“I’m sorry my story is in fragments”: Offred’s Operatic Counter-Memory

Abstract

THE CANADIAN OPERA COMPANY Opened its 2004-2005 season to great critical and cultural acclaim with Canadian premiere of Poul Ruders and Paul Bentley's The Handmaid's Tale (Tjenerindens Fortaelling), an operatic adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopic novel of same title. Opening an opera season with a contemporary work is a box-office gamble; indeed, this risky decision marked a first for Canadian Opera Company. And, as Atwood admits, when Ruders first approached her and proposed adapting her novel into opera, she thought, This person is mad (God and Gilead). But final product, which received its world premiere on 6 March 2000 with company that commissioned work (Royal Danish Opera), demonstrates fortuitous truth that first thoughts are often wrong. In his 2003 review of British premiere, Martin Anderson aptly sums up general enthusiasm for work, a superior piece of theatre it is: music, libretto, direction, stage design, costumes and lighting all coalesce to thrilling effect ... it has been years since I've seen something this good (39). A reception so positive is rare for contemporary music of any kind, never mind contemporary opera, which has misfortune of competing for airtime in perhaps most inflexible canon in classical music. (2) It is also rare for an adaptation of a literary work as famous as The Handmaid's Tale to be lauded so wholeheartedly. As Herbert Lindenberger notes, whenever a canonized literary work--be it a drama, novel, or verse narrative--has been turned into an opera, its admirers note and often deplore what has been 'lost' from original in course of transformation (41).3 Though action of a novel must be compressed in order to produce an adaptation of this kind, Bentley's libretto, which deftly contains action in forty short scenes organized into a prologue, prelude, two acts, and an epilogue, is actually fairly faithful to source text. Ruders and Bentley's work preserves frighteningly prophetic spirit and real and human of novel, which is essential to opera's success, for as Ruders remarks in an interview, a great story-line opera, at least modern opera, is useless (Sequenza 21). Ruders and Bentley's adaptation, however, does deviate from original in one important way. Only after we finish Atwood's novel and read epilogue do we learn that Offred's story is a reconstruction from fragments of a lost personal history that exists within a historical narrative that, like all historical narratives, is itself a reconstruction from fragments. In opera, on other hand, story begins with Professor Pieixoto and symposium at which he is speaking and at which opera-goers are default attendees. It then moves to Red Centre, where opera-goers and handmaids alike are indoctrinated, before acts 1 and 2 begin, and opera-goers simultaneously become voyeurs, Eyes; (4) and critics, without relinquishing their former roles as conference participants and ersatz handmaids. I have focused on opera-goers here because audience's fragmentation into these various and disparate roles mirrors ways in which opera, its main character, Offred, and her narrative are literally and figuratively fragmented, even as it also underscores way in which in an operatic adaptation of a novel, libretto itself fragments novel. Focusing on opera-goers, moreover, demonstrates most significant alteration that occurs when story moves from page to stage, namely, that readers become viewers and therefore become implicated in story, rather than passive critics of it. Postmodernism teaches that the human is fragmentary, incoherent, overdetermined, forever under construction in process of signification (Kramer 9); theorists of what George Lipsitz calls counter-memory help to explain why this true human subject is fragmentary: Unlike historical narratives that begin with totality of human existence and then locate specific actions and events within that totality . …