101 Caietele Echinox, vol. 35, 2018: Neo-Gothic – Hybridizations of the Imaginary

Dana Percec Gothic Revisitations of Hamlet: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell

Abstract: The paper looks at a recent exam- Introduction ple of rewriting Shakespeare’s Hamlet by a o here I am, upside down in a wom- British author who has gained celebrity in the an. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, 1970s and 1980s with his macabre plots, which “Swaiting and wondering who I’m in, what distill the gothic tradition in a contemporary, 1 I’m in for.” These lines are certainly a far politically and socially sensitive environment. cry from Hamlet’s famous “to be or not Ian McEwan’s Nutshell (2016) shows, after more to be” soliloquy, but, still, they belong to a than a decade in which the typical dark mode novel which, published in 2016, was meant of the author has ”mellowed”, a return to the to complete the string of literary celebra- typical sexual and psychological gothic that tions for the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s made his plots controversial in the years of his death. While a British national editorial literary debut. Reading Nutshell as a response project commissioned famous writers to to Shakespeare’s proto-gothic atmosphere and write modern versions of Shakespeare’s mindframe, the paper discusses how McEwan’s most famous plays, other authors marked signature – claustrophobia, the unemotional nar- this celebration more subtly, in their own ration of taboo subjects, horror and suspense way. The large-scale Hogarth Shakespeare – adapts an appropriation of Shakespeare’s project (from the publisher who initiated tragedy to the contemporary readers’ skeptical- it) includes a rewriting of Hamlet proposed ly critical expectations. by American writer Gillian Flynn. Known for her dark detective plots and psycholog- Keywords: Ian McEwan; Gothic; Horror; Maca- ical thrillers, Flynn was regarded as suit- bre; Appropriation; Whodunit. able to propose an anchoring of Hamlet’s gothic tale amid the contemporary police Dana Percec reports of violence and abuse. Ian Mc- West University of Timișoara, Romania Ewan’s Nutshell (2016) is a parallel offer, [email protected] which displays as many elements of inter- textuality as there are traces of his typical DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2018.35.06 macabre voice. 102 Dana Percec

The “nutshell” itself is a metaphor the Man Booker Prize winning novel which still holds the imagination of today’s Amsterdam, which addresses yet another thinkers, the best example being Stephen taboo in its crudest light, euthanasia. In Hawking’s 2001 The Universe in a Nut- the 2000s, critics remark on his progres- shel2l, where the scholar proposed a uni- sive “mellowness”, which, a high quality in fied theory of physics, including relativity other writers, here is regarded as an oddity. and the notion of multiple histories, in or- Decidedly softer in Saturday or other titles, der to describe everything that happens in McEwan returns to his darker earlier self the universe. The origin of this metaphor, in Nutshell, the story of a murder told by though, is an easily recognizable Shake- an embryo. spearean trope, Hamlet’s melancholy mood In a 2004 article about Ian McEwan, being contained in it: “O God, I could be I observed about the use of the grotesque bounded in a nutshell and count myself category in his literature as a mimetic act, a king of infinite space, were it not that I using Theodor W. Adorno’s concepts about have bad dreams!” (II, 2)3 The confession modern art.4 For Adorno, modern art anticipates the prince’s pessimistic, suicidal mimics the absence of harmony and death thoughts formulated in Act III, where the in order to continue to exist in a hostile “bare bodkin” would be an ideal way to end environment, just as animals play dead un- up the sorrow and dilemma but for the fear til the danger of the predators has passed. that afterlife is only an unfounded religious The result is the generally dark mood of fabulation. McEwan makes the necessary modernity and a process of objectification, courtesy to the Bard’s memory in his own seemingly derived from clinical observa- way, adding the gothic elements from his tion and dissection. Modern art, in an at- earlier years, which in the meantime, have tempt to free itself from the natural, so as been softened. to follow the rules of the social edifice and the manipulating techniques of cultural in- dustry, is left only with a residual form of Gothic and Mimesis beauty and joy, built in the contemplation an McEwan’s debut novels displayed a of horrible things. This complex process high concentration of macabre and ab- was identified by Matt F. Connel (1998) Ijection, to such an extent that titles like The in a reading of Kafka, the reproduction Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, of elements of reality that provoke shock or The Child in Time have generated and and horror being associated with a defense are still generating a great deal of contro- strategy, like that of the hover fly which is versy in their critical reception. Tackling scary because it looks like the wasp. This some of the most taboo subjects, such as involuntary identification “allows an in- murder, infanticide or incest, the British sight into the power of the wasp: the ab- writer strikes an even more sensitive chord sence of a real danger highlights the inten- among readers when he addresses them in sity of the automatic bodily reaction to the an unemotional, cool and detached man- striped stimulus.”5 