(Pre-print draft, published in Critical Horizons, a Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 16(1) (February, 2015), 70-87

But, isn’t Timon of Athens Really Trauerspiel?: Walter Benjamin’s Modernity

Author: William L. RemleyInstitutional Affiliation: Adjunct Assistant Professor Department of Religion andPhilosophy Hofstra University 104 Heger Hall Hempstead, NY 11549 william.l.remley@hofstra.edu

How goes the world?—it wears, sir, as it grows. —Timon of Athens, I, i, 3-4.

In his book, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin

expounds upon his theory of German tragic drama embodied in

seventeenth-century mourning play in an extremely dense and

enigmatic foray, yet with a purpose that is intent on showing the

emergence of baroque tragedy as a new aesthetic form at odds with

and emancipated from classical tragedy’s mythical foundation, and

1

instead premised in a scene of historical time and progress.1

Whereas Greek tragedy stages the human encounter with divine

forces, the hero’s surrender to fate and the sudden emergence of

a primordial past with its demonic, mythical laws, Trauerspiel

involves its characters in historical narratives testing our

beliefs in political mores, skills in negotiating the always

dicey political milieu, and the ever present but gratuitous

domination of violence. In the process, Benjamin reveals a theory

of modernity that fails to live up to its possibilities and thus

can only generate cultural and political aporias. But, in a never

ending cycle, these aporias are themselves derived from the

origin of modernity that precipitates a “malaise” or sickness

that is the modern condition. This sickness, in turn, results in

a radically alienated subject who seeks meaning and significance

by “flitting” from object to object, only to contend with the

inevitable and ineluctable melancholic truth of unrequited

satisfaction. Indeed, as Max Pensky has pointed out, Benjamin is

1 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), hereinafter referred to as “OTD.” Originally published in 1928 as Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels.

2

reluctant to even posit the existence of a “subject;” it seems to

be a category of Being that hardly exists.2

Not surprisingly Benjamin’s Trauerspeil has played a rather

insignificant role in relation to the greatest dramatist of

tragedy, that is, the works of William Shakespeare. Benjamin

himself refers to Shakespeare in his text, but the references are

never developed to any great extent. While most commentators turn

to Hamlet as the obvious example of Trauerspiel, I think a far

better illustration of Benjamin’s theory of mourning play and the

development of the plot and characters can be found in a

decidedly less well known Shakespearean work, Timon of Athens. At

this point, however, an obvious and important question comes to

mind; namely, why read Shakespeare in a Benjaminesque manner—

after all, a tragedy by any other name is still a tragedy. It is

not, however, so much what one actually calls the work of art as

it is the process of bringing truth into existence, which is

objectively present as well as discoverable in phenomenon 2 Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p. 61. A little later, Pensky arguesthat “the ebbing of the vitality of selfhood—what, in other terms, we would call “alienation”—is a virtually inescapable leitmotiv in Benjamin’s biography.” Ibid., p. 62.

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themselves. In this sense, it is my contention that Timon can be

seen as representing a shift away from classical tragedy’s

structured form to a modern configuration portrayed by Benjamin.

And in this shift Shakespeare foretells through his dramatic

works our present-day condition called “modernity”—so aptly

captured by Benjamin, and a condition that persists today. An

important distinction must be made, however. Unlike Shakespeare’s

other tragedies—and this applies especially to Hamlet which

clearly evidences the social bonds that we are ineluctably

dependent upon for our own self-worth and meaning but are,

nonetheless, fully dissolvable—I wish to challenge this point of

view by arguing that Benjamin in general and Timon in particular

envisions no such existing social bond that can come to be the

subject of delamination, and thus the inheritability or

transmissibility of human sociality is never thrown into

question.3 At most Timon points out that any social bond is based3 The theme that there are familial as well as authoritative social bonds suchas kinship, civic ties, economic dependencies and political allegiances, all of which we are wholly dependent upon for our sense of well-being and self-worth but nevertheless can come undone, is articulated by Paul A. Kottman, Tragic Conditions: Disinheriting the Globe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), p. 4. In a footnote Kottman argues that his thesis could be extended to Timon of Athens as well. Ibid., p. 169, ft. note 19.

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on a purely fictional foundation, and is, therefore, merely

illusory. Consequently, it is not possible that a social bond is

either essential to human understanding, or is, once formed,

subject to dissolution when, in fact, the bond never came into

existence in the first place.

While an exhaustive exegesis of Benjamin’s Trauerspeil is not

my intent, I will first briefly examine the three sections of the

Trauerspeil in order to understand exactly why and how the

seventeenth-century German mourning play marks the breaking

point, the point of origin, the emergence of modernity. The

importance of this origin assumes significance for Benjamin

because he is interested in the foundational aspects of history,

and, not unlike Hegel, that historical perspective encompasses a

mise-en-scène of grand, all-encompassing proportions. Thus the

aesthetics of the period under consideration have far reaching

implications. Lastly, and most importantly, I want to ask whether

a play such as Timon of Athens might better exemplify the concept of

mourning play and thus the notion of modernity that Benjamin has

5

in mind. It is this discussion that will occupy the second

portion of this paper.

