Ariel, by José Henrique Loto[Uruguay], translated by Yu Shiyang, Shanghai People's Publishing House, Guangqi Bookstore, July 2021, 208 pages, 58.00 yuan
The popular Shakespeare drama The Tempest was written in the early seventeenth century, when global colonial expansion was in full swing, driven by commercial capital. In the story, prospero, duke of Milan, Italy, is usurped by his brother Antonio, and in order to avoid the disaster of killing, he has to take his young daughter and magic books to the desert island. On the island, Prosparro encounters the "half-human, half-beast" monster Calleban and tames him as his slave. He then defeats Calebban's mother, the island witch Sicolux, and rescues Ariel, the "air elf" she has stuck in a pine tree, to be sent to his own devices. As a result, Prosper became the master of the island, and he succeeded in revenge with the help of magic and Ariel,leading to his eventual restoration of his title and return to his homeland.
In the four hundred years since the script came out, another sense of global activity has also been in full swing. The Tempest traveled from Europe to the American continent. In the interpretation of various currents of thought, the four figures of Prospero, Ariel, Calleban and The Witch have been transformed several times and given different theoretical meanings. In the context of humanism, the story represents the opposition between civilization and barbarism; in the postcolonial context, it reflects the intricate relationship between the colonizer and the colonized; and the perspective of Marxist feminism, it reveals the mystery of exploitation and exploitation in the process of capitalist primitive accumulation.
Civilization and Barbarism: Ariel and the Voices of Humanism in Latin America
In Spanish America, the focus on The Tempest began at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, the United States won the war with Spain, succeeding the latter in control of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands, becoming the new hegemony that enveloped Latin America. The rise of the United States immediately triggered uneasiness among many Latin American intellectuals.
Between 1889 and 1891, the United States held several pan-American customs and monetary agreement conferences, which caused strong dissatisfaction among the Latin people. As Consul of Uruguay, José Martí attended and wrote more than a dozen articles, including "Respect for Our Americas", "Latin Mind", and "Our Americas", which reminded Latin American countries of the injustice and imperialist nature behind the Union and called for the prevention of "tigers outside" (Ariel, p. 17). In May 1898, three representatives of the "Latin" nation gave a lecture at the Victoria Theater in Buenos Aires to protest the U.S. aggression against Spain. The Argentine representative, Ron Sachs Peña, was fiercely opposed to Monroe Doctrine, responding to Monroe's "America of the Americans" with "America of Mankind"; the representative of France, Paul Grousac, then director of the National Library of Argentina, and the representative of Italy, Tarnasi, also gave exciting speeches, sounding the clarion call of nationalism.
Echoing these three lectures, Ruben Dario published an article in the newspaper El Tiempo titled "The Triumph of The Calleban." He pointed the finger at the North American "Yankees" and portrayed them in highly figurative language as the greedy, vulgar, and mercenary "great beast" of the Calleban:
I had seen the Yankees, in their oppressive ironclad cities; the time I spent among them was all unprovoked anxiety, as if feeling the oppression of a mountain, breathing and breathing in the land of cyclops, cannibals, beastly blacksmiths, mastodon dwellers. They are bells and whistles, obnoxious, vicious and vulgar, pushing and shoving like animals, chasing dollars. These calheban ideals hung on the stock market and the factory. They eat, eat, calculate, drink whiskey and make a million. (Ariel, p. 135)
Faced with a gluttonous appetite from the north, Dario realized the urgency of the struggle and called on Latin America to unite against the beast. What he wants to defend is Spain's "chivalry, idealism, nobility", "spiritual elegance": "All the stones, iron, gold, and fat are piled up, and it is not enough for my Latin soul to be reduced to Calheban!" ”
José Henrique Rodeau's Ariel was conceived in this historical context. Rodo was born in 1871 to a bourgeois enlightened Catholic family in Montovidea, Uruguay, to a nobleman mother. He read extensively from an early age and received a good education in European classics and humanism. Although he was forced to drop out of school due to his family's lack of success, he became self-taught, taught Western literature at the University of Mondvetiya, and also acted as director of the National Library. In the era in which Rodo lived, Uruguay was making remarkable achievements in modernization. In the half century before his birth, racism was rampant. After the Battle of Salcipuedes in 1831, the indigenous people were almost slaughtered by the Republican forces, and coupled with the government's immigration policy, Uruguay was rapidly "whitened" and pure-blood Indians ceased to exist (Gordon Brossuston: Rhodo's America: Flags and Silences, in Ariel, p. 186).