Connel claims that the ner. In the middle period of his career, the unease provoked by Kafka’s texts can oper- appetite for gothic plots continued with ate in a similar manner and, by extension, 103 Gothic Revisitations of Hamlet: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell my own argument was that McEwan’s ma- a prematurely degraded body and mind cabre plots serve the same purpose. adapt, by default, to an environment from The British writer’s evocation of the which strong values, as well as strong will, abject body has a maximum of substance in absent themselves. Because it is very hot his first novel, published in 1978,The Ce- and because they have nothing else to do, ment Garden. Causing fear and discomfort, the four child-characters of the novel sleep this body is an overwhelming presence, like most of the time. A form of exhaustion or the space it occupies, its habitat, constantly inertia, this sleep is regressive and poten- vulnerable at its margins, which are fluid tially dangerous, as a form of abandoning borders, coming into contradiction with rationality and self-control. The four or- canonic ideals of propriety and discretion. phans live on their own in the big family While the “normal body” of contemporary house after their parents’ death, which they standards of correctness is closed, clean keep away from the authorities, to prevent and fit, its grotesque counterpart seems being separated and sent into foster care. magnified under the microscope. The nov- They practically hide the reality that their el’s narrator is a teenage boy, who watches mother, a widow, died of cancer in her own and hates the medium of flesh supposed bedroom, so they bury her in the cellar, in to secure the complicated transition from a huge suitcase they fill with the surplus childhood to maturity. He abandons all cement their father had used to pave the rituals of hygiene and contemplates, with a garden, an effort which had caused him to mixture of horror and thrill, how his body die of a heart attack. The mother’s death responds: coincides with the breakup of schools, so the children, free from adult supervision, Coloured light through the stained live in complete isolation, in a deserted glass above the front door illuminat- neighborhood which nobody ever visits. ed from behind stray fibres of my hair. Jack, the narrator and eldest son, lives in a The yellowish semidarkness obscured limbo of self-abandonment, without wash- the humps and pits of my complex- ing, cutting his finger nails or changing ion. […] I stared at my own image till his underwear and bed sheets. Tom, the it began to dissociate itself and para- youngest, has the fancy of being an infant lyse me with its look. It receded and and refuses to walk, speak, wash himself returned to me with each beat of my and go to the toilet, Julie, the 16-year-old pulse, and a dark halo throbbed above sibling, taking over the mother’s role. This its head and shoulders. ‘Tough’, it is, reports say, the hottest summer since said to me. ‘Tough.’ And then louder, 1900, a condition which accelerates the ‘Shit… piss… arse.’6 characters’ decline into complete torpor and the degradation of all types of waste. As early as his debut, McEwan is Food consumption, garbage and physical concerned with the impact of bioethics death become synonymous: and social policies on modern western individuals and he moralizes by expos- As I stooped to drink water from the ing his readers to the grotesque, where kitchen tap, a cloud of flies hummed 104 Dana Percec

around my face. I walked on the sides like an angry man, frowning, an entirely of my bare feet because the floor gothic décor moved to a post-industrial around the sink was covered with dimension: something yellow and sticky, probably spilt orange juice.7 Our house was old and large. It was built to look a little like a castle, with It was not long before the kitchen was thick walls, squat windows and cren- a place of stench and clouds of flies. ellations above the front door. Seen None of us felt like doing anything from across the road it looked like the about it beyond keeping the kitchen face of someone concentrating, trying door shut. It was too hot.8 to remember.12

There were several wasps in the kitch- The house seems deserted even when en feeding off rubbish that had spilled the parents are alive, although it is inhab- across the floor. Outside there was a ited by a large family with many children, cloud of flies round the overflowing because no one ever comes to visit them dustbins which had not been emptied and because it stands in a deserted area, the for weeks.9 only survivor of an urban project that never came to see the light. The lifeless landscape When she [ Julie] was not out she was surrounding the house is a sign of the in- getting ready. She took long baths difference and misanthropy of the family, which filled the house with a sweet a post-apocalyptic script which allows for smell, stronger than the smell from the last barriers of social convention and the kitchen.10 moral restraint to be smashed. It is for the reader to decide whether the rotten body Curiously, the odor of cleanness and fixed in cement, discovered by the police hygiene is ambiguous enough to be mis- at the end of the summer, or the incestu- taken with a boy’s unwashed body and the ous affair Jack and Julie indulge in, playing smell coming from the basement. Finally, mom and dad, is more revolting. A night- the smell of the corpse covers all the oth- marish, hostile and sickly background as ers, violent, aggressive: “There was some- the