Before Benjamin’s “rehabilitation,” German Trauerspiel had

fallen into relative obscurity and was often thought of as a

rather “tragic” caricature of its classical cousin.4 It was,

however, this very derision and obscurity that intrigued

Benjamin, since to reconfigure an entire literary form (what

Benjamin would refer to as an “idea”) would envision a radical

departure from accepted literary judgments and conventional

aesthetic categories. Benjamin’s Trauerspiel also provided a

further opportunity to expand upon the mystical themes and motifs

that had occupied him since his youth, and was to remain a life-

long fascination. In these themes, sorrowful nature, violence,

history as messianic, and human language as Keirkegaardian post-

lapsarian “nonsense” are interwoven to provide an understanding

of a God-forsaken world of ruin represented through a mourning

play that not by accident concerns itself with ruination.5

4 OTD, p. 50.

5 In his 1916 essay, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London, NLB, 1979), Benjamin explains that after the Fall humans abandoned immediacy

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Benjamin sees Trauerspiel as truly dealing with humankind’s futile

search for meaning only to be abandoned to an accumulation of

endless broken fragments that, in turn, represent the inevitable

decomposition of the human form. And for Benjamin, “the value of

fragments of thought is all the greater the less direct their

relation to the underlying idea. . . .”6 This is precisely because

it is the meaning that manifests itself in “the unique appearance

of a distance, however, close it may be” that holds true

significance.7 The resulting melancholic human condition forms

the basis for the lamentations found in mourning plays and

expressed quite naturally through its language. And it is through

the language of the mourning plays, and especially their emphasis

on a profusion of uncontrollable allegorical symbols, that the

arbitrary character of the linguistic sign comes to full

in all communication and “fell into the abyss of the mediateness of all communication, of the word as means, of the empty word, into the abyss of prattle.” Ibid., p. 120. See also, Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 58.

6 OTD, p. 29 (emphasis added).

7 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 104-105.

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fruition.8 The overly exaggerated sense of displacement of a

lost, stable past and a present that is violently convulsed and

replete with chaos and carnage connects the immediate

happenstances pervasive in Benjamin’s own time with the

historical events of the baroque. In short, decadence marked by

hyperbole and utter pomposity define both the baroque and

modernity in a fashion not only unavailable to classic tragedy,

but completely alien to the latter’s character.9

In his “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” Benjamin concerns

himself with the word idea and concludes that “ideas are to

objects as constellations are to stars.” 10 Ideas, then, are

linguistic phenomena that assert themselves as elements of the

symbolic in the essence of any word. As a result, philosophy’s

task is to restore by representation the primacy of the symbolic

character of the word in which the idea is given consciousness,

8 Benjamin says that “language communicates the linguistic being of things. The clearest manifestation of this being, however, is language itself. The answer to the question ‘What does language communicate’? is therefore ‘All language communicates itself’.” Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, p. 109.

9 OTD, pp. 54-55.

10 Ibid., p. 34.8

but inasmuch as philosophy cannot presume to speak in the tones

of revelation, it must seek a primordial origin. It is important

to digress slightly at this point. Benjamin was infused with a

fascination for the symbolic nature of myth and through his

friend, Gersholm Scholem, he eventually discovered Jewish

mysticism or Kabbalah. But it was the nineteenth-century work of

Johann Bachofen that was highly influential in formulating

Benjamin’s early understanding of the symbolic.11 According to

Benjamin, Bachofen’s method “consists in attributing to the

symbol a basic role in ancient thought and life.”12 Moreover, the

symbol should be, according to Bachofen, pictured in isolation

even if at some point it becomes a mere attribute; its origin

11 Bachofen’s major work is Mutterecht, which can be found in, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). For a discussion of Bachofen’s influence on Benjamin see, Joseph Mali, “The Reconciliation of Myth: Benjamin’s Homage to Bachofen,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 60(3) (January, 1999): 165. Hans Blumenberg defines symbol by saying that “the difference between a symbol and an image or a metaphor or an allegory always consists in the symbol’s unspecific adoption, in its being understood as a result of an agreement, an alliance or an antecedent relation of hospitality as a support for resulting rights.” Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1983), p. 111.

12 Walter Benjamin, “Johann Jakob Bachofen,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland, eds. Howard Eilandand Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 13.

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shows that it is self-sufficient and that it has a precise

meaning. Benjamin empathized with Bachofen’s theory of symbols,

which he also believed was quite opposed to the entire tradition

of German classical scholarship in vogue during Bachofen’s time.

If some scholars, such as Winckelmann, elevated antiquity’s

cultural creations to the idealistic standard of perfection for

humanity, other scholars like Theodor Mommsen, reduced these

cultural creations to the more specific conditions of political

and social reality. Bachofen, contrary to both strains of

thought, sought to show that the cultural conditions of antiquity

were neither aesthetic nor pragmatic but symbolic.13 It is not

difficult, therefore, to see how Benjamin construes ideas. He is

less concerned with the idea of the aesthetic as some over-

arching totality as he is with the aesthetic sphere as a

multitude of ideas. Idea, understood in Platonic terms as a kind

of essence, means that the task of philosophy must be in the

“representation of an idea,” and it is in the “dance of

represented ideas,” in their interplay rather than in a unified

13 See generally, Joseph Mali, “The Reconciliation of Myth: Benjamin’s Homage to Bachofen,” p. 179.

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totality, that truth emerges.14 The idea is a pattern of finely

tuned and exquisitely fashioned fragments composed of concepts—

what Benjamin refers to as a mosaic or kaleidoscope, which

exemplifies the discontinuous relation of ordered states that

characterizes history. While phenomena (in aesthetics, an

individual work of art) are not included in ideas, their truth

content is contained in the ideas they comprise. This points the

way to two of Benjamin’s key concepts, on the one hand

constellations, which I have alluded to previously, and on the

other hand monads. Just as a constellation is a collection of

remote yet interconnected stars that form a legible pattern, so

in ideas an enduring connection between extreme phenomena is

brought into being. Thus the individual, atomistic work of art is

but one focal point of light among a plethora that forms, for

example the idea of the tragic, or the idea of the melancholic

that in turn is merely a single molecule of a broader realm of

ideas, such as art in general, which again is forever connected

to the universal as truth.

