Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

Armelle Parey, Armelle Parey

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429795886
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature

This book offers to delineate a key phenomenon in contemporary Anglophone fiction: novel expansion, when the plot and characters from a finished novel are retrieved to be developed in new adventures set before, after or during the narrative time of the source-text. If autographic and allographic sequels are almost as old as literature, prequels – that imagine the anteriority of a narrative – and coquels – that develop secondary characters in the same story time as the source-text – are more recent. The overall trend for novel expansion spread in the mid-1980s and 1990s and has since shown no sign of abating.

This volume is organised following three types of relationships to the source-texts even if these occasionally combine to produce a more complex structure. This book comprises 11 essays, preceded by an introduction, that examine narrative strategies, aesthetic, ethical and political tendencies underlying these novel expansions. Following the overview provided in the introduction, the reader will find case studies of prequels, coquels and sequels before a final chapter that encompasses them all and more.

Part I
Prequels

1 Prequel Ontology and Temporality

The Thresholds of John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius¹

Ben Davies

In her 2003 work Quotation Marks, Marjorie Garber proposes:

in a literary-critical era that glories in prefixes like post-, pre-, early, and new (poststructuralism, the prenovel novel, early modern culture, new historicism) and that has for decades focused on the margins rather than the center, the sequel (and its near relation, the prequel) seems in a way the perfect topic for a rigorous, and pleasurable, unpacking. Recent work on the relationship of copy to original, speech to writing, and manuscript to print has nicely troubled the question of priority, precedence, and origin.

(76)

Garber brings sequel and prequel together, but somewhat subsumes the prequel under the sequel. The prequel is presented as a familial relation, parenthetically included like some form of close-yet-undesirable sibling, cousin, aunt or uncle. It is contained, at once included within and excluded from, its familial members. Such merging of prequel and sequel, or, rather, such subsuming of the prequel under the sequel, is somewhat symptomatic in literary studies. There neither exists a full history of the prequel nor a full and comprehensive analysis of its form, structure and complexities. Work on prequels often focuses on what Garber herself calls “sequel effects” and how sequels/prequels rework meaning; “the sequel-effect,” she writes, “always functions in this way, making the reader or audience rethink the various meanings of the work” (78). Correlatively, the prequel is also often discussed in terms of origins and origin stories. The rigorous and pleasurable unpacking (of the prequel) Garber anticipates still awaits.²

Without the time or the space here to provide a history of the prequel in literature or, indeed, a fully comprehensive account of the formal properties of prequels, I want to offer at least some remarks of a more formalist nature concerning prequels, moving away from the consideration of origins, meaning and remaking to open up the ontological peculiarity of prequels as well as their temporal complexities. As part of this effort to offer a more formal consideration of the literary prequel that should not simply be subsumed under the family name of the “sequel,” I shall refer to the prequel and its successor narrative as “ante-narrative” and “ante-text.” These are by no means perfect terms for describing the elements that make up this textual relation; ‘post-text’ and ‘post-narrative’ would, for example, work equally well but would be as equally insufficient. Their imperfections notwithstanding, these terms do, however, gesture towards the complex textual and narrative temporalities prequels put into operation, without prioritizing either element or seeing one straightforwardly as a ‘pretext’ for the other.³ Moreover, these terms do foreground the temporal and sequential differences between prequels and sequels, as the latter do not involve the same level of ontological disorder or narrative re-ordering. To explore these ontological and temporal complexities, I shall limit myself to a reading of John Updike’s prequel to Hamlet (c. 1602), Gertrude and Claudius (2000).⁴ Told by a heterodiegetic narrator, the three-part narrative of Gertrude and Claudius portrays the story of Gerutha/Geruthe/Gertrude before and up to the beginning of Shakespeare’s play. In each part of the narrative, the names of the characters change, from those of Saxo Grammaticus’s twelfth-century Historia Danica in Part I, to François de Belleforest’s sixteenth-century Histoires tragiques in Part II and finally to those made universally familiar by Shakespeare in Part III.⁵ In many ways, this narrative performs a common prequel function, providing Gertrude’s “back story” – her early life and marriage to old Hamlet, her affair with Claudius and the relationship she has with her son, young Hamlet – whilst also providing a particular character (or characters) greater agency and development.