one sketched by McEwan in the most thing sweet, and beyond that, or wrapped detached and technical language can fa- around it, another bigger, softer smell that vor nothing less, and the oxymoronic title was like a fat finger pushing into the back increases the burdening anxiety about a of my throat. It rolled out the concrete potential, though diffuse, cataclysm. In an steps out of the darkness.”11 interview occasioned by a staging of the While the individual body seems ob- novel in London,13 the writer confessed jectified, the environment gains anthro- that the “sexual gothic” of The Cement Gar- pomorphic characteristics: the deserted den was explained by the fatalism his gen- house protecting the children from the eration was imbued with in the late 1970s outer world but also allowing them to and the 1980s, when all things seemed on abandon decorum and break taboos looks the verge of collapse, London was filthy, 105 Gothic Revisitations of Hamlet: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell relations were semi-functional and the oppressive dimension is installed from the general mood seemed post-apocalyptic. “I very first pages, when the two friends at- don’t know about words like dark”, McE- tend a former lover’s funeral. Molly died wan exclaimed, quite tongue-in-cheek, in recently of a form of Alzheimer, something this interview. The crepuscular environ- that paralyzed her body and killed her ment and the physical abjection, though, brain, transforming her into a grotesque observe all the norms to qualify the story and pitiful shadow of the sparkling social- as disquieting and terrifying. ite she used to be. The mourners at the fu- Amsterdam (1998), another novel cen- neral, held on a rainy day, look strangely tered round the modern myth of the body, contaminated by a generic illness and can focusing on the notion of pain and disease, be easily mistaken for upright “specters” in displays the same contrast between a dark the crematorium. Terrified by such a pros- plot and an unemotional narrative. The pect, Clive and Vernon make a pact: to end “forensic elegance” praised in the interview each other’s suffering and humiliation in about The Cement Garden is identifiable case something similar to what happened here, too, plus the brevity which gives read- to Molly may happen to them – a mutu- ers the impression of swallowing a highly al euthanasia. From this point of view, the concentrated dose of grisliness in one “en- references to the newly accepted medical joyable gulp.”14 Like in other stories, the practices in Holland are a mise en abyme, Man Booker Prize awarded novel spec- an anticipation of what is going to hap- ulates about the discomfort produced by pen in the capital of legalized euthanasia, the unexpected intervention of violence in Amsterdam: the lives of otherwise normal middle-class characters. Lawrence Driscoll observes15 and in Holland some unsavoury types that the preference of middle-class writ- with medical degrees were offering a ers for middle-class characters in under- legal service to eliminate your incon- standable and predictable. What is less venient elderly parent. How interest- usual here is the uncanny nature of the cir- ing. All one needed was the aged par- cumstances they are forced to face, which ent’s signature in duplicate and several trigger the most extreme and frequently thousand dollars.17 deranged psychological reactions. While the typical gothic setting is supernatural, Another great taboo, euthanasia be- archaic and exotic, the concentrated horror comes an explicit subject, described by of events and people next door is all the McEwan with the same clinical detach- more disturbing and controversial. “The ment. Claustrophobic and hypochondriac, unsettling fable” of the 1998 novel16 con- Clive grows more and more incapable to sists of revealing the hasty degradation of concentrate on his work, to enjoy a holiday two middle-aged men who seem to be the in the country or a successful concert. Anx- very embodiments of professional success, ious and feverish, he filters all his fears and respectability and bourgeois order, Clive hesitations through his body and transfers Linley, a famous composer, and Vernon his mental troubles onto the somatic lev- Halliday, an equally famous journalist. An el. There is a certain masochistic lust for 106 Dana Percec immobility that all the characters experi- of “striking effects” and the “thoughtful” ence at a certain moment, in a symbolic manner of relating the sensational in an rehearsal for the experience of the disease unsensational way.20 that is going to mark down two of them. They choose solitude, isolate themselves Gothic and Forensic Detail deliberately in a declared misanthropy, in hatred and self-hatred. Paradoxically, Clive f The Cement Garden presented the seems more and more detached from his dysfunctionality of the post-industrial physical self as the disease progresses, as IThatcherite society of the 1970s and 1980s if his once familiar body were a mere ob- with a taste for incest and necrophilia, Am- ject now. His own house and his life look sterdam zooms in on the smaller world of unfamiliar and distant in the light of his the privileged elite professionals who, be- newly discovered sensations. He gazes at ing the same age as the author himself, are the things around him as if he saw them presented as “lucky”:21 their successful ca- in a documentary film about himself; he reers in the 1990s are the result of a few contemplates himself in the mirror and good years “with full employment, new no longer recognizes the