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Monday, April 26, 2010
Race in the Symbolic Universe 1: Caliban
cross-posted at New Savanna
The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery. . . . For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American.
—Toni Morrison, Playing in the DarkThere’s a young black boy on my job and those white cats have made him tell them so many lies about what they call his love life that he can’t tell whether he’s coming or going. They want to believe that we screw like dogs or cats—you know, just go out there and get you a piece, just like they might scratch their backs or get a glass of water. . . Another thing, if we were just like dogs, then all the rotten things they have done and are doing to us would be okay!
—Clifford Yancy, in John Langston Gwaltney, Drylongso
This is a series of short pieces dealing with the representation of race in American culture:
- Shakespeare’s Caliban
- Sam Clemens at the Cotton Club: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Inter-Racial Sex: A Passage to India and Light in August
- The Hollywood Version: Who Framed Roger Rabbit
- The Funkified Standard Version of the American Dream: The Cosby Show
The first follows immediately in this post. I’ll post the rest over the next week or three.
Shakespeare’s Caliban
The symbolic universe of white America originated in Europe. And Europeans had, by the late Renaissance, developed an image of blacks. In The White Man’s Burden, Winthrop D. Jordan showed that Europeans were disposed to see blacks as strongly emotional and sensual, qualities they were coming to reject in themselves. In the late Renaissance blacks were likened to beasts. In Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624) the “Spirit of Fornication” was depicted as “a little foul ugly Æthiop” (Jordan, p. 19). Jordan notes that Englishmen “were especially inclined to discover attributes in savages which they found first, but could not speak of, in themselves”. Thus before the European settlers of North America had any substantial contact with Africans, they had a lascivious place prepared in their symbol system through which to understand and interact with them.
We can see this symbol system in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Its central figure, Prospero, is a magician who calls storms into being and conjures visions before the eyes of the other characters. In this conjuring he enacts the dramatist’s role. Prospero is Shakespeare’s symbolic representation of his own role in life and The Tempest is his statement about the nature and purpose of dramatic art. In this play Shakespeare presents his symbolic universe, a symbolic universe which has been central to the imaginative life of European culture. In his plays Shakespeare drew on a wide variety of sources, but The Tempest is his own through and through. In it, he distilled all he had embraced in his career and presented the essence. What role does he assign to Africans?
There is one character in the play, Caliban, who is generally thought to embody European views of Africans. Stephano, one of the strangers shipwrecked on Prospero’s island, remarks thus of Caliban on first seeing him (2.2.58-72):
What’s the matter? Have we devils here? Do you put tricks upon ‘s with savages and men of Inde, ha? I have not scaped drowning to be afeard now of your four legs. . . . This is some monster of the isle, with four legs, who hath got, as I take it, an ague. Where the devil should he learn our language? . . . If I can recover him, and keep him tame, and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperer that ever trod on neat’s leather.
Caliban was, in point of mythical fact, the son of Sycorax, a witch who lived on the island when Prospero arrived. Prior to the time of the play, Prospero taught him to speak and made him his slave. Then Caliban fell from Prospero’s favor after attempting to rape Miranda. During the play Caliban is part of a ludicrous plot to overthrow Prospero—which will then give him sexual access to Miranda. Thus Caliban is plagued with the sexuality which Europeans have been seeing in non-Europeans, especially Africans, ever since they began to trade with and to conquer them.
However, when the overthrow plot is finally foiled, Prospero asserts of Caliban that “this thing of darkness I/ Acknowledge mine” (5.1.275 - 276). What does Prospero mean by this? Having regarded Caliban as his slave, there is no point in acknowledging that relationship, for that ownership and masterhood is taken for granted. The only thing which makes sense is that Prospero is now taking responsibility for Caliban’s rebellious and sexual ways. That means that, in some sense, Prospero now regards them as his own rebellious and sexual ways. Prospero and Caliban are one being, with Prospero representing the conscious desires and Caliban the unconscious.
We don’t have to push this very far to get into waters deep and dark. For, Caliban had originally fallen from favor for attempting to rape Miranda, Prospero’s daughter. If Caliban is but an agent for Prospero’s own repressed desire, then it was Prospero who had, unconsciously, desired to rape his daughter. With this acknowledgement, we are now in the psychological realm pioneered by Sigmund Freud. The notion of unconscious sexual desire between members of the same family was shocking in Freud’s day, as it is in ours. But in our day, incest has become the kind of shock which is discussed on talk shows and in tabloids. We are, at last, trying to deal with such matters.
