"The Handmaid’s Tale" by Margaret Atwood as a postmodern novel: dystopian genre transgression in postmodern era

Swift's intertext in M. Atwood's novel echoes the Enlightenment metanarrative. In the postmodernist ironic rethinking of Swift's pamphlet, written at the dawn of the 18th century, the preconditions for the decline of the Enlightenment project seem to be already discernible. Developed philosophy and the achievements of European enlightenment thought did not overcome the huge gap that separated the enlightened and wealthy sections of the population from the poor. The Industrial Revolution in England at the end of the 18th and early 19th centuries, which ended the Age of Enlightenment, indeed devalued Swift's proposal for the benefit of the homeland, preferring to save the lives of children to force them to work in factories for the benefit of the same homeland for 18 hours a day.

It is significant that despite the novel's numerous affirmations of the biblical thesis, “Gilead is a city of them that works iniquity, and is polluted with blood" [KJV, Hosea 6:8], in the “Historical Notes", written during the post-Gilead society, Cambridge University professor James Darcy Pieixoto, who in 2195 speaks at a symposium on the found records of Offred and the politics of Gilead, emphatically urges his audience to be cautious about passing moral judgment upon the Gileadeans ... not to censure but to understand, since such judgements are inevitably culturally dependent. This is the attitude the professor gives the audience before his narrative of the crimes of the totalitarian regime. At the same time, the scientific community is frankly amused by Pieixoto's report, as evidenced by the repeated repetition of the remark “Laughter". On the one hand, the “Historical Notes” indeed introduces a fair amount of optimism into the finale of the novel, characteristic of a postmodern dystopia, since the very event of the Twelfth Symposium on the history of Gilead indicates that Gilead really became history, and humanity experienced another political cataclysm, entering into the phase of democratic development. On the other hand, the description of Pieixoto's speech contains a fair amount of the author's irony, inherent in the genre of the postmodern novel. It indicates that in this text everything is not what it seems. In this regard, one cannot but agree with the opinion of researchers that the image of Professor Pieixoto in the “Historical Notes" correlates with the personality of Professor Perry Miller, whose name is indicated in the dedication to the novel. In this juxtaposition of the dedication and the “Historical Notes”, ironic relationships-links are established between scholars and the texts they (mis)read, between historical events and the historians who (mis)interpret them and give these texts value [Stein, 1994, p. 60]. In our opinion, irony somewhat dampens the sense of restrained optimism that arises in the reader at the novel's finale, since a wrong reading of history can become dangerous. In this sense, the “Historical Notes" can be seen as the author's parody of liberalism gaining momentum in the West with its inherent policy of tolerance - another metanarrative that is not yet a thing of the past but is already losing credibility. In 1985, Peter Nicholson published an article in New York with the iconic title “Toleration as a Moral Ideal,” which capped the debate about tolerance that flared up in the 1970s among English and American sociologists, political scientists and philosophers. Analysing these concepts, P. Nicholson concluded that tolerance is an inherent moral virtue of a free man and a responsible government policy, “Toleration is the virtue of refraining from exercising one's power to interfere with others' opinion or action although that deviates from one's own over something important and although one morally disapproves of it” [Nicholson, 1985, p. 162]. It seems that the position of the outside observer, which Professor Pieixoto adopts by choosing not to pass, not to censure, is that of a tolerant gentleman who has chosen to tolerate and accept what does not coincide with his moral attitudes. In such a context, “not to pass, not to censure” signifies a refusal to comprehend the past, and, therefore to separate the present and future from it, indicating the dangerous serenity of the distant descendant of Gilead. Consideration of the position of the post-Gilead liberal society and specifically the behaviour of Pieixoto in the aspect of tolerance reveals a semantic and compositional connection with Swift's intertext. The epigraph from Swift's “A Modest Proposal” and the “Historical Notes” that close the novel frame Offred's narrative, creating a kind of circular composition that encapsulates the idea of history repeating itself - the position of impartial, ironic observer taken by historical scholars does not allow for a lesson to be learned from past. Such a position is fraught with a return to the implementation of perverted modest proposals, such as gloves made of human skin.