shape, tired, tor- universities, bright paperback books [and] mented, and ill as he is. After days spent affordable ideals”. The novels that follow only in bed, he no longer knows his own abandon the gothic vein, apparently, as kitchen or dining room, feeling as if he has McEwan explains in the same 2014 inter- embarked on an expedition in a new, hos- view, because the vehemence that suited tile world and, no longer used to making him as a writer at 25 would be out of place the effort of walking, climbing down the at 50. stairs is an irksome, exhausting experience. However, at 70, the writer seems to The day before dying, he sees a doctor in return to his earlier, biting version of him- Amsterdam; his diagnosis: “unpredictable, self, in a novel that has been almost unani- bizarre and extreme antisocial behaviour, mously acclaimed by critics as a revelation. a complete loss of reason, destructive ten- Nutshell is a reading of Hamlet in a way that dencies, delusions of omnipotence, a dis- extends the gloom of the original tragedy integrated personality.”18 Vernon’s spiteful onto the doom of the contemporary world, poisoning of his former friend turns out decidedly “out of joint” in McEwan’s view. to be eventually salutary – Clive is already The writer developed the habit of using half dead when he is murdered. Vernon’s plots as pretexts to address political and crime looks no less sardonic as it turns out ethical issues of the day even in his mel- he is actually keeping his word and rescu- lower mid-phase novels, such as Saturday22, ing the victim from a dreadful agony and a story set during one single day in Feb- extreme humiliation. ruary 2003, on the famous model of Vir- While this novel was criticized for its ginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, here a neu- unconvincing ending and cartoonish psy- rosurgeon witnessing the protests against chology, critics have also saluted “the chill” the Americans’ decision to invade Iraq and of its telegraphic style,19 its exploration musing on the meanings of history and of ethical issues against the background politics in the postmodern world. Taking 107 Gothic Revisitations of Hamlet: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell his cue both from the Renaissance prince’s McEwan confesses to have had the despair against tyrannical and unenlight- idea of writing a story in an unborn baby’s ened forms of government and from his voice while talking to his pregnant daugh- own plots’ restlessness about contemporary ter-in-law about how much of a human geopolitics, McEwan employs Nutshell as a entity an embryo can be after all.23 Such pretext to discuss not only an individual’s a choice for an unreliable narrator who place in a community of shared values, but has a limited perception of the plot due to also Britain’s place in the world in the third his young age was first operated by Hen- millennium. Still in the early days of the ry James in his What Maisie Knew, where, Brexit preparations, the book is an extend- indeed, the little girl touched the readers ed soliloquy about the anxieties of living to tears with her candid interpretation of in – or being born into – an unsafe, unpre- her parents’ divorce and her displacement. dictable place. McEwan goes much further, into advanced The gothic preliminaries are secured genetic issues, when speculating about the unequivocally: the setting is a large, de- complexity of an unborn human’s con- cayed, labyrinthine old Georgian man- science, as well as into equally advanced sion; the characters – an adulterous and narrative experimentation, making his sto- murderous couple. The house, inherited by ry-teller a loquacious, complicated child John Cairncross, poet and publisher, from prodigy. The fetus, a boy, has learned a lot his grandfather, is fancied by his younger not only about his parents and his uncle, brother, also enthralled by the charms of from patient listening, but also about the the poet’s beautiful wife. The mansion being world, about terrorism, about domestic worth 8 million and the wife very much in policies, about science and technology, love, a way out of the inheritance issue and or about literature and music, from his the erotic triangle dilemma is the removal mother’s passion for Radio 4, whose news of the husband, too lyrical and unpractical she follows carefully during her long in- for his own good. The couple prepares a somnias. As the pregnancy advances, the poison out of an antifreezing solution and fuzzier perceptions of earlier trimesters mixes it with a fruit smoothie, the husband turn into an acute philosophical synthesis, dies, but the police put two and two togeth- which obviously voices the author’s own, er when a hat and a pair of gloves cannot very mature conclusions: “Pessimism is too be convincingly accounted for and come to easy, even delicious, the badge and plume arrest the accomplices. The unusual lure of of intellectuals […] We excite ourselves this detective story stems from its narrative with dark thoughts in plays, poems [… point of view. All the revolting details of but] we are bloated with privileges.”24 the double sin and crime are literally reso- The chilling dimension of this detec- nating with the consciousness of an invisi- tive plot, which made critics immediate- ble but omnipresent witness – an 8-month ly call the novel “a dark tour de force”,25 fetus which (who?) struggles for space in is the “sickening complicity”26 which the his mother’s womb, while also struggling narrator confesses with the whole busi- for a future and thus intervening in the de- ness. If