1992 "Burrows's delta."22 With apologies for a brief mathematical explanation over the next page or so, Burrows's delta (the word here meaning the mathematical symbol for "difference": Δ) consists of two steps to conduct a multivariate statistical authorship attribution. First of all, one measures the most frequent words that occur in a text and then relativizes these using a "z-score" measure. A z-score measurement is basically asking, "By how much does a word's frequency differ from the average deviation of the other words?" The first thing that we would calculate here is the "standard deviation" of the entire word set. A standard deviation means the square root of the average of the squared deviations of the values from the average. Or, in other words: work out the average frequency with which words occur in a text; then work out (for each word) how many more or less times that word occurs relative to the average; square this and add up all such deviations; then divide this by the number of words; then square root the result. To get the zscore, we next take an individual word's frequency, subtract the average (mean) frequency, and divide this result by the standard deviation of the whole set. This is conventionally written as score (*X*) minus mean (mu: µ) divided by sigma (standard deviation: σ):

$$\frac{X-\mathbb{-}\mathbb{-}}{\sigma}$$

Once we have a ranked series of z-scores for each term, the second operation in Burrows's delta is to calculate the difference between the words in both texts. This means taking the z-score of, say, the word *the* in text A and subtracting the z-score of the word *the* in text B. Once we have done this for every word that we wish to take into account, we add all of these differences together, a move that is the mathematical equivalent of taking the "Manhattan distance" (named because it moves across the multidimensional grid in right-angled blocks like the streets in the borough of Manhattan, rather than going "as the crow flies") between the multidimensional space plots of these terms.23 That is, if you plot each of the word frequencies on a multidimensional graph, with one axis for each text and one for frequency, the Manhattan distance is the route you have to take, in 90 degree turns, to get from the term in one text to the same term in the other. In Burrows's delta, the smaller this total addition of differences is, the more likely it is that the two texts were written by the same author.

Burrows's delta has been seen as a successful algorithm for many years, as validated in several studies.24 It is, mathematically speaking, relatively easy to calculate and seems to produce good results. But it is not entirely known *why* the delta method is so good at clustering texts written by the same author, although recent work has suggested that such a "text distance measure is particularly successful in authorship attribution if emphasizing structural differences of author style profiles without being too much influenced by actual amplitudes," as does Burrows's delta.25

Burrows's delta is also a somewhat outdated way of thinking in computational terms for authorship attribution. As of 2019, if one wanted to classify a text as written by one author or another, one would usually construct a model of authors and texts using machine learning methods for identification rather than using a mathematical algorithmic process.26 This would typically involve profiling a range of features and balancing them against one another within the model that one creates.27 This is the type of "model thinking" toward which Caroline Levine has recently gestured: ways of thinking that are compatible with humanistic scholarly practice but that move "across scales and media."28

But Burrows himself was always cautious about what he was doing. When writing of "authorial fingerprints," for example, he noted that "we do not yet have either proof or promise" of the "very existence" of such a phenomenon.29 Burrows also points out that, "not unexpectedly," his method "works least well with texts of a genre uncharacteristic of their author and, in one case, with texts far separated in time across a long literary career."30 So why use the delta method at all? Why not use a better, newer machine learning approach to text classification? In this chapter I am not actually interested in identifying authorship. We know from Chapter 1 that with the exception of Ebershoff 's edits to the Sonmi~451 chapter in *E*, David Mitchell is the author of all the diverging segments of *Cloud Atlas*. A machine learning approach might confirm this or get it wrong. But machine learning approaches are also notoriously difficult to inspect. The reasons why a machine learning algorithm has made a specific classification are hard to determine. By contrast, I seek to examine the different linguistic properties of texts written in a variety of linguistic genres by the same author; that is, I wish to look at the *process* of classification rather than the end result. Algorithmic failure, in such cases, becomes intensely productive as it reveals the fault lines of difference within a text. Burrows's delta is a much better method for this type of work. It is an algorithm with a strong track record, backed by mathematics that can be understood by humans, even when operationalized, unlike many newer unsupervised or partly supervised machine learning approaches such as topic modeling, word embedding, or sentiment analysis.31 This trajectory also brings us to a point where it is worth delving deeper into the underlying assumptions of many stylometric methods.

## ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT WRITING STYLE

There are a number of supposed premises on which most stylometric methods rest, and these pertain to their uses as means of identifying authorship. Before moving to work on *Cloud Atlas*, I want briefly to cover these since they bear more broadly on how we conceive of literary style. These assumptions are (1) that authors have a "stylistic naturalism," (2) that stylometry measures subconsciously inscribed features of a text, and (3) that authorship is the underlying textual feature that can be ascertained by the study of quantified formal aesthetics.

The first of these assumptions, that there is a "stylistic naturalism" to an author's works, is premised on the idea that most of us, when writing, do not consider how our works will be read by computers. As Brennan and Greenstadt put it: "In many historical matters, authorship has been unintentially [*sic*] lost to time and it can be assumed that the authors did not have the knowledge or inclination to attempt to hide their linguistic style. However, this may not be the case for modern authors who wish to hide their identity."32 Language is a tool of communication among people, designed to convey or cause specific effects or affects. The stylistic features of texts are usually considered a contributor to the overarching impact of the communication. Indeed, the scansion and rhythm of a work of prose, for instance, is an important feature of well-written texts, the three-part list being a good example of this in persuasive rhetoric. Yet the selection and prioritization of specific stylistic features (rhythm, cadence, word length, repetition) has consequential effects on the other elements of language that are deployed.

In other words, and to put it bluntly: there are hundreds of stylistic traits of texts that we can measure and determine. It is not possible for an author to hold all of these in working memory while writing; instead, authors write for intended readerly outcomes. The presumption that an imagined reader will react in various ways to one's writing is, or at least should be, the overarching concern when writing. It is this that leads to an idea of what I call a stylistic naturalism: the conceit that authors write in ways that are somehow blind to the processes of the measurement of stylometry.

I would instead seek to couch this slightly differently. Any good author is aware that his or her writing is to be "measured"—so to speak—by a reader. But there is a constant play of balance at work here. In prioritizing one set of measurements—for instance, one could notice as a reader the long, rambling sentences of David Foster Wallace's *Infinite Jest* (1998) others must inevitably be ignored. Authors are aware that they are being measured; they just must choose which measures are of most significance for their literary purposes. This is a type of "natural" writing, then, that can only be called natural in that it is social and not individual. Anticipated readerly reactions condition the writing process. As Juola puts it, on the one hand, "the assumption of most researchers . . . is that people have a characteristic pattern of language use, a sort of 'authorial fingerprint' that can be detected in their writings. . . . On the other hand, there are also good practical reasons to believe that such fingerprints may be very complex, certainly more complex than simple univariate statistics such as average word length or vocabulary size."33

A subassumption underlying the "stylistic naturalism" claim is that authors behave in the same way when writing their various works—or, at least, that stylometric profiles do not substantially change even if authors deliberately try to alter their own styles. This also assumes that authors' own styles do not change naturally with time—a contentious claim.34 Indeed, in 2014 Ariel Stolerman and colleagues identified shifting stylometric profiles of authors as a key failing in traditional "closed-world" settings.35 (What Stolerman et al. mean by "closed-world" here is that there is a known list of probable authors, and a computational classifier is trained to correctly attribute unknown works based on known stylometric profiles rather than an environment where any author should be grouped apart from all others.) Yet what happens, in stylometric terms, when an author such as Sarah Waters moves from a neo-Victorian mode to writing about the Second World War? What happens when Hilary Mantel writes about Margaret Thatcher, as opposed to the Tudor setting of *Wolf Hall* (2009)? What happens when Sarah Hall shifts from the feminist utopian genre of *The Carhullan Army* (2007) to the more naturalistic and contemporaneous setting of *The Wolf Border* (2015)?

These questions bring us to the obverse, but somehow linked, counterpart of the assumption that there might be a stylistic naturalism—that is, that stylometry can measure subconsciously inscribed elements of texts. As David Holmes puts it, at the heart of stylometry "lies an assumption that authors have an unconscious aspect to their style, an aspect which cannot consciously be manipulated but which possesses features which are quantifiable and which may be distinctive."36 This is a different type of stylistic naturalism claim, one that, instead of asserting that authors are behaving in ways that make them unaware of stylometric profiling, looks to an author's subconscious as a site of unchangeable linguistic practice. Indeed, Freudian psychoanalysis has long held that aspects of communication and language harbor revelations about a person over which that person has little or no control.

That said, as I will show shortly, all but one of the different narrative sections of *Cloud Atlas E* can be distinguished from one another through the relative frequencies of the terms *the*, *a*, *I*, *to*, *of*, and *in*. Yet who among us, when writing, is conscious of the relative frequency with which we ourselves use these terms? These seemingly unimportant articles, pronouns, and prepositions are used *when we need them*, not usually as a conscious stylistic choice. In other words, the internalized stylistic profile of our individual communications usually determines how, why, and how frequently these terms are used; they are thought to be beyond our control. Such features are, therefore, conceived of as subconsciously inscribed elements of a text that it is difficult for an author to modify, even if he or she knows that stylometric profiling will be conducted on that text. As I will go on to show, David Mitchell's novel, in its genre play, does manipulate such features.

All of this brings me to the final assumption that I identify in most work on stylometry—namely, that authorship is the underlying textual feature that can be ascertained by the study of quantified formal aesthetics. Of course, there are lengthy poststructuralist debates about what authorship actually means for the reception of texts.37 There are also disputes in labor and publishing studies about how the individual work of "authorship" is prioritized above all others, when actually there are many forms of labor without which publishing would not be possible: typesetting/text encoding, copyediting, proofreading, programming, graphical design, format creation, digital preservation, platform maintenance, forward-migration of content, security design, marketing, social media promotion, implementation of semantic machine-readability, licensing and legal protocols, and the list goes on. The first challenge here for stylometry is to understand what impact these polyvalent labor practices have in the crafting of a single, authorial profile. As above, we know that David Ebershoff requested substantial line edits to the US edition of *Cloud Atlas*. What sense does it then make to say that the figure identified as "David Mitchell" would correlate to a stylistic profile of this text? At best, if the stylometry is working correctly as an attribution system centered on the author, it would identify this text as a harmonized fusion of Mitchell and Ebershoff.