It should be noted that the parodic and ironic intertext that permeates the narrative outline of the novel, in addition to the important substantive function of rethinking the great metanarratives, plays an important compositional role, presenting different points of view on the problem of the position of women in society and, more broadly, totalitarianism from the point of view of a cultural-historical perspective and retrospectives.

Playing with time: anthropologising the chronotope as a prism for reanimating the heroine's self-identity

In the novel, the artistic model of chronotope is realised in the image of the Republic of Gilead, which supposedly exists in the United States of America. In turn, the image of the Republic includes several spatio-temporal elements: physical, geographical, social, and cultural, which correlate with models of personal chronotope, embodied in the images of a house, rooms, road, and garden. The image of the Republic of Gilead is an important plot-forming factor of the novel, which simultaneously embodies two opposing archetypes: on the one hand, the Republic of Gilead is a sacred place, because it is built on the principles of religion and sacred symbols play an important role: the church, the Soul Scrolls, a place for prayer, which is evidence of the presence of a religious chronotope (this is a new element of the chronotope of the dystopian genre of the second half of the 20th century). However, on the other hand, the author demonstrates the desacralization of the religious space, expressing an opinion about the ambiguity and duality of its purpose: a colony, a brothel. That is, the Republic of Gilead acquires at the same time the signs of heaven and hell, sinful and holy, majestic and vile, sacred and profane.

The image of the Republic embodies a model of social chronotope (in M. Atwood's novel, religious and totalitarian) that affects the consciousness and psychological state of the heroine. Offred's psychological state is accentuated by a sense of fear, which becomes the driving force behind her actions and behaviour. The motif of fear in the novel becomes a cross-cuffing one and is realised in both the external and psychological portrait of the heroine, where the decisive role is played by the detail - a lowered head, closed face, gaze at the ground, clasped hands, small steps, etc: “We aren't allowed to go there except in twos. This is supposed to be for our protection, though the notion is absurd: we are well protected already. The truth is that she is my spy, as I am hers. If either of us slips through the net because of something that happens on one of our daily walks, the other will be accountable" [Atwood, 2002, p. 30]. Another means of implementing the fear motif is the motivation of the heroine's words and actions, which is not to encourage her to take a certain action, but rather to refuse to act or speak, and is expressed in the phrases, “I can't take the risk", and “I should not take unnecessary risks".

The author focuses on depicting the house as an important element of social space. Even though it was built for a rich and large family, the house reinforces and reflects the inner emptiness, loss of orientation, and aimlessness of life for its owners. Offred's room in this house is her little space, containing the past and the present, and, like no other, possesses and will possess all the secrets of the maids who have been here before and who will appear. The room, as a closed space, acts as a mute witness to the Maid's suffering, which no one but her knows about.

However, the image of the totalitarian state as a social space that evokes fear is not the main one and is rather an indispensable attribute of a traditional dystopian plot. In the novel, through the external spatial image of the Republic, the heroine's personal space is actualised, embodied in the images of a room and a garden with an emphasis on their detailed descriptions. The spatial images that connect Offred with the past (the garden) and the present (the room) are the personification of the heroine's personal time, “I once had a garden. I can remember the smell of the turned earth, the plump shapes of the bulbs held in my hands, the fullness, the dry rustle of seeds through my fingers. Time could pass more swiftly that way” [Atwood, 2002, p. 22]. The image of the room as a space of being alone with herself, which makes self-reflection possible, is the most important means of reproducing the heroine's inner world, her self-identity, which occurs in the process of rethinking her past life, its values and traditions. Thus, it is in the room that her personal time comes to life, reflected primarily in her memories and dreams, where the key images are those of a mother, husband, and daughter.

The image of the garden as a personal space - an integral part of the parental home, created together with his mother, and family values - is also connected with memories. In addition, through the personal time of memories, the novel recreates the mode of historical memory, which brings to life the traditions of the past.