In 1900, under the influence of many intellectuals such as Dario, Rodo created Ariel in a platonic dialogue style. He called on Latin American youth to resist the temptation of the Kalliban from the north, not to fall step by step towards the idealless path of American utilitarianism, but to inherit the spiritual heritage of the Latin American nation, maintain their own values and belief systems, and follow Ariel to obtain "the spirituality of loving wisdom, beauty, and elegance."
In the book, Rodo incarnates Prosparro as a mentor to enlightened young people, the rough and greedy "monster" Calleban represents sexuality, irrationality and stupidity, and Ariel symbolizes the free and noble spiritual life. He praised Ariel with a holy light in his heart with a magnificent paving:
Ariel is the sublime crown of nature, and with the flame of the spirit, the upward development of the organized form can be completed. The victorious Ariel represents the ideal order in life, the superb inspiration in thought, the selflessness and selflessness in morality, the elegant taste in art, the heroism in action, the delicacy in customs... His irresistible strength comes from all upward movements in his life, even if he is defeated by the stubborn rebellion of Thekaban once and once, banished by the mighty barbarians, suffocated by the smoke of battle... Ariel is always able to recover, to regain her youth and beauty, just as she obeys Prospero, quickly responding to those who love him in reality and ask him for help... Break free from the bondage of matter like the one in the play, and return to the center of the Divine Flame forever. (Ariel, p. 118)
Rodo followed the imagery of Dario and others, constructing a dualistic opposition in a schematic way, the divine Ariel and the vulgar Calleban, a structure that reinforced both civilization (the spirit of exaltation) and barbarism (the supremacy of money), and also implied the opposition between Spanish America and Anthony America.
Rhodo
After the advent of "Ariel", the response was enthusiastic, setting off a movement called "Arielism". Over the next two decades, extensive discussions and practices were sparked in Dominica, Cuba and Mexico, and Rodo was hailed as a "mentor to the Youth of americas." Julio Antonio Meiya, the founder of Cuba's first communist organization, was deeply influenced by this, praising Rodo many times in his works and participating in the establishment of the Ariel Institute of Technology in Havana. The national issue raised by "Ariel" is deafening, awakening the Latin Americans who are in the dream of "Pan American" and becoming a banner of faith and ideals.
But it should not be overlooked that "Ariel" also quite representatively embodies the elitist color of the Latin American conservative Creoles ("Creole" has many meanings, here pointing out that the Spanish descendants born in Latin America, mostly adopt a Europeanized lifestyle). In the book, Lotot does not mention the suffering of indigenous peoples and blacks, only defending the top-down elite ruling order. He remained a colonist and adopted ethnographic expressions. At a symposium on the centenary of the publication of Ariel, Gordon Brossuston noted that Rhodo denied the continuity and importance of the Indigenous heritage, and that he saw the Quechuas as a thoughtless race, like mountain beasts. For example, he once summed up the Indians this way:
In the Republic, the Indians still constitute a conquered class, like lowly dirt, carrying social buildings... On this sad democratic basis is a minority, divided, and mostly incompetent ruling class, unable to adapt to the use of freedom because of its defects. (Ariel, pp. 187-188)
After the South American War of Independence, although Spain gradually lost its colonial power, it did not bring equality and liberation to everyone on the Latin American continent. For natives, slaves, disenfranchised people of color, and women, the dominance of Creole men of European descent was established after the Revolutionary War. For an elite ruling class like Loteau, how to shape and reconstruct Latin America is a necessary and difficult task, and the challenges they face are multiple. On the one hand, those who have sought independence from the old colonial rule are threatened by "neo-colonialism" that attempts to control Latin America through economic means and political policies such as economic, trade and monetary policies ([American] Mary Louis Pratt: The Eye of empire: Travel Writing and Cultural Interaction, translated by Fang Jie and Fang Chen, Translation Lin Publishing House, 2017, 300 pages), they need to be vigilant against this kind of foreign cultural and economic infiltration; on the other hand, internally, they need to consolidate their privileged position on the Latin American continent, Continue to grasp a large number of land, mineral, commercial, administrative and other resources. They need to manage their relationship with non-Europeans, lock the indigenous people at the bottom of society, and ensure that the original hierarchical order is not subverted.