McEwan has long accustomed his nouement of the thriller. readers to the even, dispassionate voice in 108 Dana Percec which he reveals the most atrocious crimes been constantly scary and revolting not by and the most unworkable secrets, Nutshell virtue of an agglomeration of ghosts and adds yet another level to this crudeness. monsters, but of a slowly growing pile of While totally blind to everything around waste and dump, a grotesque reminder of and outside him, the baby is a witness and the characters’ collateral sins – neglect, la- accomplice despite himself to the careful ziness, insensitivity, regression into a state preparation of the murder, its mise en oeu- of primitivism and brutishness. vre, the interrogation of the police officers, As a whodunit, Nutshell follows the the realization that all is lost and the only rules theorized by one of the canonical escape is a quick exit from the stage by the authors of detective fiction, P.D. James, night train to France. He hears the first who, in a book where she reflects about the hints made by his uncle that death is not as evolution of the genre from sensational to impossible to achieve without suspicion as (partly) highbrow, acknowledges the role it seems, his technical description of poi- played by the gothic novels of atmosphere soning symptoms, the actual deed, with the in the coagulation of the new story, stating father’s voice, while swallowing the laced that the step to be undertaken by writers is smoothie, drumming in his ears like thun- that of securing the passage from supernat- der, the arrival of the chief inspector and ural to rational terror.29 McEwan, who dis- the adrenaline rushing through his moth- tills the avant-gothic plot of Hamlet into a er’s body, finally her desperate attempts to post-gothic story of lust and murder, com- save herself when she realizes their plans bines atmosphere with the forensic detail, have gone terribly wrong. Rather than plus a good dose of “morality fable.”30 In sight, it is the other senses, hearing, touch- the presentation of the potential murder ing, smelling and tasting that take over the weapon – a drop of ethylene glycol in a narrative and its galloping pace, making glass of fruit juice – the narrator faithfully the story seem even more overwhelming reproduces the accomplices’ presentation because of this. For example, the kitch- of the poison’s chemical composition, the en, the murder scene, which hasn’t been list of symptoms it generates, the time it cleaned for a long time, is abruptly tidied takes this poison to kill an adult man, its by the baby’s mother in an attempt to re- “advantages” over other more conventional move all evidence, suddenly feeling differ- poisons. Gone are the days when arsenic ent in the baby’s perception: “The floor no was such a successful way to remove one’s longer sticks to her sandals, the flies have adversaries or undesirable relatives that it moved to other heavens.”27 This is in sheer had acquired the sinister nickname poudre contrast with yesterday’s visit to the same de succession. Now a very simple test can im- kitchen, when downtrodden meat and fat, mediately detect even the smallest quanti- molten butter and greasy knots, “the rot- ty in the victim’s hair and nails. Gone are ted putty of the unwashed panes” gener- also the days in which, somehow poetical- ated a nauseous sensation and called for ly rather than maleficently, poison could the presence and immediate action of pest be poured into one’s ear while the victim control.28 We recognize here McEwan’s was asleep. This Hamletian trope, though, clear signature, the setting for him having is imported by McEwan into his modern 109 Gothic Revisitations of Hamlet: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell tale, in the form of news about the removal the latter’s self-sufficiency and vanity (both of a Russian spy (how many Russian spies synonymous with stupidity). Claude and can actually get poisoned in London?) by Trudy don’t need more time to plan the means of diphenhydramine, a highly effi- perfect murder because they are instinctive cient substance even in the smallest doses. beings, described by the narrator as dull Some classical gothic elements are pre- hedonists, so they act as they usually do, served, if only for the pleasure of experi- with too much self-confidence and too lit- menting with the juxtaposition of various tle anticipation, feeling sexual arousal rath- registers and planes of reality. The fetus has er than remorse after poisoning takes place a vivid dream in which he travels back in and John’s death is announced. But their time to medieval London and observes the crime of passion (even if it is passionless) solemn ritual of a funeral, while later, dizzy ignores all the marvels of state-of-the art from the alcohol consumed by his moth- criminology, which includes DNA tests er, he has a hallucination, in which his fa- and CCTV camera evidence. So it only ther’s cadaver, smelling of “maggot-friend- takes the chief inspector 24 hours to put ly flesh”31, appears in the room where he all the clues together and to seize the vil- was poisoned to claim his revenge. In the lains. Aware of this denouement, the lovers hallucination, the murderous uncle dies of plan to catch a train that would take them horror and the adulterous mother is pet- out of the country, but their escape is pre- rified after the cadaver, whose lips have vented by the baby’s decision that enough disappeared, embraces her with ardor and is enough and that, while he has witnessed rage. the entire plot with the frustration of