The writer's appeal to the literary traditions of past eras is also reflected in the tendency to revive the naturalistic principles of depicting reality. The detailed descriptions of the room, the heroine's appearance, her gestures, and her behaviour acquire the features of naturalistic documentation, including details in the description of physiological processes (childbirth, the Ceremony).

The novel describes the events of the distant future. Hence the inevitable attempt to look into the future, the desire to finish the story, to see tomorrow. The combination of the past and the present is presented in one synchronous perception. Such temporal substitutions help us understand the formation of the protagonist's character. In the novel, the past interacts with the present, so the protagonist lives in two temporal dimensions: the past and the present. The fragmentation of memories directly serves to express the interpenetration of both temporal planes. This tendency of displaying time allows us to consider events from the point of view of the past and the present.

In the novel, the past tense is constantly being restored by the protagonist, brought to life in the present by her inner state. In her memory, Offred strives to revisit her past repeatedly, driven by a fear of losing it. The past, to her, is the most precious possession. Her inner time is turned to the world of the past and memory. In the images-memories that “revive” the heroine's personal existence, the problem of finding her own identity, her own “I”, is comprehended.

Time appears as the history of the past, which can only be re-read in the mind, making it possible to analyse an event from the perspective of the past and the present. Memories of the past evoke a sense of madness in the heroine, which is happening now. “I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it" [Atwood, 2002, p. 242]. The actualisation of the retrospective plan in the novel shifts the emphasis to the individualisation of the protagonist's image. In this sense, her narrative is full of self-reflection, where a particular place is occupied by memories of her past life, which causes reminiscences with the flow of consciousness as the narrative style of V. Woolf's heroine Clarissa Dallo- way, which reveals a strong connection with the traditions of modernism in creating an image of inner human individuality as a value in itself.

The image of night becomes a crucial component of the chronotope. Important events in Offred's life are associated with night-time. The significance of night-time is also revealed in the composition of the novel, which is divided into “day” and “night” chapters. At night, Offred belongs to herself, to her reflections on the present state of affairs and memories of the past. At this time, important events in the Maid's life take place: secret meetings with the Commander, with Nick, the last moments in the house and her escape. In the novel, night is the personification of the heroine's personal time.

The possibility of self-reflection, due to the presence of personal chronotope, is a prerequisite for overcoming her fear - Offred's psychological state declared as dominant at the beginning of the story, and for carrying out a personal (existential) rebellion, based on the desire to find inner freedom and her own identity. The successful escape of the heroine (overcoming the boundaries of the closed dystopian space) indicates the Canadian writer's departure from the pessimistic ending inherent in the tradition of classical dystopia.

Acting as a way of preserving self-identity (retrospection into the past, keeping in consciousness the image of the house and family), the chronotope in the novel is anthropologised, revealing the indispensable “presence of a chronotope in a person and a person in a chronotope” [Sirotkin, 2022, p. 277]. In identifying herself with space (“I am like a room where things once happened" [Atwood, 2002, p. 113]) and time (“[I] step sideways out of my own time. Out of time. Though this is time, nor am I out of it" [Atwood, 2002, p. 49]), Offred is reflected in chronotope, and the image of chronotope becomes a way of comprehending the image of Offred.

Monologue, dialogue or polylogue? Options for playing with the reader

The game mode of the narrative asserts itself in the very first pages of the novel, opening a window of opportunity for deciphering and interpreting the protagonist's name, both the real one, which is not specified in the novel, and the one assigned by the laws of Gilead by the name of the Commander (Fred), whose house she entered and was given to use to bear a child by him, and was deprived of this name when she left this house - Offred.

