Monster of the Isle

Thanks to Brandon for giving us/you a separate container/thread for any residual Tempest conversation, to which I guess I'm adding another -- there's still so much to comment on, I suspect. In a play that is, we might say, about the making of identity and about contingent, constructed realities (and about ontological undoing as a result of storms and being "sea-swallowed"), it's interesting to contemplate, as we did briefly in class last week, the "deformity" and visual representation of Caliban. Without any kind of detailed knowledge of the history of these representations on the stage and in film, I'd propose that it probably doesn't matter "how" he's deformed; Peter Hulme writes that "the difficulty in visualizing Caliban cannot be put down to a failure of clarity in the text. Caliban, as a compromise formation, can exist only within discourse: he is fundamentally and essentially beyond the bounds of representation." George Lamming, in another great book, The Pleasures of Exile, sees Caliban as standing in for the Other, as "the excluded, that which is eternally below possibility"; this aspect of Caliban does authorize us to situate this text quite directly within the poetics and discourses of the New World.

Some of you, by the way, might want to take note of (and maybe track down) Hulme's useful and penetrating book, Colonial Encounters: in addition to a chapter on Prospero and Caliban, the book includes a survey of other adventure/discovery stories involving the likes of Columbus, Robinson Crusoe, John Smith and Pocahontas, etc.

Much of the postcolonial/ideological debate surrounding this play revolves around choosing between Ariel and Caliban as a way of understanding one's past and imagining one's future (whether individually or collectively as a nation). Both are subject to Prospero, of course, but Ariel is a willing subject while Caliban is more forcefully enslaved. Ariel accepts Prospero's directives and, at play's end, seems ready to regain his freedom in a kind of untroubled way (i.e., as Edward Said notes, he projects as a kind of "bourgeois native untroubled by his collaboration with Prospero"). Choosing to align oneself with Caliban, though, implies either accepting his mongrel past while looking ahead with some optimism to emancipated development, or escaping the state of abjection and seeking out his originary essence -- i.e., the identity and history that predate the contamination that resulted from the colonial encounter. As Said proposes, we can say that "both Calibans nourish and require each other," even as each suggests different central investments and political purposes. As we move forward in this class and with our subsequent readings, Caliban will perhaps more evidently come to be seen as a kind of representative for all who were similarly subjugated. Anyway, feel free to weigh in and to keep building up the relevance of Shakespeare's play to our inquiry. There seem to be all sorts of relevant keywords we might use as jumping off points: exile, displacement, shipwreck, the sea, Robinson Crusoe, usurpation, bondage, coercion, the decentering of power and legitimacy, language and representation, historiography, etc.

See you in a couple days.