Shakespeare Survives the Apocalypse in Hale’s My Name Is Monster (2019): A Third Millennium Commentary on The Tempest (1611)

Résumé

The following scholarly endeavour, while not pertaining to be exhaustive, yet well targeted, in many respects, has sought to delve into the dynamic interplay, to be detected, between Katie Hale’s My Name Is Monster and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest with particular focus on the novel’s second part. The bard’s last play, I suggest, has been revisited, in a quite different spatiotemporal context, through Hale’s text, the aspect which has allowed her to recreate, reinvent and comment on, though in a subtle way, the four-centuries-old account in a post-apocalyptic setting. The theoretical background, following this thread, selected to underpin my designs and the analysis that would follow, emanate from Gérard Genette’s studies imbedded in textual relationship; from the panoply of concepts, the French theorist has developed and coined, I have appealed to the one he has dubbed ‘metatextuality’. I argue, all along this research paper, that My Name Is Monster might be read, beyond the surface layer, as a metatext of The Tempest. The former, in this way, is examined as a work that has not only commented on but has also criticised the latter recasting it, from a new angle; the Prospero and Caliban opposition with the entire authority, it entailed, balance of power and ability to craft language, to carve a discourse in one’s favour, have all been shifted, in the course of their, then colonial but now post-apocalyptic, relationship from the invader to the native.