Researchers have noted that the real name of the protagonist is encrypted in the very first pages of the novel at the end of the first chapter. The scene when the girls, locked in a huge shared bedroom (former gymnasium), whispered their real names at night (“We exchanged names, from bed to bed: Alma. Janine. Moira. June" [Atwood, 2002, p. 14]). According to researchers, the heroine's real name is June, because it is the only name that is not connected to any of the characters and, except at the beginning, is never mentioned again in the narrative ([Templin, 1993], [Howells, 2005], [Thomas, 2008], etc). Charlotte Templin points out that “June" comes from the Latin “Junius”, the name of a noble Roman family and is the most popular of the names derived from the names of the months of the year, and is associated with youth and innocence [Templin, 1993, p. 149]. Sharing the researcher's opinion, we also note that the name “June" simultaneously suggests a mythopoetic reading, since the name of the month goes back to the name of the ancient Roman goddess “Juno” - the patroness of marriage and motherhood, the protector of women. This role, in fact, is fulfilled by the protagonist - the narrator, speaking on behalf of the women of Gilead.

In the social aspect, a name means a person rather than just a word; in the anthropological aspect, it embodies a personal substance. The heroine's real name is connected with the problem of preserving her own identity, her own “I”, the marker of which in the novel is Offred's personal name, unknown to the reader, which is forbidden in the conditions of the religiously totalitarian present, but carefully preserved in her memory like a treasure, endlessly repeated in private as a spell, almost visualised in the heroine's mind, “the name floats there behind my eyes, not quite within reach, shining in the dark" [Atwood, 2002, p. 95].

In addition, the meaning of one's own name is also connected with a religious meaning. Olivier-Maurice Clement notes that the secret of the personality imperceptibly appears in the name. A name is the knowledge that God has about each person. “I know thee by name” [KJV, Exodus 33:12, 33:17]; “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee" [KJV, Jeremiah 1:5]. These are quotes from the Old Testament. The theme of the name means that the Lord names everyone, giving life to everyone. Jesus says, “...your names are written in heaven" [KJV, Luke 10:20]. The Apocalypse says that everyone's mystical, hidden name is written on a white stone [Clement, 2003, ðð. 20-21]. In the novel, the heroine's name as such is absent, which means that not only is her faith absent, but for God, the heroine also seems to be non-existent; she is erased from both worlds. In other words, she both exists and does not exist (in this regard, the play with the meanings of the word “invalid" is noteworthy - Offred compares herself to a disabled person and immediately puts an equal sign between the meanings, “incapacitated" = “invalid" as not existing in reality and not having legal force, like “no valid passport" [Atwood, 2002, p. 238]). On the one hand, this ephemeral, flickering image of Offred appears as an element of the author's game with the reader - the author brings the narrative closer to reality, involving the reader in the action, creating the 'faction' effect, or creates a distance between the novel narrative and reality, implying that everything told is fictitious (the 'fiction' effect).

It is noteworthy that in an interview with Margaret Atwood, answering a question about the name “June," she did not confirm the researchers' guess, but did not refute it either, saying that this name would suit the heroine [Atwood, 2017]. Even after many years, the author continues to implement the gaming strategy, encouraging readers and researchers to search for new meanings, ciphers and interpretations of the novel's text.

This game strategy is also associated with the interpretation of the name Offred, which forms a wide field of variations in the works of researchers: Offred as Offered (as her sexuality encoded under a contract and “offered as property" [Rubenstein, 2001, p. 13]; sacrificed to society [Kaler, 1989, p. 47]); Offred as Of Red (since it is an analogue of the Whore of Babylon, the scarlet woman of mystery from Revelation 17 [Kaler, 1989, p. 47]); Offred as Afraid (as she is intimidated [Lacombe, 1986, p. 5]). However, the most interesting to us is Michelle Lacombe's interpretation of Offred as 'offread', which can mean 'unread' (misread) or 'misread' (misinterpret) [Lacombe, 1986, p. 5].

On the one hand, the 'misread' may refer to the “Historical Notes” and Professor Pieixo- to's 'reading' of Offred's personality. His 'reading' of Offred, like his reading of the history of Gilead, is indeed quite superficial, since, as we mentioned earlier, his position as a detached observer does not suggest the depth of study and learning from history. Let us mention that many researchers emphasise that Pieixoto's statements indicate the persistence of sexism and a “condescendingly superior" attitude towards women in the post-Gilead era [Grace, 1998, p. 481]. However, it seems to us that the point is not only that the attitude towards women has not changed. Much more important is the frivolity that a history professor shows in relation to the past, being in the illusion that their era has gotten rid of all the “excesses" of history, (“Also, Gileadean society was under a good deal of pressure, demographic and otherwise, and was subject to factors from which we ourselves are happily more free" [Atwood, 2002, p. 316]).

