Wells-Lassagne, Shannon & Fiona McMahon (Eds.). Adapting Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Sandra Danneil Since the 1970s, much has been written about Canada’s premier literary figure Margaret Atwood. But most research is about her literary production, and not her practice of adapting. Literary companions discuss her poetry, international literary scholars introduce readers to the dystopian visions in her speculative fiction, Atwood’s biographers trace her stations in life, dozens of scholars seek to uncover the dimensions of her female Gothic - and all them teach their readers how to intellectually adapt to Atwood texts, but tend to overlook the creative potential for artists to take her texts and show instead of only tell what is in it. Since her most acclaimed sixth novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, was rediscovered by a new generation of 21 st -century readers, we have seen that the 1985 book spoke precisely to people’s feelings about President Trump and how his Twitter-channeled postfactual politics began to crucially influence Americans’ conceptions of right and wrong. When the feminist classic again topped the world’s bestseller lists in the moment of Donald Trump’s election as 45 th US president in 2017, the text went through an extensive transformative process. Suddenly, the novel inspired a wave of creative reactions drawing on the instructive function of Offred’s story of oppression for new audiences. Auteurs from various genres re-imagined the novel The Handmaid’s Tale for television, re-wrote it for the stage, re-translated it into the complex language of the opera, re-drew language into illustrations boxed into panels of a graphic novel, and even transferred it from the page to the streets by re-interpreting its most iconic markers, the maiden’s red coat and white wings, as symbols of female empowerment. The great success of Bruce Miller’s TV adaptation, Hulu’s signature format The Handmaid’s Tale (since 2017), seems not only to have inspired Margaret Atwood herself to respond to such fame by turning Offred’s story from a narrative of repression into a narrative of rebellion with her 2019 sequel novel The Testaments. Such fame moreover elicited new thinking about how much Atwood’s practice of exploring what has been defined as “the blueprint of the AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 47 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2022-0009 Rezensionen 164 literary imagination” would lead back to a novel that was written in the mid- 1980s. Atwood’s lasting success might in large parts be based on her talent to create dystopian worlds and relatable characters. But the booming hype of The Handmaid’s Tale leads us far beyond the novel itself: Atwood is an alchemist who catches up on the changing nature of media consumption and distribution in the 21 st century - a statement which is key to the critical essays in the new volume Adapting Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond. What this book convincingly argues is that the various options to view Margaret Atwood as a writer of The Handmaid’s Tale opens up new possibilities to experience her also as a reader, as Jekyll and Hyde, who is caught between authorship and re-immersing into the psyche of much formative canonical literature - from Homer to Shakespeare to Shelley to Milton and back. The essay collection Adapting Margaret Atwood, edited by Fiona McMahon, professor of American literature at Université Paul Valéry Montpellier, and Shannon Wells-Lassagne, professor of film and television at Université de Bourgogne in Dijon, is published as part of the Macmillan series of Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. As the selection of essays shows, the editors have paid particular attention to the changing objects or, in today’s language, the “Easter Eggs” Atwood has incorporated also in the texts that came after The Handmaid’s Tale. Although or even because Atwood’s corpus includes 50+ books, essays, cartoons, poetry and much more on offer, the volume manages to strategically structure its critical contributions in the “ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation,” to quote from adaptation theorist Robert Stam. “Part I: Atwood Adapts” thus starts with Atwood’s undercutting of any hierarchical order between originator and adaptor by shedding light on her own adaptation practices particularly elaborated in her rewritings of Shakespeare’s Tempest (in Hag-Seed, 2016), Milton’s Paradise Lost (in The Heart Goes Last, 2015), and Homer’s Odyssey (in The Penelopiad, 2005). The essays in “Part II: Atwood Adapted” focus on the acclaimed adaptations of the novels Alias Grace and The Handmaid’s Tale for television, graphic novel, the opera as well as the wider public. Part III, “Atwood in the World”, offers insights into the purely practical questions of how to stage and to film Atwood’s most renowned narratives within three interviews. What stands out here is that stage directors and different cinematographers define their search for compositing a “photographic vocabulary from first-person retrospective narration, interior monologue, [and] dream” (Steacy) as a piece of hard work “to get people to […] watch your stories” (Watkinson). The practice of creating a “visual storytelling” to find a “dramatic and uplifting action” not only affected the filming, but moreover the staging of the originally non-dramatic text The Penelopiad (cf. Thornton). The interviews show how today’s creative industry indulges in the pleasure of reinventing the written word and transforming it into a vocabulary for the senses. Canada’s internationally acclaimed critical theorist of postmodern culture Linda Hutcheon has contributed an afterword in which she not only honors Atwood from her position as a literary scholar. She also praises Atwood from Rezensionen 165 the perspective of a fan. In Atwood, her compatriot sees a writer who has perfected the postmodern technique of adaptation, given that Atwood’s literary work has productively informed much of Hutcheon’s theoretical insights about adaptation itself. On a formal rather than content-based level, Hutcheon resumes Atwood’s writing technique in her commonly shrewd and trenchant manner: Atwood would have managed to “write back” to the classics of Western literature, to “write alongside” other oppositional rewritings and, by doing so, offer her readers “women’s versions of familiar stories”, and finally to please her audience with texts that are “written into (and out of)” an array of popular genres. In their introduction, the editors not only point to Atwood’s “very identity as a poet, essayist, cartoonist, environmentalist, and overall cultural figurehead” whose intertextuality and cultural recycling within innumerable genres and media have shaped her “lively presence on digital and social platforms since the 2000s” (4). Wells-Lassagne and McMahon’s unique idea is to further unravel how much Atwood has inscribed herself in the evolving landscape of new media production, distribution, and consumption. The editors are convinced that her writing