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Caliban Without Prospero by Max Dorsinville

1977; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 3; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1977.0035

1913-4835

Cecil Abrahams,

Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics

365 (1970). For some, this span might make The Haunted Wilderness too much like the kind of survey whose days should be over, according to Desmond Pacey. For me, the constant generic focus and the distinctions made within that focus give Northey's book its cohesiveness and direction. She has undertaken an innova­ tive study whose chronological range is necessary at this time. Her critical investigation is perceptive, concise, and apposite and points in the directions indicated by Davey and Pacey in a way that survives the paraphrase very well. john w. lennox / York University Max Dorsinville, Caliban Without Prospero (Toronto: Press Porcépic 1974). 227. $6.95 William Shakespeare had the uncanny knack of creating suggestive metaphors through which he and others following him could deal with the prejudices of European society. It is not fortuitous, therefore, that his metaphor of Prospero and Caliban in The Tempest should continue to create so much controversy even in our times. Shakespeare, undoubtedly influenced by the maritime explorers' fantastic tales of "weird, black, uncivilized people" in the Third World, at­ tempted to put these tales of racism into their true perspective by creating the categories of the arrogant European intellectual Prospero and the seemingly non-rational non-European Caliban. What Shakespeare does, of course, is reveal the hollowness of Prospero's position as he confronts Caliban. Prospero, in true colonial fashion, sets out to "civilize" Caliban (Cannibal) by imposing the standards of his European way of life on Caliban. But Shakespeare shows that even such an exercise cannot prevent Prospero from discovering the Caliban which exists in himself and in every person. Later interpreters of Shakespeare's metaphor have been selective in their approach and at times have given the false impression that Shakespeare himself had sanctioned their method. Hence the French scholar, O. Mannoni, in Psychologie de la Colonisation, used the metaphor to "erect a pattern of justification for the colonial policies of Europe." Frantz Fanón, in his Wretched of the Earth, attacked Mannoni and his ilk for their arrogance and sent out a call to the Calibans of the Third World to revolt against their European Prósperos. George Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile, Ngugi wa Thiongo's Homecoming, and Chinua Achebe's Morning Yet on Creation Day make a strenuous effort to depict the arrogance and cruelty of Prospero's world as it imposes itself on Caliban. And in each of these works there are notes of defiance, challenge, and revolt. The latter writers are themselves longtime victims of Prospero and in writing they analyze Prospero's seeming invincibility with the main hope of stirring Caliban against and away from Prospero's circumscribed world. 366 Max Dorsinville's book, Caliban Without Prospero is, as he says, an attempt to bring Shakespeare's metaphor back to its true meaning. Recognizing Janheinz Janz's method in Neo-African Literature as being close to Shake­ speare's attempt to unify Prospero and Caliban (or for that matter to see the two aspects as part of the same soul), Dorsinville sets himself three difficult tasks: he attempts with the generalized Shakespearean metaphor to find common ground in the literatures of black America and French Canada; he desires to de­ monstrate the universality of what he calls “ post-European" literatures; and finally he uses Shakespeare's metaphor to create a reconciliation of the two forces that are embedded in man and civilization. The African writer, Chinua Achebe, argues against universality as follows: I should like to see the word universal banned altogether from the discussions of African [or black American, or French Canadian] literature until such a time as people cease to use it as a synonym for the narrow, self-serving parochialism of Europe, until their horizon extends to include all the world. (Morning Yet on Creation Day, p 28) Achebe is aware that European models and critical tenets are often used by Western critics to judge literatures that are spawned by cultures that are unlike Europe's. Therefore, at another point in his book, Morning Yet on Creation Day, he challenges European critics to learn first the psycho-physical processes of the wellsprings of his culture before they canonize him...