The challenge that I actually want to pose to these three straw-figures that I have drawn up against many stylometric practices is one foreshadowed by Matt Jockers and others at the Stanford Literary Lab, namely that the author-signal is often neither the sole nor the most important signal that we can detect through stylometry.38 Indeed, the first pamphlet of the Stanford Literary Lab found that, while the pull of the author-signal was strong and seemed to outweigh other signals, various quantitative signatures also corresponded to those features that we might call "genre."39 Instead, especially in the case of Mitchell's rich and varied novel, one version of which was heavily edited by another person, and which deliberately employs mimicry and pastiche to achieve its proliferation of stylistic effects, it might be more appropriate to consider the *genre* signals that a text emits.

## I N V E S T I G A T I N G M I T C H E L L' S G E N R E S

## THROUGH COMPUTATIONAL FORMALISM

To investigate the distinctions between the chapters of Mitchell's novels, the first thing that I was keen to check was whether the most basic methods of Burrows's delta analysis of z-scored Manhattan distances could correctly segment and group the different sections of *Cloud Atlas E* within a hierarchical dendrogram. This would, I hoped, ascertain at the highest level whether Mitchell's writing is truly differentiated between chapters or whether there is an underlying authorial stylistic signature at work.40 To do this, I used the "stylo" package in the statistical programming language R to ascertain the most frequent words (and then the most frequent bigrams for characters) in the whole novel, and then hierarchically to rank these and z-score them above the average for each section.41 Computing the Manhattan distance on each of these (for words and two-character groupings) rendered the clusterings shown in figures 5 and 6. 42

What this shows us is not particularly sophisticated or novel, but it does verify the most cursory of stylometric phenomena here. Mitchell's novel is strongly differentiated between sections in terms of the unique lexical content and the order in which the most frequent terms occur. This is the case whether we take the one thousand most frequent words or the one thousand most frequent bigrams. What is perhaps more curious is that the same holds true (although I haven't pictured it) when one computes this based solely on words in the top one thousand that occur in *all* of the narratives (of which there are 284, most of which are common words such as *the*). In other words, the frequency with which Mitchell uses common words varies enough between different sections of the text to enable the analyst to statistically distinguish them from one another.

In fact, we can actually be far more granular than this in a description of the novel and its specific segments. With the exception of "An Orison of Sonmi~451" (and excluding "Sloosha's Crossin' " for the obvious reasons of its total linguistic separation from the rest of the novel), the sections of *Cloud Atlas E* can be distinguished from one another and grouped purely by how frequently Mitchell does or doesn't use the six most frequent words: *the*, *a*, *I*, *to*, *of*, and *in*. When scored by the same classic delta paradigm as above, the only mistaken classifications are that Orison part 1 is billed as part of "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" while Orison part 2 is mistaken for a Luisa Rey Mystery segment. All other parts of the novel differ from each other by enough of a margin, by *only* the use of these six words, as to make the chapters distinguishable from each other, as seen in figure 7. To classify accurately

Figure 5. The sections of *Cloud Atlas E* grouped by classic delta (z-scored one thousand most frequent words differentiated by Manhattan distance). Data Source: Digital Appendix 2: Figure 5.

Figure 6. The sections of *Cloud Atlas E* grouped by classic delta (z-scored one thousand most frequent bigrams of characters differentiated by Manhattan distance). Data Source: Digital Appendix 2: Figure 6.

"An Orison of Sonmi~451" with its counterpart requires an expansion to just the twenty most common words in the novel: *the*, *a*, *I*, *to*, *of*, *and*, *in*, *my*, *you*, *was*, *his*, *it*, *for*, *on*, *me*, *is*, *he*, *but*, *that*, *with*.

Such a low barrier of most-frequent-word counts as an accurate discriminator between the sections of Mitchell's novel is quite remarkable. But the cluster dendrogram analysis method that I am using is hard to statistically validate. In other words, the question here is whether, if I ran this same procedure on other novels that did not share the stylistic variance of Mitchell's text, we might see random groupings and what the statistical likelihood is that the groupings shown above have been arrived at by chance rather than being distinct feature-sets of the subtexts. After all, the fact that it was at the twenty-words mark that the clustering worked, while not below that, is arbitrary and based on my advanced knowledge of the dataset (the novel). This could lead to a type-three error, or HARKING: hypothesizing after results are known.43

According to Maciej Eder, validation of cluster-analysis dendrograms can be undertaken, to an extent, by using a technique called bootstrap consensus tree plotting.44 Essentially, this technique reruns the clustering algorithm over multiple iterations for many different most-frequentword values and produces a final tree when a certain percentage of the underlying trees agree with each other. Running this same procedure on *Cloud Atlas E*'s one hundred most frequent words at 93 percent and 94 percent confidence (that is, one percentage point higher or lower than the six-word threshold where the algorithm breaks down), we would expect, from the above investigation, to see the correct clustering of all but "An Orison of Sonmi~451" at the 93 percent mark. Indeed, figures 8 and 9 (one at 94 percent and one at 93 percent) seem to give some validation to the findings.

This validation technique and underlying clustering analysis tells us a few things about the initial, internal stylistic properties of Mitchell's novel. First, if one is only interested in the identification and distinction of the chapters of the novel using the most minimal feature-set possible, then, in fact, 92 percent of the distribution of words between the different sections of the text is irrelevant. This is not to say that they are not also different, just that they are more closely correlated than the 8 percent

Figure 7. The z-scored frequency occurrence of the six most frequent words in *Cloud Atlas E* in all chapters except "Sloosha's Crossin'." Data Source: Digital Appendix 2: Figure 7.

Figure 8. *Cloud Atlas E* classified using 2 to 101 most frequently used words in a bootstrap consensus tree with 94 percent consensus of underlying clusters. Data Source: Digital Appendix 2: Figure 8.

that act as strongly discriminative markers of each section. Second, while a conventional reader might argue that it is the unique thematic and stylistic elements of each subtext that are important ("orisons," nuclear reactors, sea storms, retirement homes, etc.), the shifts in grammatical register that Mitchell deploys to distinguish his chapters from one another force perceptible microchanges among words that usually go unobserved.

Two other experiments are relevant here, and I will cover them quickly. The first that is worthwhile in the realm of authorship attribution

Figure 9. *Cloud Atlas E* classified using 2 to 101 most frequently used and shared words in a bootstrap consensus tree with 93 percent consensus of underlying clusters. All but "An Orison of Sonmi~451" are clustered correctly. Data Source: Digital Appendix 2: Figure 9.

techniques is to validate the claim by a character in the novel that "Ewing puts me in mind of Melville's bumbler Cpt. Delano in 'Benito Cereno.' "45 While the character may be put in mind of that text, conventional authorship attribution methods using Burrows's delta cluster Ewing neither with Melville's *Moby-Dick* nor with "Benito Cereno" (see figure 10). Indeed, even comparing just the top four words in the Ewing chapter alone against Melville's novels is enough to differentiate them—that is, using nothing except the frequency order of *the*, *of*, *and*, and *a*. 46 While this chapter may put a human reader in mind of Captain Delano in "Benito Cereno," the two authors, Melville and Mitchell, are doing very different things with their prose stylistics.

The second experimental question that is worth investigating is whether this differentiation between generic sections of *Cloud Atlas* is unique or whether it is a feature that may be common among other multivocal novels. The ideal experimental setup within which to test this would be to take other multigeneric texts from the same time period as *Cloud Atlas* and then to reconduct the modeling on these works. The challenge,

Figure 10. Melville and *Cloud Atlas E* compared by delta cluster bootstrap consensus tree at 0.8 consensus with twenty to one hundred most frequent words. Data Source: Digital Appendix 2: Figure 10.

as above, is that the labor in preparing such a corpus for a minor correlative experiment is huge. For this reason it is far easier to turn to nineteenth-century novels that nonetheless also possess a multigenericity or multivocality. For the purpose of a small-scale test, I decided to use Bram Stoker's well-known 1897 novel *Dracula*. This text works well for such an exercise since its chapters are divided into different documentary registers within its epistolary mode. For instance, we have the diaries/ journals of the characters Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray/Harker, and Dr. John Seward. I hypothesized that each of these diaries should, to some extent, present itself within a differentiated stylistic framework. After all, Stoker wishes the reader to believe that each could have been written by a figure with his or her own stylistic naturalism.

The comparison to *Cloud Atlas* here is hardly perfect. Whereas *Cloud Atlas* spans a wide range of subjects and ranges across epochs of time, with each section mediated through a known and recognizable generic form, *Dracula* is a far more confined novel. The various diaries in *Dracula* all revolve around the same central plot, for instance. They are all set within roughly the same time (or, at least, they are barely temporally separated compared to *Cloud Atlas*'s leaps into the far-distant future). Regardless, then, of the challenges of finding a suitable comparison text in *Dracula*, I nonetheless hoped that the novel might prove similar *enough* to give some initial confidence to either a positive finding (that *Dracula* exhibited the same differentiation) or a negative result (that *Dracula*'s sections do *not* differ in the same way as the chapters in *Cloud Atlas*). Put otherwise: I wanted to know whether the intradiegetic voicing of *Dracula* could fool Burrows's delta method into thinking that each diary was written by a separate author, as does *Cloud Atlas*.

To conduct the experiment, I took several diary sections from *Dracula*: Harker's diary from chapters 1 and 2; the Murray diary portions from chapters 4 and 8; and Seward's diary from chapters 12 and 13. The textual version that I used was the freely available Project Gutenberg edition produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. In this way I had six segments purportedly written, in Stoker's fiction, by three different authors, with two sections each. Knowing that the chapters of *Cloud Atlas* can be differentiated from one another using just twenty words, I opted to begin my experiment on *Dracula*'s voicing by using the thirty most common terms (as a generous head start). At this level Stoker's novel shows a strong similarity between Harker's diary segments. These are clearly written in a similar and, to some extent distinctive, register. Chapters 1 and 2 are identified as written by the same author even using just thirty words (and, in fact, at the lower level of ten most frequent words). But that is where the similarities end. Murray and Seward are terribly confused at this point. Chapters 4 and 13 are classified on their own branches, while Chapters 7 and 12 are misclassified as by the same author at thirty most frequent words. Even at much higher levels of word usage, chapters are misclassified. At the five-hundred-word mark, for instance, Seward and Harker are both accurately clustered. Murray, however, remains misplaced as though authored by two different writers. In my experiments it took 566 most frequent words to accurately cluster all diary portions by the correct intradiegetic authors.

