エアリルとキャリバン : ラテン･アメリカにおけるシェイクスピア的人物の文化史への覚書

Ariel and Caliban, an invisible fairy and a monstrous creature in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, played highly important roles in the Latin American cultural history: these two dramatis personae have provided an allegorical key to understand the New World’s historically specific cultural status vis-à-vis European metropolitan cultures. This essay or what may best be described as some preparatory note tries to trace back the well-trodden path of symbolic changes from Ariel to Caliban, reconsidering their vicissitudes of interpretations and finding out those intricacies and ambiguities which refuse any kinds of recapitulations. Edward W. Said’s overview of this cultural history reveals unwittingly some obvious but often neglected importance of Ariel, who, as a collaborator of colonization as well as a creator of independent movements, remains one of the central representations of the intellectuals. Rob Nixon’s now notorious essay, a highly devastating criticism of the present-day third world culture and society, can be easily refuted by the discursive strategy with which he attacked the postcolonial rewritings of Caliban, those rewritings which have, according to Nixon, failed to encounter any objective correlatives in their real politics. Jonathan Goldberg’s marvelous queer reading opened up some critical space in which we can reconsider two advocates, Rodó, an author of Ariel and Retamar, a Cuban critic of the collection of essays Caliban. In each discourse Ariel and Caliban get intermingled, crossed and interchangeable, making boon companions instead of opponents in their cultural resistance. Rodó’s antidemocratic vision and Retamar’s notorious homophobia, two targets of postmodern theoretical attacks, turn out to be some voice of their own situation of historical crisis if they can be put within their original contexts. Any detailed analysis of Ariel and Caliban will reveal that their hitherto conventional images are not sustained only to leave us enigmatic queer monsters for further explorations.特集 ラテン文学論