be- The police investigation is surprising- ing unable to act, the ending can be written ly efficient. This is partly due to McEwan’s by him in the simplest way, following the love for the three classical unities, which course of nature. make most of his novels be dramatic, con- centrated plots which consume themselves Gothic and Appropriation almost instantaneously. Nutshell, like Sat- urday, unravels within the frame of the n generating a powerful sense of awe unity of time and place: only a couple of in his Elizabethan audiences, Shake- days pass since the fetus, already entangled Ispeare was one century and a half ahead in “incestuous sheets” with his mother and of the aesthetic debate about the sublime, uncle, overhears their murderous plans, which produces admiration and fear in the witnesses the poisoning and the killers’ at- viewers, therefore being superior to beauty, tempt to flee. Everything happens in the which is responsible only for less intense old Georgian house, which is part of the reactions, like pleasure. In 1757, Edmund reason why the baby’s father has to die Burke wrote A Philosophical Enquiry into anyway, a place whose large size, consid- the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and erable neglect and unquestionable gloom Beautiful32, thus preparing the ground for contribute to the overall macabre effect. the gothic fashion that seduced writers for On the other hand, the detectives’ speed the next one hundred years. Burke’s mech- in identifying the culprits has to do with anism of reception based on the principles 110 Dana Percec of the sublime consists of acknowledging extraordinary physicality and interdepen- the most intense passion as being fear dence between the pregnant host and the – especially the fear of death – and de- tenant of her womb, a love-hate relation, in scribing its effect as suspense. A pre- or which the mother protects her large belly proto-gothic technician in his dark trag- instinctively even if she wants to give the edies, Shakespeare anticipates both these child away for adoption, or the baby adores aesthetic debates (though he gives them his mother with the same intensity with a more religious touch) and the tension which he loathes her for betraying his fa- of the narrative which is specific in mod- ther. One of the most intimate remarks the ern thrillers. Hamlet presents some of the fetus makes is related to the enforced and most evident gothic features in its use of extreme fleshliness of the Oedipus com- an exoticized version of the past – the early plex: “I wear my mother like a tight-fitting Middle Ages amid the Scandinavian mists cap.”35 The sense of claustrophobia that the of folk mythology, quite remote from the original play conveyed by the evocation of tranquil, domestic Tudor England –, in the the metaphorical prison is here transferred use of the theme of revenge – also a stylized to the physiological description of the lack form of tension between a past tormenting of space, in an outstretched uterus, of a big a guilty present –, and the cathartic effects fetus, who remembers the days when he was of literal and metaphoric madness. “drifting” aimlessly in the placenta as op- This potential has been recognized by posed to the discomfort he experiences now. most of the writers, stage and film directors In general, this rewriting of the great who have attempted an exercise of appropri- tragedy benefits from the considerable dis- ation, both highbrow and popular. While the tance it takes from the original (unlike many Introduction of this article offered an exam- of the commissioned novels in the Hoga- ple of the former, completing the anniver- rth Shakespeare project, which have been sary Hogarth Shakespeare project of 2016, frequently criticized for trying too hard to a recent example in the latter category is a accommodate an Elizabethan plot, with Victorian gothic romance where the Ham- its conventional oddities, to the practical letian plot is told by a young female nar- expectations of today’s readers). The main rator who resembles Ophelia.33 McEwan’s element of originality is, of course, the fe- Nutshell complicates the gothic labyrinth tus, a replica of young Hamlet who goes the when he decreases the level of melodrama other way: not from life to death, but from by having the story told by an innocent non-being to getting born. The “to be or not whose morality is rather philosophical. To to be” opposition, which voices the fears of compensate, the author increases the level of a still profoundly religious society for the horror by having this same innocent witness unknown – the ghost, the murder, suicide “a deftly charted crime”,34 not by seeing but or natural death being all mere versions of by hearing its gory details, from inside the the same formidable unknown, which is echoing shelter of his mother’s body. “the undiscovered country” (III, 1)36 – takes The Freudian interpretation of the the shape of another dilemma in Nutshell. mother-son relation in Hamlet is given by How to prevent the murder, then, how to McEwan a brand new dimension in the punish the murderers, and finally, how to 111 Gothic Revisitations of Hamlet: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell stay alive and secure a future for himself when he changes the final moments of the after birth? While Claude is unequivocal- plot from a successful escape into an ill- ly contemptible (a greedy, narrow-minded timed succession of events, his strength in- and priapic real-estate agent, who speaks creases and his role shifts from that of pas- in “dribbling cliché” and