The extreme differentiation between the chapters of *Cloud Atlas* is not a feature shared by *Dracula*. That said, Harker's narrative does stand separately from the other sections, while Seward and Murray become confused and clustered together (in fact, correctly in an authorship attribution sense, given that both are really authored by Stoker). It could also be that temporal properties of the text's authorship are being reflected in this analysis. On the one hand, it seems clear that chapters 1 and 2 (Harker) are simply split in two from one initial run of writing; and these cluster closely together. On the other hand, I do not know when the Murray and Seward narratives were composed relative to one another, but it is possible that they were more intertwined than the initial Harker chapters. As Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller, commenting on Stoker's notes, point out, it is very difficult to determine the chronology of the novel's authorship.47 As above, there are good reasons why this is an imperfect comparison, but it is my wager that the substantial stylistic, measurable differences between the chapters of *Cloud Atlas* are not shared by many other novels.

In some ways, though, using these methods is more of a performance stunt than a help with close reading. Certainly, the fact that we can distinguish between Mitchell's registers using only function words tells us something. Namely: these chapters differ from each other not just in the realm of theme but also in grammar. This is probably not surprising to a reader of Mitchell's novel. It does, however, open the way for a more detailed investigation of the linguistic differences between the text's sections.

There are differences of linguistic style that would be interesting to test with the above measures but that pose challenges, even within a computational environment. For instance, does Mitchell write his men and women in different ways? As I will discuss below, the "Luisa Rey" chapter, one of the few with a female protagonist, is among the most linguistically different from other sections of the novel. But binary tests for gender in language are both socially complicated (how is the gender identity determined and in what terms?) and linguistically frustrating (are comparative contexts for speakers identical?). In the latter realm, for instance, within the context of *Cloud Atlas*, it would be useful to be able to compare the language of the male archivist with that of the female Sonmi~451. But since the archivist's language is near-universally that of a question while Sonmi's is usually an answer, the linguistic structures that we might here measure and assign to a gender position are prewarped by their functional role. Question-words will appear with great frequency among the archivist's words, while they are barely present in Sonmi's. In short: there are too many variables in operation to be able to assign differences in speech pattern between Mitchell's characters to gender. Often this is the way when close reading with computers: one can be lulled into believing that one has measured one phenomenon when, in fact, the posited causal relationship between the words and the result in the narrative is, after all, only correlative.48

## MICROTECTONICS

These microtectonic, subsurface shifts of linguistics that constitute changes to genre and register between the chapters of *Cloud Atlas* could also reasonably be expected to remanifest in part-of-speech (PoS) trigrams. A "trigram" refers to a set of three consecutive entities, while by "part-of-speech" I here mean a named word type (noun subject → verb → noun object, for example, is a part-of-speech trigram). After all, the reconfiguration of the frequency of basic blocks of speech, such as determiners (articles), seems likely to affect the grammatical composition of each one of the texts.

To investigate what might happen to Mitchell's prose within the linguistic variations of his chapters, I used the feature-rich part-of-speech tagging software known as the "Stanford tagger," which uses a cyclic dependency network to assign a set of symbols to each part of speech.49 Tagging parts of speech, however, is not an easy computational problem.50 Many words have multiple functions and are highly dependent on the context. This method of PoS tagging uses a set of trained models (on a broader English corpus) to look for similarities in linguistic structure and demonstrates a 97 percent accuracy in test runs, although I have here again ignored "Sloosha's Crossin' " in my determination of accuracy. It is not likely that the tagger would work well against Mitchell's mutilated fictional language of that central chapter. The 97 percent accuracy benchmark, remember, means that for every one hundred words of the novel, three will be misclassified.

As an example of how this tagger works, let us take the sentence "We make sail with the morning tide," which comes from the first chapter of Ewing's narrative.51 The Stanford tagger transforms this sentence into a symbolic dictionary of parts of speech. In this case the output reads: "PRP VBP VB IN DT NN NN." A full lookup of these abbreviations is given in table 2. Translated back into English, this means: "we [personal pronoun] make [verb, non-third-person singular present] sail [verb, base form] with [preposition or subordinating conjunction] the [determiner] morning [noun, singular or mass] tide [noun, singular or mass]." Note here that we can see an erroneous transformation: *morning* is actually being used as an adjective, but it is misclassified as a noun. *Sail* is also misclassified as a verb when, in reality, it is the direct object of *make*. Using the Stanford tagger, I converted each chapter of *Cloud Atlas E* into its corresponding PoS version, yielding largely unreadable text files of the underlying linguistic structure of the novel, as determined by a 97 percent–accurate machine reading approach (the results are available in Appendix B: Digital Appendix 2: Part-of-Speech Tagging).

	- RB Adverb
	- WP Wh-pronoun

Table 2. Parts of speech produced by the Stanford tagger, derived here from the Penn Treebank classification.

## 84 C hapter 2

The first aspect that I wanted to know was whether PoS tagging provided another way by which we might group the chapters of *Cloud Atlas E* as distinct from one another. To achieve this, I began by running bootstrap consensus tree imaging (see above) of the top one thousand PoS components that occur throughout the novel, insisting that 90 percent of them agreed with one another in how the texts were clustered. Indeed, as shown in figure 11, it does appear that in nine hundred of the one thousand iterations on which I performed the cluster analysis, it is possible to group the texts by the PoS trigrams.

That said, the sensitivity of differentiation between the chapters is here far less than when using word frequency. In fact, we cannot use the twenty

Figure 11. Bootstrap consensus tree of part-of-speech tagged version of *Cloud Atlas E* including all unique PoS constructs of one thousand most common PoS trigrams. Data Source: Digital Appendix 2: Figure 11.

most common parts of speech because there is too much overlap. There is also an insufficiently strong signal if we use only the PoS trigrams that are shared between the sections of the novel. Where the text becomes interesting is when we see standout deviations of linguistic patterns that occur in certain of Mitchell's chapters and not in others.

Consider figure 12, for example. This shows the one thousand mostto-least common PoS trigrams throughout the text, sorted by an average across each portion of the text. It also provides a useful visual index of where the texts vary from one another in terms of their unique linguistic features. If one looks approximately 1/15 of the way into the graph, there is one isolated point that juts out well above the others in height. This marker turns out to represent the fact that the Luisa Rey portion of *Cloud Atlas* uses the figuration NNP NNP VBZ (proper noun singular → proper noun singular → verb, third-person singular present) to a far higher extent than any of the other chapters.

This NNP NNP VBZ formula comes about because of the Luisa Rey section's unique tendency to reuse the full name of its characters before any present-tense verb. To take but the first few instances, we can clearly see "Rufus Sixsmith leans," "Luisa Rey hears," "Maharaj Aja says," "Javier Moses leafs" (*P*)/"Javier Gomez leafs" (*E*), "Nancy O'Hagan has," "Jerry Nussbaum wipes," "Dom Grelsch breaks," "Joe Napier watches," "Albert Grimaldi scans" (*P*)/"Alberto Grimaldi scans" (*E*), "Isaac Sachs closes," "Roland Jakes drips," and "Bill Smoke watches," among many, many other instances.52 (Note also here the renaming of Javier Moses/Javier Gomez between editions; this affects whether we can read Javier as the son of the threatened "Dr. Moses" at the Seaboard plant.)53 While this trigram is present at around the 0.1 percent mark in all other chapters of *Cloud Atlas E*, the Luisa Rey portion is distinct in having almost ten times as many relative occurrences.

That said, although figure 12 is helpful in determining which linguistic features are of interest and are unique to each section, a better way to achieve this is to calculate the standard deviation from the average frequency and to note outlier points by comparing them to this. For instance, in the example I was just using, the average frequency of occurrence of the NNP NNP VBZ is 0.30. The standard deviation (that is, the average amount by which every chapter frequency for NNP NNP VBZ varies

Figure 12. The one thousand most common PoS trigrams in *Cloud Atlas E* across all sections except "Sloosha's Crossin'." Data Source: Digital Appendix 2: Figure 12.

from this average) of this line is 0.33. The Luisa Rey chapter, at 0.97, is 1.98 standard deviations above the mean, which, assuming a normal distribution of PoS trigrams across the whole text, is in the top 5 percent of anomalous results. If we plot the standard deviations and remove all entries from the table where no single text reaches a 1.9 standard deviation, we can create a stacked percentage chart (figure 13) that can serve as a strong visual index of unique part-of-speech formulations.

In this chart the vertical width of each striated band represents the relative use of the 123 trigrams that score at a standard deviation of 1.9 as though the sum of each column were 100 percent. This allows us to visualize the difference between sections for each trigram without the actual frequency values between each trigram masking internal differences. In other words, columns cannot be compared to each other on an absolute basis. The fact that one column is taller than another does *not* mean that the trigrams on the right that are wider than those on the left actually occur more frequently. What it does mean is that, in relative terms, the taller the bar, the more frequently a section uses a trigram *compared to the other sections within its column*. Indeed, the results toward the right of the graph are often the difference of only a single greater occurrence of a trigram between sections (and given that we have a 3 percent error rate, we should be wary here). In this sense such results are both more *and* less reliable: they are more reliable as markers of distinction, since they occur precisely a single unit more or less than counterpart chapters, error rate notwithstanding; they are less reliable because the variance is far more likely to have been introduced by utter chance rather than any aesthetic/stylistic control on Mitchell's part.

Indeed, on this type of calculation and visualization, the Luisa Rey portion of the narrative differs the most from all others, with seventy-four out of one thousand trigrams occurring at the 1.9 standard deviation mark. For example, another formulation that is uncommon among the other parts of the novel except for the Luisa Rey section is VBZ DT NN (verb, thirdperson singular present → determiner → noun, singular or mass). This is partly a result of the novel's present-tense setting and consists of formulations such as "hits the sidewalk," "slams the balcony," "hears a clunk," "shows the world," and so on.54 Indeed, the present-tense narration of the Luisa

Figure 13. PoS trigrams at 1.9 standard deviations in *Cloud Atlas E* as a stacked percentage chart. Data Source: Digital Appendix 2: Figure 13.

Rey chapter gives it a unique flavor, and there are many instances of VBZtype formulations that do not exist elsewhere in the novel. For instance, we also see NNP VBZ DT (proper noun, singular → verb third-person singular present → determiner) with a much greater frequency in this chapter than elsewhere ("Luisa inspects the," "Luisa manages a," "Javier attaches the," etc.).55 In fact, as a general rule the Luisa Rey segment can be said to differ characteristically from the other sections of *Cloud Atlas* in its use of present-tense narration that includes VBZ formulations occurring with 1.9 standard-deviations more frequently than the average of other portions of the text. As one would expect as a correlative, many VBD (verb, past tense) formulations occur at significantly lower levels in the Luisa Rey narrative. This is clearly part of the generic distinction of the thriller formation of this portion of the novel. The chapter is lent a fast pace by the present-tense trot of the text. The reuse of full names at the start of each chapter serves to seemingly relocate the action in a slamming fashion, a total and distinct replacement of the reader through full-name appellation.