Modern film-makers, for example, can be freer and more explicit about the relationship between the conscious and unconscious than Shakespeare could ever have been. For example, Forbidden Planet is a science fiction film from the mid-fifties and was based loosely on The Tempest. Instead of a nobleman/magician marooned on an island in the Mediterranean we have a brilliant scientist, one Dr. Morbius, marooned on a distant planet. Instead of the sprite Ariel to do Prospero’s bidding, we have Robbie the Robot. Instead of Caliban the man-monster, we have the Monster from the Id. Recognizing the symbolic connection between Caliban and the id of Freudian psychology, these film-makers made that connection explicit by naming the monster after that very id. In the movie, the monster arose when Morbius’s unconscious somehow linked up with a fantastic power-generating system left behind by an ancient, and now dead, civilization. A connection which Shakespeare had only hinted at was made more explicit by post-Freudian film-makers of the fifties.
Returning to Shakespeare, the point is that, however great his artistry, he was not exempt from standard European prejudice. He painted Caliban with the same brush Europeans used to paint their pictures of Africa and Africans. However, he did, just barely, manage to indicate that the colors and forms in that picture came, not from Africa, but from himself, from Europe. Whatever Africans were really like, their picture was European, painted to meet European psychological needs. Caliban was Prospero’s creature, acting out those desires which Prospero himself could not acknowledge.
The Tempest was written in 1611 and first performed in 1612. The first blacks, twenty of them, arrived in North America at Jamestown in 1619. While a culture’s symbolic universe can change over time, the necessary time span is greater than the seven or eight years between The Tempest and Jamestown. The symbolic universe Shakespeare presented in his play is the same one inhabited by the Jamestown colonists. Their twenty blacks would represent the same forces to them that Caliban represented to Shakespeare and his audience. African cultural reality would be forced to bow to the intense pressure of European psychological need.
Comments
Great post Ben. I was curious if you think that Shakespeare, while acknowledging that Europeans project their own sexual desires and prejudices onto Africans, also still conceived of Caliban/Africans as beings who could and should be constructed and mastered by Europeans (and thus as a rationalization for enslavement, colonization)?
I have no way of reading S’s mind, but, yes, I figure more likely than not that he’d conceive “of Caliban/Africans as beings who could and should be constructed and mastered by Europeans.”
Of course, the problem is that Prospero shipwrecks his brother and co. on their way home from marrying a daughter off to Ethiopians. So I don’t think Caliban is much of a symbol of African-ness, given that the play has a rather approving image of real Africans marrying Italians.
Caliban is a creature straight out of *The Odyssey*. He’s from Fairy Land. His mother is a witch. He represents those who live outside the bounds of civilization, those who lose their humanity. That he’s essentially no different than Don John and other comic villains suggests that Shakespeare didn’t see these traits as black, white, purple, or red.
Ah, the Don John connection is interesting, Luther. The rest, not so much.
Prospero’s acknowledgment is often interpreted to mean that Caliban is his biological son with Sycorax—in which case, he has a far older reason to forbid intercourse with Miranda. And clearly Shakespeare had thoughts that went beyond stereotypes about this issue, if you consider Othello.
Most humans throughout history considered people beyond their ken as not quite human, regardless of color—particularly if they had inferior technology and/or were in the way. Witness the Roman attitude towards Germans, Britons, Picts… nary a dark skin in the lot.
Not sure how Caliban and A Passage to India can possibly be reflections of American culture, given that neither was written by an American and one predates America. I also think that lumping together European and American attitudes toward the darker-skinned “other” is about as reductive as the attitudes themselves.
Witness the Roman attitude towards Germans, Britons, Picts… nary a dark skin in the lot.
Dark blue, in the case of the Picts.
Your quote from Stephano doesn’t support your argument that “Caliban is generally thought to embody European views of Africans”. Stephano says “Have we devils here? Do you put tricks upon ‘s with savages and men of Inde, ha?”
Note: devils, savages, men of the Indies. (Presumably, he means the West Indies: the New World.) Not Africans, Ethiops, Moors or whatever. And he comes to the conclusion that Caliban’s a four-legged monster. Not an African. Stephano wouldn’t have thought that a mere African who could speak Italian would be a wonderful present for an emperor - it’s not as though they had much novelty value. But a talking monster…
Your argument depends on rolling together all non-Europeans into one - assuming that Shakespeare and his contemporaries saw no difference between the Turk, the Moor, the Ethiop and the Caribee.
