ABSTRACT
When Caliban enters the world of Prospero’s language, when he comes to write his own books and appropriate the power they embody, how will those books talk? To answer this we must first ask how Caliban is to arrive at meaning in Prospero’s language, how he will use writing. But how does writing communicate? How can Caliban produce his own books, his own source of magic power? The answer to this lies at the heart of the practice of writing: Caliban uses writing, as all writers do, by entering into dialogue. The written text is a social situation. That is to say, it has its existence in something more than the marks on the page, namely, the participations of social beings whom we call writers and readers, and who constitute the writing as communication of a particular kind, as ‘saying’ a certain thing. When these participants exist in different cultures, as they do in post-colonial writing, two issues quickly come to the forefront: can writing in one language convey the reality of a different culture? Or, conversely, is writing linguistically bound to a particular culture? One of the most persistent misconceptions about this activity is that the meaning of writing is an a priori to be uncovered; existing either as a function of the language, or the inscription of something in the mind of the writer, or the reconstruction of the reader’s experience. Indeed, the very term ‘meaning’ tends to infer some objective content which is the end point of reading. This problem in metaphysics is itself a problem of language.