That said, the use of present-tense narration for crime thrillers is not necessarily as common as might be believed when reading the Luisa Rey chapter. Dan Brown's Robert Langdon novels are written in the past tense, and sampling recent thrillers shows a set of novels that move between tenses. For instance, Robert Harris, in thrillers such as *An Officer and a Spy* (2013), alternates between present-tense and past-tense narration to build a projected frame diary around the central historical plot. Likewise, John le Carré's *A Delicate Truth* (2013) also segues between tenses. Ian Rankin deploys this shifting technique in his crime fiction. While narration of his protagonist, Rebus, sticks largely to the past tense, in works such as *Tooth and Nail* (1992; originally titled *Wolfman*), the interior monologue of the antagonist murderer is lent an urgency through an abrupt move to the present. As a final example, Elly Griffiths's Ruth Galloway crime-fiction novels are written in the present tense, her Stephens and Mephisto series in the past. While it is possible that a formal quantitative study of contemporary crime-thriller fiction might reveal a prevalence for one narrative perspective, my anecdotal survey here leads to the hypothesis that such novels—or at least authorial oeuvres of those producing such work—are usually of hybrid tensing.

Of course, in the case of Luisa Rey, the present tense is the logical choice to *differentiate* the crime section from the other portions of the novel. This is not an unusual way of writing for a crime thriller; far from it. But the rationale for the selection of tense must be seen in contrast to the remainder of the novel and the desire to firmly delineate the stylistic profile of this chapter.

The next most linguistically distinct portion of *Cloud Atlas E* is "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," which contains fifteen trigrams that occur at over or under 1.9 standard deviations from the mean (albeit not all of which seem to distinguish the chapter from others in a reliable fashion; see above). Indeed, Ewing's narrative can be categorized as overusing IN DT NNS (preposition or subordinating conjunction → determiner → noun, plural), represented in formulations such as "on the stairs," "than the digits," "through the paths" (italicized in *E*), "inside the coils"; DT NNS IN (determiner → noun, plural → preposition or subordinating conjunction), seen in "the fangs of," "the pearls of," "the works of "; and NNP CC PRP (proper noun, singular → coordinating conjunction → personal pronoun), which are mostly instances of "Henry & I."56 Put otherwise, the Ewing narrative is linguistically distinct in order to achieve two features of its generic register and thematic concerns that are important for the text. The first is that, in the use of DT NNS IN and NNP CC PRP, the Pacific Journal chapter gives many more comparative and locative descriptions of characters and artifacts than do other portions of the text. This lends a degree of formal pedantry to the voice here that is not present elsewhere. In the second case the NNP CC PRP formulation is integral to establishing the supposed friendship with Henry Goose that leads to Ewing's near-downfall. But the tight usage of "Henry & I" here, consistently with no slippage, contributes to the historical imaginary of the 1850s writing style, as from an era where grammar was "correct" and people wrote in a formal register. This is an aspect to which I will return in Chapter 3.

By contrast, Ewing's narrative is short on JJ JJ NN (adjective → adjective → noun, singular or mass) and RB JJ NN (adverb → adjective → noun, singular or mass). While Luisa Rey's narrative contains a "hopelessly uneven gunfight," a "mostly empty wine" bottle, and "very little traffic," such formulations are rare in the "Ewing" diary.57 This lends a specificity or qualifying nuance to the Luisa Rey narrative. It is also, though, clearly a trope of hackneyed, overwritten airport thrillers to modify every term that is used in this way.

The other sections of the novel are not so clearly differentiated from one another by part-of-speech formation. The "Letters from Zedelghem," "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish," and "An Orison of Sonmi~451" chapters are possessed of far fewer statistically significant linguistic outliers than the other sections of the novel. For instance, one of only two outliers in "The Ghastly Ordeal" is the underused RB DT JJ trigram (adverb → determiner → adjective). An example of such a formulation from the Pacific Journal is Te Whanga being described as "nearly an inland" sea.58 What it might mean that "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" does not use such a formulation as frequently as the other chapters, however, is unclear to me. This is where various computational techniques break down without some imaginative thinking; the mechanistic description itself is insufficient. It is undoubtedly *true* that the language in this section of the novel is behaving differently at this point as a knock-on consequence of thematic and genre stylistics. But why the RB DT JJ configuration should be significant—and what this linguistic formation (a premodifier) denotes/does—is not obvious, at least to me.59 This is not, for instance, a known trait of gender-specific communication, at least in professional legal writing (i.e., the formulation RB DT JJ is not known to occur specifically in relation to any gender characteristic of author or subject).60 Certainly, Cavendish is a bombastic character, overly sure of himself, so perhaps the qualifying nature of such adverbial statements would be contrary to his nature. Such a reading, though, is a bit of a leap, since the character is also fond of overwriting his narrative. Nonetheless, these linguistic formations—just some of the many that the amplifying visualization technique allows us to see—are the substrate on which Mitchell's genre effects are built, whether or not we can understand why.

## SEEING THE OCEAN FOR THE DROPS

I have attempted in this chapter to provide a demonstration of the ways in which computational methodologies can be used to garner new linguistic empirical evidence that can then be fed back into traditional close-reading and theoretical approaches. There are many more techniques to be explored here, particularly in the realm of machine learning for authorship attribution. What I have tried to show, though, is that digital methodologies need not be utilitarian in the way that they approach literature. We can use these approaches in symbiosis with more conventional literary interpretation. Indeed, I have given significant thought to what we mean by "literary style" through a questioning of the conditions under which, I contend, we frequently assume that writers work. This theorizing was made possible through the digital approaches of stylometry. I then moved to examine how we might use a computational approach to pull out significantly more common part-of-speech patterns among portions of a novel. This, in turn, opened the possibility of a more informed linguistic understanding of Mitchell's genre techniques.

The benefits of such an approach are reciprocal: literary theory can be enriched through a new set of methodologies and the cracks in our thinking that they expose, while literary criticism is armed with a fresh set of formal observations that are difficult to spot by eye but that can be extracted using computational techniques. In many ways the methods I use here and that I have described as a microscope can also be understood through a different, imperfect, somewhat mixed, metaphor: filtration. As the ocean of the text is sifted for material that we might use, its drop-like composition at the linguistic level that causes the macro-oceanic effects can be better discerned. Such a forced metaphor is apt for thinking about *Cloud Atlas*. For as Mitchell's Ewing closes the novel, he asks of the reader: what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Where to from here? In Chapter 1 I argued that the transtextual variance of *Cloud Atlas* refocused the novel on the central importance of the *archive* to the work's own textual-historical world-building. From the linguistic analysis in this chapter I want finally to draw attention to a specific feature of the novel's microtectonics, as I have called them. Specifically: *Cloud Atlas* is a novel about power structures and the interrelations of wholes to parts.

Such a view is also reflective of Mitchell's broader corpus. For instance, in *David Mitchell's Post-Secular World: Buddhism, Belief and the Urgency of Compassion*, Rose Harris-Birtill—who perhaps knows more about the whole body of David Mitchell's writings than any other living critic—argues that the interrelatedness of Mitchell's grand "macro-novel" or "uber-book" is best represented through the cartographic metaphor of the Buddhist mandala. In Harris-Birtill's view, formed from extensive interviews with the author, Mitchell is crafting an epic-scale world across his books and short stories, over a gigantic historical period. Yet Harris-Birtill also notes that this macronovel is constructed from differently denominated units: "the smaller scale of the short narrative unit, the larger scale of the novel, and the macro-scale of the fictional universe." For Harris-Birtill it is "the 'smaller' narrative unit" that "is unquestionably prioritised in [Mitchell's] writing process";61 a focus on the minute—the drops of the ocean—builds toward the total of the macrowork.

Against Claire Larsonneur, Paul Harris, and Robin Visel, Harris-Birtill shuns the metaphor of the "fractal" in understanding Mitchell's novelistic worldview.62 Yet, whether we use the image of a fractal or a kaleidoscope of differentiated repetition, *Cloud Atlas* nonetheless iteratively and structurally repeats its own macrolevel power relations at the level of the subunit.63 The clearest incarnation of this is the less-than-subtle birthmarks that the characters from the novel's different time periods almost all share. By physically inscribing identical marks on his characters' bodies, Mitchell asks the reader to look for structural and thematic similarities in narrative. It is also clear that the narratives are *not* the same; each has a specificity even while it possesses commonalities with and overlaps the others.

This focus on the relationship between the part and the whole has a lengthy and hearty philosophical pedigree. It is most pronounced in the dialogue between Hegelian idealism and the Frankfurt School thought of Theodor W. Adorno.64 In Hegelian ontotheology it is only in totality that truth is found: "Das Wahre ist das Ganze" (the whole is the true).65 By contrast, while Adorno retains some vestige of theology, his is a reworked materialism that, as Robert Hullot-Kentor puts it, shines "the image of divine light not to behold the deity as its source above, but to illuminate a damaged nature below."66

Adorno recognizes that wholes and totalities can possess a sort of truth, particularly with respect to the dialectical method: "the dialectical method as a whole is an attempt to cope with this demand by freeing thought from the spell of the instant and developing it in far-reaching conceptual structures."67 In his well-known *Minima Moralia* (1951), however, Adorno famously states that "the whole is the untrue."68

Adorno expands on this statement in his later "The Experiential Content of Hegel's Philosophy": "'The whole is the untrue,' not merely because the thesis of totality is itself untruth, being the principle of domination inflated to the absolute; the idea of a positivity that can master everything that opposes it through the superior power of a comprehending spirit is the mirror image of the experience of the superior coercive force inherent in everything that exists by virtue of its consolidation under domination."69 For Adorno, the dialectical model of knowledge is one saturated with domination. At the moment that an object becomes classified, its specificity is absorbed and lost in the name of understanding: "to think is to identify."70 In Hegelian logic this falls under the heading of "determinate negation": "the negation of [the concrete object's] particular content" in order to achieve synthesis.71 For a trivial instance, at what point does a dog become a "dog" rather than one specific unidentified hairy organic mass? At what point do we recognize or ignore the specificities of the objects that we classify? For "objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder."72

Such a "remainder" is the specificity of objects that defies their aggregation into untrue wholes. To give primacy to the specificity of the object is the aim of Adorno's project of negative dialectics, against Hegel's assertion that thinking inheres in the identity (synthesis) between identity and nonidentity (contradiction). In many ways there is also a *utopian* impulse in this focus on the specific, the one-time, the unique. It lies in the insistence that we do not simply aggregate upward to classes and assumed knowledge but instead focus on the differentiated that will never happen again. It is not necessarily an anticollectivist drive—Adorno's work is, after all, situated within a Marxist lineage—but it is also a celebration of difference and individual qualities.