14 OTD, p. 29.11

This brings us to the second of Benjamin’s key concepts, the

monad. The movement from particularity to totality also works in

reverse. The idea does not just resemble a constellation it is

the monadic totality of the idea that contains within it, in an

indistinct way, all the other ideas.15 The idea thus fails to

establish itself as autonomous, and it is this lack of autonomy

that causes Benjamin to rethink the notion of origin. In a much

quoted passage, Benjamin defines the category of origin as

historical, but it is not just one historical category among all

others. Rather, it is the essence of the historical; it is its

name:

Origin, although an entirely historical category has nevertheless nothing in common with emergence. In origin what is meant isnot the becoming of something that has sprung forth, but rather that which springs forth out of becoming and disappearance. Origin stands in the flow of becoming as a maelstrom (Strudel) which irresistibly rips the stuff of emergence into its rhythm. In the bare manifestation of the factual the origin is never discernible, and its rhythm is accessible only to a dual insight. It is recognizable on the one hand

15 Ibid., pp. 47-48.12

as restoration, as reinstatement, and precisely in this as on the other hand incomplete, unfinished.16

Origin is a leap, a springing forth, an offspring that shoots out

from the oscillation of becoming and disappearing, of constantly

coming and forever departing. Yet it stands in the flow as a

maelstrom; as if it were the victim of a violent whirlpool that

“swallows” the material involved in the process of its very

origin. Origin is neither temporal nor spatial, but rather a

constant movement of change from one pole to another and always

back again. What at any point may “stand” firm in the flow of

time is not a stable entity or thing; it is, rather, something

that turns in upon itself as it is ripped apart in the vortex out

of which something emerges, arises, and decays, all in a regular

rhythm of origin. That emergent “something” is, however, always

imperfect and incomplete.

That origin cannot be perceived at the level of mere fact is

essential for Benjamin, for the simple reason that origin

organizes the very material of facticity in accordance with its

rhythms. Similar to an idea from which it is not possible to be 16 Ibid., p. 45 (translation changed).

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separated, origin is a relational conception. Accordingly,

origin is not only distinguished from becoming or the future, it

is also directed toward its past. In this sense, which Benjamin

first enunciated in his earlier work in the “Critique of

Violence,” origin does not simply bring something radically new

and different into the world of existence; it holds in abeyance,

it restores, it reproduces.17 As Benjamin continues, “There takes

place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in

which an idea will constantly confront the historical world,

until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its

history.”18 Hence, the effort to restore and reproduce which

already contains a nascent connotation of repetition, leads to a

more manifest form of repetition by its attempt to reproduce the

unique. The totality of history that Benjamin refers to is not

the overcoming of originary incompleteness, but the exhausting of

the possibility of differential ideas that define the idea.19 In

17 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume I, 1913-1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 236-252.

18 OTD, pp. 45-46.

19 Ibid., p. 34.14

other words, the originary phenomenon sets itself apart from the

historical world until it has exhausted all manner of

permutations. In so doing, origin distinguishes itself in its

ever incomplete movement of restoring and reproducing. Originary

phenomena are not, in the sense of absolute beginning, absolutely

original; rather, in a paradoxical sense they are extreme. Yet

their uniqueness is inseparable from a movement of restoration

that cannot be tied down to any now point. Instead, origin is

alienated between a past and a future, between a pre-history and

a post-history both of which constitute the historicity of

origin. And it is this alienation that marks the movement of

restoration and reinstatement by which individuals attempt to

totalize themselves in their uniqueness. The introductory

“Epistemo-Critical Prologue” provides a foundation for Benjamin’s

ensuing study of German Trauerspiel, and, as we shall see, an

insight into several key concepts that are integral to an

understanding of how Trauerspiel is to be conceived.

In the subsequent section, Benjamin moves to a discussion of

“Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” which he believes have unnecessarily

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been thought of in the same terms. In short, he wants Trauerspiel

recognized as an idea, and that idea is, however outlandish or

absurd, a portrayal of fallen human existence. It is the

cataclysmic downfall of the main character, the sinister

machinations of the intriguer, the butchery, the bloodshed, and

the suffering of melancholic martyrs that form its subject

matter. As Benjamin explains:

Historical life, as it was conceived at that time, is its content, its true object. In this it is different from tragedy. For the object of the latter is not history, but myth, and the tragic structure of the dramatis personae does not derive from rank—the absolute monarchy—but from the pre-historic epoch of their existence—the past age of heroes.20

If Greek tragedy tells the tales of mortals and gods placed

outside the mundane existence of historical life, then Trauerspiel

squarely deals with the prosaic ruinous events of the absolute

sovereign, who, as its representative, “holds the course of

history in his hands like a scepter.”21 More likely, however,

those historical forces entrap the sovereign in its grasp, since

20 Ibid., p. 62.

21 Ibid., p. 65.16

the king rarely controls events. Thus the sovereign of the

mourning play never transgresses the divine law, or confronts

fate with tragic defiance; rather, the mourning play presents the

sovereign as a feeble ruler who is passion’s victim, who commits

murder out of rash desires, and upon whose enemies is unleashed

unspeakable horrors before the tables are inextricably turned and

vengeance seeks its own reward. It is the violent fluctuation

between omnipotence and pathetic powerlessness that is

sadistically inscribed upon the ruined sovereign’s body much like

the sentence inscribed upon the flesh in Kafka’s penal colony.