In the view of conservative elites like Rodeau, American-style democracy, equality, and constitutional practice have no foundation in Latin America, and their utilitarian pursuit of wealth will only create vulgar mass rule, and if they want to find their own path in Latin America, the only cultural resources that can be used are Europe. Dalio and Rhodo, using the genre from ancient Greece, through the rewriting and appropriation of shakespeare's classic characters, while preserving European humanistic values and white supremacy, to achieve their own cultural tasks of decolonization, autonomy and anti-Americanism. Their portrayal and praise of Ariel is also a self-shaping of the Creoles.
"Who is Calleban?" : Postcolonial interpretation from Retamar to Spivak
Rhodo still uses the language and concepts of the old colonizers to characterize the colonized lands, and looks forward to Latin America with Ariel as the embodiment of (European) humanism. But from the 1820s onwards, intellectuals such as Borges and Mariatjee began to attack the "Rhodo Myth" with their own positions. By the second half of the twentieth century, with the rise of Marxism and postcolonial theory, praise for Prospero had shifted to concern and sympathy for Calheban. In areas not as "albino" as Uruguay, such as the Andes and the Caribbean, the tendency to question "Arielism" is more prominent.
As early as 1938, the Argentine Marxist Ponce pointed out in his article "Bourgeois Humanism and Proletarian Humanism" that Prospero represented an enlightened tyrant and the capitalist education under his rule for hundreds of years, and Ariel was a servile intellectual who succumbed to authority, and he prevented people from seeing the clear truth; the monster nature of the Kareban was not born, but an imposed injustice, and only the new world of the proletariat could make its soul look new (Yu Shiyang: "Ariel, Waiting for Rhodo"). , The Paper, Book Flipper Party, September 15, 2021). In 1941, the Peruvian thinker Alberto Sanchez accused Rodo of preaching the cultivation of "spiritual" and "leisurely" living in a subcontinent with its own rich cultural traditions, while suffering from poverty and social injustice (Gordon Brotherston, "Arielismo and Anthropophagy: the Tempest in Latin America", "The Tempest" and Its Travels, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, Reaktion Books, 2000, p.216）。 In 1971, on the occasion of the centenary of Rodo's birth, the Cuban thinker Roberto Fernández Retamar published the article "Calleban" in House of America, which further reversed the symbols of Ariel, Prospero and Calleban, breaking the binary opposition established by the Rhodos. Retamar proposes that the symbol of Latin America is not Ariel, but Calleban:
We live on the island of Kareban: Prospero invaded, killed our ancestors, enslaved Kareban, and taught him the language in order to make him understand the orders. What else could Caleban do but curse in this language and pray for the red sores to fall on Prospero's head? I can't find a more accurate metaphor to describe our cultural situation, to describe our reality. (Ariel, p. 166)
In Retamar's writings, Prospero is the embodiment of the colonizer, while the former owner of the land, like Calebban, can only use the language and conceptual tools of the suzerainty. In this sense, there is no real polar opposite between Ariel and Calleban, they are both slaves of Prosper, but Kalliban is difficult to tame, and Ariel has the "shadow of an intellectual". In a study of Jose Martí, Retamar pulled Ariel off the altar of a cultural icon and set up a model calleban, arguing that "Latin" Americans should not only draw nourishment from European classics, but also rediscover meaningful heritage from Indigenous cultural classics, and be in awe of the Caribbean ancestry that was wantonly divided by European explorers (p. 218).
