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The Caliban Beneath the Skin: Abstract Drama in Auden's Favorite Poem
Style, Spring, 1999 by Jo-Anne Cappeluti
It is no coincidence that after writing this play Auden became aware of the problem in presenting such a demanding scene. He realized that no one in the audience could "stop and say, 'I would like to have that bit over again'" because a play's action is "continuous and irreversible" (Plays 516).
III
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A poem, however, is a different kind of text; one can read it and go back as much as one desires or needs to; in a piece as complex and indirect as Caliban's address, that is a good thing. As section III of The Sea and The Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest, Caliban's address continues the commentary, offering an inner drama of repeating and recursively reading interwoven ideas. Having listened (in the first two sections of The Sea and The Mirror) to the multiple perspectives coming out of one self, the imagination (re)performs those perspectives to the audience of self that created them. This self, moreover, is a dramatist/poet who addresses himself "off stage" about the nature of making poetry, i.e., about what has taken place "on" stage. In Caliban's address Auden thus achieves, first, what he recognized in 1929 as stage-life ("something which is no imitation but a new thing" [Plays xvi], and, second, the impossible task of presenting a "drama of ideas," a poem that dramatizes how a commentary/poem is made.
Like the dog-skin, who has experienced a physical and historical nature, Caliban has "naturally" picked up an "accent" by hanging around with this strange audience, but unlike the dog-skin, he does not declare the same kind of "emigre's pride." Playing his "officially natural role" in the address' second section, Caliban declares:
If I seem to attribute these powers to you when the eyes, the ears, the nose, the putting two and two together are, of course, all His and yours only the primitive wish to know, it is a rhetorical habit I have caught from your, in the main juvenile and feminine, admirers whose native unawareness of whom they ought properly to thank and praise you see no point in, for mere accuracy's stuffy sake, correcting. (Collected Poems 432)
In speaking for the imagination, as is the case with the dog-skin, Caliban realizes that the only way he can speak - or see or hear or think at all - is because of the real Word, a missing author or "original owner" who, having breathed life into all life, is now nowhere to be found. Unlike the dog-skin's original owner, who was fond of drinking whiskey (a fondness which may or may not be shared by the "so great, so dead author" of Caliban) this original author (the real Word) has no fears about being an invalid poet (Collected Poems 422).
Like this original author, Caliban has seemingly himself been invisible to this audience. Indeed, the most difficult thing for anyone to see is one's physical-historical nature, in short, one's "bad habits." Thus the audience is repelled when Caliban, this "gibbering fist-clenched creature" with whom the audience is all too unfamiliar, looms into view. Caliban retorts, "But where, may I ask, should I have acquired them [the desired traits of poise, and composure, and the like], when, like a society mother who, although she is, of course, as she tells everyone, absolutely devoted to her child [. . .], you have never in all these years taken the faintest personal interest in me?" (Collected Poems 433).
