Abstract
This chapter provides a close reading of incest in John Updike’s prequel to Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius, specifically exploring the way incest complicates the relationship between the spatiotemporality of the self and an already related other. Examining the effects of the incestuous affair between Gertrude and her husband’s brother, Davies, also conceptualises the pleasure of ‘adulterous parallelism’, that is, the sexual excitement of being in two times and spaces—inside and outside marriage—simultaneously. This affair also creates an intense form of sexual abandonment, Davies argues, as the couple figuratively except themselves from the king’s legal sphere and delight in their sexual animalisation; they create a tension between sexual and political abandonment. In the final section of the chapter, Davies turns to more formal matters, proposing a theory of the ‘incestuous prequel’.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Ante-narrative’ and ‘ante-text’ 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 prioritising either element.
- 2.
Throughout this chapter, I shall refer to the characters by the version of their names relevant to the part of the narrative I am discussing. Where I wish to draw attention to connections across the various parts of the narrative, I shall refer to the relevant two or all three variations of the characters’ names.
- 3.
In The Royal Society of Medicine Health Encyclopedia, for example, R.M. Youngson explains the possible harm of incest, writing: ‘genetically, incest becomes undesirable only when there are recessive traits for disease in the family so that breeding carriers are more likely to produce offspring homozygous for the condition. The same genetic implication applies to marriages between first cousins, which are almost universally thought acceptable’ (2000, para. 4).
- 4.
Previous theoretical accounts of incest’s temporal qualities have tended to focus on other temporal aspects of incest. For example, in The Use of Pleasure (1984) Foucault provides an insightful discussion of the Greek attitude towards the dangers of parent–child incest that result from the age of the (older) parent and untimely sexual intercourse, explaining:
the punishment consists in this: regardless of the intrinsic qualities that the incestuous parents might possess, their offspring will come to no good. And why is this? Because the parents failed to respect that principle of the ‘right time,’ mixing their seed unseasonably, since one of them was necessarily much older than the other: for people to procreate when they were no longer ‘in full vigor’ was always ‘to beget badly.’ Xenophon and Socrates do not say that incest is reprehensible only in the form of an ‘inopportune’ action; but it is remarkable that the evil of incest is manifested in the same way and with the same consequences as the lack of regard for the proper time. (1992, p. 59, citing Xenophon)
Writing more generally in her introduction to the special edition of GLQ on queer temporalities (2007), Elizabeth Freeman notes the domestic temporal disruptions of incest, claiming: ‘the most arresting figure for familial time out of joint is, of course, cross-generational incest’ (p. 172). In contrast to such analyses, a genetic consideration of incest provides an empirical and scientific basis for older notions of coincidence or boundary confusion in sex, such as that expressed in the mythological story of loss and reunification in Plato’s Symposium. For a commentary on this story and a modern inflection involving the placenta, see Anne Dufourmantelle’s Blind Date (2007 [2003], pp. 57–8).
- 5.
The Oxford English Dictionary indicates how biological connection is not a necessary condition of incest, defining this sexual practice as ‘the crime of sexual intercourse or cohabitation between persons related within the degrees within which marriage is prohibited; sexual commerce of near kindred’. Of course, Geruthe’s two lovers are themselves genetically related.
- 6.
In an interview with Charley Reilly, Updike himself offers an explanation of the characters’ changing names, saying:
My inquiries into the uncertainty principle, quantum physics, and quantum mechanics reminded me of a riddle which has always perplexed me: why is our external world so solid and consistent? Why is there a little nick in this plate, and why does it retain its nick-ness day after day?… why am I me instead of somebody else? Then how did it happen that I wasn’t, oh, a monk slaughtered a thousand years ago? So it seemed a reasonable narrative experiment—I did something similar [to his use of quantum science in Toward the End of Time (1997)] in Gertrude and Claudius with name changes. (Updike and Reilly 2002, p. 230)
Aside from Updike’s own analysis, only limited critical attention has been paid to the different names of the characters. See, for example: Richard Eder’s review of the novel ‘Spoiled Rotten in Denmark’ (2000, para. 7); James Hopkin’s review of the novel ‘Bard Times’ (2000, paras. 3–5); Laura Savu, ‘In Desire’s Grip: Gender, Politics, and Intertextual Games in Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius’ (2003, p. 24); and Patrick Gill, ‘“The drops which fell from Shakespear’s [sic] Pen”: Hamlet in Contemporary Fiction’ (2012, p. 264).
- 7.
Many critics have argued for the positive effects of Gertrude and Claudius’s affair. See, for example: John Duvall, ‘Conclusion: U(PDIKE) & P(OSTMODERNISM)’ (2006, p. 172); Stephen Greenblatt, ‘With Dirge in Marriage’ (2000, p. 37); Laura Savu (2003, pp. 35–9); James Schiff, ‘Hamlet Predux’ (2000); and Kathleen Verduin, ‘Updike, Women, and Mythologized Sexuality’ (2006).
- 8.