When appraising the relationship connecting David Mitchell's short stories, novels, and his macroworld, it is easy to erase this relationship between the specific and the whole. Finding connections in order to link and aggregate is a satisfying literary-critical activity. Yet it is also the case that Mitchell's component stories, chapters, and novels have their own unique features that cannot just be minimized for the sake of forging connections.

The unique language of the chapters of *Cloud Atlas* that I have examined here is one such feature that demonstrates a drive toward uniqueness and, at the same time, to connection. In this chapter I have shown a variety of ways in which we *can* delineate the literary language of the chapters of *Cloud Atlas E*. This is a move toward specificity, a questioning of the unique content of each chapter and how it differs from the others. At the same time, these chapters all sit within literary-generic forms; they are constituted by their direct and sometimes explicit comparison with other literary works. This is the second point that I wish to draw out for the argument to which I will return in Chapter 4: *Cloud Atlas* is a novel about the interplay among the one-time, the specific, and the unique and a broader context of synthesis, comparison, and interlinkage.

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## *Chapter 3*

## H I S T O R I C A L F I C T I O N AND LINGUISTIC MIMESIS

> Perhaps the chapter that must perform the most work in *Cloud Atlas* is "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing." Certainly, one could argue that the final, distant-future section, "Sloosha's Crossin'," has chronological priority, looking back on the other chapters of the text from a historical vantage point. One might also assert that the "Letters from Zedelghem" are central to the text, for it is there that the synechdochal "*Cloud Atlas Sextet*" is composed.1 Ewing begins and ends the novel, however, thus placing its language and themes under more intense literary-critical scrutiny.2 The chapter must not only introduce this strange book but, owing to *Cloud Atlas*'s unusual narrative structure, also convey that sense-making function of an ending toward which Frank Kermode gestured.3 This diary object that is later read by Robert Frobisher certainly has an important role in this novel.

Adam Ewing's diary itself is written in the supposed style of a seafaring narrative of the mid-nineteenth century. As I remarked in the previous chapter, Frobisher notes in both editions of the text that "Ewing puts me in mind of Melville's bumbler Cpt. Delano in 'Benito Cereno.' " Yet, despite this being a metatextual setup maneuver by the novel that undoubtedly "expos[es] its concerted effort to 'forge' the form of a historical journal," the work in the preceding chapter showed that authorship attribution of the Ewing narrative using common stylometric properties of bigram or trigram frequencies (through Burrows's delta method) correlates the text neither with Melville's *Moby-Dick* nor with "Benito Cereno."4 By at least one stylistic measure, the text fails in its attempt to condition its readership into a specific generic mode through authorial affiliation.

The novel also gives its own internal dating for the Ewing narrative. The reader is told, by Frobisher, that "mention is made of the gold rush, so I suppose we are in 1849 or 1850."5 If we take the diary at face value, then Frobisher is almost right. In fact, the year must be precisely 1850, since this is the only year in the 1850s range that has November 7 (the first dated entry in the diary) falling on a Thursday. Hence, also, by the internal chronology, when Ewing notes that "today is [his] thirty-fourth birthday" on Sunday, January 12, 1851, he reveals that his precise birthday is January 12, 1817. 6 In its tight internal chronology that *does* match the historical record, the text even manages here to parody the act of literary interpretation; Frobisher is akin to the paranoid critic who would seek out such information.

Indeed, it is worth noting that this type of fact-finding, undertaken by Frobisher, can be called "paranoid." For it confuses the fact that, during the historical development of the novel, "the quality of being history-like [had to] become separable from the fact of being a history and acquire a validity of its own," as Michael McKeon has it.7 Frobisher is the paranoid critical reader who seeks to uncover the truth of a deceptive diary object with which he is presented. His paranoia is also rewarded in this instance, since it is important to note that we cannot take the date of the diary at face value. As Frobisher again puts it, in what is perhaps a defensive authorial move by Mitchell, there is "something shifty about the journal's authenticity—seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn't ring quite true."8 Frobisher clearly suspects, through his questioning of the aesthetic, that the entire thing is a literary forgery—which, of course, it is.9 Mitchell is the ultimate forger here (although it is by license of the reader), but in the intradiegetic setup of the text, Jackson Ewing looks likely to have doctored the diary.

The reader knows, from the final pages of the diary, that Jackson Ewing, the son who has "edited" this published diary, was born before Ewing set sail in 1850. But we are also told that Jackson Ewing is the same age as the first hazing victim aboard the ship: "Rafael was Jackson's age."10 Rafael is described as having "boyish spirits" and is a "virgin" with respect to this being his first seafaring expedition, but he is also bearded, and the once "sprite lad" has become a "sullen youth," perhaps indicating that he is in his late teens.11 Assuming, then, an earliest birthdate of January 1, 1835, for Jackson Ewing, it seems likely that the furthest date within the text's internal chronology for editing and publication of the diary, taking an optimistic human lifespan average of sixty years for the time, might reasonably be 1895. The diary would also have to have been edited after Ewing's return at a later date. If one wanted to be generous, one could extend this by fifteen years to 1910, so as to also chime approximately with the date of the diary's "discovery" by Frobisher in the "Letters from Zedelghem" section of the novel, a few years later.

The date range that this yields for Mitchell's Ewing chapter is, then, 1851 to 1910. But the chapter is not a traditional "historical fiction." Certainly, it possesses some of the tropes that we traditionally ascribe to historical fiction: a sense of "heft and authenticity" and a time frame beyond the knowledge of present-day human readers.12 It is also clearly the case that the chapter required intricate research to write, in accordance with the rules of the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Yet where Mitchell's text differs from other works of contemporary historical fiction—such as Mantel's *Wolf Hall*—is that the *linguistic style* purports to be of the time. That is, Mitchell aims to write as though the diary was actually produced in the 1850 to 1910 time frame.

There are other works of historical fiction that also attempt such historico-linguistic mimesis. Thomas Pynchon's *Mason & Dixon* (1997) springs to mind among these as a text littered with mock-archaic typographic features (ampersands are liberally scattered within that novel, and certain, though by no means all, nouns are capitalized). This novel uses parodic voicing and stylistic features to make its serious points about the Enlightenment and colonial cartography.13 Likewise, for a futuristic setting, Russell Hoban's *Riddley Walker*—which formed the basis for Mitchell's mutated future language of "Sloosha's Crossin'," already mentioned several times in this book—deploys a mutilated narrative style throughout, the language bearing but a phonetic similarity to our own: "On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen."14

By most accounts, Mitchell's novel is successful at imitating the linguistic style of the period in which it purports to be set. But the questions that I want to ask here are, How does Mitchell achieve this? What are the limits of linguistic mimesis in *Cloud Atlas*? And what kind of historical imaginary could function as a model against which we could measure Mitchell's prose?

Asking these types of question pushes this inquiry into the realm of encyclopedism and encyclopedic narrative. Certainly, *Cloud Atlas* contains some of the urge toward totalization that critics since Edward Mendelson have thought of as crucial to encyclopedic works.15 The encyclopedic author, writes Mendelson, "attends to . . . the whole social and linguistic range of his nation," an aspect that can be applied to Mitchell's novel when the word *nation* is replaced by *planet*. 16 Yet, in recent days, what we mean by *encyclopedic* has begun to change. For Mendelson, encyclopedic narratives "are products of an era in which the world's knowledge is vastly greater than any one person can encompass," and, as a result, he claims, such narratives turn to synecdoche.17 David Letzler amplifies this point for the information era, noting that, in fact, the "real problems of encyclopedism" are "limited resources" such as a "mortal lifespan." Encyclopedism then becomes, for Letzler, concerned less with "epistemology or mastery" than with "organizing, searching, and filtering an unmanageably vast amount of data into a form wherein it can be used."18

In asking questions of the underlying linguistics of novels—when their words number in the hundreds of thousands—we quickly find ourselves in this realm. The labor becomes, even at the microlevel, too extensive for mastery without techniques for marshaling the linguistic data. We need a tool that can repetitively check words against source data and ways in which we can understand frequencies among broad linguistic corpora. This is where the computational techniques of this chapter can help. In the previous chapter this data wrangling was still present; it was not possible to interrogate style at the close, microlevel without such work. But the mathematical complexity of authorship attribution techniques may have led to the false impression that computational methods are difficult and that they must always involve an understanding of statistics. In this chapter I instead show how even simple acts of brute, repetitive searching and reference, facilitated by software, can furnish us with textual evidence that was otherwise inaccessible. In turn, this leads to further questions about mimesis and historical fiction.

## ETYMOLOGICAL MIMESIS

Assuming that Mitchell's diary object attempts an accurate depiction of language from the time of its purported authorship, an obvious first question to which we can turn a computational method is, Are there words in the diary whose first usage falls later than the date of the Ewing section of *Cloud Atlas*? To gauge the "authenticity" of the diary through the appropriateness of its linguistic register, I conducted two initial acts of text parsing on *Cloud Atlas E*'s first section, "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," the portion to which Frobisher refers. The first pass that I made was to split all words within the text into their own lines and then to eradicate any words that appeared in the Project Gutenberg version of Herman Melville's *Moby-Dick*. Using this text as a filter enabled me to remove words that were clearly in use in 1851, the first publication date for Melville's novel. The second step was to produce a piece of software that would "scrape" sets of open-access dictionary sites for claimed "first usages" of words and to run the remaining words through that software.19 The idea behind this was that it should give an indication of any obvious outlier words, which I would then be able to check more thoroughly.