Note also that Prospero did not “teach him to speak and made him his slave”. He taught Caliban to speak. It’s not clear that he enslaved him until after the incident with Miranda. He’s a slave now - Prospero addresses him as such explicitly. ("Thou earth! Thou slave!")
If you want an inhabitant of the island who’s a slave from the start, it’s Ariel. I’m amazed that you didn’t mention him in a discussion of slavery in The Tempest. He was imprisoned by Sycorax and then released by Prospero - and promptly enslaved by him, under constant threat of re-imprisonment ("I shall rend an oak...")
Also impressed that Shakespeare and Forster are now American. Personally, I think they sound best in the original Klingon.
You could also make the point that we do know at least some of Caliban’s ancestry: his mother was Algerian.
...This damn’d witch Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Argier,
Thou know’st, was banish’d…
Was she black African? Unlikely. She had blue eyes. And she gave birth to “a freckled whelp”. Not a black one.
(Either before or shortly after her banishment, at least according to Prospero: “This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child”.)
To Ajay: Dark blue was war paint. Then again, the Celts used to bleach their hair, so there might have been a few stray brunet(te)s among them.
I made the same point about Klingons in my book The Biology of Star Trek before Admiral Chang made it famous in The Undiscovered Country.
More generally, I agree with those who have noted that Shakespeare and Forster have been shoehorned into a paradigm they don’t fit. Furthermore, not only does this post conflate America with England, but it also has England subsume and represent all of Europe and its attitudes toward the Other. Not particularly enlightening.
Ouch! Looks like I blew it on a bunch of details.
What mostly matters to me is the sexual dynamic here. Just what kind of creature Caliban is supposed to be, whether African or other descent, that’s a secondary matter. I’m inclined to think Luther’s right, that Caliban is a creature of fantasy. If so, is Shakespeare’s depiction of him at all relevant to how American’s perceived blacks?
There’s two questions there. One of them is whether or not Shakespeare’s depiction of anything whatsoever is at all relevant to the question of how early European-Americans perceived similar whatsoevers. Unless you are prepared to argue that those colonists underwent some sort of total mind-sweep during the Atlantic passage so that they arrived in the New World with a blank mind, then I think that, yes, Shakespeare’s worldview is relevant. A significant segment of colonists grew up and became encultured in the world in which Shakespeare lived and worked. They participated in a common culture. Further, it is not unreasonable to think that those early colonists raised their descendants in that culture as well. North American geography did not exercise some mystical force that immunized the minds of first generation European-Americans from the values and mores of their Europe-born parents.
The other question is about, shall we say, the expressive provenance of Caliban. If he’s not, in Shakespeare’s play, a representative of a black African (a notion, btw, that is not at all original to me, though I do not know, off hand, the source), would it be possible, nonetheless, that Shakespeare’s (apparent) attitude toward him would be indicative of American attitudes toward black Africans in America? Well, if Caliban’s a creature of fantasy, then surely that fantasy can be projected onto the real world in whatever way makes sense to the projector. So, how did early European Americans, in fact, think about and relate to blacks, whether free or enslaved? I’ve presented no evidence on that question one way or the other.
You actually blew it on more than details. You persist on conflating many disparate issues into one to prove some a priori theory that you favor. And your last paragraph is grasping at straws—or straw men (it’s also close to word salad).
Actually, no one other than Patrick Potyondy has said anything about my central argument, which is about the process of sexual projection in the play.
I may be missing your point, and if I am, I apologize. Another question left open by your clarifications is how Forster has any bearing on the attitudes of these “early European-Americans,” as either the source or reflection of their attitudes towards the racial “other”?
If he’s not, in Shakespeare’s play, a representative of a black African (a notion, btw, that is not at all original to me, though I do not know, off hand, the source), would it be possible, nonetheless, that Shakespeare’s (apparent) attitude toward him would be indicative of American attitudes toward black Africans in America?
I would be careful about this. As I implied above, Jacobeans (let’s call them that for short) seem to have had very different attitudes towards Turks/Moors, Africans and “Indians”. Indians were savage curiosities, ferae naturae; Moors were fully human, definitely intelligent and sophisticated enough to be threatening or sympathetic.
To Ajay: Dark blue was war paint.
Yes, I didn’t think it was actually pigmentation…
Um, err, Kevin, did my argument about Shakespeare and Caliban say anything about Forster? Yes, I mentioned Forster in the intro, but not in the Shakespeare segment. When we get to Faulkner/Forster segment, you all can simply ignore what I say about Forster.
Okay, I see now that Forster is a topic to be addressed in a future piece. My apologies.