And, unlike earlier tragedy that holds out the prospect of

redemption and reconciliation, the death of the sovereign evokes

no such hope. Even though the baroque knows no eschatology, “and

for that very reason it possesses no mechanism by which all

earthly things are gathered in together and exalted before being

consigned to their end,” as Benjamin quickly points out,

the hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation and, at its high point, brings them violently into the light of day, in order

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to clear an ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world with catastrophic violence.22

Benjamin reminds us that in classical tragedy the hero dies

in the mode of sacrifice that intertwines the rupture of ordinary

life with the ushering in of a new moral order. Indeed, the

hero’s only response is to not respond at all; in other words,

the language proper to the tragic hero is silence. In his silence

“the hero burns the bridges connecting him to god and the world,

elevates himself above the realm of personality, which in speech,

defines itself against others and individualizes itself, and so

enters the icy loneliness of the self.”23 In contrast, death in

the mourning play evokes a pandemonium of emotions and an

outburst of lamentations, all orchestrated by the second main

character and the organizer of the plot, the intriguer.24 It is

the role of the schemer, through lies, deception, and an uncanny

ability to play on the sovereign’s weaknesses and emotions, who

controls the sovereign’s strings like a puppet. Even though this

22 Ibid., p. 66.

23 Ibid., p. 108.

24 Ibid., p. 95.18

character is the embodiment of evil, he is also the provoker of

humor, and it is this Lustspiel that forms the “inner side of

mourning” and forever distinguishes Trauerspiel from tragedy.25 The

two characters are essential to each other, but it is not just

the duplicitous, smiling intrigue of the schemer or the sorrowful

ruminations of the sovereign that is of interest, since the

courtier alone is not the full cause of the king’s downfall.

Beset with a baleful sadness, it is the king’s inaction, his

hesitancy; it is his inability to act decisively in the situation

into which he has been thrust; in short, it is melancholy that

ultimately leads to the king’s demise. Benjamin sees melancholy

as a conceptual attribute and not strictly an emotional

condition.26 Thus it is an historical phenomenon bound to

cultural mores. The melancholic retreats into an inner world of

the mind; his brooding intellect recognizes with an acute

sensibility the futile nature of existence, but most especially

25 Ibid., p. 125.

26 Ibid., p. 139. For a general discussion of Benjamin’s notions of allegory and melancholy see, Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellation. For a more detailed account see, Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics.

19

he recognizes himself in his own animality.27 Locked within this

condition of worldly sorrow the only pleasure permitted the

melancholic, and as Benjamin points out it is a powerful one, is

that of allegory.28

Allegory must be understood as a figure of speech in which

an element or object comes to signify or stand in for something

else, which throws us back into a world dear to Benjamin, the

world of the symbolic.29 Generally, Benjamin believes that neo-

classical prejudices relegated the allegorical to the mere form

of designation at the expense of the alleged merits of the

symbol.30 If the meaning of allegory resides in the ever constant

dialectic between two discrete terms, the symbol’s power resides

27 OTD, p. 146.

28 Ibid., p. 185.

29 Ibid., p. 164-165. Benjamin refers to Creuzer to provide a definition for, The ‘difference between symbolic and allegorical representation’ is explained as follows: ‘The later signifies merely a general concept, or an idea which is different from itself; the former is the very incarnation and embodiment of the idea. In the former a process of substitution takes place . . . In the latter the concept itself has descended into our physical world, and we see it itself directly in the image’. Ibid.,

30 Ibid., p. 162.20

in its momentary totality or unity with which it expresses its

idea.31 In fact, the symbol is the very embodiment of the idea in

which we possess a momentary totality, and, as such, the symbol

embraces myth. For its part allegory is dispersed across an

endless horizon of diverse referents. And, just as Trauerspiel is

thought of as a lesser form of tragedy, so allegory is believed

to be the ugly stepchild of the symbol. Whereas allegory only

offers long winded oration and excessiveness, the symbol is seen

as exemplifying brevity and, of course, beauty. Benjamin, on the

other hand, sees allegory as disclosing and conveying the

baroque’s world view, not in any grand sense of perfection but in

the sense of ruin. Again, Benjamin believes that allegory

represents the fallen nature of mankind as it lays bare the

degradation, the meaninglessness, and depravity of human

existence. If the symbol represents mankind’s transcendent nature

in all its perfection, allegory represents the divine symbol in

its mundane, animalistic guise.

The symbolic comes to represent the perfection of humankind

as reflected in timeless myth, while allegory, as subject to the 31 Ibid., p. 165.

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violent conditions of temporality, is seen as a dialectical

movement. It is, however, only with the introduction of time that

a formal distinction can be made between symbol and allegory:

Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, inallegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history asa petrified, primordial landscape.32

The transfigured face of nature that the symbolic reveals has a

counterpart in allegory, but in the latter’s case the face that

is revealed is the face of death. As Benjamin explains, even

though death “lacks all ‘symbolic’ freedom of expression, all

classical proportion, all humanity—nevertheless, this is the form

in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious. . . .”33 The

very heart of the baroque’s way of seeing life, of the secular

explanation of history as the passions of the world, resides

singularly in its decline and eventual demise. And it is the ruin

that exemplifies, par excellence, this demise of the creaturely.