It is worth making a brief digression at this point to outline some of the difficulties of trusting etymological source data. I used two dictionary sources for this project: one was Dictionary.com, and the other was the experimental Oxford Dictionaries API (that is, the *Oxford English Dictionary*). In the case of Dictionary.com the sources on which this site draws for its etymological data are not entirely clear. That said, a sampled check of their etymologies compared to other dictionaries—such as the *OED* and Merriam-Webster's—indicates a close correlation. Yet, of course, etymological research is a historical process like any other, prone to flaws, revision, bias, and the perils of document destruction. The science of etymology is far from precise. Furthermore, the science of data-mining such sources, as used here, is even less precise. There were many words that I was unable to automatically classify and that were simply marked as having an unknown etymological start date. That said, because I was specifically looking for words that fall *outside* those accessible to Jackson Ewing in the novel, this presents less of a challenge. Indeed, so long as there were some anachronistic results, there would be something happening in the novel's style that would have a knock-on effect on its interpretation. In other words, this type of approach is good for answering a simple, well-defined (but nonetheless limited) query that I would phrase as "return as many as possible, but not necessarily all, words in a text that have etymological first-usage dates after 1910."

To militate against the above challenges of etymological research data, I decided to reduce further the terminologies studied (in addition to deduplication and the *Moby-Dick* filter) to words that appear in Ewing part 1 that have etymological data in both the *OED* and Dictionary.com. At the time of authorship, the *OED* had just released an experimental API that allows for word lookup. This includes a date-range parameter. But since there are multiple senses for many lemmas, with different first-use dates, after an initial computational filter, I had to check manually the majority of the remaining terms. Nonetheless, this resulted in a final unique vocabulary of 896 words out of an original 13,246 terms for which I then had two sets of etymological first-use dates. As can be seen in figure 14, there is generally a close correlation between the two dictionary sites for the distribution curves. The words that fall after the 1900 cutoff point, however, are different between the two sources.

Taking, then, a latest in-text "publication date" of 1910 for the first section of the "Pacific Journal" yields, in my search of Dictionary.com, just six anachronistic words that would definitively not have been available to either Adam or Jackson Ewing and that occur in both editions of the text: *home-town* (*P*)/*hometown* (*E*) [1910–15],20 *spillage* [1920–25],21 *lazy-eye* [1935–40],22 *returnees* [1940–45],23 *Latinos* [1945–50],24 and *Aframe* [1960–65].25 The *Oxford English Dictionary* disagrees, however. For *hometown*, it tells us, was coined in 1851, *returnee* in 1870, and *Aframe* as early as 1827. The *OED* also yields a number of terms from the

Figure 14. Word distributions in part 1 of "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" in *Cloud Atlas E* by first usage according to Dictionary.com and the *OED*. Data Source: Digital Appendix 3: Figure 14.

novel as being after our cutoff date that Dictionary.com does not. In the *OED*, through the automatic approach, we are given *bizarreness* (1920),26 *spillage* (1934), *slumped* (1937),27 *pulsed* (1942),28 *colour* (*P*)/ *color* (*E*) (1944),29 and *scuttlebutt* (1945).30 There are some strange things going on here that are worth briefly unpacking.

In the case of *bizarreness*, *slumped*, and *pulsed*, the *OED* API simply disagrees with Dictionary.com, claiming that the specific forms of these words, deriving from older ancestors, were not used until these later points. This is probably because my software is pulling out the incorrect part-of-speech definitions for first usage within the specific contexts. Two words have more interesting stories behind them, though.

*Color* seems an unlikely candidate to have been coined, even in its American spelling, in 1944. Indeed, this is the case. What has actually happened here is that the *OED* API has taken *color* in the sense of "any of various musical devices or techniques used to enhance the performance of a piece, esp. a repeated melody in late-medieval isorhythmic motets"; a very specific definition of *color*, with the main entry for perceptions of electromagnetic radiation listed instead under *colour*. This usage of *color* in the musical sense appears later in *Cloud Atlas* but hardly applies to the initial use here: "a Bonapartist general hiding here under assumed colo[u]rs."31

*Scuttlebutt* also has two different meanings. The older, given by Dictionary.com as first occurring around 1800, means "an open cask of drinking water." The usage in the text, though, is that "Henry shall inform the 'scuttlebutt' that Mr. Ewing has a low fever," meaning in this case a person who puts a rumor about. This second definition as a colloquialism, according to the *OED*, comes from 1945, while Dictionary.com yields 1905. Interestingly, Mitchell puts this term in quotation marks, as though the speaker is using an informal or new word. Although there is disagreement between my two etymological sources, *scuttlebutt* is definitely an edge-case here. On the one hand, it is very unlikely that it would have been used in the informal sense during the period of purported authorship of the document. On the other hand, Dictionary. com does put such a use at 1905, so it makes sense to exclude this from the final definitive list.

This leaves, then, just three terms that I believe can be said with certainty to have been absolutely inaccessible either to Mitchell's historic author or to the intradiegetic editor: *spillage*, from 1934; *Latino*, from 1946; and *lazy-eye*, from 1960. In the case of *spillage*, the text is recounting the debate between the Moriori elders as to whether "the spillage of Maori blood" will "also destroy one's *mana*." Interestingly, a third source, the Online Etymology Dictionary, disputes this entry, claiming it for the nineteenth century.32 Mitchell could have avoided this slip through reverting to the verb form, *spilling*. The term *Latino*, however, is definitely a twentieth-century construction: "'Passionate Latinos,' observed Henry, bidding me a second good-night." While this term did not actually come to prominence until after the Second World War, the use, here, of a racial epithet has an important different effect for the construction of a stylistic imaginary of the nineteenth century, to which I will turn shortly.

The first thing to note is that this is a very good attempt at linguistic mimesis within a work of purported historical fiction. Despite Mitchell's disclaimer through Frobisher about the accuracy of the diary, to have used only thirty-three terms in total from after 1850 (the earliest date of composition) is a substantial achievement. At the same time, the admission that "the language doesn't quite ring true" is either a tacit defense or an outright confession of linguistic inaccuracies.

The second important aspect that this language use changes, however, is our understanding of the text's metaleptic slippage. In fact, the precise datings of first usage here alter the slippage twofold. The use of words that entered the language after 1850 but before 1910 (as a generous estimate) validates Frobisher's assessment that the diary has been subsequently edited within the narrative (in the *OED* these words are *moniker*, *hometown*, *wide-eyed*, *boredom*, *play-act*, *despoiling*, *cartography*, *loin-cloth*, *far-flung*, *maturer*, *bronco*, *returnee*, *primed*, *prodded*, *windjammer*, *commandeer*, *wiped*, *marooned*, *excoriating*, *transliterated*, *intuited*, *slowing*, *unlocked*, and *empathy*). But our knowledge, also, that three of the linguistic terms in the portion of narrative that Frobisher reads were not coined until *after* the time of that section introduces a far stranger violation of diegetic layers. For, just as Adam Ewing's narrative is told by Jackson Ewing, and "Sloosha's Crossin' " is told by Zachry's son, this linguistic dating gives an authorial intrusion by Mitchell at this moment—the type of authorial self-inscription seen in much metafiction, here played out in a more subtle, undoubtedly unwitting, linguistic fashion.

The third notable aspect, though, is that there are remarks to be made on the linguistic styling of pastiche, parody, and historical fiction in their attempts to become believable. It is clear that readers are very poor at both identifying terms that are anachronistic and dating the first use of words. I had no idea that *spillage* came from the 1920s. Indeed, I am unsure that, if asked, readers would be able to point to these words as the markers of the language seeming not to "ring true." How, then, does one create a linguistic styling that *appears* mimetic of 1850 when working under the assumption that readers will not know when words are coined? For if readers do not know the truth of the language and the dating of words, then they cannot be capable of spotting when the text veers away from linguistic reality.

These questions of historical accuracy at the microlevel bring to the fore a problem that has vexed historical fiction and its study for many years: to what extent is mimesis to the historical record *important* for historical *fiction*? For instance, Harry E. Shaw notes that there are two types of representational phenomena at play in historical fiction. A work "may represent societies, modes of speech, or events that in very fact existed in the past," or it may "promote some sort of historical effect within the work."34

This "historical effect" can be seen in many contemporary takes on fantasy. In Kazuo Ishiguro's remarkable (though not universally wellreceived) fantasy novel *The Buried Giant* (2015), for instance, the inhabitants live in a hybrid ancient Saxon world of Arthurian knights, ogres, and dragons.35 Although the trait is hardly exclusive to *The Buried Giant*, I call the world "hybrid" because it contains elements that seem historical even while introducing mythical, fantastical aspects. The novel engages, clearly, in a mode of mythopoesis: sowing its otherworld within a reader's own past reality, cross-fertilizing between a Tolkienesque universe and ancient Britain. Among the most interesting facets of this novel, however, is the mist of forgetting that covers Ishiguro's land. Indeed, the inhabitants of his story have only the weakest sense of history, a poor historical consciousness, and are unable to remember even recent events that were nonetheless, by all accounts, central to the characters' lives. As the warrior Wistan puts it, "Who knows what went on here in ancient days?"36

*The Buried Giant* is clearly not simply a fantasy tale but is also a rumination on history. In fact, it is a rather pessimistic meditation on the ability of fiction to reconstruct a past. Like Wistan, the reader may hope that "by travelling beside" Ishiguro's characters, "the memories would awaken." Like Wistan they may too find, though, that "they've not yet done so."37 Ishiguro's novel closes with an ambiguous warning. As the memory fog lifts, the infidelities and betrayals of the journeying couple, Axl and Beatrice,

are revealed, in parallel to a warning of ancient nationalistic grudges. At the end of the novel it remains unclear whether Axl and Beatrice are allowed to journey together to the heavenlike island or whether these past grudges cause them to fail the ferryman's potentially unpassable test. What is clear is that *The Buried Giant* warns of recovering history, unless one is prepared to forgive its wrongs in the present.

