타이먼의 소외, 그 이중적 전망: 『아테네의 타이먼』

Abstract

Shakespeare introduces Timon, the last feudal aristocrat, into the world of capital society and illustrates the process of alienation by money significantly. The aristocracy are traditionally spend-thrift. This is certainly true of Timon, one of the last Shakespeare's big spenders. His generosity to his friends is in essence an act of aggressive generosity which reduces everyone else to the inferior and passive position of recipient. Even it turns out to be literally self-destructive, as he sinks deeper into debt. Timon gives as a friend, and expects to borrow as a friend, but instead he is being treated like any debtor bound not by the ties of friendship but by the conditions of a legal contract. In a word, living in the hour of capitalist emergence, Timon is not aware of aquisition and dispossession as a timely theme. He is so out of touch with the world that his tragic invective against mankind fails to carry out any weight and seems merely rhetorical. But it is also Timon who in the lowest depths of his disillusion and misanthropy expresses money's power to pervert everything into its opposite. He ironically calls money 'sweet,' 'young,' 'fresh,' 'loved,' and 'delicate' and gloats over his ability to make the common whore of mankind act according to her nature. From this contradiction of characterization and discourse, we can infer Shakespeare's double vision of the essence of money. However, Timon cannot see clearly to the last that he is the victim of these perversions of money even while profiting from or exulting in them. That is why Timon's bleak and desolate alienation suggests strikingly that money is "the alienated ability of mankind."