Ontological Thresholds

As may seem fitting for an essay on prequels, I turn first to the end of the text or, more precisely, beyond the end of the text to Updike’s afterword. In this paratext, Updike offers a rather simplistic interpretation of the relationship between his text and Hamlet, telling the reader: “the action of Shakespeare’s play is, of course, to follow” (2000, 211, my emphasis). Despite this assertiveness, Updike’s subsequent comments undermine his straightforward explanation.⁶ In acknowledgement, he refers beyond the text to the medium of film, explaining: “to Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour film of Hamlet in 1996 the author owes a revivified image of the play and of certain off-stage characters” (211). Furthermore, Updike also refers to academic studies of the play by Salvador de Madariaga, William Kerrigan and G. Wilson Knight. Thus, due to Updike’s allusions to a specific version of Shakespeare’s tragedy in another medium as well as to critical studies of the play, the relationship between novel and play now appears more complex. The intricacy of this relationship is metanarratively depicted in Part III of Gertrude and Claudius when Gertrude senses her dead husband’s ghost and the narrator provides an analysis of her sensibilities, telling the reader:

Gertrude had always been able to turn toward the natural, trusting in what was obvious, what she could touch—the dyed threads of her embroidery, the feathery seed-bearing heads of the grasses—leaving to the Church the great scraggy superstructure of which nature is but the face, the visible fraction, the forestage holding an evanescent drama. Confidently and universally the priests proclaim this sad and gaudy earth to be but the prelude to an everlasting afterlife.

(195)

In this examination of Gertrude’s natural tendencies, the superstructure of earth and heaven works as a cosmological analogy, representing the formal relationship between novel and play, ante-narrative and ante-text. Nature is a face, a “prelude” to a spiritual drama, just as Gertrude and Claudius narratively precedes Hamlet. Furthermore, Hamlet is the eternal (textual) afterlife. It precedes Gertrude and Claudius’s existence, yet follows – comes after – its narrative (life).

The type of intricate textual relationality that exists between ante-narrative and ante-text, which is ignored by Updike but teased out in the above analysis of Gertrude’s worldview, is briefly explored by Agamben in “Experimentum Linguae,” his preface to Infancy and History (1978). At the beginning of this preface, Agamben writes:

Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks. The absent work, although it is unplaceable in any precise chronology, thereby constitutes the written works as prolegomena or paralipomena of a non-existent text; or, in a more general sense, as parerga which find their true meaning only in the context of an illegible ergon [work]. To take Montaigne’s fine image, these are the frieze of grotesques around an unpainted portrait, or, in the spirit of the pseudo-Platonic letter, the counterfeit of a book which cannot be written.

(3)

For Agamben, all texts are prologues of unwritten works. The written texts are “prolegomena,” “paralipomena” and “parerga,” additions and supplements to those that are unwritten, and this theory of the relation between written and unwritten texts opens up the relationality of ante-narrative and ante-text. Specifically, Agamben addresses the spatiotemporal qualities of presence and absence; in his theory, the present work (the prologue) is predicated on – or at least results from – the absence of the unwritten work. Furthermore, the absent work cannot be accurately located in chronological time: it is a text-to-come, a text held in abeyance and introduced by the written text. Similar to Agamben’s unwritten work, the ante-narrative must also, first of all, be non-present and non-existent. To come into existence, the ante-narrative must first be spatiotemporally suspended, as its future presence is predicated on its initial and necessary absence. However, the ante-narrative differs from Agamben’s potential work, as the ante-narrative does come into existence, coming after the ante-text but preceding it narratively. Indeed, as Derrida writes of the preface in “Hors Livre: Outwork” – his preface to Dissemination (1972) in which he deconstructs the concept of the preface is deconstructed – the prequel also ‘can rightfully have been written only after the fact’ (12), only after the narrative it comes before.

As Agamben indicates in his analysis of the unwritten work, intertextual relations operate by a logic of supplementarity. In Gertrude and Claudius, the concept of the supplement pervades Gerutha/Geruthe/Gertrude’s incestuous relationships, and its significance is established from the beginning of the narrative.⁷ Gerutha fears her first marriage to Horwendil will deny her the play and opportunity afforded by supplementarity, yet her affair with Feng/Fengon is, however, marked by the very qualities of disorder and addition that characterise Agamben’s theory of the relationship between written and unwritten texts. Indeed, Horvendile himself sees his brother as an incestuous supplement to his marriage, telling him: “Even my own instincts, which I know you and Geruthe think are hopelessly dulled by my ponderous crown, told me something was amiss—or, rather, something had been added” (144). A similar logic is repeated at the end of the narrative when Gertrude tries to appease her own guilt about the affair and rather awkwardly says to Claudius: “‘Betrayed’ seems harsh—augmented him, was how I felt it. Augmented him with you” (199). Whilst Gertrude’s diction belies an insecurity concerning her role as a supplement, it is a role Claudius celebrates: “All my life I have been gnawed, feeling but half a man, or a real man’s shadow. No more: you flesh me out” (201).

