The conceptual figures of Ariel and Caliban in the Shakespearen kaleidoscope of The Tempest an their French and Latin American reception. The barbaric and the civilized through Renan, Darío and Rodó

Abstract

In 1898, across his text called “Triunfo de Calibán. Visiones de América” (“Victory of Caliban. Visions of America”), Rubén Darío appropriated the conceptual character of Caliban for his own cultural discourse, not devoid of strong polemic strength in the context of the war of Cuba and the emergency of the United States as the new world power of the modern times. That was twenty years after the publication in France of Renan’s Caliban, suite de la Tempête (Caliban. Continuation of The Tempest. If Darío clearly suggests a continuity with Renan’s topic of the mass society, he introduced however a new opposition, missing in Renan’s own writings, which is the opposition between two models of modernity, the Greco-Latin modernity, personified by the Mediterranean Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Portugal) together with Latin America’s nations and the Anglo-Saxon modernity, personified by the nations of northern Europe and North America, principally the United States. José Enrique Rodo, through his Essay Ariel, deepened the ideas already developed by Darío, but however he shifted the gravity centre to the character of Ariel: in Rodo, as in Shakespeare’s Tempest, Ariel incarnates classical measure and classical reason, against the exorbitant aspects of Caliban. Now Rodo imagines a real triumph of Ariel, that is, of Latin civilization, against Dario’s triumph of Caliban. In this paper, in the context of the commemoration of Dario’s death, which occurred in 1916, and of the four centenary of Shakespeare’s death, we propose a constellation between Shakespeare’s Tempest, together with Renan, Darío and Rodo to deal with the notions of the barbarian and the civilized in the horizon of the question of modernity, the postcolonial and the emergence of the twenty century new superpower.