The Anthology "The Tempest and Its Journey"
At the same time, however, Retamar was aware that the use of calheban as a symbol of Latin America remained problematic, as the word "kareban" itself was a derogatory term given to colonizers by the colonists. For example, in Cuba, he said, the word "mambi" was used to honor the insurgents of the Revolutionary War, and during the war it was a term used by colonizers to humiliate colonists (similar to "niggers"). The people of the independence camp ended up gloriously applying this humiliating word to themselves, which Retamar called "the dialectic of Calleban." Prospero not only taught Calebban to use his language, but also gave him a name, but that wasn't his real name. Retamar quoted Fidel Castro as saying: "To be precise, we don't have a name yet... From Keelung Beach, their thinking changed a little, from racial discrimination, discrimination against Creoles, mestizos, blacks, to discrimination against Latin Americans, just being Latin American, it was shameful. (Ariel, p. 172)
How to have their own name is not only a question of "cultural assimilation" as Marie Louis Pratt called in The Eye of the Empire (how the people at the end of the empire deal with the representational patterns exported by the suzerainty, how to misappropriate, screen and construct), but also how the colonizers find their own identity and rebuild subjectivity. A few years later, Retamar's plight was echoed in the second wave of postcolonial theory. The Indian-American thinker Spiewak went one step further in her critique of imperial and colonial discourse. Spivak was convinced that colonialism had completely disintegrated colonial culture into incorruptible fragments, and that any attempt to reconstruct it would therefore end in an essentialist formulation that violated the pluralism of colonial culture. India has its social class complexities, and so does Latin America. Citing Rhodo's Ariel and Retamar's Calleban, she argues that postcolonials should not see Kalliban as their symbol, because Retamar's powerful substitution still fails to take into account the cultural specificities of Maya, Aztec, Inca, or other smaller peoples. Spievac points out that "the cause of imperialism has long historically refracted the irreducible and discontinuous other into the naturalized other. This dilemma is reflected in the Kaleban of Retamar, between Europe and Latin America" (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Havard University Press, 1990, p. 130).
Spielwak's Critique of Postcolonial Rationality
From Retamar to Spivak, Kareban's dilemma in the search for identity has persisted, and it is this dilemma that evokes two waves of postcolonial interpretations. The first wave of postcolonial thought believed that the Kareban could find identity by returning to their own glorious culture, in which they could have a very different image than the colonists had seen, while the second wave of postcolonial theory held that returning to the cultural heritage of the past was an escape, that the colonized should recreate an identity based on national consciousness, and that they could no longer have a "pure" identity that did not take into account the influence of colonialism, just as The Kareban had learned the language and worldview of Prospero The influence from the colonizers cannot be denied.
In any case, The Tempest is now a classic postcolonial critical text, with Prosper transformed from an enlightened mentor to a colonist, and Kareban, once portrayed as an untamable monster, symbolizing a rebellious colonialist, though the latter's path to self-naming remains long and hindranced.
Calebban and the Witch: Feminist Rethinking of Capital Accumulation
In the twenty-first century, with the global expansion of emerging capitalist relations, a series of phenomena related to the origins of capitalism reappeared in a completely new guise, and leftist intellectuals began to re-examine the history of the capitalist transition period and analyze the process of primitive accumulation. The Italian feminist Silvia Federici is concerned about the relationship between witch hunts and primitive accumulation in Europe and the colonies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She argues that witches and colonizations, like enclosure movements, are all for the development and expansion of capitalism (Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Autonomedia, 2017). In The Kaleban and the Witch, the story of The Tempest is called upon again, except this time that the Kareban represent not only anti-colonialists, but also the world proletariat – more specifically, the proletariat as a symbol of resistance to capitalist logic. At the same time, the mother of Theleban, the witch Sicolax, who has always been neglected, has moved from the fringes to the center of the stage, becoming the embodiment of the female subject that capitalism desperately needs to destroy.
In contrast to the image of Calebban and the Witch is a "new man" born in the sixteenth century at the beginning of the Puritan Revolution and the rise of the commercial bourgeoisie in Western Europe, typified by Prosparro, who combines Ariel's transcendent spirituality with The vulgar materialism of The Kareban. By the seventeenth century, the binary opposites we were familiar with earlier had taken shape: one pole was the "power of reason," including frugality, prudence, responsibility, and self-control, while the other was "bodily desires," such as lasciviousness or greed.
