Transcending Conventions & Neuroqueer PracticeA Neuroqueer Reading Of Cloud Atlas By David Mitchell
I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so. - Cloud Atlas By David Mitchell David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is, on its surface, a novel about six nested lives across centuries. Read through a neuroqueer lens, it becomes something else; a meditation on how selves get made, unmade, and refused by the systems around them. This is not a claim that Mitchell wrote a neuroqueer novel. It is an invitation to read one of the ways that the text's structure and its recurring concerns; interconnection, resistance to categorisation, and the constructed nature of "natural" order, map onto ideas central to neuroqueer theory. What Neuroqueer Theory Brings To The TextAgainst The Isolated, Broken SelfNeuroqueer theory, building on Nick Walker's work, rejects the pathology paradigm's image of the neurodivergent person as a broken individual to be fixed in isolation. Selfhood is relational; it is made in ecosystems of relationship, culture, and power, not manufactured in a vacuum and then judged against a fixed norm. Cloud Atlas is built on the same premise at a structural level. Its six narrators are never fully separate; their lives bleed into each other across time (through letters, journals, films, and a shared birthmark). No character's story is self-contained. The novel's formal argument is that isolation is an illusion; every life is authored partly by the lives around it. To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, that go on and are pushing themselves throughout all time. Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. - The Revelation Of Sonmi-451, Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell Sonmi-451 And The Refusal Of Manufactured IdentityThe clearest neuroqueer resonance in the novel is Sonmi-451's arc. She begins as a "fabricant"; engineered, categorised, and assigned a role before she ever has the chance to define herself. Her journey is one of breaking out of an identity that was manufactured for her by a system that had no interest in who she actually was. This is neuroqueering in miniature. Neuroqueer theory treats diagnostic and social categories not as neutral descriptions but as manufactured roles, assigned by systems (medical, educational, familial) that decide who a person should be before that person has had any say. Sonmi's insistence on authoring her own Selfhood, against a system built to prevent exactly that, is a fitting allegory for the neuroqueer refusal to be reduced to a diagnostic label or a caste. Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this--one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. - Adam Ewing, Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell The "Natural Order" As Something Built, Not GivenA recurring move across the novel's six stories is the unmasking of systems that present themselves as natural or inevitable; slavery, caste, corporate control, all justified by their architects as simply how things are. The novel's closing argument, carried through Adam Ewing's journal, is that such orders hold only for as long as enough people accept them as fixed. Neuroqueer theory makes the same move against neuronormativity; the idea that there is one natural, correct way for brains and behaviour to be organised. Like the caste systems in Cloud Atlas, neuronormativity presents itself as given rather than constructed, and both frameworks argue that what looks fixed is actually a set of choices, upheld collectively and therefore also collectively revisable. A practical example of this can be found in contemporary posthumanism which challenges the held humanist assertion of human exceptionalism that positions mankind hierarchically above that of other life on earth. Human dominance is an imposed order rather than one of natural kind. Posthumanism, then, presents a queering of the humanist ideal. One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each 'shell' (the present) encased inside a nest of 'shells' (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of 'now' likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. Isaacs Sacchs, Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell Multiplicity Instead Of A Single Fixed SelfThe novel's nested structure; one soul, it is implied, recurring across different bodies and eras, resists the idea of a single continuous, fixed identity. Selfhood in Cloud Atlas is both contextual and in constant becoming; it shows up differently depending on the body, the era, and the relationships it is embedded in. This lines up with neuroqueer theory's treatment of identity as an ongoing process rather than a static trait-list. A person's neurodivergence is not a fixed essence to be diagnosed once and filed away; it is enacted, relationally and contextually, over time; much as Mitchell's recurring soul is not the "same" person from story to story, but a continuity expressed through difference. My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops? Adam Ewing, Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell Small Acts, Systemic ChangeThe novel closes on the image of a single drop as part of a larger ocean; the idea that one act of resistance means little alone, but accumulates into something that can move a system. This is a familiar rhetorical move in neurodiversity movement writing; individual acts of autistic or ADHD self-advocacy, public identification, and refusal of masking are framed not as isolated gestures but as contributions to a collective, cumulative shift in what counts as natural. ConclusionRead through the lens of neuroqueer theory, Cloud Atlas is less a story about reincarnation than a story about the machinery that manufactures Selves, and the recurring, cross-era work of refusing that machinery. Sonmi-451's fabricant, Adam Ewing's abolitionist turn, and the novel's insistence that no life stands alone all rehearse an argument neuroqueer theory makes explicitly; that the categories we are sorted into are built, not given, and that authoring a self against them is both an individual and a collective act. Further to this, it lays bare the resspoonsibility we have to the world to consider the impact of our own neuroqueer practice on the ecosystem we inhabit. If no life exists in isolation, then to engage in a personal endeavour of neuroqueering is in itself a queering of the ecosystem itself. Our intentional acts of resistance and Self-becoming ripple throughout the world around us. Therefore, it is necessary to grow an ethics of neuroqueering. Neuroqueering that liberates the individual while containing those around us is not the liberatory act intended by the theory, rather it is an act of normative violence hidden beneath a superficial Queerness. Truth Is Singular, it's versions are mistruths. Sonmi-451, Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell You're currently a free subscriber to NeuroHub Community Journal | Newsletter | Announcements. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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