It is also clear that *The Buried Giant* and Mitchell's "Pacific Journal" are not intended to be taken as truly historical, even while they carry within them a "historical effect." The question then becomes, To what extent does it matter whether or not historical details are correct? For Hilary Mantel's Tudor fictions, the detail of the past matters intensely. In one journalistic interview she professed that "although she 'would make up a man's inner torments' she would never invent the colour of his drawing-room wallpaper," yielding a dedicated archival approach to the facticity of her fictional past eras. At the same time, Mantel acknowledges the historiography of her enterprise, noting that "history is not the past" but instead "the method we've evolved of organising our ignorance of the past."38

Other authors in recent days have expressed greater skepticism regarding the degree to which their fictions must, or even *can*, be historically "accurate." For Ferrie in Don DeLillo's *Libra* (1988), the interconnections in narrative are what cut across otherwise independent variables and create the binding force that we call "history": "Think of two parallel lines. . . . One is the life of Lee H. Oswald.  What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time."39

Thomas Pynchon also recognizes that there is a negotiation involved in the accuracy of historical fiction. When defending Ian McEwan against charges of plagiarism, Pynchon wrote that, regardless of how much artistic license he might employ, "most of us who write historical fiction . . . feel some obligation to accuracy."40 At the same time, though, David Cowart points out that Pynchon is an "unconventional historian" and that, for Pynchon, "narrow canons of accuracy may not be important to" a broader "historical vision."41

What we can say about David Mitchell's almost, but not quite, historically accurate language is that it is no further from the bounds of fabrication than other period details in contemporary writing. The fact that the diary has been altered, within the narrative framework of the text, yields a certain historiography to this linguistic mimesis, an admission of recovery and of incomplete historical knowledge. At the same time, however, Mitchell's language is almost entirely accurate—as accurate as one could feasibly hope for in a work of historical fiction. The question then becomes, What other markers might denote a historical effect to a contemporary readership in the early twenty-first century beyond etymological linguistic mimesis?

## SIGNS OF THE TIMES

First and foremost, to achieve his historical stylistic imaginary, Mitchell deploys archaic language. Within the first few lines of the text we are given *Indian* to refer to any non-European, a *hamlet* to refer to a settlement, a spelling of *trousers* as "trowzers," a jacket of eighteenth-century origin (the "Pea-jacket"), an ampersand repeated for conjunction, and the term *eyrie* to refer to a homeland.42 This "archaic overloading," as we might term it, is not strictly accurate. Looking at the first passage of *Moby-Dick* as a correlative text can provide an instructive example, since *Cloud Atlas* implicitly evokes this novel with its "'tis not down on any map" echoing Melville's famous "it is not down in any map; true places never are."43 In the opening of *Moby-Dick*, however, ampersands do not appear instead of *and*, and several passages would be totally acceptable in contemporary spoken English (were they not so well known already): "Call me Ishmael" and "there is nothing surprising in this." That said, there are also a set of terms in the first paragraph of Melville's text that resonate with Mitchell's opening: Ishmael reports himself to be "grim about the mouth" and notes that "with a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."44

Second, I hypothesized that Mitchell might simply be using *uncommon* language to create the perception of a stylistic affinity with Victorian-era prose for the twenty-first-century reader. For, to achieve the effect of archaic language within an environment where readers do not know when words were actually first used, it might make sense to present a range of words that they are *less likely* to have encountered. This unfamiliarity might be construed as outside the bounds of conversational tone, which a reader could take to mean that the words are older than those used in day-to-day speech. Or more simply put, the less familiar the language, the more archaic it sounds.

To test this, I noted that the Merriam-Webster dictionary has a feature that ranks the "popularity" of words, and I decided to profile the first portion of the Ewing narrative using this tool. If, I thought, my hypothesis is correct, we could expect to see a distribution of words skewed dramatically toward the "unpopular" end of the spectrum. I also thought that it would be worthwhile and important here to profile a work by Melville of the time, to see whether these works, too, genuinely chose words "unpopular" in our present day (I chose "Benito Cereno"). The results of the experiment can be seen in figure 15. The graph of part 1 of "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" is, indeed, interesting. It shows an approximately normal distribution (that is, a bell curve) of the vocabulary's range but with a strong positive skew applied by the fact that approximately 42 percent of the words used in the text fall within the *bottom 10 percent* popularity of the Merriam-Webster account. This seemed to confirm my thinking that unpopularity of terms was a better indicator of how to achieve a sense of the prose style of the 1850s than strict mimetic linguistic accuracy.

Perhaps more importantly, though, when we plot the same graph against Melville's "Benito Cereno," the patterns are *almost identical*. (Certainly, some of the reason for this curve can be seen in the dataset for "Benito Cereno" and for *Cloud Atlas*; I have removed neither names such as "Ghofan" nor hybrid words such as *fellowvoyager* or *userofthegoldenrod*—originally hyphenated—from the dataset, which, clearly, score in the lower popularity percentages. In the *Cloud Atlas* set, hyphenated terms such as *help-I* have become *helpi*. That is, for reasons that will shortly become apparent, I have not taken time to perform extensive data cleanup for this experiment.) The percentage of words that falls in the bottom 10 percent, according to Merriam-Webster, is just 0.5 percent different from that in *Cloud Atlas*. The remainder of the distribution is also

Figure 15. Word "popularities" in part 1 of "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" in *Cloud Atlas E* and "Benito Cereno" according to Merriam-Webster (online). Data Source: Digital Appendix 3: Figure 15.

nearly identical to that in Mitchell's subnovel. At this point in proceedings, I began to wonder whether there might be an underlying linguistic pattern at work here that pervades all language. Perhaps the long tail of these distributions is actually a feature that is intrinsic to language more generally? Or might it be, in fact, an underlying feature of how Merriam-Webster measures "popularity"?

Unfortunately, there is a problem with this methodology that I have not yet addressed. The underlying question that must first be answered is, What does the Merriam-Webster dictionary mean by *popular*? It turns out that the Merriam-Webster score for popularity is calculated by *the number of times that each word is looked up by users* online. In other words, *popularity*, as defined in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, is not taken from any representative corpus of contemporary use but is determined by how frequently users visit the definition page in question. This, in turn, raises questions about what *popularity* might actually mean that hinges on the reasons for which people turn to online dictionaries. By Merriam-Webster's measure, "popularity" is actually constituted by a range of sociobehavioral and technological aspects.

To deal with the technological elements first, since they are the simpler to handle, it is unclear whether automated requests by search engines, repeated visits by the same users, fleeting "hits" on pages, and other nonhuman uses of the web page that contains the definition contribute to the "popularity" score. It could even be the case that by requesting how popular these terms are, my own data gathering actually ended up modifying the result. The length of time over which hits on pages are measured is also an unknown factor here. The patterns of linkage around the World Wide Web must also play a role in determining these values. Word definitions that are hyperlinked from prominent articles are likely to see more hits than those without such high-profile referrers.

Perhaps more interesting than these technical questions about how Merriam-Webster collects its popularity data, however, are the social reasons for which people might turn to online dictionary pages. For example, when a word scores in the "bottom 10%," does this mean that (1) the word is hardly ever searched for because it occurs so rarely in contemporary usage?  (3) the word is both uncommon in usage but also very well known? (4) the word is easy to spell? In contrast, when a word is scored as being very "popular," this could mean that (1) the word is extremely rare and not very well known; (2) the word is very common and is being searched for by nonnative speakers of the language; (3) the word has a subsidiary use that is less familiar; (4) the word has a specific grid pattern that fits with various word puzzles and is looked up disproportionately by players (*okapi*, for instance, is by far the most common crossword answer for any grid that reads: "o\_a\_i"); (5) the word has a difficult spelling and is frequently looked up not because it is uncommon in usage but for its composition; (6) the word has one or more homonyms, and users are seeking to disambiguate the term(s); (7) the word has an interesting and unapparent etymology; (8) the word has recently featured in a popular context, giving undue exposure to the term.

In actuality, how frequently a term is searched for in a dictionary will be made up of any number of the above factors in a randomly varying quantity per term. It is strangely the case that when I looked up the words *an* and *to*, the former was classified as among the most popular 10

## 112 C hapter 3

percent of words while the latter scored in the bottom 10 percent. That said, the terms that I identified above (*pea-jacket* and *eyrie*) ranked in the bottom 10 percent and 30 percent of words, respectively. Likewise, words such as *convalescence*, *excoriating*, *pockmarked*, *bleating* and other less commonly used terms in *Cloud Atlas* do fall within the bottom 10 percent. Conversely, though, a word such as *ornery*, which could not be said to be frequently used in everyday contemporary speech and writing, features within the top 10 percent.

This is all to say that, in actuality, it is not really possible to use the Merriam-Webster "popularity" measure as an example of frequency of contemporary use, although it may appear as such at first glance. (This is also why I did not perform extensive cleanup on the dataset here. This is an excellent example of a humanities hypothesis for an experiment failing.) This is one of the methodological risks of close reading with computers: when we do not understand the composition and collection of the underlying data sources on which we draw for comparative evidence, we can be led astray. For, as Andrew Piper puts it, "unlike the imperious pronouncements of the literary critic who is only ever right, there is an element of uncertainty, error, and chance built into the task of computational criticism."45 In this instance I am sure that Merriam-Webster has a definition of *popularity*. But the social and behavioral reasons that contribute to the final figure for "popularity" here are multivariate; many factors are condensed into a single measure, and it is almost impossible, from the outside of the black box, to determine whether the definition of *popular* matches the one for which I hope to search.

Instead, if we wished to get a true popularity measure of word-term usages in contemporary English, we would need a broad reference corpus against which to compare the language in our target texts. One such corpus is called the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), which is used by the makers of the *Oxford English Dictionary* to study evolving language use. It consists of approximately 2.5 billion words of twenty-first-century texts, which gives a far better sample basis for studying the most frequent words in contemporary usage. This is because the corpus is simply a range of texts on which one can measure frequency directly. This allows us to assume that the frequency of terms within the corpus will broadly correlate with the behavior that I am seeking to measure—that is, that Mitchell uses certain terms with far less frequency than in a broader corpus.

To study the relative frequency of terms within Mitchell's novel, I plotted the frequencies of the terms in Ewing part 1 as percentages of that text and then did the same for those terms within the OEC. The resultant overlaid graph can be seen in figure 16. This graph serves as a handy locating aide for those instances in which the usage differs between the texts. If we ignore all words that are below 1 percent of the total usage and only include those that have any degree of difference from the OEC, we find a number of interesting points. I refer to this as a "locating aide" rather than a definitive map of *Cloud Atlas*'s word frequencies, since there are all kinds of problems with the computational approach here, the most pressing of which is stemmatization. That is, usually, were we searching for uses of *abet*, we would need to make a conscious decision about whether to include *abetting*, *abets*, and a whole raft of other terms. As per the above exercise where I instead opted to narrow the problem ("find any but not all words after 1910"), the same might be said here: find instances of linguistic frequency discrepancy that we can use as a starting point for a more thorough, manual investigation.

