오든의『불안의 시대』에 나타나는 바로크 감성

Abstract

This paper attempts to ascertain the Baroque sensibility in Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, subtitled “A Baroque Eclogue.” René Welleck abstracts such diverse notions of the Baroque as the courtly, the atectonic, and the sensually mystic, and Walter Benjamin notes a natural tendency towards the extreme, the revolutionary in the peripheral, and decadent violence as significant characteristics of German Baroque tragedy. Auden seems to have been acquainted with the achievements of Baroque studies and analogically, fragmentarily, and complexly applied a variety of Baroque nuances to The Age of Anxiety. The Baroque sensibility revealed mostly in such pre-modern powers as the absolute monarchy and Catholicism is contradictorily ambivalent. Grandiose and flamboyant on the surface, they are also resigned to the premonition that the magnificent and florid facade will be encroached upon by the modern dynamics of science, capitalism, and Protestantism. Now Modernism, which was the dark germ of the Baroque and replaced the ancient regime and has ripened fully, also encounters the ironic altercation of the strongest chiaro(light) and oscuro(darkness); the compact oscuro adumbrates the most brilliant summit of humanistic civilization leading to the nadir. As Auden nightmarishly portrays in The Age of Anxiety modernists have continually witnessed how two world wars could exterminate even the most mightiest cultures, or, imperialistic capitalism, mechanical industrialism, and science and technology and that peripheral nothing and uncertainty was introduced as a new foreground. Despite the improbability of pastorals in an age of unpredictability, effete modernists have no other choice but to phantasy a kind of utopia or pastoral. Auden arranged for his four characters to go on a quest for an prelapsarian and prehistoric pastoral. But the modern pastoral is divergent from the traditional one in that it does not locate an appropriate place for pastorals, and the narrative structure is incompatible due to nebulous and apprehensive endings. The four characters complete their unconscious journey at the edge of a bleak desert no longer possible to track. In a phrase, it can be seen as a baroque pastoral. Yet, just as traditional pastorals established the reconciliation between an isolated individual and an inclusive society, so Auden sought not to terminate otherness and sociality. In The Age of Anxiety we may ascertain some development in sociality. Sometimes they fantasize their quest as a whole body and even Emble and Rosetta promise an engagement; yet after all they recoil to diurnal solitude proving that their relationship is superficial. However, Auden detects another route from this shrinking to Always-Opposite, Absolute Otherness, or the capital He. Especially Rosetta confesses that regardless of the external world the Absolute He always watches, judges, and protects her like a Kierkegaardian God. Auden summons the tinge of baroque mysticism of an infinite inner way. The Age of Anxiety, which deals with the Second World War incorporates Auden’s intention that ethical and religious seriousness should curb hallucinatory artifice more clearly. It also represents modern anxiety more dramatically with the analogies of the Baroque as the premonition of the dark ellipsis of modern culture, the insecure narrative of the modern pastoral, and the mystic inner way to Absolute Otherness.