looks like a fox), sive witnessing to one of resolution. What the father is a mixture between heroic and breaks Hamlet, who is given a license to ordinary. A good-hearted poet, he is often kill by his father’s ghost and by the moral too predictable in his honesty and naivety, and legal standards of his age, but is pre- and his golden aura is spoilt by his psoriatic vented by his excessively introspective na- skin, the character being regarded by critics ture, makes Trudy’s boy, his determination as “convincing as both melancholy hero and to have the culprits punished coinciding bore.”37 Moreover, despite his generosity, he with the need to pierce the membrane of seems just as uninterested in his future son the womb two weeks earlier, be born and as his wife and brother. The careful prepara- behold his mother’s face. Unlike Hamlet, tion of the murder, all the talking about it, who dies in a tardy attempt to finish his the anxiety growing in the female accom- father’s mission, the baby contemplates plice after the murder has taken place, all the outer world in silence, though his first remind us more of Macbeth than of Hamlet, thought after birth is not Hamlet’s fate the former being a play about what hap- after death. “The rest is silence” (V, 2)40 is pens both before and after killing, the latter opposed by McEwan with a more explicit dealing exclusively with the aftermath of “first sorrow, then justice, then meaning. murder. The thirst for revenge is present in The rest is chaos.”41 Nutshell, but it seems to have a more paro- In this subtle appropriation of Ham- chial, selfish dimension, since the baby, who let’s revenge tragedy, some more hints of an knows he will be abandoned by mother explicit intertextual game are identifiable. and uncle if they escape, plans to get them The baby dreams about an avatar of him- caught by the police because in prison he self riding in the streets of Tudor London, won’t be separated from his mother. Infants, where the high number of dubious figures he reasons, are known to be treated better of thieves and prostitutes and the intensi- behind bars than in foster care, on the thir- ty of foul smells suggests an ill-famed area teenth floor of a working-class family flat. of the city, possibly on the south banks of While Hamlet, as a grown-up prince, the Thames, the very neighborhood where is expected to act dutifully and courageous- playhouses began to flourish in the 16th ly, his tragic flaw being his very inability century and where, of course, Shakespeare “to take arms against a sea of troubles” himself became famous. The same baby (III, 1)38, McEwan’s fetus is not expected has a Halloween fantasy in which his fa- to do, or even be, anything. This status of ther’s dead body scares Claude to death, the novel’s protagonist and “over-reliable this ghost appearing somewhere else in the narrator”39 is exploited by the author who economy of the plot and with a different takes the opportunity to ask a series of sci- purpose, but still being effectively reminis- entific questions about genetics, kinship, cent of the original ambiguity contained by neurological processes, and obstetrics. So, the supernatural presence. The poet’s corpse 112 Dana Percec is horrible to contemplate but stands there Conclusion to do justice to himself, just like the royal ppropriation is a phenomenon which Dane’s specter in armor was alternatively 42 says as much about the authority of “a spirit of health or goblin damn’d” (I, 4) . theA source as about the literary, cultural or Finally, the talk about poison poured into even political context into which the source one’s ear appears as a news bulletin watched is imported and adapted. In this logic, Nut- by Claude, who admires the assassin’s cre- shell documents the diversity of directions ativity and skill and laments his own lack in which Hamlet can be read and exploited, thereof. Dull as he is, he chooses the most as well as the peculiarities of Ian McEwan’s unimaginative substance in the world to use writing technique. While Shakespeare’s as poison against his brother, antifreeze in Danish tragedy was by all standards a pre- the middle of a very hot summer – a dry cursor of the psychological and aesthetic and biting touch today’s readers can’t miss. intricacies of reception that defined the Another re-write of a Shakespearean solil- gothic genre during the early days of Ro- oquy, from Macbeth this time, is the baby’s manticism, the contemporary British writ- sorrowful projection about his own future, er’s sparse style and grim mode is an ex- possibly celebrating New Year’s Eve in tension of a disenchanted age, in which the 2099: “Life [is] a thriller of sorts, violent, various voices of postmodernism overlap, sensational, highly commercial, a compen- 43 experimenting, in a detached manner, with dium of dreams, with elements of horror”. irony, cynicism and understatement, which Not a far cry from Macbeth’s fatalism: makes it possible that all the imminent small apocalypses of a shifting geopolitical Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor map can be announced in the flattest voice. player All the more intense given its apparent lack That struts and frets his hour upon the of intensity, McEwan’s dark prose is not just stage a contemporary proposal of how the canon And then is heard no more. It is a tale can be read today and where its hierarchies Told by an idiot, full of sound and should be placed, but also a reflection on fury, 44 the kind of magic – if any – that readers Signifying nothing. (V, 5) and writers alike can still afford today.

