retamar caliban (2 page)

One of the most widely disseminated European utopian works is Montaigne’s essay “De los canibales” [On Cannibals], which appeared in 1580. There we find a presentation of those creatures who "retain alive and vigorous their genuine, their most useful and natural, virtues and properties.”
⁶

Giovanni Flora’s English translation of the
Essays
was published in 1603. Not only was Floro a personal friend of Shakespeare, but the copy of the translation that Shakespeare owned and annotated is still extant. This piece of information would be of no further importance but for the fact that it proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the
Essays
was one of the direct sources of Shakespeare’s last great work,
The Tempest
(1612). Even one of the characters of the play, Gonzalo, who incarnates the Renaissance humanist, at one point closely glosses entire lines from Floro’s Montaigne, originating precisely in the essay on cannibals. This fact makes the form in which Shakespeare presents his character
Caliban/cannibal
even stranger. Because if in Montaigne—in this case, as unquestionable literary source for Shakespeare—“there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation . . . , except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice,”
⁷
in Shakespeare, on the other hand,
Caliban/cannibal
is a savage and deformed slave who cannot be degraded enough. What has happened is simply that in depicting Caliban, Shakespeare, an implacable realist, here takes
the other option
of the emerging bourgeois world. Regarding the utopian vision, it does indeed exist in the work but is unrelated to Caliban; as was said before, it is expressed by the harmonious humanist Gonzalo. Shakespeare thus confirms that both ways of considering the American, far from being in opposition, were perfectly reconcilable. As for the concrete man, present him in the guise of an animal, rob him of his land, enslave him so as to live from his toil, and at the right moment exterminate him; this latter, of course, only if there were someone who could be depended on to perform the arduous tasks in his stead. In one revealing passage, Prospero warns his daughter that they could not do without Caliban: “We cannot miss him: he does make our fire,/ Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices/ that profit us”(1.2.311-l3). The utopian vision can and must do without men of flesh and blood. After all,
there is no such place.

There is no doubt at this point that
The Tempest
alludes to America, that its island is the mythification of one of our islands. Astrana Marin, who mentions the “clearly Indian (American) ambience of the island,” recalls some of the actual voyages along this continent that inspired Shakespeare and even furnished him, with slight variations, with the names of not a few of his characters: Miranda, Fernando, Sebastian, Alonso, Gonzalo, Setebos.
⁸
More important than this is the knowledge that Caliban is our Carib.

We are not interested in following all the possible readings that have been made of this notable work since its appearance,
⁹
and shall merely point out some interpretations. The first of these comes from Ernest Renan, who published his drama
Caliban: Suite de "La Tempete”
in 1878.'° In this work, Caliban is the incarnation of the people presented in their worst light, except that this time his conspiracy against Prospero is successful and he achieves power—which ineptitude and corruption will surely prevent him from retaining. Prospero lurks in the darkness awaiting his revenge, and Ariel disappears. This reading owes less to Shakespeare than to the Paris Commune, which had taken place only seven years before. Naturally, Renan was among the writers of the French bourgeoisie who savagely took part against the prodigious "assault of heaven. ’ ’
¹¹
Beginning with this event, his antidemocratic feeling stiffened even further. ‘‘In his
Philosophical Dialogues,"
Lidsky tells us, “he believes that the solution would lie in the creation of an
elite
of intelligent beings who alone would govern and posses the secrets of science.”
¹²
Characteristically, Renan’s aristocratic and prefascist elitism and his hatred of the common people of his country are united with an even greater hatred for the inhabitants of the colonies. It is instructive to hear him express himself along these lines.

We aspire [he says] not only to equality but to domination. The country of a foreign race must again be a country of serfs, of agricultural laborers or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities among men but of broadening them and making them law.'
³

And on another occasion:

The regeneration of the inferior or bastard races by the superior races is within the providential human order. With us, the common man is nearly always a
declasse
nobleman, his heavy hand is better suited to handling the sword than the menial tool. Rather than work he chooses to fight, that is, he returns to his first state.
Regere imperio populos
—that is our vocation. Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries which, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. . . . Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, with its marvelous manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor; govern them with justice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will be satisfied; a race of tillers of the soil, the black ... a race of masters and soldiers, the European race. . .
. Let each do that which he is made for, and all will be well
.
¹⁴

It is unnecessary to gloss these lines, which, as Cesaire rightly says, came from the pen not of Hitler but of the French humanist Ernest Renan.

The initial destiny of the Caliban myth on our own American soil is a surprising one. Twenty years after Renan had published his
Caliban—
in other words, in 1898—the United States intervened in the Cuban war of independence against Spain and subjected Cuba to its tutelage, converting her in 1902 into her first
neocolony
(and holding her until 1959), while Puerto Rico and the Philippines became colonies of a tradtional nature. The fact -which had been anticipated by Marti years before—moved the Latin-American
intelligentsia.
Elsewhere I have recalled that “ninety-eight” is not only a Spanish date that gives its name to a complex group of writers and thinkers of that country, but it is also, and perhaps most importantly, a Latin-American data that should serve to designate a no less complex group of writers and thinkers on this side of the Atlantic, generally known by the vague name of
modernistas.
^ls
It is “ninety-eight”—the visible presence of North American imperialism in Latin America—already foretold by Marti, which informs the later work of someone like Dario or Rod6.

