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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University
--"A wish was now ingender'd in my fear / To cleave unto this Man" ...
--Wordsworth
"STRIDING UP TO HIM IN FURY, YOU GLARE INTO HIS UNBLINKING EYES and stop dead, transfixed with horror at seeing reflected there, not what you had always expected to see, a conqueror smiling at a conqueror, both promising mountains and marvels, but a gibbering fist-clenched creature with which you are all too unfamiliar ... the only subject that you have ... the all too solid flesh you must acknowledge as your own." (1) In the middle of W. H. Auden's mid-career prose poem, "Caliban to the Audience," Caliban describes what happens when, looking for Ariel, the imagination, the audience finds Caliban instead, a disturbing reminder of the begged question of its existence: "solid flesh," as it were, mysteriously linked to the less-than-solid imagination. Like Ariel, Caliban is a ubiquitous presence who refuses to go away. As he reminds the audience at the very beginning of his address, even when it seeks the "so good, so great, so dead author to stand before the finally lowered curtain ... it is I ... who will always loom thus wretchedly into your confused picture ..." (CP 422). Auden's poem circles around this begged question of existence as Caliban takes his audience through an impossibly circular, tripartite structure that adroitly performs the same begged question. The address thus "proceeds" with recursively interwoven echo and apostrophe: in a dense style of hyperbole and convoluted sentence structure.
From the time it was published, the elaborate artifice of the address suggested--and continues to suggest--to most that the poem is about the ultimate artifice and collapse of poetry, especially the imagination required to produce it. As such, and as the last section of Auden's long poem, "The Sea and The Mirror, A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest," Caliban's address does what many argue of Shakespeare's Tempest: it exposes its art as mere artifice. This way of thinking lends itself well to support the view of those who see Auden becoming anti-Romantic at mid-career, turning his genius to undermining poetry and serving as a licensed jester.
This way of thinking, however, ignores Auden's genius in using artifice to expose and undermine the anti-Romantic (and anti-aesthetic) style of thinking characterizing Caliban's audience--and Auden's. It ignores Auden's central explanation of the piece, not in terms of what it attempts to represent but in terms of its unusual style performed by an "inarticulate creature," Caliban, who speaks by borrowing from Ariel the "most artificial style possible": that of the imagination. (2) Speaking the "real Word," Caliban gets at the ineffable truth of human existence, the existence of "born actors" (CP 444). As Edward Mendelson observes, Caliban, in fact, is an "artifice that embodies everything that is not an artifice." (3) Like the imagination for which he speaks, Caliban is an irritating, irrefutable, aesthetic entity impossible to deny or silence. In all of these respects, finally, Caliban plays a highly Romantic role performing, rather than attempting to represent, the sublime, a role this paper will investigate in three, interwoven venues as evidence of Auden's revision of the Romantic sublime.
To begin with, as Auden defines it in his study of Romanticism, The Enchafed Flood, the ultimate focus of the Romantic poet, who serves as the subject of his poetry, is his journey into himself. Here he finds an "unsolved problem," perpetually both "a stating and a solving of the problem." (4) He finds the begged question of identity inherent in being human, the indeterminate identity there within the poet's consciousness, privy to his thoughts and feelings. The discontinuity and dialectical tension that mark Caliban's observations in these ways, align him with what M. H. Abrams defines as the "silent human auditor" in the greater Romantic lyric. In the tripartite form, that moves from outer to inner and back to outer landscapes, this auditor appears in the inner landscape, the landscape of the poet's thoughts and feelings. (5) The auditor is somehow part of the poet's consciousness (hence, the way in which he speaks is not the usual way of speaking--out loud). The auditor disrupts and problematizes the poet's consciousness; as such a presence, it is what I will call a disrupting auditor. Second, foregrounded in Caliban, this auditor is what Thomas Weiskel notices as the "hidden sense of presence" germane--and problematic to--the Romantic sublime, itself also a tripartite form through which the poet explores the nebulous boundaries between what is human and what is "beyond human." (6) Appearing in the second movement of the sublime, this auditor is a presence that cannot be signified but keeps appearing anyway (Sublime 29).
