ABSTRACT
Focusing on John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (2000), this chapter explores how prequels employ narrative techniques and structures to problematise standard understandings of time. Firstly, prequels provide a way to reconsider causality, as the ‘past narrative’ of the prequel is controlled and – to some extent – caused by the future narrative of its related text. Secondly, prequels challenge us to rethink absence, presence and order, as they must first of all be non-present, non-existent; to come into existence, the prequel must first be suspended, as its future presence is predicated on its initial absence. Thirdly, prequels disturb our understanding of past, present and future, as they are always already proleptic; through both allusion and diegetic connection, the prequel refers to the future of its narrative successor, simultaneously anticipating and deferring this future. Moreover, past and future are not so easily discernible in the relationship between the prequel and its related text, as the ‘future’ narrative is a type of ‘past future’, a future that has already been. Ultimately, then, prequels can provoke reconsiderations of our temporal thinking and, crucially, how we construct narratives and sequences within and beyond literature; therein lies their potential.