Your hyperbole about total mind sweep is exactly my point, although I’ll concede that it took a little longer than the first few trips from England. But nobody would suggest that American and European attitudes towards anything are the same now, and this divergence had to start pretty quickly after the two populations separated and began living in such different circumstances.
And, even if a case can be made for lumping England and America together, I’d echo the point made by someone else about the error implicit in positing a monolithic “European” attitude towards the other that includes England and non-English speaking countries with wildly divergent geographical reference points. I’d bet that, no matter when you look, the attitudes in England and continental Europe are likely to be very different (even without a theoretical “total mind sweep").
I’d also question the influence of Shakespeare as a reflection or influence on the attitudes of non-English speaking Europeans at all. Plus, geographic proximity to darker-skinned people has to count for something in the attitudes of, say Southern Europeans as opposed to England and maybe France.
All of these points would seem to apply equally to the process of sexual projection as well.
I must admit I had always had Caliban down as one who live’s outside the bounds of civilization. He has the classic features.
Due loss of social status and moral decline, the resulting transformation is one of his fears.
“I will have none on’t. We shall lose our time
And all be turned to barnacles, or to apes
With foreheads villainous low.”
The ape was known for being sexualy lewde as indeed was the wild man who also shares the other motifs as well.
“There is not only disgrace and dishonor in that,
monster, but an infinite loss.”
A Dispvtation Betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a Shee Conny-catcher. by Robert Greene sheds light on Shakespeare’s play on the diffrent meanings of barnacle. Caliban has just limed his hands to commit an act of theft and it may indeed have been influenced by Greene’s remark in the Conny Catcher.
“but mine eyes are stauls, & my hands lime twigs”
I think the play is with the idea of the limed soul, a creature trapped.
p.s if Caliban is a creature of fairy land may play into to youre notion. Elite belief at this time viewed faires as taking on the the appearance and dress of the inhabitants and country they were found in. They akso imitate local customs. Calibans Isle is far from the Euro zone. Though the fairies simply imitate native appearance, Caliban would presumable be non- euro on the surface.
This belief is found in one of the first eyewitness accounts of America, fantastical sea creatures are described as having the appearance of native americans. Account is found in Richard Hakluyt who was also responsible for a lot of early knowledge with regard to african inhabitants in the u.k. He is just slightly later than Shakespeare.
But it suggests that such beliefs are found alongside discriptions of exotic lands and their inhabitants in source’s of the period.
An interesting side-note on the Tempest:
FERDINAND ...myself am Naples,
Who with mine eyes,—never since at ebb,—beheld
The King, my father wrack’d.
MIRANDA.
Alack, for mercy!
FERDINAND.
Yes, faith, and all his lords, the Duke of Milan,
And his brave son being twain.
The Duke of Milan, of course, is Antonio - Prospero’s usurping younger brother. And his son? Prospero’s nephew? He’s never seen or mentioned again.
(Or is this a misreading? Is Ferdinand referring to himself: i.e. “his” meaning “the King’s”? Unlikely. He’s grieving at the death of his father, and he adds that all his father’s court has also been killed; he’d hardly include himself in that list. Nor describe himself as ‘brave’. And Prospero’s next words make it clear that it’s Antonio’s son that’s meant here:)
PROSPERO.
(Aside) The Duke of Milan,
And his more braver daughter could control thee,
If now ‘twere fit to do’t.
The real Duke of Milan, from Prospero’s point of view, is of course Prospero. And he’s contrasting Antonio’s brave son with his own more braver daughter, Miranda.
(acknowledgement to David Langford who pointed out this little slip)
Luther: “Of course, the problem is that Prospero shipwrecks his brother and co. on their way home from marrying a daughter off to Ethiopians.”
Not Ethiopians. Claribel, Alonso’s daughter, marries the King of Tunis, and it’s seen as a major success - with Gonzalo making all sorts of learned references to Dido and Aeneas. As mentioned above, this doesn’t give much insight into Jacobean opinions of black Africans, but it rather reinforces my point about Moors being seen as ‘fully human’. The bizarre idea that everyone between Suez and the Cape should be lumped together as African wasn’t shared by the Jacobeans.
"Witness the Roman attitude towards Germans, Britons, Picts… nary a dark skin in the lot.”
Roman attitude was mixed. You have diffrent schools of thought alexandrian soft primativisim which saw such societies as the most learned and just of men and a harder school which emphisised the human sacrifice engaged in by such cultures in particular and barbarity in general.