In this regard, an interesting parallel arises associated with the decoding of the name 'Pieix- oto', which is consonant with the name 'Quixote' and introduces the motif of quixotism into the professor's narrative (the consonance of these names was noted by Anne K. Kaler [1989], without giving any explanation, but her observation prompted us to develop this idea further). The playful reading of the name 'Pieixoto' as 'Quixote' indicates an ironic interpretation of the image of Pieixoto as an inverse version of the “knight of the sad image” - both concerning his penchant for sexism and in relation to his utopianism, stemming from excessive idealism (this is how quixotism is usually interpreted in a negative sense). Two points are of interest here. Firstly, in the eyes of Pieixoto, Gilead appears as a world that is “misread” (misinterpreted), like Don Quixote's imaginary world, in which he believes. Thus, the postmodernist interpretation of history as a “story” or “tale” is asserted, which connects/brings together the images of Offred and Pieixo- to. Secondly, the novel actualises the play with the notions of “utopia” and “utopianism”, which researchers prefer to distinguish to differentiate [Popper, 1945; Claeys, 2018]. Thus, Karl Popper argued that since utopias depict an ideal society, and the ideal is unattainable, then utopianism inevitably leads to totalitarianism and violence as a means of imposing a utopia [Popper, 1945]. This, in fact, is the other side of the dystopian narrative revealed in “The Handmaid's Tale”.

Playing with the names of the characters sets the variability in the reading of their images, which in turn determines the variability in the reading of the texts-narratives transmitted (formed) by them and opens up for them as narrators the possibility of playing with the reader. The monologues of Offred and Pieixoto appear as both dialogues and polylogues, each of which reveals its own gaming strategy.

The narrative of Offred as the primary narrator, at first glance, is a monologue - the narration is conducted in the first person, mainly in the present tense, interrupted by reminiscences in the past tense. In the retrospective narrative-memoir, we can distinguish two temporal layers - the pre-Gilead period of Offred's peaceful life with her husband and daughter and the period of her initial stay in Gilead - memories of the heroine's training time, conveying information about the almost prison regime as a condition of her existence (Chapter I). Offred's narrative is non-linear and fragmented - a retrospective plan is superimposed on a present-tense narrative, which, in turn, includes fears about the future, which gives the heroine's monologue the features of a stream of consciousness. However, it is precisely this form of the Handmaid's story - fragmentary, sometimes confusing - that best conveys both the state of her soul and the state of torn consciousness, which Offred herself hints at, “Story is in fragments, like a body caught in cross" [Atwood, 2002, p. 281]. Such a temporally multilayered text is complicated by a game mode, manifested in the variability of the heroine's narration of events, “He's in his shirt sleeves, and is holding a cigarette, lit... He moves away from me, turns off the lamp. Outside, like punctuation, there's a flash of lightning; almost no pause and then the thunder. He's undoing my dress, a man made of darkness... I made that up. It didn't happen that way. Here is what happened. He's in his shirt sleeves, he's holding a cigarette... No preliminaries, he knows why I'm here. To get knocked up, to get in trouble, up the pole, those were all names for it once... It didn't happen that way either. I'm not sure how it happened; not exactly. All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate" [Atwood, 2002, pp. 277-279]. This kind of narrative specificity makes the line between the actual event being narrated and the heroine's imagination/dream of the event as a suggestion of how it might have happened very shaky, giving the reader a choice of interpretation.

