Caliban as a Postmodern Puzzle
Caliban as a Postmodern Puzzle

Summary/Abstract: Postmodernism, as conceived by literary criticism, has a particular taste for revisions, reconfigurations or reconsiderations of works belonging to a past that continues to haunt us, despite the many layers of interpretation that now mystify it. In a 2016 novel adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the much-acclaimed Canadian writer Margaret Atwood reconstructs the original plot of the play, cleverly exploiting its semantic potential for today’s audiences. While preserving some of the elements and patterns in Shakespeare’s text, the novelist introduces a series of displacements and changes at various levels. One of the most intriguing aspects of Atwood’s novel is that it is entitled Hag-Seed (a derogatory term used by Prospero to address Caliban in Shakespeare’s play), while there is no clearly identifiable Caliban in it. The present paper explores this puzzle, by pondering on Atwood’s narrative techniques of emphasizing and developing certain discreet but unsettling meanings whose seeds are to be traced in Shakespeare’s play.

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