against, alongside and into (or out of) literary conventions have inspired new ways of dealing with gendered narrative perspectives in much contemporary (dystopian) storytelling. This reminds me of a remark about complex television in the digital age by television scholar Jason Mittell; an observation that seems to speak to Atwood’s literary strategy. Atwood’s style parallels many of today’s complex TV narratives as they blur “the experiential borders between watching a program and engaging with its paratexts” (2015: 7). The Handmaid’s Tale as Atwood’s most adapted text is a proper example to prove this. The practice of adaptation as explored within the corpus of works by Margaret Atwood receives many different names the authors have borrowed from postmodern critical theory. The literary analyses in the first section, “Atwood Adapts,” for example, are discussing adaptation by ways of Genette’s “palimpsest” (Dvorak); explain Atwood’s approach to adaptation with “ghostly voices” from past literary influences that “haunt her writing” (Niemann); highlight various moments of “transformation” as an effect of post-human resilience within the post-apocalyptic worlds constituted in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (Crucitti); a theme which is further extended in the subsequent analysis that defines adaptation as an “ongoing act of biological survival” when looking at MaddAddam’s protean poetics (Coté); and finally view Atwood’s “mutation” of her own stage adaptation of the The Penelopiad as an act of “liberation” that freed a text from its generic hold. Bridging the gap between practice and theory has become a common method of much current popular cultural studies research which clearly identifies the contributors in the second part as ACAfans. The label was coined by the renowned cultural studies scholar Henry Jenkins. He invented the ACAfan category to refer to himself as an academically educated aficionado; as someone who indulges in recognition; and as someone whose active voice participates in what Stephen King once defined as the “cultural echo chambers” for which the practice of adaptation, to dwell upon the same musical metaphor, Rezensionen 166 provides the most sustainable instruments. Whereas the contributors of “Atwood Adapts” offer their readers oftentimes meticulous literary re-readings of many of Atwood’s more (or less) recent publications, “Atwood Adapted” follows a different approach. Here, six different ACAfans pay close attention to the benefits of audiovisual media in the process of updating Atwood’s feminist viewpoints in The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace for mass media entertainment. That being said, “Part II: Atwood Adapted” focuses on the realization of formal techniques such as the voicing of the “unreliable narrator” in Alias Grace or the conscious use of “shallow focus composition” in the awarded cinematography of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In such complex TV formats, the transformation of the written texts benefit from the very structure of a mix of serial openness and episodic closure as well as the visual and acoustic layers that guide the emotional nuances in the reception. Through the intersection of contemporary politics and the ongoing gender wars, the contribution by Elizabeth Mullen writes the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale “out of” the limits of mass entertainment and “into” the current sociopolitical climate. The series’ “impact on the larger world” not only shows the avenues for new forms of adaptation; an approach that Joyce Goggins sees evident when immersing into Renée Nault’s graphic novel. As Mullen points out, the story’s impact is even more manifest in the semiotic renderings of having transformed specific motifs from the novel into symbols of feminist empowerment that today emerge as forming the backbone of much #MeToo activism. Two essays of the “Atwood Adapted” section are little treasure troves as they shed light on the interdisciplinarity of adaptation and make understandable why this book needed to be written. By taking the artistic practice literally, these essays make clear that adaptation not only links literary and (popular) cultural studies or tries to find a place in film analysis, television theory, and semiotic musicology. What David Roche’s article “Shallow Focus Composition and the Poetics of Blur” and Helmut Reichenbächer’s “Offred at the Opera: Dimensions of Adaptation” accomplish is, even more importantly, to tie the reader in with the practical aspects of cinematography and libretto composition. The question what steps are necessary “to arrive at the opera” is skillfully answered by Helmut Reichenbächer. His contribution offers a comprehensive introduction to Poul Ruders and Paul Bentley’s complex linguistic system in their opera interpretation of The Handmaid’s Tale. In the same vein, David Roche investigates the ramifications of the cinephile technique of “shallow focus composition” in the TV series. Although the technique of the aesthetic blur - known from the Japanese “bokeh” photography that stylizes out-of-focus points of light - has become a cliché of much contemporary complex TV series to ensure the best possible cinephile experience, Roche argues into a different direction. To him, the blur in the otherwise deep-focused mise-en-scène compensates a lot for the novel’s visual language. According to Roche, the shallow focus composition becomes a marker of Offred’s subjectivity, her intimacy, and memory on the one hand. But on the other hand, the blur operates almost Rezensionen 167 allegorically as it visualizes the vertigo of an unstable homogeneity of the fundamentalist regime. It is a visual fulfilment of the perspective which Offred longs for in the novel, but only has words to do so. Roche delivers remarkable observations about the aesthetic quality of the blur which expresses the tension in the moment when it seems as if losing touch with reality; a nebulous feeling that viewers might know from the short moment before fainting, or when they try to remember a dream from last night. Taken together, the sixteen pieces in this volume, partly illustrated with colored stills and screenshots, photographs, diagrams, or musical scores, build a comprehensive piece of conducted research about the texts of Margaret Atwood and the art of adaptation that accompanies her and many other artists’ creative work. In the afterword, Linda Hutcheon once more finds the right words to explain what has happened to the art of adaptation: On roughly 250 pages, this volume shows how the mode of telling has been increasingly replaced by the mode of showing; a development which Atwood values time and again as a must if you want to have your finger on the pulse of the Zeitgeist (cf. 252). The fact that a great number of fans, academics, readers, or artists keep returning to the creative output of Margaret Atwood, or perhaps have first turned to her tellings by way of the showings, Atwood’s alchemy leaves no doubt that her magic “has to do, in one word, with relevance” (252). Sandra Danneil TU Dortmund University