In the course of the narration, Offred's monologue turns into a dialogue - her story finds an addressee and, in the novel's finale, a recipient Researchers in the field of narratology suggest distinguishing between the notions of `addressee' and `recipient'. Thus, Wolf Schmid states, “The recipient can be divided into two entities, which differ <...> into the addressee and the recipient. The addressee is the receiver presumed or intended by the transmitter, the one to whom the transmitter sends his message, whom he had in mind as the presumed or desired receiver while writing; the recipient is the factual receiver, of whom the transmitter possibly -- and, in the case of literature, as a rule -- has only a general mental picture. The necessity of a distinction of this sort is clear: if, for example, a letter is not read by the person who was the intended addressee, but by someone else into whose hands it happens to fall, inconvenience may arise” [Schmid, 2010, p. 34].. Offred addresses her story to a fictional interlocutor - an impliedfictive reader-addressee - hoping for his understanding and sympathy, “But I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance, if I meet you... By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are" [Atwood, 2002, p. 281-282]. Here, the final phrase, “I tell, therefore you are” attracts attention, representing a paraphrase of the Cartesian statement Cogito ergo sum - “I think, therefore I am", which in this case indicates the materiality of thought: in the novel it is mentioned that the maid's story is being told mentally, and yet the thought is formed into a text intended for someone, and the ability to create and transmit this text is the key not only to the existence of the author but also to the existence of the reader/readers, which significantly expands and universalises Descartes' formula.

However, at the level of the overall novel narrative, another level of dialogue emerges - Of- fred's notes get to Professor Pieixoto, who becomes not their intended, but their actual recipient - an explicitfictive reader-receiver. His condescending and mocking attitude towards the author of the notes and towards the customs of Gilead, which we mentioned above, does not allow us to say that this is precisely the kind of reader Offred was counting on. Based on Offred's found recordings, Pieixoto (as a secondary narrator) reads his report-monologue, which is addressed to the audience of the symposium and develops into a dialogue - the professor receives feedback from the audience, expressed in the text through the remarks of the audience's reactions to his report (“Laughter', “Laughter, applause", “Laughter, some groans", “Applause"). The style of the professor's report, who does not want to delve into the problems of history, and the reactions of the audience, who are primarily in the mood for entertainment, shift the focus away from the content of Offred's story - the image of the society (world) of the future, which presents only a seeming contrast to the world of Gilead, comes to the fore. We also note that Pieixoto's report employs the same game strategy as Offred's narrative: the report suggests several possibilities for the ending of the Handmaid's story - 1) she managed to escape (since the recordings, according to Pieixoto's claim, could only have been made post facto of the events depicted in the story and most likely outside Gilead [Atwood, 2002, p. 316]), 2) she failed to escape from Gilead (since the report assumes that the tapes were recorded within the confines of Gilead [Atwood, 2002, p. 319]), 3) indefinite option - “We shall never know..." [Atwood, 2002, p. 325] Here we can discern a reference to the game strategy of J. Fowles, who at once proposed three options for the ending of the novel in the novel “The French Lieutenant's Woman".. At the same time, the plurality of readings in this case does not so much question the secondary narrator's point of view as it presents it as one of the possible options for creating the text.

