Citizen-Saints by Julia Reinhard Lupton;

Author:Julia Reinhard Lupton; [Lupton, Julia Reinhard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2005-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

Creature Caliban

What is a creature? Derived from the future active participle of the Latin verb creare, “to create,” creature indicates a made or fashioned thing, but with the sense of continued or potential process, action, or emergence built into the future thrust of its active verbal form. Its tense forever imperfect, creatura resembles those parallel constructions, natura and figura, in which the definitive determinations conferred by nativity and facticity are nonetheless opened to the possibility of further metamorphosis by the forward thrust of the suffix -ura (“that which is about to occur”).1 The creatura is a thing always in the process of undergoing creation; the creature is actively passive, or, better, passionate, perpetually becoming-created, subject to transformation at the behest of the arbitrary commands of an Other. The creature presents above all a theological conceptualization of natural phenomena. In Judaism and Christianity (and indeed it is only via the Latin of late antiquity that the word enters the modern languages), the word creature marks the radical separation of Creation and Creator.2 This separation in turn can articulate any number of cuts or divisions: between world and God;3 between all living things and those that are inert, inanimate, or elemental; between human beings and the “other creatures” over which they have been given rule;4 or, in more figurative uses, between anyone or any thing that is produced or controlled by an agent, author, master, or tyrant.5 In modern usage, creature borders on the monstrous and unnatural, increasingly applied to those created things that warp the proper canons of creation. It can even come to characterize the difference between male and female, or between majority and minority: Creature as a term of endearment is generally used of women and children, and creatura itself might be said to break into formed and formless segments, with creat- indicating the ordered composition of humanity and the -ura signaling its risky capacities for increase and change, foison and fusion. In various moments in the theological imagination of the West, “creatureliness” has served to localize a moment of passionate passivity, of an abjected, thing-like (non)being, a being of subjected becoming, that precipitates out of the divine Logos as its material remnant.

Caliban is such a creature. Although the word appears nowhere in The Tempest in conjunction with Caliban himself, his character is everywhere hedged in and held up by the politico-theological category of the creaturely. As Stephen Greenblatt remarks, “The Caliban of Act V is in a very real sense Prospero’s creature,” a designation that describes Caliban’s radical subjection to and separation from Prospero, as well as the peculiar bond of responsibility implied by those relations.6 As a solitary Adam on an island to which he is native but not natural, Caliban first stood apart from the rest of creation as “his own king.” Now enslaved to a Master-Maker, he finds himself locked within the swarming ranks of “scamels,” filberts, and the nimble marmoset, a natural marvel in a world of marvels. As such, he becomes an emblem

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