32 Ibid., p. 166.

33 Ibid. 22

The ruin represents the process of withering away; it is the

merging of history with nature; it is, as Benjamin remarks,

“beyond beauty.”34 But its eventual demise carries with it no

particular meaning. On the contrary “any person, any object, any

relationship, can mean absolutely anything else.”35 The

consequences are grim, since the world is thus characterized as

one in which the detail is of little importance; instead, it is a

profane world in which a just but destructive outcome has been

rendered. If allegory is a mode of ruination, then the body is

its insignia. Allegory rips and mutilates the body in order to

disclose the hopelessness of the human condition.

While his portrayal of allegory as a metaphor for a sick

human existence is entirely negative, Benjamin does hold out a

ray of hope as the allegories of decay and ruination ultimately

reverse their direction and are transformed into salvation and

redemption. In the Aufhebung of the dialectical play of allegory,

the profane world is cast down, held in abeyance, and raised up

once more. The mortified flesh of the corpse suddenly becomes the

34 Ibid., p. 178.

35 Ibid., p. 175.23

“allegory of resurrection,” and all that was once profane is now

made holy.36 In the process,

allegory goes away empty handed. Evil as such, which it cherished as enduring profundidty, exists only in allegory, is nothing other than allegory, and means something different from what it is. It means precisely the non-existence of what it presents. The absolute vices, as exemplified by tyrants and intriguers, are allegories. They are not real, and that which they represent, they possess only in the subjective view of melancholy. . . .37

Allegory, even though it expresses a creaturely relation to the

world, redeems that relation, and left to its own devices, “re-

discovers itself, not playfully in the earthly world of things,

but seriously under the eyes of heaven.”38 This third and last

section of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel reflects on the importance of

36 Ibid., p. 232. Terry Eagleton remarks that “the more things and meaning disengage, the more obvious become the material operations of the allegories that fumble to reunite them. Such unity, to be sure, can be won only at the cost of a grievous reification: emblem and hieroglyph paralyse history to print, and the body achieves its deepest signification as corpse.” Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (Verso: London, 1981), p. 19.

37 Ibid., p. 233.

38 Ibid., p. 23224

allegory within the German mourning play, and, in fact, has been

the basis for the study of Hamlet and Trauerspiel.39

As I have pointed out, Benjamin mentions Shakespeare in the

Trauerspiel several times, but not in any great detail. Moreover,

the references he does make are, more often than not, directed to

Hamlet. Although others come to mind, Hamlet is the evident option

since his indecision, his brooding melancholic behavior, his rash

decisions, the gratuitous death scenes, and the mayhem ending in

his total destruction as well as everyone he touches all seem to

fit the notion Benjamin sought to render. Even at a deeper level,

the play with its interconnected poetic imagery of the Ghost, the

ruin like “unweeded” garden and fallen world, the beetling cliff,

the satirical book, the play-within-a-play, the graveyard and

skull, and the poisoned sword, the pearl, and the deathly cup—the

props of the fatal last scene—all conjoin as a deferring

fragmented allegory of an ambiguous, melancholic vision of the

world; all of which are key elements in Benjamin’s repertoire.

39 For a reading of Hamlet as Trauerspiel and specifically as allegory, see Hugh Grady, “Hamlet as Mourning-Play: A Benjaminesque Interpretation,” Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008): 135-165. Shakespeare’s historical works have also been analyzed as Trauerspiel, see for example: Zenón Lui-Martinez, “Shakespeare’s Historical Drama as Trauerspiel: Richard II—and After,” ELH 75 (2008): 673-705.

25

One glaring problem with this particular play is, however, the

common Trauerspiel characteristic of a non-focalizing hero, which

Hamlet hardly seems to accommodate.40 More importantly, like many

of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hamlet is the story of real human

social bonds that come unglued. Therefore, rather than analyzing

a play that does not seem quite adequate to Benjamin’s notion of

mourning play, I want to look closely at a one that too often

gets little attention but that was written about the same time as

Hamlet. I will also argue that quite unlike Hamlet, Timon of Athens

portrays no social bonds, familial or otherwise, that may be the

subject of rupture. Indeed, what Benjamin reveals and Timon

epitomizes is a structure of modernity that is conspicuously

absent of ties that either bring us together or bind us to one

another.

Timon is a rather odd play, not quite the caliber of a King

Lear or a Hamlet, which, in its incompleteness and imperfection, 40 I must note in passing that a German adaptation of Hamlet was produced in 1626 complete with an allegorizing double title and a determinedly de-focalized Hamlet that nearly replicates Benjamin’s notion of baroque Trauerspiel. “Trageodia: Der Bestrafte Brudermord oder: Prinz Hamlet aus Dannemark (Tragedy: Fratricide Punished; or Prince Hamlet of Denmark),” in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Hamlet (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1877), 2: pp. 121-142.

26

gives us ground to think of Timon as Trauerspiel.41 Its tragic

pedigree is, however, outwardly apparent: it focuses on the fall

and eventual death of a major character within the play. But this

character is not the sympathetic fellow designed to engender our

sorrow and arouse our pity like, for instance, Hamlet. In fact,

there is something quite reprehensible about Timon that gives one

pause, and in that hesitation, that undecidability we again

confront Trauerspiel. The mood, while superficially festive in the

beginning, always has an overriding sense of something foreboding

and darkly staged; a becoming and a passing away that will rip

Timon apart in a constant downward movement of repetition.