The voice of the author, present in both narratives - both Offred's and Pieixoto's - and uniting them, forms a polylogue in which the image of the author (in this case, the implied author), being a guide to the main idea of the novel, organises the metatext as an image of the dystopian universe and, as it were, comments on the events and actions of the characters, embodying its game strategy. The author's point of view is present in Swift's (Jonathan Swift) intertext, in the playful comprehension of character names and topoi (as discussed above) and in the structural organisation of the novel's narrative. In terms of structure, the most interesting is the principle of framing that we have already mentioned - Offred's narrative is framed by dedications and epigraphs at the beginning and the “Historical Notes” in the finale. The “Historical Notes” use the “manuscript found in a bottle” device (the tapes of Offred's story are found by Pieixoto in a valise at the site of the former city of Bangor) and the academic report of a scholar-historian as a way of pseudo-documentary framing. As Patrick D. Murphy mentions, pseudo-documentary framing is more believable because it conforms to journalistic and academic writing traditions. This appeal may be due to the influence of “New Journalism” and the popularity of the “non-fiction novel”. The researcher believes that the pseudo-documentary framing is intended to reduce the dystopian distance between tenor and vehicle and thus further demonstrate the strangeness of what has already become commonplace: the dystopian features of the present and the possible horrors of the future [Murphy, 1990, pp. 25, 27]. We see the importance of such framing, particularly the role of the “Historical Notes”, in two other ways. First, it is Pieixoto, as a researcher of Gilead's history, not Offred, who gives the reader an insight into the structure of that state, completing her story. As Patrick D. Murphy points out, unlike many first-person science fiction stories, “The Handmaid's Tale” does not explain the created world at the outset, but reveals it in dark tones through a narrative focused on direct individual experience [Murphy, 1990, p. 34]. This shifts the emphasis from the problems of social structure inherent in the genre of dystopia to Offred's inner feelings and experiences - it is not the image of the dystopian society that becomes the main thing, but the image of a person in this society. Secondly, in the “Historical Notes", the author, in fact, presents another dystopia, already in the year 2195 - the symposium takes place at the University of Denay in the state of Nunavit. Here, the author resorts to a play on words: University of Denay, Nunavit - a pun meaning “Deny none of it' [Snodgrass, 2011, p. 42], which calls for no illusions that Nunavit society is free from the tyranny of Gilead. A certain similarity between Gilead and Nunavit is also indicated by the possible decoding of the word “Denay" as “Danae", which, according to Mary Ellen Snodgrass, refers to the character of ancient mythology - Danae, being imprisoned in an underground copper house, was fertilised by the sun ray of Zeus [Snodgrass, 2011, p. 42]. Thus, the author practically equates the theocratic-totalitarian dystopia (Gilead) and the liberal-democratic “pseudo-utopia” (Nuna- vit), warning that the liberal “utopia” can slide into a totalitarian dystopia at any moment. Here, we wholeheartedly agree with Patrick D. Murphy that there is a highly ominous note in the historian's smug statement at the end when he refers to the “clearer light of our own day" [Murphy, 1990, p. 35]. In this situation, the cautiously optimistic ending presented by the author is, in fact, another form of play, since such an ending is possible for Offred, but, apparently, is not possible for all humanity. As a result, the same idea pulsates in M. Atwood's novel as in A. Huxley's dystopias - a perfect social order cannot be built until the imperfect nature of man can be changed (in “The Handmaid's Tale", this point is indirectly confirmed by the fact that Pieixoto is more concerned with how he looks on the podium than with the content of the found records and the historical problems associated with them).

The polylogue, which sets the parameters of the game with narrative levels in the text itself, continues in numerous discussions of researchers, readers, and dialogues with Margaret Atwood. The narrative of “The Handmaid's Tale" transcends both the dystopian narrative and the literary work itself, entering into transtextual relations with other texts and discourses - polemics at the level of literary studies, philosophy, sociology, and political science are maintained even today. The transtext of “The Handmaid's Tale", as a text that considers the specificity of content “as an intermediate step before the multilevel decoding process" [Zhu, Wang, 2022], is still being created today, acquiring the features of an ongoing narrative. The complex structure of the novel-transtext can be represented as follows:

In this scheme The scheme of communicative levels in Wolf Schmid's narratology and terminology is taken as a basis [Schmid, 2010, p. 35]., the concrete author is Mrs Margaret Atwood, the famous writer who created the novel “The Handmaid's Tale". In her interviews and essays, she comments on her work repeatedly, answering questions from readers and critics [see, for example, Atwood, 2017].

The abstract author is understood as the image of the author in the novel, created by the reader in the process of comprehension of the work by the latter - a concentrated embodiment of the idea of the failure of great cultural narratives that failed due to unwillingness to take into account the lessons of history.

The represented dystopian world of the novel is a single dystopian universe in the unity of the images of Gilead and Nunavit in the totality of all creative acts, including the creation of images of characters, their texts, intertextual implications, principles of game strategy, etc.

