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The Caliban Beneath the Skin: Abstract Drama in Auden's Favorite Poem
Style, Spring, 1999 by Jo-Anne Cappeluti
With this goal in mind, Caliban dramatizes the negative results of ignoring the present. To those who keep hoping to go back to some more empirically real past, he concludes that such a journey, like the journey around a clock, will come right back to where it began: "[W]here Liberty stands with her hands behind her back. [. . .] Confronted by a straight and snubbing stare to which mythology is bosh" (Collected Poems 439). Those who want to be taken ahead into some more spiritual future will find only an "ever giddier collective gallop" into the "Black Stone on which the bones are cracked" (Collected Poems 441).(20) In other words, either refusal to become the self will lead one into a losing battle with time, a nightmare that is all too real, the unblinking present moment, itself always both prologue and epilogue to life.
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Caliban's performance dramatizes such begged questions and renders faithfully such "defects" in the artistic mirror, dialogue with themselves about themselves that reflects something quite unpredictable. Because it has already happened, that something has allowed this text to come into being. The situation looks hopeless. The audience is just not getting it. Although they keep asking what has happened to Ariel (at least their concept of what Ariel should be), they are the ones who tried to dismiss him. At the end of the address, however, Ariel speaks to Caliban and confesses that he has fallen helplessly in love with Caliban's drab mortality. This love becomes the largest begged question: the relationship that enabled the address to take place. Ariel's "falsehood," an entity that knows no bounds and that falls in love with Caliban, conjoined with Caliban's, Caliban an entity that cannot speak, borrowing the language of that which knows no bounds, has brought about the shabby performance in the first place. Ariel has fallen in love with Caliban and has agreed to limit himself to limitations that are both real and possible. In the specific terms of Auden's "private Quicunque vult," the (Primary) imagination has fallen in love with a sacred object:
The sacred is that to which it [the Primary imagination] is obliged to respond; the profane is that to which it cannot respond and therefore does not know. The profane is known to other faculties of the mind, but not to the Primary Imagination. A sacred being cannot be anticipated; it must be encountered. [. . .] The impression made upon the imagination by any sacred being is of an overwhelming but undefinable importance - an unchangeable quality, an Identity, as Keats said: I-am-that-I-am is what every sacred being seems to say.(21) ("Making, Knowing and Judging," Dyer's Hand 55)
In imagining that Caliban could speak and then letting him speak, Auden found in Caliban a sacred being. This event could not have been planned. It seems as if it is, in fact, that "unpredictable" "unforseen mishap" (Collected Poems 443). Had he used his imagination to retreat into a past or escape into a future, Auden would have become a victim to what Caliban describes:
