Jack Hilton’s Caliban Shrieks, re-published this year, is a work of picaresque modernism, closer to the early fragmentation of picaresque in the sense of its idea of unfortunateness as a bitter satire of an increasingly fractious, displaced, unequal cityscape. In this regard, the comparisons to Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller seem exceptionally pertinent, therefore opening the apparently unique fragmentation of modernism as a comparison with earlier styles. The erstwhile protagonists of both picaresques are often being locked up, and the grotesque conditions of their locking up mirror those of their respective times. Caliban Shrieks, tanked with Shakespeare references, no least to the character who is at the margin of an island he uniquely understands, captures the brute reality of early twentieth century prisons:
“You are ordered to place your cards in the frame outside the door. Then the warder – from now on called screw – looks up and down to see us all in miscellaneous forms of attention, and again indifferently chirps ‘Into your cells.’ Once again there’s a rhythmic banging of doors one after the other, and the grating of the key. You look round at your home, and find it like the one you left behind just after tea with the addition of a bed board of three planks’ width and nearly seven feet long, with two batons underneath to raise it about three inches from the floor.”
I like here the way the picaresque collapses character, that character is replaced by invective, derision. It compares resonantly with a passage in “The Unfortunate Traveller”, Nashe similarly understanding the fate of being tossed into prison long before human rights, detention limits, merely the sheer fear:
“I could drinke for anger till my head akt, to think how I was abused. Shall I shame the deuill and speake the truth, to prison was I sent as principall, and my master as accessarie, nor was it to a prison neither, but to the master of the mints house who though partly our iudge, and a most seuere vpright iustice in his own nature, extreamly seemed to condole our ignorant estate, and without all peraduenture a present redresse he had ministred, if certaine of our countrie men hearing an English earle was apprehended for coining, had not come to visite vs.”
This is to avoid dwelling on the other countless similarities between Caliban Shrieks, and classic Elizabethan picaresque modernism, such as its reliance on wheedling allusion. It is to initiate an understanding of a fascinating, undiscovered writer, who lived in my own town of Rochdale, and equally stretches beyond it.
Squidditas 