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.