The words given to you

The writer and music critic Paul Griffiths’s recently reissued Let Me Tell You (2008) is a short, intense, evocative novel in which the character of Ophelia steps forwards from the subsidiary role allocated to her in Hamlet to tell her own story. That the only words she is allowed to speak are those scant 481 originally given to her by Shakespeare does little to curtail her powers of expression. Griffiths’s O reveals herself to be complex, insightful and sensitive, determined above all to address the lack of agency she was accorded by the playwright.

A picture emerges of O as a young woman born to privilege, but crippled by the burden of duty and expectation such privilege commands. She grows up in a strange, disturbed household in which a fond but foolish father and a treacherous brother take turns to exploit her generous nature. Her mother – never named in Hamlet – abandons the family after showing signs of a psychosis that O is destined to inherit.

There is real fury here, a desperation that reminds us O’s mother is herself a victim. “She would tell me things that may have been true, but things I had no wish to know, and indeed no right to know … Did she know what she had done?”, O wonders aloud. “She had made it so I could not believe my own memory.” But while her mother’s cruelty may not be forgivable, there is no doubting her intelligence – a trait more constructively deployed by O’s maid, who reveals unwelcome truths about the prince who has captured her heart and defined her existence: “He, your young lord … will see the king on his knees. He’ll do nothing. When the time comes for him to do something, he will not. He’ll do it tomorrow, so he’ll tell himself. Take it from me, tomorrow never comes”.

“This is the reason for the maid’s speech”, O reflects afterwards, “to tell me that I have to do something if I wish to go on, if I wish to find another path, other words to speak than these words of death.” And it is this other path, this attempt to reshape her own destiny, that forms the substance of Griffiths’s newly published sequel, Let Me Go On. It picks up precisely where Let Me Tell You ended. “All I could say was what some other lay down for me”, O has discovered, “but look, if the words are all given you, what they say is not.”

Having broken free from the circularity of her predetermined role O finds herself wandering in a strange land – the snowy white expanse of the unwritten page. Here she encounters others of her kind, characters in search of their author, whom they call “the Master”. All have something to say about O’s current predicament: her faithless brother Laertes tries to shame her into returning to the family fold, while a roving band of kings quibble over the qualities that most worthily personify the royal estate. The nurse from Romeo and Juliet offers O her familiarly plain-spoken common sense, while Mistress Quickly – in a marvellous tavern scene ringing with bawdy songs, cockney rhyming slang and echoes of The Waste Land – provides a plate of victuals and a side of staunch advice. In this novel’s most touching episode O communes with an earlier incarnation of herself, their slightly differing vocabularies both a bridge and a barrier between them.

There is a danger with devotees of the Oulipo school – of whom Paul Griffiths is one – that their works will seem merely “clever”, lacking the passion and spontaneity that mark out, for example, the propulsive psychological dramas of Shakespeare. But Oulipians insist that the rules they set themselves are simply a deliberate manifestation of the constraints all writers struggle with, and that the success of any work of art must finally be measured by how effectively it surmounts its own limitations. One of Oulipo’s founders, Raymond Queneau, said of its proponents that they are “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”. He would presumably have found it satisfying that O’s final flight from the labyrinth of “letter strings” in Let Me Go On is a connivance between writer and reader that contrives to be both uncanny and deeply moving.

Nina Allan is a writer and critic. Her most recent novel is Conquest, 2023

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post The words given to you appeared first on TLS.