Caliban's Filibuster by Paul West

First published: 1971

Type of work: Psychological romance

Time of work: An unspecified present covering a three-day span

Locale: Over the Pacific Ocean and Tokyo

Principal Characters:

• Cal, the protagonist, a hack writer of teleplays
• Sammy Zeuss, a film producer and the employer of Cal and Murray McAndrew
• Murray McAndrew, an actor starring in Geisha from Venus

The Novel

To speak of plot in Caliban’s Filibuster is to suggest that it adheres to a series of fictional conventions which simply do not pertain. Of outward action there is very little (three men are flying in a jet from California to Japan, where they meet other actors and a Japanese producer); it is the tortured musings of Cal’s consciousness which provide the basis for most of the novel’s activities.

The novel opens with the protagonist, Cal, rehearsing in his mind a film in which he functions as both actor and audience as he travels over the Pacific. As he dramatizes his relationships with his two traveling companions— Sammy Zeuss and Murray McAndrew—a host of voices begin interrupting, questioning, and even demanding that Cal explain, change, or otherwise amend his cinematic musings. While it is unclear exactly to whom these voices belong, the reader quickly discerns that these are parts of Cal himself or alternate selves competing with the self that appears in control.

What quickly emerges from these meditations is Cal’s overwhelming frustration with the course that his career has taken; instead of writing the novel he had always aspired to write, he feels forced to capitulate to Zeuss’s crass aesthetics and grind out endless hack work. Almost as a hedge against this commercial turn that his career has taken, Cal begins formulating the first of three interdependent, yet distinctly separate, scenarios, in which he and his two companions will play significant roles.

In the first of these, McAndrew appears as a fabulously wealthy Greek shipping magnate, P. D. Malchios, who invites three guests to his home for a feast at which each proffers a gift and holds forth on a subject of his choosing. The meal concludes with Malchios taking his guests to a laboratory, where he is injected with chemicals and frozen for later thawing. The scenario, however, ends with Malchios and a frozen narrator both being seized and unceremoniously dumped into the Red Sea.

In his second narration, the narrator appears as P. D. Maleth, whose pseudonyms are Cortex Me and Cortex To, a scholar of Elizabethan drama who offers a taped lecture (given by himself) which he violently interrupts. He is punished for his outburst by one A. Z. Zeuss, put on sabbatical, and eventually appears to have become divided from himself, as one part of him whiles away his time incarcerated in a place known as the Cain Lab.

With two-thirds of his journey over, Cal begins a third story, in which what appears to be the disturbed narrator of the second tale, now known as P. D. Malkari, receives a cryptic message to travel to a land and introduce himself to the natives there. Traveling by steamer to Australia, he is eventually captured by aborigines, subjected to excruciating torture, and elevated to the position of demigod. He then presides over the killing of a herd of dugongs, a duel between two combatants, and a mass fertility ritual. The tale ends when the captain of the steamer destroys a crippled plane floating in the ocean.

Once in Japan, Cal is jostled out of his reveries and forced to return to the work he finds so distasteful. In a final scene, McAndrew reveals that, while stationed in Japan during the war, he sired a deformed daughter whom he has been supporting all these years, and that he has been secretly married for years to a Japanese woman. At the novel’s close, Cal has arrived at mono no aware, a phrase a geisha taught him, meaning the “awareness of the pathos of things.”

The Characters

Cal is clearly a deeply troubled man who desperately tries to hold on to his patience and sanity by distancing himself from his life like a filmgoer and by projecting in his scenarios versions of the self he would like to be. In many ways, like his Shakespearean namesake from The Tempest, Caliban, he is a primitive, hateful creature who wants to take revenge on others for what he sees as the unjust waste of his talent. Thus, he creates the scenarios as ways of visiting his wrath on McAndrew and Zeuss. Like his namesake, he curses those who he believes control him and dreams of a freedom that is never truly his.

