신경제비평의 관점에서 본 벤 존슨: 연금술사』에 나타난 환상의 자본과 분변 음욕증(淫慾症)
Ben Jonson and New Economic Criticism: Capitalist Fantasy and Coprophilia in The Alchemist
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The Alchemist uses alchemy as a metaphor of capitalism to satirize reification of human values. This essay adopts new economic criticism as theoretical methodology to analyze capitalist fantasy and scatological obscenity in the play. The methodology has benefited greatly from symbolic economies, which argues for homology between Marx’s capitalist theory and Freud’s psychoanalysis. Renaissance’s alchemical theory forms homological relations with the process by which Marx’s commodity is abstracted into world money and Freud’s libido is sublimated into the phallus. The play treats alchemy as a pseudo-science combined with verbal fantasy and money fetishism, and it satirizes utopian tendency of alchemy with scatological words. If the purpose of alchemy is to sublimate low-grade substances into the highest substance, then the purpose of the play is to reduce gold to feces. The progress of alchemy in the play indicates the growing gap between fantasy and reality. The explosion of the alchemical workplace in Act 4 is a deliberate incident which explodes part of the fantasy, and Lovewit’s return afterwards shatters the entire fantasy surrounding Blackfriars. However, his house does not return to the state as it was prior to the plague outbreak. The play’s finale reveals that the con artists’ alchemical dream and its filthy counterparts are ironically replaced by Lovewit’s opportunistic greed and its coprophilic equivalents. Moreover, the fantasy Jeremy suggests in the epilogue goes beyond the level of theatre. The play leaves us with the unsettling notion that capitalism obsessed with money fetishism might be an economic system of coprophilia.
Abstract
The Alchemist uses alchemy as a metaphor of capitalism to satirize reification of human values. This essay adopts new economic criticism as theoretical methodology to analyze capitalist fantasy and scatological obscenity in the play. The methodology has benefited greatly from symbolic economies, which argues for homology between Marx’s capitalist theory and Freud’s psychoanalysis. Renaissance’s alchemical theory forms homological relations with the process by which Marx’s commodity is abstracted into world money and Freud’s libido is sublimated into the phallus. The play treats alchemy as a pseudo-science combined with verbal fantasy and money fetishism, and it satirizes utopian tendency of alchemy with scatological words. If the purpose of alchemy is to sublimate low-grade substances into the highest substance, then the purpose of the play is to reduce gold to feces. The progress of alchemy in the play indicates the growing gap between fantasy and reality. The explosion of the alchemical workplace in Act 4 is a deliberate incident which explodes part of the fantasy, and Lovewit’s return afterwards shatters the entire fantasy surrounding Blackfriars. However, his house does not return to the state as it was prior to the plague outbreak. The play’s finale reveals that the con artists’ alchemical dream and its filthy counterparts are ironically replaced by Lovewit’s opportunistic greed and its coprophilic equivalents. Moreover, the fantasy Jeremy suggests in the epilogue goes beyond the level of theatre. The play leaves us with the unsettling notion that capitalism obsessed with money fetishism might be an economic system of coprophilia.
참고문헌 (30)
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