Federic's Calebban and the Witch
In fact, the view of The Kareban as the representative of the proletariat dates back to the nineteenth century. The French expert on ancient middle Eastern language civilizations and philosopher Ernest Renant published the philosophical play Calleban: After the Storm – one of Rodeau's works. But the pro-monarchy, anti-democracy Lenant portrayed Caleban as a fanatical workers' revolutionary, "drunk, ignorant, and in pursuit of immediate interests and power" who defeated the aristocrat Prospero and his assistant Ariel in the workers' movement. The labor conflict reflected in the script is deeply rooted in the historical process of the primitive accumulation of capital: after the enclosure movement, the emerging bourgeoisie found that the expropriation of peasants from public land was not enough to force the disenfranchised proletarians to wage labor. The latter are often reduced to beggars, tramps and criminals. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the proletariat was so hostile to wage labor that many would rather risk going to the gallows than accept new working conditions (in England alone, seventy-two thousand people were hanged during the thirty-eight years of Henry VIII's reign).
This was the first crisis of capitalism, and the bourgeoisie therefore needed to adopt tough disciplinary measures, to develop more labor discipline, to domesticate disobedient "Karebans" into responsible, disciplined workers; not only that, but the bourgeoisie had to reshape the subordinate classes and incorporate them into the rational logic of the capitalist economy. According to Max Weber's famous theory, the "ultimate goal" of capitalism is acquisition, not just to satisfy our needs, and it requires people to abandon spontaneous, natural desires and promote reason.
At the same time, the persecution of witches, like the slave trade and the enclosure movement, was a very important aspect of the process of capital accumulation and proletarian formation. Many scholars have noted the synchronized relationship between the global witch hunt movement in the early modern period and the rise of capitalism and global expansion, and have placed their analysis of witch hunt in the dual context of the demographic and economic crises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the land and labor policies of the mercantilist era. A view commonly shared by feminist scholars is that witch hunts are aimed at destroying women's control over their fertility while paving the way for more oppressive patriarchal rule. At the beginning of the story of The Tempest, Prospero begins his reign by defeating the witches. We can only know from his lines that she was a "demon woman" with "blue eyes" and "pregnant" and was expelled from Algiers.
Marx had argued that the violent activities of the primitive accumulation stage would fade with the development of capitalism, and that the constraints on labor and exploitation would be accomplished mainly through the formulation of economic laws. On the contrary, Federic argues that primitive accumulation exists in different guises at each stage of capitalist globalization. The plundering, persecution and exploitation of peasant-labour, colonies and women are in some ways isomorphic, a necessary way for capitalism to survive and to deal with every crisis. In the process, capitalism inevitably resorts to racial and sexism and disparages the exploited by all means— portraying them as Calleban"-style "orcs" or "witches" rather than "rational people", thereby covering up their actions and justifying the inequality and poverty that actually prevail in a supposedly free and rational society.
Federic's analysis provides a new interpretation of the characters in The Tempest. Prospero's image changed from a colonialist, similar to that of a plantation owner, to that of a bourgeois ruler and witch hunter. In contrast, Kareban, the embodiment of the proletariat, and his mother. Based on Federic's theory and from the perspective of the needs of capitalist development, we can further understand Rodo's exaltation of reason in the above article, understand the dualistic opposition in Ariel, and why Calleban must be a "half-man, half-beast" monster.
The characters in The Tempest are diverted from the rewritten thought travel, reflecting different cultural contexts and power relations. From conservative to radical, Prospero's relationship with Calleban and Ariel has been reversed and re-released several times. And whether their relationship is enlightened/enlightened, colonized/colonized, or exploited/exploited, Latin America is an important link that should not be ignored. The story of The Tempest bears witness to the (ongoing) expansion of global capitalism and is relevant to our present. Like "The Tempest", "Ariel" has also been translated into English, French, German, Italian and other languages in the hundred years after its publication, and has sparked ideas from different contexts. Now, with the chinese translation, a new journey is about to begin.