References Adams, Tim, “A tragic hero in the making”, in The Observer, 30 August 2016. Bird, Orlando, “Lectures from the womb”, in The Telegraph, 23 September 2016. Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton, Prairie State Books, 1993. Clanchy, Kate, “An elegiac masterpiece”, in The Guardian, 27 August 2016. Connel, Matt F., “Mimesis and childhood in Adorno, Kafka and Freud”, in Body and Society, London, Sage Publications, 4/1998. DeWees, Amanda, Sea of Secrets, Amazon Digital Services, 2014. Dickson, Andrew, “Ian McEwan on The Cement Garden, sexual gothic and being in the toddlerhood of old age”, in The Guardian, 26 January 2014. Driscoll, Lawrence, Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 113 Gothic Revisitations of Hamlet: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell

Hawking, Stephen, The Universe in a Nutshell, New York, Bantam Books, 2001. James, P.D., Talking about Detective Fiction, London, Vintage, 2011. Kakutani, Michiko, “Dark tour de force”, in New York Times, 1 December 1998. McEwan, Ian, The Cement Garden, London, Vintage, 1997. McEwan, Ian, Amsterdam, London, Jonathan Cape, 1998. McEwan, Ian, Saturday, London, Anchor, 2006. McEwan, Ian, Nutshell, New York, Doubleday, 2016, kindle edition. Miller, Michael W., “Ian McEwan on Nutshell and its extraordinary narrator”, in The Wall Street Journal, 29 August 2016. Mukherjee, Siddhartha, “An unborn baby overhears plans for a murder in Ian McEwan’s latest novel”, in New York Times, 9 September 2016. Percec, Dana, “The Horror of Mimesis and the Abject Body in Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden and George Konrad’s The Case Worker”, in British and American Studies, no. 1 year 2004, p. 7-14. Pritchard, William, “Publish and perish”, in New York Times, 27 December 1998. Shakespeare, William, Tragedies, ed. David Bevington, New York, Pearson Longman, 2006.

Notes 1. Ian McEwan, Nutshell, New York, Doubleday, 2016, kindle edition, p. 1. 2. Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, New York, Bantam Books, 2001. 3. William Shakespeare, Tragedies, ed. David Bevington, New York, Pearson Longman, 2006. 4. Dana Percec, “The Horror of Mimesis and the Abject Body in Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden and George Konrad’s The Case Worker”, British and American Studies, no. 1 year 2004, p. 7-14. 5. Matt F. Connel, “Mimesis and childhood in Adorno, Kafka and Freud”, Body and Society, London, Sage Publications, 4/1998, p. 68. 6. Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden, London, Vintage, 1997, p. 22. 7. Ibidem, p. 72. 8. Ibidem, p. 73. 9. Ibidem, p. 122. 10. Ibidem, p. 85. 11. Ibidem, p. 118. 12. Ibidem, p. 23. 13. Andrew Dickson, “Ian McEwan on The Cement Garden, sexual gothic and being in the toddlerhood of old age”, The Guardian, 26 January 2014. 14. Michiko Kakutani, “Dark tour de force”, New York Times, 1 December 1998. 15. Lawrence Driscoll, Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 2. 16. William Pritchard, “Publish and perish”, New York Times, 27 December 1998. 17. Ian McEwan, Amsterdam, London, Jonathan Cape, 1998, p. 142. 18. Ibidem, p. 156. 19. Michiko Kakutani, op. cit. 20. William Pritchard, op. cit. 21. Andrew Dickson, op. cit. 22. Ian McEwan, Saturday, London, Anchor, 2006. 23. Michael W. Miller, “Ian McEwan on Nutshell and its extraordinary narrator”, The Wall Street Journal, 29 August 2016. 24. Ian McEwan, Nutshell, p. 14. 25. Kate Clanchy, “An elegiac masterpiece”, The Guardian, 27 August 2016. 114 Dana Percec

26. Ian McEwan, op. cit., p. 84. 27. Ibidem, p. 81. 28. Ibidem, p. 37. 29. P.D. James, Talking about Detective Fiction, London, Vintage, 2011. 30. Tim Adams, “A tragic hero in the making”, The Observer, 30 August 2016. 31. Ian McEwan, Nutshell, p. 93. 32. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton, Prairie State Books, 1993. 33. Amanda DeWees, Sea of Secrets, Amazon Digital Services, 2014. 34. Orlando Bird, “Lectures from the womb”, The Telegraph, 23 September 2016. 35. Ian McEwan, Nutshell, p. 17. 36. William Shakespeare, op. cit. 37. Kate Clanchy, op. cit. 38. William Shakespeare, op. cit. 39. Siddhartha Mukherjee, “An unborn baby overhears plans for a murder in Ian McEwan’s latest novel”, New York Times, 9 September 2016. 40. William Shakespeare, op. cit. 41. Ian McEwan, Nutshell, p. 94. 42. William Shakespeare, op. cit. 43. Ian McEwan, Nutshell, p. 64. 44. William Shakespeare, op. cit.