The logic of supplementarity that characterises Gertrude’s sex life also marks the formal nature of the prequel. In both cases, the supplement is incestuous: Gertrude supplements her marriage with her husband’s brother and the prequel supplements an already related text.⁸ The prequel cannot simply or straightforwardly be considered a metaphorical offspring of its narrative successor, as it problematises generational chronology, narratively preceding its textual relation. Rather, as with bodies and genes in incestuous sex, the ante-narrative/ante-text relationship causes an indetermination of self and already related other, inside and outside, and a threshold between the two is created.⁹ Gertrude and Claudius emphatically foregrounds the importance of the threshold to the ante-narrative/ante-text relationship through its clearly divided but linked parts; through the iterative cycle of incest and the iterations of the characters’ names, the divisions between Parts I and II and between Parts II and III of the narrative operate as thresholds that separate and join the iterative diegesis. Consequently, the reader is placed in a complex textual spatiotemporality. Once beyond Part I, the reader is indeterminately in two times and spaces – two related parts – simultaneously, as the change of the characters’ names means that he is in and out of the previous part and the part he is reading, aware of both the differences and the continuations across the narrative sections. Furthermore, as each part is divided by a threshold that continues the diegesis but marks the difference between one part and the next through the change in names, the text can be seen to be made up of three spatiotemporalities, which are at once separate and braided together. Therefore, the reader is at any one time inside and outside an overall narrative construction and the various parts that make up that construction. In addition to these narrative thresholds – between Parts I and II, and Parts II and III – two further thresholds are created through Updike’s quasi-academic apparatus of foreword and afterword. This division of the text into foreword, narrative and afterword positions the narrative itself in, or even as, an interval between two paratexts, as the narrative is situated between the foreword that explains the sources of the names used in each part and the afterword.¹⁰

In addition to these internal thresholds, a major threshold of course also exists between Gertrude and Claudius and Hamlet, which Updike himself discusses in his interview with Charley Reilly, explaining: “I knew I was going to end the novel at the threshold of the Shakespearean play, with the optimistic speech Claudius gives […]. I knew my action would move toward that happy moment of equipoise, which the play would then deconstruct” (224). The equipoise – the balance of the two texts – or, more appropriately, the threshold through which the two texts are joined and separated simultaneously, is marked in Part III of Gertrude and Claudius by the use of the names from Hamlet, the portrayal of the court gathering that takes place in Act One, Scene Two of the play, and the reference to the way in which Claudius speaks with “one iambic cadence smoothly succeeding another” (209) towards the end of this third and final part (or, indeed, at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play). Thus, ante-narrative and ante-text explicitly begin to merge, and the indetermination of the two is metanarratively registered by the narrator’s declaration in the very final section of the narrative: “the era of Claudius had dawned; it would shine in Denmark’s annals” (210). This declaration marks the supposed end of the ante-narrative and consequently the beginning – the dawn – of Shakespeare’s play. It is also at such moments – at and in such thresholds – that any possible terminological or taxonomic exactitude becomes problematic if not impossible, with prequel here also becoming a form of adaptation or rewriting.¹¹

Flirtatious Thresholds

The reader of a prequel such as Gertrude and Claudius is situated in the threshold between ante-narrative and ante-text, and she consequently passes through two textual spatiotemporalities. Her positionality between the two is partly created by the way in which the ante-narrative is always already in a mode of anticipation of the to-come; through numerous allusions and its diegetic connection, the ante-narrative refers to the future of its narrative successor, and in so doing simultaneously anticipates and defers this future-to-come. The tension between anticipation/inevitability and deferral is made particularly palpable in Gertrude and Claudius through the role and effects of flirtation during the affair between the two titular characters. As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips argues in On Flirtation (1994), “if our descriptions of sexuality are tyrannized by various stories of committed purpose – sex as reproduction, sex as...