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

Ticker! Ticker! Are you awake? [The Clock strikes one.] It's only me, the dog's skin that hides that eccentric young man. I hope you admire my accent? I've lived so long with them, I have all the emigre's pride at having forgotten my own. I'm quite deracine, as they say in Bloomsbury. (Plays 272-73)

The "eccentric young man," of course, refers to the stage presence of Francis, the missing heir, and emphasizes that it is not he whom the dog-skin addresses. A turning away from action, the apostrophe is emphasized by the darkness and the spotlight on the dog-skin. The dog-skin addresses Ticker, the name for the clock. Ticker, however, is also an idiomatic term for the heart; the dog-skin having a heart-to-heart with himself.

It is significant that this scene is preceded by Alan's love scene with Miss Lou Vipond, a shopwindow dummy. Alan makes the dummy speak by running behind it and speaking in falsetto. Followed by the strangeness of the dog-skin soliloquy, such transparent pretense dramatizes a contrast: a different way of making or letting fiction happen. Like the dummy, the dog-skin is an inarticulate creature. Unlike the dummy, the dog-skin is not a transparently manipulated mouthpiece for another character on stage. Moreover, this turn in the soliloquy scene to a focus on ideas (instead of on action) emphasizes a previously hidden reality of the dog-skin. The highly fictional nature of the dog-skin that had been emphasized by all of the roles played as a human contrasts sharply with this seemingly unmasked role, which seems a lot more genuine than the previous roles. Unlike "George" in The Chase, whose soliloquy offers yet another fiction and/or disguise, the dog-skin speaking here, although a dog-skin speaking should be seen as the most fictional of all roles, seems instead like the most genuine and natural of all roles.

The dog-skin continues its apostrophe to the clock by talking about some event that happened outside the world of the play. This world is the dog-skin's past: as Caliban might call it, the "original drama which aroused his [the dramatist's] imitative passion, the first performance in which the players were their own audience" (Plays 273). Here we learn of the dog-skin's first role as a poet who had left his native country but keeps his national identity as an Irish Wolfhound: "The odour of a particular arm-chair, the touch of certain fingers, excited me to rash generalisations which I believed to be profound. I composed poems that I imagined highly idiomatic, on the words 'walk' and 'dinner.'" The dog-skin/poet's "dearest ambition" during this phase of life was to be "accepted naturally as one of them." He was earnest about this. He had severed all ties with his past in order to be accepted, but he was soon disillusioned: "To them I was only a skin, valued for its associations with that very life I had hoped to abandon" (Plays 273).

Thus far, this verbal contraption involves such technical devices as one imaginary character speaking to another about a former life as a fiction-maker. The matter is further complicated, however, when the dog-skin next refers to a life that took place even before that: to the "old days" before he became a skin, the days when he was really a dog: the pet of some "very famous author" who talked to him a lot and who, not incidentally, was rather fond of whiskey. One night at "nearly one o'clock in the morning," this author, also a poet, had a talk with "George" (as the dog was called then) about his guilt for being an "invalid" poet during a time of war. This situation offers a latent possibility that Auden develops in Caliban's address: if the dog-skin was at one time really a dog, he was a corporeal form, just as Caliban is and as such he reminds the owner in some way of the owner's limitations. The limitation is left implied in the dog-skin's account that after his owner spoke to him about the war and could not bear to look at the dog and sold him. Caliban, by contrast, announces to his audience that he is the "all too solid flesh" they must "acknowledge as their own" (Collected Poems 433).