In a speech given by Paul Groussac in Buenos Aires on 2 May 1898, we have an early example of how Latin-American writers of the time would react to this situation:

Since the Civil War and the brutal invasion of the West [he says], the
Yankee
spirit had rid itself completely of its formless and “Calibanesque” body, and the Old World has contemplated with disquiet and terror the newest civilization that intends to supplant our own, declared to be in decay.
¹⁶

The Franco-Argentine writer Groussac feels that “our” civilization (obviously understanding by that term the civilization of the “Old World,” of which we Latin Americans would, curiously enough, be a part) is menaced by the Calibanesque Yankee. It seems highly improbable that the Algerian or Vietnamese writer of the time, trampled underfoot by French colonialism, would have been ready to subscribe to the first part of such a criterion. It is also frankly strange to see the Caliban symbol—in which Renan could with exactitude see, if only to abuse, the people—being applied to the United States. But nevertheless, despite this blurred focus—characteristic, on the other hand, of Latin America’s unique situation—Groussac’s reaction implies a clear rejection of the Yankee danger by Latin-American writers. This is not, however, the first time that such a rejection was expressed on our continent. Apart from cases of Hispanic writers such as Bolivar and Marti, among others, Brazilian literature presents the example of Joaquin de Sousa Andrade, or Sous&ndrade, in whose strange poem,
O Guesa Errant,
stanza 10 is dedicated to “O inferno Wall Street,” “a
Walpurgisnacht
of corrupt stockbrokers, petty politicians, and businessmen.”
¹⁷
There is besides

Jose
Verissimo, who in an 1890 treatise on national education impugned the United States with his “I admire them, but I don’t esteem them.”

We do not know whether the Uraguayan Jos6 Enrique Rod6—whose famous phrase on the United States, “I admire them, but I don’t love them,” coincides literally with Verissimo’s observation—knew the work of that Brazilian thinker but it is certain that he was familiar with Groussac’s speech, essential portions of which were reproduced in
La Razon
of Montevideo on 6 May 1898. Developing and embellishing the idea outlined in it, Rod6 published in 1900, at the age of twenty-nine, one of the most famous works of Latin-American literature;
Ariel.
North American civilization is implicitly presented there as Caliban (scarcely mentioned in the work), while Ariel would come to incarnate—or should incarnate—the best of what Rod6 did not hesitate to call more than once “our civilization” (223, 226). In his words, just as in those of Groussac, this civilization was identified not only with “our Latin America” (239) but with ancient Romania, if not with the Old World as a whole. The identification of Caliban with the United States, proposed by Groussac and popularized by Rod6, was certainly a mistake. Attacking this error from one angle, Jose Vasconcelos commented that "if the Yankees were only Caliban, they would not represent any great danger.”
¹⁸
But this is doubtless of little importance next to the relevant fact that the danger in question had clearly been pointed out. As Benedetti rightly observed, “Perhaps Rod<5 erred in naming the danger, but he did not err in his recognition of where it lay.”
¹⁹

Sometime afterward, the French writer Jean Gu6henno—who, although surely aware
of the
work by the colonial Rod6, knew of course Renan’s work from memory—restated the latter’s Caliban thesis in his own
Caliban parle
[Caliban speaks], published in Paris in 1929. This time, however, the Renan identification of Caliban
with
the people is accompanied by a positive evaluation of Caliban. One must be grateful to Gu^henno’s book—and it is about the only thing for which gratitude is due—for having offered for the first time an appealing version of the character.
²⁰
But the theme would have required the hand or the rage of a Paul Nizan to be effectively realized.
²¹

Much sharper are the observations of the Argentine Anibal Ponce, in his 1935 work
Humanismo burgues y humanismo proletario.
The book—which a student of Che’s thinking conjectures must have exercised influence on the latter
²²
—devotes the third chapter to "Ariel; or. The Agony of an Obstinate Illusion.” In commenting on
The Tempest,
Ponce says that "those four beings embody
an
entire era: Prospero is the enlightened despot who loves the Renaissance; Miranda, his progeny; Caliban, the suffering masses [Ponce will then quote Renan, but not Guehenno]; and Ariel, the genius of the air without any ties to life.”
²³
Ponce points up the equivocal nature of Caliban’s presentation, one that reveals "an enormous injustice on the part of a master.” In Ariel he sees the intellectual, tied to Prospero in “less burdensome and crude a way than Caliban, but also in his service.” His analysis of die conception of the intellectual (“mixture of slave and mercenary”) coined by Renaissance humanism, a concept that “taught as nothing else could an indifference to action and an acceptance of the established order” and that even today is for the intellectual in the bourgeois world “the educational ideal of the governing classes,” constitutes one of the most penetrating essays written on the theme in our America.

But this examination, although made by a Latin American, still took only the European world into account. For a new reading of
The Tempest—for
a new consideration of the problem—it was necessary to await the emergence of the colonial countries, which begins around the time of the Second World War. That abrupt presence led the busy technicians of the United Nations to invent, between 1944 and 1945, the term
economically underdeveloped area
in order to dress in attractive (and profoundly confusing) verbal garb what had until then been called
colonial area,
or
backward areas}*

Concurrently with this emergence there appeared in Paris in 1950 O. Mannoni’s book
Psychologie de la colonisation.
Significantly, the English edition of this book (New York, 1956) was to be called
Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization.
To approach his subject, Mannoni has created, no less, what he calls the “Prospero complex,” defined as “the sum of those unconscious neurotic tendencies that delineate at the same time the ‘picture’ of the paternalist colonial and the portrait of ‘the racist whose daughter has been the object
of
an [imaginary] attempted rape at the hands of an inferior being.’ '
’
²⁵
In this book, probably for the first time, Caliban is identified with the colonial. But the odd theory that the latter suffers from a “Prospero complex” that leads him neurotically to require, even to anticipate, and naturally to accept the presence of Prospero/colonizer is roundly rejected by Frantz Fanon in the fourth chapter (“The So-Called Dependence Complex of Colonized Peoples”) of his 1952 book
Black Skin, White Masks
.