The Rage of Caliban

THE RAGE OF CALIBAN JACOB KORG The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray The Philistine in Wilde's aphorism is confronted by a simplified form of the Victorian problem of personal identity. It was the rage of Caliban, a rage against the images of man available to the contemporary mind, that led to the preoccupation with doubles and psychological dualism which Dorian Gray illustrates. Dissatisfied with the pragmatic and the idealistic views of the self, yet detecting truth in both of them, the nineteenth century turned to the hypothesis that the mind was a dualism which could accommodate contradiction. To many hard-pressed Victorians this seemed a plausible, even an inescapable explanation of their spiritual crises. It acquired the status of an ethical convenience, a psychological fact, a metaphysical reality. Doubling invaded literature as a theme, a pattern, a ubiquitous unconscious inference. Even the unimaginative could grasp the validity of the principle expressed in Rimbaud's "JE est un autre." It led an underground life, for it was in conllict with the dominant assumption that the soul is a unity, and with the traditional beliefs that rested on it. In his study of this subject, Doubles in Literary Psychology (1949), Ralph Tymms names Dorian Gray as a book which brings together several of the forms the motif of the double had been given in earlier works. But it does more than this, for it also registers the crucial change in the ideas about the self that has become a central theme in twentieth-century literature. Like most other tales of the double, Dorian Gray ends by denying that man is a divided being, and asserts the unity of the soul. But just as the sober moral conclusions of Wilde's comedies lead hazardous lives in the Volume XXXVII, Number 1, October, 1967 76 JACOB KORG company of the brilliant scepticism that leads up to them, the conventional doctrine of his novel is threatened by more complex and more sensitive intimations. Dorian's identity is divided between the painting and his physical self; but it is divided again when he develops the double personality of the dandy. And in the long chapter devoted to his intellectual development, he is shown experimenting with other identities. In this way, the novel goes beyond the romantic issue of whether the soul is single or double to anticipate the twentieth-century theme of multiplicity , and to add a new and significant dimension to the literature of personal identity. Dorian Gray touches on all three of the assumptions about the structure of the self, each connected with its own sensibility and style of feeling, that have functioned since the Romantic period. There has been the assumption that it is single, or that it possesses sOme essence or unifying principle; that it is double, haVing the form of a cleavage or a dialectic; and that it is multiple, a view that ends, as we shall see, in an ultimate denial of the self. In spite of much overlapping, these represent a progression, each arising to fill the vacuum in nineteenth-century thought left by the death of its predecessor. When it is under examination , the sense of being is the most plastic of subjects; it seems to have no real conformation of its own, but is ready enough to assume a structure convenient for the culture that moulds it. There is a complex reciprocity between the sense of the self and external experience, and any observation about one begins by making assumptions about the other. Hence, ideas of personal identity are not in the nature of factual statements , but are simply attempts to establish a ground from which experience may be adequately dealt with. The conviction that the soul is unitary was inherited by the Victorians from romantic sources. The romantic doctrine that the subjective self is, or participates in, ultimate reality, obviously includes the belief that it possesses some enduring identity. In this view, the changes and conflicts that...