Caliban Exiled Into The Library

I'm passionate about literature, yes, but that doesn't mean I'm reading day and night to get through that "list" of "must reads" and "should reads."

I feel that literature and the literary life is like pollen, i.e. wildly dispersed and may enter you in any which way, some obvious, like reading directly and persistently, or the collisions may be singularly amorphous and fragmented.

One of the ways in which wisps of literary intonations are reaching my ears and eyes of late are through reviews of books.

In reviews of John Irving's new novel In One Person, there are interesting mentions of Shakespeare (and Dickens). I read that Irving's novel--the erotic history of a bisexual protagonist--is staged, in essence, as a dark comedy of disguises, mistaken identities and giddy/out-of-the-box erotic trajectories    , much along the line of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. 

However, there's more of Shakespeare in Irving's novel than the adventures of a transgendered (un moored from the fixity of gender) eros. There a bit of The Tempest as well. Ms. Frost, one of the hero(in)e's love interest is akin to Caliban, the banished-to-exile monster in this last of Shakespeare's plays. Caliban, a semantic reconstruction of "cannibal," refuses to convert to the mores of civilization brought upon his island by the outsider-invader, Prospero. As a result of his stubborn refusal to become civilized (in a particular kind of way), Caliban is variously punished.

Ms. Frost is the latter-day Caliban because she refuses to convert to the ideology of "categories" in an all-encompassing kind of way. Born in a "small town" in rural Vermont, Ms. Alberta Frost is an ex-male wrestler Albert, who decides to carry on as a woman in the second part of her life. The "small town" predictably wants to extirpate an unabashed transgender like Ms. Frost (she makes love to men like a woman, yet does not hide her penis from them), but she stays put and lives a life of perpetual banishment. She is condemned to live the life of a librarian in a parochial school.

What amuses me is that punishment for a modern Calibanic figure like Ms. Frost is the library! That inspires me to become a Caliban myself.