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Metatheatricality and Art in the Tempest and Hag-Seed

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Metatheatricality and Art in the Tempest and Hag-Seed 93 MY KINGDOM FOR A STAGE “SPIRITS TO ENFORCE, ART TO ENCHANT”: METATHEATRICALITY AND ART IN THE TEMPEST AND HAG-SEED YAĞMUR TATAR Yeditepe University, Istanbul Abstract: Although interpretations of the metatheatre stand as a recurring theme in many of Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest can be observed to be the most self- conscious one as a theatre about the theatre. With a comparative look at the Bard’s The Tempest and its rewriting Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, the present study aims to explore the ways in which metatheatricality functions, and is translated to a contemporary context, as an asset of symbolic power and representing different layers of reality governed mainly by Prospero’s art. Keywords: contemporary, metatextuality, metatheatre, reality, rewriting 1. Introduction The work of a thespian held out a remarkable happiness to him – the first, perhaps, he had ever known; but when the last line was delivered and the last dead man applauded off the stage, the hated taste of unreality would assail him. He would cease being Ferrex or Tamerlane and return to being nobody. Borges, “Everything and Nothing” (1964: 231) When Shakespeare, on his deathbed after years of being “so many men in vain”, asks God to allow him to be finally one and himself, God replies that He is no one either: “Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one” (Borges 1964: 232). This unbearable possibility of the mankind to be both the creator and the audience of its own existence has been explored in great detail by Borges in many of his other writings. He interrogates further this strange case of metatextuality through Don Quixote – “Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet?” – and the initial answer comes to us as contradictory and laborious as an author tilting at windmills: a self-conscious text considers the astonishing possibility that “if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious” (idem: 187). It is then no wonder that John Barth (1984: 64), examining “the used- upness” of the conventional modes of literary representation in his 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”, finds himself wrapped up by the Argentine writer, whose love of books endowed his writings to a great degree with a unique layer of metatextuality. Leaving aside the intricate business of the “death of the novel,” Barth renounces the realistic discourse as the touchstone of literary and dramatic criticism, and points out that the recent debate concerning literature which may have been exhausted its ability to ever produce “original” texts is simply an idea too impossible to embrace. Like many postmodern writers, he is especially B.A.S. vol. XXVI, 2020 94 intrigued by Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, in which the French Symbolist Pierre Menard “produces – not copies or imitates, but composes” several chapters of Cervantes’s novel. Through a metafictive agenda, Borges (re)uses Cervantes’s novel, in order to produce a “remarkable and original work of literature, the implicit theme of which is the difficulty, perhaps the unnecessity, of writing original works of literature” (Barth 1984: 68). With these concerns in mind, I aim to show how Barth’s metatextual ideas on (re)creating works of literature reflect themselves in a recent postmodern rewriting. Through invoking the theory of metatextuality in literature and theatre as one of the core traits of postmodernism and its many effects on its audience, I propose to explain how the reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest through its 2016 retelling Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood supports enwrapped layers of (un)reality and how Atwood “confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work” (idem: 69). 2. Metanarrative or self-conscious fiction Although our contemporary literature more often than not supports a metafictional discourse, the erosion of the belief in the nearly-fascist authority of the author and the written word begins with Cervantes. In Partial Magic, Robert Alter (1975: 3) states that Cervantes was among the first writers “to see in the mere fictionality of fictions the key to the predicament of a whole culture, and to use this awareness centrally in creating new fictions of their own”. Supporting two very different planes of existence from the beginning, Cervantes not only creates a very real portrait of the aged knight Don Quixote, with his pragmatic squire, on the plains of La Mancha, but also presents the knight as “merely a lifelike model of papier-mâché, a design in words, images, invented gestures and actions, which exists between the covers of a book by Miguel de Cervantes” (idem: 4). Thus, it stands befitting for Don Quixote’s adventures to start in a library and even lead to a printing shop in Barcelona, where he becomes familiar with the processes of type- setting, revision, and publishing. Interrogating Ortega y Gasset’s ideas that the world of the novel must be “hermetically sealed” in order not to let the outside world meddle with its fragile representation of reality, Alter points out that Cervantes is au fait with the idea that there is an ultimately serious tension between the recognition of fictions as fictions and their acceptance as reality, however easy it may be to maintain these two types of awareness simultaneously (idem: 5-10). Knowing that fiction is, after all, only fiction is potentially subversive of any meaningful reality that might be attributed to the fiction whereas assenting imaginatively to the reality of a represented action is a step in a process that could undermine or bewilder what one ordinarily thinks of as his sense of reality. Over the last few decades, novelists have been more submerged with the theoretical issues concerning the construction of a text, which consequently have rendered their creations more self-reflective and formally uncertain. Patricia Waugh attributes this rising awareness of “meta” levels of discourse to the contemporary culture’s awareness of our everyday “reality.” According to Waugh (1984: 3), since “the simple notion that language passively reflects a coherent, meaningful and ‘objective’ world is no longer tenable…‘meta’ terms are required in order to explore the relationship between this arbitrary linguistic system and the world to which it apparently refers”. Consequently, metafiction functions as a self- 95 MY KINGDOM FOR A STAGE reflective narrative that flaunts its own condition of fictionality and artifice in order to pose questions about the problematic relationship between fiction and reality. It further aims to reveal and play with the primary identity of the novel as a genre: by constructing the fictional illusion and unveiling that illusion in order to make a certain statement about the process of creating it, metafiction “offers both innovation and familiarity through the individual reworking and undermining of familiar conventions” (idem: 12). Although metatextuality functions as one of the trademarks of postmodern literature, Waugh additionally clarifies that almost all writing supports at least some metafictional qualities. Richard Hornby (1986: 17) makes a similar statement about the metatheatrical quality of dramatic representation in his Drama, Metadrama, and Perception, when he concludes that “[a] play does not reflect life; instead, it reflects itself. At the same time, it relates to other plays as a system”. A play, then, first and foremost mirrors itself before any external reality, which makes the audience aware of its self-contained experience as it watches the play. It is through this experience and the audience’s disturbed feelings about this experience that notions such as Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekte or ‘alienation effect’ emerges. Although Brecht has mostly cultural and political objectives in mind when he writes about a play “alienating” its audience, this process also functions as a way of distancing the same audience from the clichéd forms of identification and conventional modes of understanding. In the same way, Barth (1984: 73) reports that the audience is disturbed “metaphysically” when fictional characters become readers or authors of the fiction they belong to, since this same estranging stance reminds us of “the fictitious aspect of our own existence”. 2.1. Shakespeare’s partial magic Traditionally acknowledged as the epitome of his career and his valediction to the stage, The Tempest can be considered as one of the most explicitly self- aware play among Shakespeare’s plays. The concept of theatrum mundi, however, is nothing but handsomely employed in many of his other works as well: Jacques the melancholy claims that “[a]ll the world’s a stage” in As You Like It (II.7.140); Antonio regards the world as “a stage where every man must play a part” in The Merchant of Venice (I.1.77); the-play-within-a-play creates a double dramatic presence in Hamlet’s famous Mousetrap, just like the labourers’ performance of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Cleopatra, anticipating to be humiliatingly staged by the Romans after Anthony’s death, creates an image through a theatrical vocabulary, suitable to the dramatic practices of Shakespeare’s day: […] The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us, and present Our Alexandrian revels. Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’ th’ posture of a whore. (V.2.216-21) The Tempest, however, constitutes a complete contextualization of metatheatrical elements in the way it is replete with audiences, masques, and explicit allusions to the world of the theatre.
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