The play opens with Timon absorbed in an idealistic

philosophy, which he believes will provide him happiness in an

41 Although never interpreted as Trauerspiel, Timon has been analyzed as a moral tragedy, see for example: Rolf Soellner, Timon of Athens: Shakespeare’s Pessimistic Tragedy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), and Derek Cohen, “The Politics of Wealth: Timon of Athens,” Neophilogus 77 (1993): 149-160. Others see the play as an allegory of the self, as for example: Anne Lancashire, “Timon of Athens: Shakespeare’s Dr. Faustus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 21 (1970): 35-44, and Lewis Walker, “Timon of Athens and the Morality Tradition,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 159-177. Another has maintained the play as a tragedy of suffering. Robert Pierce, “Tragedy and Timon of Athens,” Comparative Drama 36 (2002): 75-90. More recently the play has been interpreted as Platonic misanthropy; see, Darly Kaytor, “Shakespeare’s Political Philosophy: A Debt to Plato in Timon of Athens,” Philosophy and Literature 36(1) (April, 2012): 136-152.

27

otherwise tainted world. In such a situation, where social bonds

do not tie people together, he believes in a voluntary group

connected by philia or amicitia, an ideal of classical friendship.

Little, however, seems to have a claim upon these Athenians other

than the rather prosaic obligations of the Old Athenian seeking

the best bargain for his daughter’s marriage, and Ventidius’

opportune inheritance of his father’s wealth. It is in Timon’s

imagination that this unpresupposing assemblage of guests becomes

a band of brothers and, in his eyes, “friends:”

are born to do benefits; and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends? O what a precious comfort ‘tis to have so many like brothers commanding one another’s fortunes. O joy’s e’en made away ere’t can be born! Mine eyes cannot hold outwater, methinks. To forget their faults, I drink to you.42

But as Timon will soon discover his community of friends—his

“social bonds”—is merely an illusion created by his own wealth

and fueled by his self-destructive will. As a collective, these

friends assume the role of the schemer; they cajole and flatter

42 William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, ed. H.J. Oliver (London: Arden, 1959), I, ii, 100-105. Hereinafter referred to as “Timon.”

28

Timon to their will only to abandon him in his cataclysmic

demise.43 Only those of a seemingly lesser status such as his

servants who view Timon form a distance, or Apemantus the cynic

philosopher who traipses about desiring only to be right rather

than to possess material goods, or the ambiguous figure

Alcibiades who commits himself fully to war, show any kindness to

Timon in his hour of need. One should not, however, confuse

kindness with any notion of social bonding. In the throes of his

melancholic misanthropy, Timon will dismiss each and every one of

these acts of kindness as well as its projenerator.

While classical tragedy usually focuses its attention on the

development of the plot, in reading Shakespeare’s tragedies one

generally looks to character development, an approach extolled by

A.C. Bradley.44 But in Timon, Shakespeare does little to develop

the plot in order to produce a more intricate character, as he

does with Hamlet or Othello for example. Partly this is a result of

the dyadic structure of the play, which finds Timon oscillating

43 In the list of Dramtis Personae at the beginning of the play, Shakespeare describes several of Timon’s “friends” as “flattering lords.”

44 A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (New York: Penguin Books, 1991).29

between extremes of behavior. He flips from spendthrift to

miser, from trusting brother to the hater of all mankind, only to

repeat the same behavior. Whether in the initial portion of the

play or in its second half, Timon throws whatever he has at other

people, including himself. He both rejects Apemantus and keeps

him close at hand, and whether he is rich or poor he goes hungry

not only physically but emotionally as well. In his self-imposed

exile and seclusion in the second part of the play, one can

imagine Timon merely withering away from his meager diet of grass

roots and cold water, and in this sense Timon is the human

manifestation of the allegorical ruination Benjamin associates

with Trauerspiel.

While the psychological aspect of Timon’s self-

destructiveness is quite apparent, this is not altogether at odds

with Shakespeare’s other tragedies. The amount of ink spent

analyzing Hamlet would undoubtedly result in a major

reforestation project.45 But with Timon his self-destructiveness

is apparent almost from the start. At the feast in Act I, he

45 See for example, Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

30

turns a blind eye to the Steward’s warning as he eagerly casts

out his valuable jewels among his friends.46 He seems all too

willing to part with his possessions; a willingness that portends

an inbred feeling of unworthiness that manifests itself in a

desire to give away the material aspects of his life out of fear

that he has little inner value to offer. It is interesting to

note that Timon does not partake in any of the food at his own

banquet. Instead, as he pushes the extravagant meal upon his

friends like a mother hovering over her brood, it is as if he is

haunted by a self-doubt that in some perverse way he should not

be a party to his own festivity. But the flattery doled out by

his friends keeps Timon going; it fuels an insatiable sense of

emptiness. Timon’s guests play upon his vanity as the ever

present Apemantus all too clearly recognizes when he laments

that, “O that men’s ears should be to counsel deaf, but not to

flattery.”47 As he departs, Timon will hear none of the cynic’s

advice unless, of course, it “come[s] with better music.”48

46 Timon, I, ii, 170-178; 190-202.

47 Timon, I, ii, 250-251.

48 Timon, I, ii, 246-247.31

The merriment of the first act breaks apart at the start of

the second as the unpaid bills accumulate in the hands of the

Steward, and creditors line up to await Timon’s arrival. Amidst

the impending calamity, Shakespeare invokes a sardonic humor

between the Fool and Apemantus in the early portion of this act.