The primary narrator is the image of Offred, who acts as the narrator of the main story.

The narrative "Gilead" is Offred's diary, which tells about the internal (mental and spiritual) state of the heroine, her lifestyle and functions in Gilead and presents the image of the republic through the eyes of her subject (the view from the inside).

The implied fictive reader-addressee is the desired reader/interlocutor to whom Offred intends her story.

The explicit fictive reader-receiver is the image of Pieixoto, who is the accidental actual recipient of Offred's “message”.

The secondary narrator is the image of Pieixoto, who presents his own narrative, a report on Gilead at a symposium in Nunavit, based on readings of Offred's recordings.

The narrative "The History of Gilead" is the text of Pieixoto's report on the structure of the theocratic totalitarian dystopian state of Gilead, based on Offred's accidentally found and listened recordings, representing the perception of Gilead through the eyes of an outside observer (an outsider's view).

The explicit fictive reader-addressee is the community of scholars at the symposium listening to Pieixoto's report and reacting to what they hear.

Thenarrative "Nunavit"is the image of the liberal-democratic pseudo-utopian society Nunavit, seen in the subtext of Pieixoto's report.

The abstract reader is a hypostasis of Margaret Atwood's idea of her reader as educated, well-read, erudite, capable of deciphering the intertext and meeting the level of the play.

The concrete reader is the set of real people, including researchers and critics, who became recipients of the novel “The Handmaid's Tale".

Conclusions

In the context of the postmodern dystopian paradigm, the genre of dystopia is significantly transformed. Changes in the substantive aspects of the genre are associated with a reduction in the gap between dystopian and real time, the affirmation of a relatively optimistic tone, the lability of the dystopian world (which predetermines the conditionally metaphorical nature of the chronotope, the amorphousness of spatial and discrete time boundaries), and a shift in emphasis to the inner world of the character. The increased degree of anthropocentrism, which is characteristic of postmodern dystopia, determines the change in the nature of the protagonist's rebellion against the totalitarian regime - the focus of social rebellion shifts to personal existential (the struggle to preserve one's own identity), where it is not the result that is important, but its philosophical content.

At the same time, dystopia also absorbs the features of the postmodern novel form and postmodern narrative strategy, mastering the techniques of intertextuality and rethinking the traditions of the past, irony and parody, playing with time and the author's game with the reader. Moreover, the function of the author's game strategy is not only to make the reader a coauthor of the text but also to encourage him to make multiple interpretations. The multifaceted nature of the game draws the reader into the action and forces one to reflect on the windows of opportunity opening up in modern civilization, that is, to perceive the story of Gilead as more than just exciting storytelling. The game mode reveals the author's ideological and contentbased storytelling strategy - through intertext (as a combination of multi-level chronotopes and cultural texts), on the one hand, and through involvement in the experiences of Offred, on the other, to encourage/force the reader to experience the entire history of Christian civilization, presented in the dystopian heroine's narrative.

In contact with the aesthetics of postmodernism, dystopia loses its inherent “conservatism”, blurring the boundaries of its own genre. It is subject to transgression, constantly going beyond itself, approaching reality and moving away from it, playing on the ironic reinterpretation of its own genre principles - the confrontation between the hero and totalitarian society ends not with the desired revolution and change of the world order, but with the escape from the “totalitarian paradise”; the image of the totalitarian state itself “blurs”, multiplies, balancing between dictatorship proper and liberal democracy; the narrative strategy is subordinated to the principle of total play, when not only the author but also the hero plays with the reader, when everything is not what it seems, and everything is only one of many possibilities, including history; when comprehending both possibilities (Gilead and Nunavit), presented in the narratives of two narrators, and creating on their basis a single dystopian universe, the author concentrates not on the problems of ideal/anti-ideal social order, but on the questions of how to survive mankind, vigorously walking along the path self-destruction, and how far a person can go in their inexhaustible thirst for power, hiding under the mask of the desire to improve the world's existence. For all the worst, as the novel's cultural intertext suggests, has long since been created and tested.

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