In a lecture entitled ‘Why Can’t Time Run Backwards?’ (delivered at the University of St Andrews on 27 November 2009), the physicist Sir Anthony Legget argued that future science will be dramatically shaped by new investigations into how time works and what effects it has on the fundamental laws of physics. As part of his speculative lecture, Legget proposed that the idea that the past causes the future might one day have to be rejected. On a textual level, the ante-narrative/ante-text relationship provides an example, albeit imaginative, of the way in which the future can cause the past, as the past narrative of the ante-narrative is controlled—and to some extent—caused by the future narrative of the ante-text: the ante-narrative does not cause the events of that future narrative, either in strictly narrative terms or even in terms of its composition.
- 9.
In his essay ‘Bored with Sex?’ (2003), Phillips argues that duplicity is an essential aspect of Freudian aesthetics, claiming: ‘[Freud] is encouraging us to be connoisseurs of the cover story. For him our lives literally depend on the aesthetics of duplicity. If we are not the artists of our own pleasure there will be no pleasure (and no art).... After Freud, being consistent is something that one might be accused of’ (p. 7). In Gertrude and Claudius, the inconsistency—the cover story of sexuality—of which Phillips speaks is translated into an aesthetics of spatiotemporal indeterminability. (‘Bored with Sex?’ is the written version of Phillips’s October 2002 British Academy lecture entitled ‘Freud?’ It was published in the London Review of Books in 2003 as ‘Bored with Sex?’, and it is to this version that I refer.).
- 10.
The twofold effect of adulterous parallelism also features prominently in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime: Scenes from a Provincial Life (2009). In one of the interview sections that make up this playful and ironic narrative of biographical investigation, a woman named Julia describes her affair with the now dead J.M. Coetzee. During the interview, Julia discusses ‘the sense of excitement, of heightened self-awareness, during the act itself—the act of betrayal’ (p. 37) and how her affair with Coetzee renewed her martial sex life. Moreover, the parallelism of adultery is doubled in this text, as both Julia and her husband, Mark, have affairs at the same time. Her husband, she tells the biographer, ‘was positively enraptured with the institution of bourgeois marriage and the opportunities it afforded a man to rut both outside and inside the home’ (p. 39); on her side, Julia ‘was unbearably excited to be having two men so close to each other’ (p. 39). Significantly, Julia’s adultery offers her a temporal–sexual structure to her life. As she explains, ‘it was against the background of those [marital] weekends that my weekday relations with John played themselves out’ (p. 43). Like Geruthe, therefore, Julia interweaves two men and two temporalities to create a heightened sexual existence. Unfortunately for Julia, however, the affair with Coetzee was not entirely successful, as the writer ‘wasn’t any kind of animal, and for a very specific reason: his mental capacities, and specifically his ideational faculties, were overdeveloped, at the cost of his animal self. He was Homo sapiens, or even Homo sapiens sapiens’ (p. 58).
- 11.
Much critical attention has been paid to the tension between Gertrude’s religion and her natural sensibility. See, for example: Greenblatt (2000, p. 37); Ron Rosenbaum, ‘Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius: It’s His Valentine to Eve’ (2000, para. 2); and Verduin (2006, pp. 64–6).
- 12.
Michael O’Driscoll provides an excellent analysis of the complexity insects and entomology bring to posthumanism and work on human/animal relations in his essay ‘Entoporn, Remy de Gourmont, and the Limits of Posthuman Sexuality’ (2014). Identifying this often overlooked aspect within posthuman discourse, he writes:
The recurrent examples of lions and monkeys and horses throughout recent studies of animality, while certainly illuminating, remain nonetheless relatively straightforward compared to considering the complexities of our relationships to those crawling, biting, stinging life-forms who, by all accounts, enjoy communication but not language, are anatomically foreign, function all too efficiently in what are disturbingly uncanny social forms, and as best as we can determine, embody the cruel indifference of nature while failing to approach anything like what humans might understand as suffering. (p. 635)
- 13.
In a radio interview about Gertrude and Claudius, Updike considers the dangers of adultery in the Middle Ages, claiming: ‘sleeping with another man, for a queen, meant death in those days, and so she knew she was playing for big stakes’ (Updike and Williams 2000, para. 106). He elaborates on this idea, reflecting: ‘I think that their behavior was correspondingly reckless, often, because they thought they’d better live intensely now; there might not be a tomorrow’ (para. 108). In a different interview (with Reilly), Updike specifically turns to Gertrude’s precarious position, commenting: ‘the role of a woman in that world was certainly off to the side of the circles where power resides. Even a queen was very much at the mercy of the men in her world’ (2000, p. 224).
- 14.
Gertrude’s acceptance of the marriage proposal can be seen as a form of decision, as, according to Phillips in On Flirtation, ‘“Every conclusive decision brings flirtation to an end.” Perhaps for people who can’t make choices, death is the exemplary decision. In flirtation one does not take risks, one only sustains their possibility’ (1995, p. xxi, citing Georg Simmel).
- 15.
Many critics have noted the echoes of Freudian criticism in the novel. See, for example: Greenblatt (2000, p. 36), Adam Mars-Jones, ‘That Hamlet is Full of Clichés’ (2000, para. 10); and Duvall (2006, pp. 171–2).