Here, the Fool is asked by various servants waiting for Timon

what a whoremaster is, and he replies:

A fool in good clothes, and something like thee. ‘Tis a spirit; sometime ‘t appears like a lord, some- time like a lawyer, sometime like a philosopher, with two stones moe than’s artificial one.49

The play is ripe with this type of humor, but it is not provoked

by the schemer in the case of Timon, unless one believes

Apemantus to be the evil orchestrator of Timon’s downfall, which

is certainly not the case. Benjamin specifically points to

Polonius in Hamlet as the type of comedic schemer he has in mind,

but Polonius’ comedy is more of the plodder who dishes out advice

against Hamlet only to die a gratuitous death at the hands of the

person he sought to discredit.50 Here the schemers are, as I

49 Timon, II, ii, 112-115.

50 OTD, p. 127.32

have indicated, Timon’s so-called friends who in their own way

are plodding figures while at the same time they can be seen as

humorous in their narcissistic and self-satisfying justifications

for denying Timon in his time of need.

As Timon learns that his bills far exceed his resources, he

seeks to rely on the friendships he believes he enjoys as a

result of his past largesse. Once again, the Steward tells Timon

that:

Ah, when the means are gone that buy this praise, The breath is gone whereof this praise is made. Feast-won, fast-lost; one cloud of winter show’rs, These flies are couch’d.51

Timon, in an act of repetition, dismisses the Steward’s warning,

and, believing his friendships are a blessings upon which he may

rely for his ultimate salvation from ruin, dispatches his

servants to seek their financial help. Unfortunately, there will

be no salvation for Timon as his friends turn him down with an

answer conveyed “. . . in a joint and corporate voice.”52 Unfazed

by these early rejections Timon seeks the financial help of

51 Timon, II, ii, 173-176.

52 Timon, II, ii, 208.33

Ventidius who, as I pointed out previously, recently inherited a

vast estate and whom Timon rescued from debtors prison at a cost

of five talents earlier in the play. Unfortunately, even

Ventidius rejects Timon’s plea, and in the end, Timon’s friends

“have all been touch’d and found base metal, for they have all

denied him.”53 In an ironic twist of false justification,

Sempronius rejects Timon’s plea for support on the spurious

ground that he was not the first person summoned for help; he

thinks that he may have had the “courage” to do Timon good, but

now he feels his honor has been abated.54

What is Timon’s response to his ungrateful friends? Surely,

the main character of classical drama would have borne his plight

in silence, but this is not the path that Timon embarks upon.

Timon assembles his friends to one last banquet, and in a speech

before the serving dishes are uncovered speaks to his friends in

a far different voice, now as enemies:

You great benefactors, sprinkle our society with thankful- ness. For your own gifts, make yourselves prais’d; but

53 Timon, III, iii, 7-8.

54 Timon, III, iii, 25-28. (Here courage means inclination or disposition).34

reserve still to give, lest your deities be despis’d. Lend to each man enough, that one need not lend to the another; for were your godheads to borrow of men, men would forsake the gods. Make the meat be belov’d more than the man that gives it. Let no assembly of twenty be without a score of villains. If there sit twelve women at the table, let a dozen of them be as they are. . . . For these my present friends, as they are tome nothing, so in nothing bless them, and to nothing are they welcome.55

With this said the trays are uncovered to reveal a feast of warm

water. At the same time, Timon flies into a rage cursing his

false friends and condemning them as “courteous destroyers,

affable wolves, meek bears.”56 He then unceremoniously throws

them out, but not before hurling the warm water in their faces.

As the act ends, the disheveled guests re-assemble outside

Timon’s home and declare him mad. But in their haste to retreat

from the chaos of the dining room, one has lost his cap, another

his gown, and one guest concerns himself only with his lost

jewel, a jewel that Timon had given him in the opening act.

55 Timon, III, vi, 69-81.

56 Timon, III, vi, 91.35

The bombastic language that characterizes Timon’s speech at

the false banquet continues throughout the remainder of the play.

Even in his self-imposed exile beyond Athens’ protective walls,

Timon offers up a prayer where one can feel his exploding rage

expressed in the excessive and verbose use of language as his

former “friends” are again referred to as “wolves” who only

deserve to be murdered by having their throats cut—a most

gruesome and bloody death. The prayer, however, conveys much

more. Timon is, in effect, seeking through utter mayhem the total

and cataclysmic destruction of Athens. In his wrath no one is

spared not even children are to be exempt from the butchery and

bloodshed that the melancholic Timon summons forth. But the

absurd aspect is that it is in the form of a prayer in the first

place; wishing another’s death is hardly the ideal material for

divine intervention. Moreover, at the end of his prayer Timon

desires only that his own hate will grow beyond those who have

estranged him to include the whole of humankind—Timon knows no

bonds that tie him to anyone; all are enemies. Quite unlike

classical tragedy with its symbolic, mythical structure that

36

invokes the god’s name to win battles, to rise above the profane,

and to strengthen heroic resolve, Timon does not appeal to the

gods to bring him fortune; rather, he prays to the gods for

revenge and to make him more miserable than he is already. The

prayer, then, becomes an ironic allegorical device that seeks the

ruination that Timon, through his inaction and inability to

recover his past situation, cannot bring himself to accomplish.