By the late 17th cen. Britons are depicted as dark skined, they are thought to be the original inhabitants of Britain who became a subject people of a light skinned fair haired Celtic race of Germanic origin. This idea is very much a Jacobean construction.
I find it rather interesting that a very popular myth in both the U.S and the U.K presented Native American culture and language as British in origin after a Welsh prince went native after landing in the U.S in the 13th cen.
Ben Johnstone notes that Native American females look European are attractive and sexualy available. Early settlement to the States is sold in part as a sexual adventure it would seem.
I think the construction of attitudes towards diffrent culture at this period is partly an administrative empire building exersise. History is being reshaped, legends invented and older stories re-used.
So it is going to vary from country to country depending on involvment in such activities and enterprises.
All of these points would seem to apply equally to the process of sexual projection as well.
But the default position is that they all engage in such projection. There may be locally specific nuances, but sexual projection onto outsiders is extremely common.
At last a point we can agree on! I’m with you as far as the existence perceptions/projections by groups (however defined) upon other groups (however defined), and how those things can be passed on in the literature of the given group. But at a more specific level of generality, I have to get off the bus because of the way you have chosen to define the group doing the perceiving/projecting. Shakespeare’s, et al., characters are certainly a good indicator of the perceptions/projections of some group, the dispute here is which group that is.
Are you claiming that the English-speaking colonists who settled North America do not come from a group influenced by Shakespeare or, that if they did, they didn’t manage to pass that influence on to their descendents?
It’s a good question with regard to some of the settlers, certainly. Take the Massachusetts colonists.
To what extent would a bunch of Nottinghamshire Puritans have been influenced by a theatre they abhorred in a town they’d barely visited?
To what extent, furthermore, would the attitudes of Shakespeare’s audiences - reasonably-literate, not-terribly-devout townspeople in one of Europe’s great trading cities - have been anything like the attitudes of the sort of deadbeats, adventurers and fanatics who would drop everything to go off to some benighted colony on the edge of the world?
How many of the colonists would have ever seen a play by Shakespeare, do you think? How many would even have heard of him?
I am claiming that not all English-speaking colonists would have experienced that influence to the same extent and in the same way, and some may not have experienced it at all. Further, the influence of that influence is even harder to discern or quantify the further in time we get from the first group over from England. Those colonists were in the process of becoming Americans, and Americans hold different attitudes about race and sex than the English.
Despite that last comment, I still think Benzon’s main point holds--that the colonizing English would have (historically speaking) held similar views to Shakespeare’s whether those Puritans abhorred the Bard or not.
And despite all the detailed comments, I still agree with the initial argument.
Hmmm . . . what a mess. Let’s just scrap talk of “influence,” talk in which I participated.
Let’s think of literary texts as indicators of the cultural psycho-social dynamics existing in the population in which the texts circulate. Other dynamics may also be circulating in those populations. And, of course, it’s quite possible that there are similar dynamics in populations which pay no attention to these particular texts of interest.
So, on the one hand there’s a certain dynamic of projection in the relationship between Prospero and Caliban in The Tempest, a text that is known to a certain population which we’ll call X. Just what this population X might be, that’s a tricky question, as that particular text has been read far and wide (and acted on the stage) for four centuries or so. Are we interested in that whole population, smeared as it is all over geographical space and historical time? Well, I don’t want to try to come up with a precise answer to that, not here and now. Not so much because this is merely a comment to a blog post, but because I simply don’t know how to do it. Let’s say that we’re particularly interested in the subpopulation of X that existed in early modern England in the early 17th century.
Imagine, then, that we find a similar dynamic in some other text or texts, texts that circulate in some different population Y. Under what circumstances does it make sense to argue for a historical and causal connection between the underlying psycho-social dynamics of population X and population Y? I think, for example, that there is a projective psycho-social dynamic in A Light in August that is similar (but not the same) to the one in The Tempest. Is there some kind of causal connection between the cultural psychodynamics operating in that early modern English population X (in the case of the Shakespeare) and the cultural psychodynamics operating in that mid-20th century American population Y (in the case of the Faulkner)?
Consider a similar, but different question. That early modern population X spoke some version of English. That language is similar, but not the same, as the version of English spoken by the mid-century American population Y. Those versions of English are similar enough that people in the two populations could converse with one another and have some degree of mutual understanding, though there certainly would be difficulties. Is there some causal connection between the English spoken by X and that spoken by Y? If so, how does that causal connection work? There certainly isn’t any direct influence (there’s that word) between early modern England and mid-20th century America. But there is something. What is it and how does it work?