There is a long tradition, stretching back to the earliest days of the modern "novel," of writers attempting to add to or revise the narrative of a favorite novel by shifting attention to a minor or secondary character from the original, re-telling the story from a different perspective. A fine and famous example is Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which tells the earlier life of Rochester's mad wife, from Jane Eyre. Another clever one is Mary Reilly, the re-telling of the Jekyll and Hyde story from a servant woman's perspective. Occasionally, as with Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, the same process can be applied to characters from a play.
In recent years, we have had a flood of such stories, some of them just "fan fiction"--devoted readers extending the stories of their favorite fictional characters, often on line. Others have exploited the popularity of particular writers, Jane Austen being possibly the most frequent source of novels purporting to reveal the inner secrets or truths of her minpr characters. The Bronte sisters also have provided such foundations, as has Virginia Woolf. What we hope for when we read such novels is a deepening of our understanding of the previously secondary character, or possibly a radically new understanding of the significance of the narrative, perhaps benefiting from what has been called "the Rashomon effect." And we might ask whether Nicole Galland has supplied such added values in her novel, I, Iago? I am afraid that the answer is no.
Iago is one of the darkest and most mysterious of all of Shakespeare's characters; efforts to unravel his motivations and to elucidate his meaning have offered many critics and actors significant challenges, and though many have offered exciting performances and subtle interpretations, I think no one would claim that his mystery has been solved, except by reductive explanations which do not satisfy. Even the great libretto by Arrigo Boito for Verdi's opera is forced to impose a narrowing and brutalizing characterization in order to make Iago fit into the narrowed focus of the operatic interpretation.
Nicole Galland, to be fair, has done a good job of researching the social and geographical background of Iago's life, and she provides convincing portrayals of his youth (growing up as a younger son in a strictly hierarchical culture that leaves him a lower standing, even though he is carefully presented as a boy and young man of superior intellect--exactly the kind of bright teenager who develops a fierce disgust with the culture and fashions around him, especially since he feels not only excluded but underappreciated according to his own estimate of his superior value and intelligence), of his military training, his courtship of Emilia, and his first encounter with the man who will be his nemesis, Othello. Roughly the first half of Galland's novel, therefore, provides the pleasures of a conventional historical novel--a bit of foreign culture and social behavior, some references to food and entertainment, and an outline of family structures and courtship customs.
Once Iago and Othello begin to work together, however, we quickly find ourselves on the stage of Shakespeare's play, complete with occasional quotations and more frequent allusions to Shakespeare's language, and very slightly altered (by perspective) versions of the familiar scenes of the play. It is at this point that we would hope for some new insights, some surprises, perhaps a twist that will show us to our amazement that what we have thought about Iago is simply not correct, or not sufficient. That is not to be. Galland falls back very quickly on the familiar and simplistic explanation of Iago's behavior--that he resents Othello's failure to promote him, further inflaming his jealousy of the Florentine interloper, Cassio, and that he is bothered by insinuations he encounters that Othello has a sexual interest in his wife, Emilia, as well as in Desdemona. We follow his tortured reasoning as he plots to discredit Cassio, on the assumption that Othello's favor to Cassio is just a momentary lapse, and he will surely see the value of honoring Iago, instead. Iago exploits Othello's insecurity and his shame about his epilepsy; Iago exploits Cassio's vanity and sense of entitlement; Iago exploits his friend, Roderigo's naive loyalty and wealth, implicating him in a murderous plot; perhaps most shamefully and foolishly, Iago exploits Emilia's love and faith in him to help him advance his effort to persuade Othello of Desdemona's infidelity. All these lead to the calamity we know from the final scenes--Othello's murder of Desdemona, Iago's murder of Emilia, Othello's suicide, Iago's vow never to say another word.
This novel reads smoothly and plausibly; it offers elegant presentations of historical details. Unfortunately, at no point does it show the least bit of creative daring or invention. Anyone familiar with the play will see the all-too-obvious building blocks being set in place through the first half of the novel--we know long before it is made explicit that Iago is likely to be resentful if those he admires do not offer him the praise and advancement that he feels he deserves from them. His injured self-esteem repeatedly reminds us of what is to come, and his self-deception about his own superiority is obviously his fatal flaw. And when the story reaches the point of the beginning of the play, everything falls into place with clockwork regularity. In the process, we realize that we will never learn anything new about Othello, Desdemona, or Cassio, nor even Emilia, because though Iago often boasts to himself that he knows and understands the behavior of those around him, we can see that he really is portrayed as deceiving himself about them in order to serve his own plans and plots. So in this novel, Othello remains a lesser character than he is in the play because Iago is incapable of perceiving him fully; the same for Desdemona (totally undeveloped), and the others. There is, in other words, nothing in this novel to justify its addition to the literary canon, since it is little more than a pastiche, or perhaps not much less.
It might be said that if Galland had made significant changes to the plot or characterizations, she would be faulted for doing that, "violating" the great work of Shakespeare; no doubt someone would have said that, but the question would be whether the innovations worked aesthetically or not; if they did, the objections would be brushed aside; if not, the objections would be less significant than the failure to create a successful new work of art. In this case, we will never know, though someone else might attempt an Iago novel in the future.