- 16.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘caul’ as ‘the amnion or inner membrane enclosing the fœtus before birth; esp. this or a portion of it sometimes enveloping the head of the child at birth, superstitiously regarded as of good omen, and supposed to be a preservative against drowning’.
- 17.
In his Freudian study Hamlet and Oedipus (1949), Ernest Jones turns to Gertrude’s sensuality as support for his reading of Hamlet’s own desires, arguing: ‘as a child Hamlet had experienced the warmest affection for his mother, and this, as is always so, had contained elements of a disguised erotic quality, still more in infancy. The presence of two traits in the Queen’s character accord with this assumption, namely her markedly sensual nature and her passionate fondness for her son’ (1976, p. 80).
- 18.
In Part IV of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish: Proem, narrative, hymmnn, lament, litany & fugue’ (1961), a similar, albeit inversed, facial/pubic hair relationship is portrayed with the mother’s pubic hair being seen as a beard:
O mother
what have I left out
O mother
what have I forgotten
O mother
farewell
with a long black shoe
farewell
with Communist Party and a broken stocking
farewell
with six dark hairs on the wen of your breast
farewell
with your old dress and a long black beard around the vagina. (1999, ll. 1–13)
- 19.
My conceptualisation of the incestuous supplement that is the prequel can be seen in relation to, but different from, Derrida’s masturbatory supplement in Of Grammatology (1967), and the interested reader may wish to see the section entitled ‘… That Dangerous Supplement…’ (1997, pp. 141–64) to trace the similarities and differences between the two readings. In distinction to Derrida’s masturbatory theory of the supplement, there is, I would argue, at least a minor implication of incestuous intertextuality in his account of the preface and dissemination in ‘Hors Livre: Outwork’ (2008, pp. 3–65), as he claims that ‘as the preface to a book, it is the word of a father assisting and admiring his work, answering for his son, losing his breath in sustaining, retaining, idealizing, internalizing, and mastering his seed’ (2008, pp. 33–4). Furthermore, he contends, ‘the scene would be acted out, if such were possible, between father and son alone: autoinsemination, homoinsemination, reinsemination. Narcissism is the law, is on a par with the law’ (p. 34). My work on the ante-narrative/ante-text relationship is, in part, influenced by Derrida’s theory of the preface, its temporality and the thresholds between pre-texts and texts.
- 20.
Reflecting on the novel’s paratexts in his interview with Reilly (2002), Updike explains that ‘the afterword and foreword were originally one and same; that is, they were both included as an afterword. But my editor and others found the name changes confusing, and after some reflection… I thought some kind of foreword was appropriate’ (p. 225). In ‘“Master Eustace” and Gertrude and Claudius: Henry James and John Updike Rewrite Hamlet’ (2003), Henry Janowitz interestingly extends the paratextuality of Updike’s text to include the inside of the jacket cover. Discussing what he sees as the novel’s ironically hopeful ending, which ‘Updike underlines… in his Afterword’ (p. 196), Janowitz argues: ‘the reader had been already warned of this outcome in the flyleaf of the volume: “Gertrude and Claudius are seen afresh against a background of fond intentions and familial dysfunction, on a stage darkened by the ominous shadow of a sullen, disaffected prince,” which Updike might well have written himself’ (p. 196). Janowitz refers to the first edition of Gertrude and Claudius, as do I. For a further discussion of the foreword to Gertrude and Claudius, as well as similar scholarly elements in another of Updike’s novels, Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel (1992), see Duvall (2006, pp. 169–70).
- 21.
The temporal complexities I outline above can, in part, be seen as resulting from the way in which prequels produce an intensification of the problems Mark Currie identifies concerning the categorisation of prolepsis and analepsis. In his sophisticated and rigorous work About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (2007), Currie demonstrates the difficulties that arise when one follows Gérard Genette’s analysis of anachrony in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972) and endeavours to make a distinction between a principal narrative and its anachronous moments, and between prolepsis and analepsis. Currie argues that Genette’s approach leads to relative and possible arbitrary distinctions, as ‘it suggests that analepsis requires only that the anachronous event be narrated after events which it precedes in the chronological sequence, and that prolepsis requires only that the anachronous event be narrated before events which chronologically precede it’ (2010, p. 35). With his focus mainly on the latter type of anachrony, Currie further contends that ‘prolepsis is meaningful in its narratological sense only when there is a clear first narration in relation to which a flashforward can be seen as anachronous, when that first narrative is dominant’ (p. 36), and that it is heavily dependent ‘on a conventional and established narrative pattern in which a basic linearity of events is assumed, or on the predominance of chronology over anachrony’ (p. 37). Whilst a prequel may seem to offer a simple and straightforward ‘prior’ narrative to its textual relation, it is exactly concepts such as a ‘dominant first narrative’, linearity, chronology, anachrony, past, and future that prequels make problematic, all of which can be further compounded by the order in which the reader reads the two related narratives and her awareness of both textual elements.
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Davies, B. (2016). Incestuous Implications: Gertrude and Claudius . In: Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48589-2_3
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