The Caliban Beneath the Skin: Abstract Drama in Auden's Favorite Poem

Style, Spring, 1999 by Jo-Anne Cappeluti

Here, then, is Auden's challenge: how to avoid the pretensions of a high art form such as abstract drama - which, as a drama, must by its nature make memorable talk - when using poetry, the very form that flattens dramatic talk. What kind of character could talk in such a fashion, and on what subject could he or she speak? While writing for the theater, Auden knew that the only way he could rise above conventions was to use them. The poet could avoid the pitfalls of conventions and pretensions only if "he is willing to be humble and sympathetic, to accept what he finds to his hand and develop its latent possibilities" (emphasis mine; Plays xxii).(5)

Along these lines, the elaborate rhetorical structure of "Caliban to the Audience" reflects Auden's realization - and mastery - of the latent possibilities in the dog-skin character that he had written in 1935 with Christopher Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin, or Where is Francis? These possibilities reflect his realization in "Genius & Apostle" that what he has is himself, a poet-dramatist who is slowly becoming aware that the artist-genius can be substituted as the "traditional man-of-action," or a hero (Dyer's Hand 435). In this respect, Auden sees that he writes poetry about his life as an artist. In retrospect, in the 1956 essay, "Hic et Ille," he names it making poetry out of his "ripostes to his reflection" in the mirror (Dyer's Hand 94).

Here he found quite a worthy challenge: how to dramatize the making process. As he observes, "An artist is not a doer of deeds but a maker of things [. . .] so that what makes an artist of interest, his art, [. . .] will have to take place off stage" ("Genius & Apostle," Dyer's Hand 435). Not only must the treatment be indirect (i.e., "off stage"), but the subject must be as well. The facet of the artist that Auden was most interested in dramatizing is the imagination, specifically, the ability that enables him to "imagine anything which is the case as being otherwise" (Dyer's Hand 436). Finding a "figure traditionally associated with the stage" to stand for this "imaginative faculty," Auden turned to Keats's description of the poet: "As to the poetic character itself, it is not itself; it has no self - it is everything and nothing" (Dyer's Hand 436). It is an inarticulate dog-skin or a Caliban - the body that cannot speak for itself unless the imagination gives it a voice. Like the dog-skin, Caliban is a corporeal form whose author is dead, or absent; like the dog-skin, Caliban is a mouth through which the imagination can speak. Caliban represents the human body, which Auden was aware could not speak on its own, and if it could "it would have every right to say, 'Well, who taught me my bad habits?'" ("Balaam and His Ass," Dyer's Hand 132). Like the dog-skin, then, Caliban is a perfect choice for acting as the imagination's spokesperson. Besides the fact that it takes a lot to imagine either of these entities speaking, they are both begged questions about which any audience would like to question any author. Caliban, moreover, is not merely the flesh; finding the dialectic between spirit and flesh too easy, Auden preferred the idea of the "whole physical-historical nature of fallen man" ("Balaam and His Ass," Dyer's Hand 131).(6)