Divine (with) Shakespeare: Two Postmodern Case Studies of Divination Cover Image

Divine (with) Shakespeare: Two Postmodern Case Studies of Divination
Divine (with) Shakespeare: Two Postmodern Case Studies of Divination

Author(s): Estella Ciobanu
Subject(s): Studies of Literature
Published by: Editura Universităţii »Alexandru Ioan Cuza« din Iaşi
Keywords: Shakespeare; Hamlet; Mr. Nobody; A History of the World in 10½ Chapters; chaos theory; teleology;

Summary/Abstract: This essay focuses neither on modernist allusions to the “classics” of western culture, as Joyce’s Ulysses does, nor on postmodernist rewritings of Shakespeare in parodically minimalist or subaltern key, as Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead do, but on half-sounded allusions in two works, Jaco Van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody and chapter 10 of Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10. Chapters. Both the film (2009) and the novel (1989) engage in a light-hearted dialogue with Hamlet. The former does so, via Hamlet’s sparrow’s fall motif, to revisit the classic fortuna labilis motif in jocular low-key. Barnes’s chapter creates, in Shakespearean vein, a dream-like illusion of consumerist heaven, which answers ironically Hamlet’s “For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come” (3.1.66). Such Shakespearean references immerse the two postmodernist works ina universe governed by the principles of chaos theory; yet the immersion also enables them to refute the implicit promise of teleology (the search for final causes, or purpose) to predict the future. By conceiving the future as causally intelligible teleology powers discourses which can motivate individuals into action. Contrariwise, chaos theory shows how “their currents turn awry” (Hamlet 3.1.87) into iterative (non-) action.

  • Issue Year: 3/2017
  • Issue No: Special
  • Page Range: 43-52
  • Page Count: 10
  • Language: English