First, the word *and* occurs only three times in Ewing part 1; a mere 0.04 percent of the text. In the OEC, the term occurs 57,716,722 times, a far higher 2.78 percent of the corpus. This astonishingly low usage of one of the most common terms in the English language can be attributed to Mitchell's frequent deployment of the ampersand in its stead—the same technique that Pynchon deploys in *Mason & Dixon* but also seen in China Miéville's *Railsea* (2012) to achieve a strange temporality for the "weird" environment of that novel.46 Less common in contemporary usage, for sure, the ampersand was at one point in the nineteenth century taught to schoolchildren as the twenty-seventh letter of the English alphabet.47 Although there are multiple convergent histories of the ampersand and its usage, there is no evidence that I have seen of such wholesale replacement of *and* with the ampersand in nineteenth-century printed prose, such as Melville. That said, the "Pacific Journal" is supposed to be a handwritten document, so, in the fictional landscape, the contraction of *and* to *&* would have saved writing effort.

Figure 16. Relative percentage frequency of terms from part 1 of "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" in *Cloud Atlas E* vs. the Oxford English Corpus and COCA. Where a lighter line appears higher, the usage in the OEC is higher than in COCA. Where a black line appears higher, the usage in the OEC is lower than in COCA. Higher bars represent significant and interesting outliers. Data Source: Digital Appendix 3: Figure 16.

Again, owing to the first-person diaristic nature of this segment, we also see a far higher usage of the first-person pronoun *I* in *Cloud Atlas* than in the broader OEC (2.33 percent vs. 0.81 percent).48 This is less a stylistic observation than simply a reflection on the specific object type that Mitchell uses. Likewise, there is a marked difference in usage of the term *is* between *Cloud Atlas*'s diary and the OEC (0.56 percent vs. 1.13 percent). This is curious. Certainly, the "Pacific Journal" moves between tenses; some portions of the diary-in-a-novel are written in the simple present and present continuous while others are written in various past tenses. One would assume that the same would be true, though, of the OEC.

Similarly, some of the other differences between Mitchell's frequencies and the OEC's are harder to understand. For instance, the term *in* has almost a half-percentage-point difference between *Cloud Atlas* and the OEC (2.03 percent vs. 1.55 percent). It is possible that the microtectonic shifts in word frequency that occur as a result of Mitchell's forced grammatical changes could have caused this difference. It is also possible that the difference has occurred purely by chance. The 0.4 percent difference between *of* also falls in this category, as do the differences for *the*, *that*, and *to*.

The challenge here, of course, is that the more frequent words (> 1 percent) tend, in both the OEC and the novel, to be function words. Yet those terms that are rarer in the OEC but that occur frequently in *Cloud Atlas*, such as *Moriori* (*Cloud Atlas*: 0.32 percent vs. OEC: 0.000004 percent), tend to be thematic words related to the novel's focus on the "Chatham" isles (Rēkohu). This coincides with a thematic focus on empire and tropical medicine alongside the use of racist language, prevalent in nineteenth-century English society (e.g., *blackamoor* at 0.01 percent in *Cloud Atlas*'s Ewing compared to 0.000003 percent in the OEC).49

Certainly, though, some terms are used that are just strange to our contemporary ear and that do not circulate in twenty-first-century parlance. *Hugger-mugger*, for instance, although occurring but once in *Cloud Atlas*, has a significant deviation from the OEC (0.007 percent vs. 0.0000005 percent). Similarly, the abbreviated '*kerchief* occurs at 0.015 percent in the novel but only at 0.00002 percent in the OEC. *Maladies* also has a 0.015 percent occurrence in *Cloud Atlas* but constitutes a mere 0.00005 percent of the OEC.

In fact, there is a relatively good (or, at least, better) way to identify terms that sound unusual to the contemporary ear: by comparison to the magazine portion of the Contemporary American Corpus of American English (COCA). This corpus consists of newspaper articles, fiction, academic writing, spoken word, and magazine articles from 1990 until 2015. As Ewing is supposed to be an American character, this US English corpus seemed appropriate as a comparison database. That said, COCA is itself a messy database. Examining the 2004 entry for fiction, I found

ad Leila thought of him in those final seconds ? he knew the answerof course she had n't thought of him-but he could n't help entertaining the notion that the final image that came to her , the person she thought of , was him

## and

Or play it out . 113 OMITTED 113 114 OMITTED 114 <p> 115 NEWS FOOTAGE - AIRPORT ARRIVAL ( VIDEO ) 115 TV115 Raymond emerges from a private jet , waves to a crowd of TV115 supporters behind a chain link fence—116 EXT.

## Clean, this dataset is not.

Nevertheless, I decided to take the 2004 magazine corpus from COCA and locate words that occur in *Cloud Atlas*'s Ewing part 1 that do not occur in the comparison dataset. This is an appropriate comparison since it comes from the same year as *Cloud Atlas*'s original publication and represents writing about the contemporary as opposed to the fiction corpus, which may contain historical fiction, for instance.  Furthermore, according to the above hypothesis, several terms of outmoded address—*Blackamoor*, *blackfella*, *darkies*, *harridan*, *womenfolk*, *bedlamite*, *mulatto*, *quadroon*, and *mixedblood* again—fall within this category. Curiously, though, *nigger* appears several times in the 2004 magazine section of COCA but always in quotation marks or through a distancing inflection: "She remembered churchgoing folks in Kansas and Texas who also called people niggers."

Nonetheless, in some ways this list lends credence to my hypothesis: Mitchell does tend to use archaic/unusual terms with a greater frequency than we see in a general corpus of contemporary English. Specifically, colonial terms of racist abuse occur in the Ewing section of *Cloud Atlas* at a far higher frequency than in a broader contemporary corpus. There are, however, a number of additional limitations to this method that must be discussed. First, because the Ewing chapter is relatively small, a low number of usages is, as before, often enough to produce a distinctive skew against the OEC. For instance, the term *Blackamoor* is used only twice within the Ewing narrative, but this is enough to substantially weight its relative percentage against the OEC and COCA. This particular method, then, overweighs words with low frequencies in the smaller corpus. In a sense, though, this is helpful; the small number of usages here is a distinctive linguistico-thematic intersection to which we *should* pay attention.

Second, there is the question of the composition of the OEC. The blurb for the OEC indicates that it seeks to build a representative corpus of twenty-first-century English from across the spectrum of writing types:

[The corpus] represents all types of English, from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines, and even the language of blogs, emails, and social media. And, as English is a global language, the Oxford English Corpus contains language from all parts of the world—not only from the UK and the United States but also from Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, Canada, India, Singapore, and South Africa.

The extensive use of web pages has allowed us to build a corpus of unprecedented scale and variety—the corpus contains nearly 2.5 billion words of real 21st-century English, with new text being continuously collected.50

Indeed, although the OEC is not composed entirely of fiction, the breadth it offers in terms of sourcing provides for a comparison environment that is more representative of global language usage in the early twentyfirst century. Time and time again, Mitchell uses words that occur less frequently in the OEC. Certainly, this comparative frequency disjunct contributes to the stylistic historical imaginary of the nineteenth century in *Cloud Atlas*.

## THEMES, LANGUAGE, AND STYLE

In the construction of literary style, where does the theme or topic end and language begin? Is it even possible to speak of literary style in terms of such subcomponents, crudely divorced from one another? Debates have raged for decades over the definition of style, and it is not likely that they will be resolved here.51

Mitchell himself has noted that the construction of a historical stylistic imaginary is not about total mimetic accuracy:

Historical fiction isn't easy; it's not just another genre. How are they going to speak? If you get that too right, it sounds like a pastiche comedy—people are saying "thou" and "prithee" and "gadzooks," which they did say, but to an early 21st-century audience, it's laughable, even though it's accurate. So you have to design a kind of "bygone-ese"—it's modern enough for readers not to stumble over it, but it's not so modern that the reader kind of thinks this could be out of *House* or *Friends* or something made for TV—puff! Again, the illusion is gone. It's very easy to be wrong; it's very easy for the book to fail.52

In this reading, Mitchell believes that complete accuracy sounds alien and overperformed, though he does not go so far as to write about specific vocabularies and their (un)availability.

I want to turn, finally, to some thematic areas that Mitchell explores and that constitute this historical imaginary of the nineteenth century in *Cloud Atlas*, the ways in which thematic concerns interact with Mitchell's "bygone-ese." The main sources for the historical accuracy of this section of Mitchell's novel are well documented and implicitly include A. Shand's 1892 work in the *Journal of the Polynesian Society* on the Moriori genocide but also Jared Diamond's *Germs, Guns and Steel*, which Mitchell cites as the origin of *Cloud Atlas*, although Wendy Knepper also suggests a useful range of broader sources.53

The dominant driver of narrative action in this portion of the text is the slow poisoning of Ewing by the sinister Dr. Henry Goose. Indeed, it emerges—at first in the "Letters from Zedelghem"54—that Goose is a robber, intent on killing Ewing in order to retrieve the "entire estate" that he believes to be in Ewing's trunk.55 Goose almost achieves this feat by convincing Ewing that an internal worm is causing his illness. The deceit works by Goose disguising his poison as medicine, substituting the toxin for the cure, while thereby also drawing a metaphorical parallel between the supposed parasite within Ewing's body and the parasite that is Goose within Ewing's confidence. Ewing so heartily swallows the lie—even if readers can perceive the threat and dramatic irony—that he proclaims that "Henry's powders are indeed a wondrous medicament."56

The technology of medicine from this historical period, then, is the most prevalent thematic strand that I identify in this first section of *Cloud Atlas*. This technology is situated within two epistemic contexts: empire and *pharmakon*. On the first of these aspects, as Pratik Chakrabarti has shown, "the history of modern medicine cannot be narrated without the history of imperialism."57 While each of the very different world empires affected the development of medicine in different ways—be it through a "civilizing mission" or the "scramble for Africa"—the most important aspect for the Ewing chapter of *Cloud Atlas* is the intersection of tropical colonialism and parasitology.58 For the discipline of "tropical medicine," although actually heterogeneous in its geographies and climates, which are collapsed into the single word *tropical*, has its roots in medicinal care for European colonial troops and expatriate civilians.59 From this, as Michael Worboys points out, tropical medicine developed to become the "main scientific expression of Western medical and health policy for the Third World" throughout the twentieth century.60 Specifically, the epistemology of "germ theory" was significantly revised as military doctors battled malaria. Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran's 1880 discovery of the protozoan cause of malaria, combined with Patrick Manson's work on filarial worms in 1877, created a hybrid discipline of parasitology and vector studies, merging into "tropical medicine," all within a colonial context.61