Nevertheless, Cal struggles with his frustrations and limitations, and through his struggles the reader comes to a grudging acceptance of him and his dilemma. At the time of the novel’s publication, some reviewers argued that Cal’s three tales amount to the masterpieces of his life, master works that are destroyed when he crosses the International Date Line and which are thus lost on the very day of their creator’s greatest artistic triumph. Nevertheless, for all of their passion, these scenarios are hardly major works. Instead, they are a filibuster (as the novel’s title suggests) against those forces to which Cal cannot entirely capitulate.

One must admire a consciousness so determined to announce its individuality: Cal is filibustering not only against the pernicious influences of Zeuss’s debased art but also, more important, against the self Cal has become, against the ravages of “time the destroyer” (here depicted as the International Date Line), and against those forces (among them selfish ambition) which deny honest emotion.

Thus, in spite of his name, Cal is not a thoroughgoing equivalent of William Shakespeare’s Caliban. He is not an utter primitive, uneducable and unredeemable. He is a creature of some considerable sensitivity, one who can improve and arrive at a more profound understanding of himself and the world about him. In his musings, Cal also offers important antidotes to the forces of sterility and conformity which threaten to annihilate him, and all life for that matter.

Murray McAndrew, on the other hand, appears, at least initially, to be a helpless and even willing victim of those forces of conformity and sterility. Like Cal, he is a man who, though he may have once been quite talented, has squandered his talents for a well-paid life of mediocrity. Like Cal, he chafes against what he considers the abuses visited upon him, but he is also different in his incapacity to marshal much of a defense, verbal or otherwise. Cal’s strong antipathy for McAndrew through most of the novel most likely stems from the writer’s awareness of their shared weaknesses and failings. As the novel’s conclusion indicates, McAndrew is more contented than he appears on the surface, and his life is much richer than Cal ever imagines.

Sammy Zeuss acts as the rapacious, tasteless comic foil to these two victims. In most respects, Zeuss stands as the conventional stereotype of the Hollywood mogul dedicated to satisfying the most puerile of desires and tastes. As Cal explains it, Zeuss is obsessed with “What Is Acceptable To All Men (meaning kitsch).” In Cal’s mind, the world belongs to the Sammy Zeusses, men who, despite or perhaps because of their utter mediocrity, control everyone else for their own profit. Ultimately, what makes a character such as Zeuss so exasperating is his complete calm and blithe incomprehension of the frustrations from which Cal and McAndrew suffer.

Critical Context

As many reviewers and readers have indicated, Caliban’s Filibuster represents West at his most experimental. With its emphasis on consciousness and interior states, it is hardly atypical of his early fiction; the distinct difference, however, rests with the remarkably complex linguistic patterns. The novel is furthermore important for provoking West to write such other experimental novels as Colonel Mint (1972) and Gala (1976). In these novels, West tries to inspect “man in his complete environment.... It will be all to the good when the novel bleeds over into a whole range of fields—cybernetics, anthropology, possibly psychiatry.”

Caliban’s Filibuster also inaugurated West’s practice of finding some external structuring pattern for his seemingly aimless narratives. In this case he relies upon both the International Date Line and the color spectrum to give some objective pattern to Cal’s thoughts. For example, the first narrative is dominated by the color blue, the second by yellow, and the third by red, and West has stated that originally he wanted these sections of the novel coded with their respective colors on the pages’ edges.

As a result of this novel and the experiments that succeeded it, West is often labeled an inaccessible writer, but this is simply not true. While the reader may not always follow every event or be able to make sense of all the novel’s elements, there are numerous delights and some genuinely comic moments. What West’s fiction does demand is an active engagement on the reader’s part, and there are indeed rewards for that engagement.

Bibliography

Kirkus Reviews. Review. XXXIX (February 15, 1971), p. 199.

Library Journal. Review. XCVI (April 15, 1971), p. 1389.

National Observer. Review. X (May 17, 1971), p. 19.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. LXIV (June 20, 1971), p. 5.

Publishers Weekly. Review. CXCIX (March 8, 1971), p. 63.