Finally, concurrently with and central to its investigation of Auden's Caliban in these Romantic terms, this argument looks at Caliban specifically in comparison to Wordsworth's disrupting auditor, that mysterious, aesthetic presence in the fifth book of The Prelude, in the passage on which Auden bases his Enchafed Hood study of Romanticism. Caliban is like the mysterious auditor who engenders such fear in Wordsworth's "friend's" dream: the aesthetic presence to which the friend is nevertheless drawn. To see Caliban in this way will make clear that "Caliban to the Audience" demonstrates Auden's revision of Wordsworth's sublime. It is not a revision that demystifies the sublime. Performing what Auden realizes is non-representational and which cannot, by its nature, be represented, Auden confirms the sublime experience, making it impossible--for Caliban's or any audience--to explain it (away) in true or false terms. Offering a text made up exclusively of inner, aesthetic landscapes that comment about a text, Auden shifts the focus in the greater Romantic lyric from the disrupting auditor who appears to the poet (who then attempts to represent that auditor) to the disrupting auditor who appears to every reader (i.e., audience), performing that reader's thoughts and feelings after he or she has read a text.
My argument will arrive at a final idea that to read Auden as a modern poet who becomes anti-Romantic at mid-career is to misread him. Having presented the possibility that "Caliban to the Audience" is not a parody of the sublime intended to show its failure in poetry--that it shows, in fact, a parody of criticism trying to explain away the sublime--I will offer my own rather revisionary agreement with Edward Mendelson that the "surest way to misunderstand Auden is to read him as the modernists' heir." (7)
I
Auden writes "Caliban to the Audience" approximately twenty years before Abrams names and defines the greater Romantic lyric. Abrams calls it a tripartite form that moves from outer to inner and back to outer landscape, its inner landscape interrupted so markedly by what Abrams calls the "silent human auditor," usually invisible ("Structure" 77). Long before Abrams names the form, Auden is obviously aware of the outer and inner landscapes germane to Romantic poetry. He begins his career by studying the Romantics, finding the poetry they write to be one in which the poet serves as his own subject, exploring his own inner landscapes. (8) As such, this poetry engages the poet in the experience of journeying into an audience of selves within himself.
Like the Romantics, Auden finds within himself great indeterminacy and ambiguity, inexplicable and undeniable doubleness, if you will. What begins in his poetry as the stranger embodies this doubleness and evolves, by mid-career, into Caliban. The ambiguous presence of Caliban, in fact, is precisely the kind of ambiguity created by the disrupting auditor in the greater Romantic lyric. This auditor is a presence, either present or absent, Abrams observes, that appears in the inner landscape of the poet's thoughts and feelings and is usually silent--or, in Caliban's case, inarticulate, as Auden says. Abrams observes further that the special appeal of the form to Wordsworth is reflected in Wordsworth's device of "two consciousnesses": that is, in the initial, outer landscape, the poet, while viewing that landscape, revisits it. He remembers it from a prior time. This memory of the way it was, juxtaposed to the way it looks now, poses a problem--which propels the inner meditation or inner landscape--since the scenes do not match ("Structure" 77, 83).
Abrams's claim to be studying Wordsworth's and especially Coleridge's poetry is somewhat undermined by Abrams's pervasive attention to the genesis of Coleridge's criticism, Biographia Literaria. Arguing, however, as if poetry and criticism are separate, Abrams does not seem aware that these two consciousnesses can easily apply to criticism--and/or to Wordsworth's evolving awareness of himself as both poet and critic/reader. In terms of criticism, Abrams does not see reading as an activity in which the critic revisits a landscape of text and sometimes sees something differently from the way he or she remembers it from a prior time. In this respect, a problem is posed, which is, of course, what makes reading interesting. What Abrams does not consider, moreover, is the possibility that the two consciousnesses also apply and/or extend to the hidden auditor, which I will call the disrupting auditor; this is the case with...
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