Playing the Un-naming Act against the Desire for Totalization in The Tempest

Abstract

Recent scholarship on The Tempest has drawn connections between the nascent colonialism and the figure of otherness constructed in European thought. As an Ur-text for fictional colonialist discourse in English, this play addresses the relationship of the European interlopers and the native of the island, whereby it displays and fosters the rhetoric of colonialism built on self-rationalization and self-justification. On the other hand, as much as the colonial discursive strategies are ambiguous and contradictory, The Tempest is itself even more undecidable and complex. It can be noticed, for example, that the complexities of the central figures, Prospero and Caliban, remain profoundly unresolved. Wary of the problematics of the colonialist rhetoric at work in The Tempest, this essay is devoted to demonstrating, first of all, how Caliban’s body materializes a force field in which the colonizer’s desire for totalization and the colonized’s resistance to colonial usurpation are bound up with each other in a naming process. It is also interesting to follow the signification of Prospero’s magic book as a metonymy of colonial controls. The magic book, which conditions and limits Prospero’s power, represents the authority of the colonist-magician’s repressive mechanism. Finally, it is significant to note that Prospero’s self-serving rhetoric reveals, especially in the latter part of this play, a strange hesitation about his legitimacy as a purveyor of colonial hegemony; on the other hand, Caliban plays a double dealer more cunningly and remains a potential reveler even after he is thought to be brought back under Prospero’s control.