In his exile from Athens, Timon retreats not to some

luxurious villa normally inhabited by an Athenian noble but to

the ruin like cave of the “unweeded” forest. The choice is

purposeful in that Timon’s removal beyond the city’s walls

allegorically represents his casting apart, his fallen nature

from his imagined “Eden.” He now enters an inner world that

recognizes existence as futile and animalistic. His allegorical

forest home—nature to be exact—adds to our sense of Timon’s

plight, since it is nature and not the heroic hero who is

ultimately brought to ruin through decay. But, as luck will have

it, Timon finds gold while digging for his daily ration of roots.

The news of Timon’s new wealth brings a host of visitors

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including those who had forsaken him. Trauerspiel allows, however,

no hope for reconciliation for Timon and his former “friends.”

While modern humanity may forgive through forgetfulness there can

be, according to Benjamin, no real reconciliation.57 One of his

first such encounters is with Alcibiades who tells Timon of his

plan to sack Athens. Upon hearing this news Timon, in

uncontrollable excitement, implores Alcibiades to kill everyone,

and again he says “spare not the babe whose dimpled smiles from

fools exhaust their mercy: think it a bastard, whom the oracle

hath doubtfully pronounc’d the throat shall cut, and mince it

sans remorse.”58 While this type of over-heated language

characterizes the final scenes of the play, there is something

else that rears its head in these final moments. Again,

Shakespeare causes us to laugh in a scene otherwise devoted to

57 In a note on the moral meaning of time, written in about 1921, Benjamin makes clear his rejection of any Hegelian, Christian notion of reconciliation.He does believe that the moral meaning of time can efface the traces of the misdeed beyond all remembrances. This leads, he says, in a “mysterious manner to forgiveness, although never to reconciliation.” Walter Benjamin, Gesamelte Schriften Vol. VI, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag. 1985), p. 98. See also, Samuel Weber, “Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth and Allegory in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play,” MLN 106(3) (April, 1991): 468.

58 Timon, IV, iii, 120-124.38

tumult and destruction. Of the several groups and individuals who

interrupt Timon’s melancholic misanthropy, are three bandits

intent on relieving him of his new found gold. Wise to their

purpose, Timon rants on about the physician who kills more than

the thieves rob, and about the thievery of everything from the

sun, to the sea, and to the earth. In the end, Timon tells the

thieves:

Love not yourselves; away, Rob one another. There’s more gold. Cut throats. All that you meet are thieves. To Athens go; Break open shops: nothing can you steal But thieves do lose it. Steal less for this I give you, And gold confound you howsoe’er! Amen.59

Timon’s speech is so effective that the Third Bandit retorts to

the scolding by saying “H’as almost charm’d me from my

profession, by persuading me to it.”60 Such profane and poignant

humor would rarely embrace a classical tragic drama.

Having dispatched his visitors, Timon prepares to die, but

not before writing his epitaph. We are not told what malady

claims Timon’s life, but we surely know that it is not the

59 Timon, IV, iii, 447-452.

60 Timon, IV, iii, 453-454.39

sacrificial death of the heroic variety. More likely Timon just

dies, not from the dramatic thrust of the poison rapier or dagger

blow to the heart in the midst of a heroic struggle, but

something far more mundane—just as Virginia Woolf once remarked,

we all just die alone. Moreover, Timon chooses to inter himself

in an everlasting mansion upon the beached verge of the salt

flat; it is, however, a place exposed to the turbulent surge of

continual destruction and wearing away. In short, it is a tomb

designed to court an enigmatic oblivion. It is left to

Alcibiades, even with the absence of a body, to read Timon’s

self-composed epitaph once his death is announced:

Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul berift: Seek not my name. A plague consume you, wicked caitiffs left! Here lie I, Timon, who alive, all living men did hate. Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait.61

Even though the epitaph provides an obvious contradiction, this

too may indicate the imperfect nature of the play more in line

with Benjamin’s ideal of Trauerspiel than classical tragedy.

Moreover, in his death, Timon does not go silently into that good

night; rather he castigates all humankind with a pandemonium of 61 Timon, V, iv, 69-73 (emphasis in original).

40

emotion and an outburst of lamentation. Just the same, Timon’s

death is not particularly meaningful. Here again, the classical

hero’s death such as Oedipus’ fated demise carries with it a

sense of meaning that one can acknowledge as one’s own, but

Timon’s death arouses no such inspiration; we are not tied to

Timon emotionally or otherwise. In short, no catharsis can be

expected from Timon’s actions. He is a man who acted unwisely not

because fate dictated that he do so, but because of his own poor

judgment, his uncontrolled desires, and his untamed will. As such

Timon’s fate is his alone to bear and displays little universal

implication, since the intrinsic meaning of his actions will

never be revealed.

Benjamin’s modernity thrusts us in a milieu of human malaise,

a sickness that results in an alienated subject flitting about

from one object to the next in a futile search for meaning, a

sense of well-being, and an individual identity which is,

nevertheless, based on our social bonds and relationships. But

our search discovers only an endless morass of broken fragments,

gratuities violence, and an alienated world filled with cultural

41

and political aporias, each of which coalesces in the inevitable

decomposition of human existence. Benjamin shows us that along

the way, we come to the realization that modernity’s plight is to

exist without social bonds that tie one another together because

no such bonds exited in the first place. This is the “tragic

condition” of modernity that casts humans adrift in a cruel world

as isolated monads consigned to a fate of the fateless.

What illustrates the structure of the German mourning play

that Benjamin was keen to resurrect as paradigmatic of the modern

condition is Timon of Athens. We find Timon “ripped” apart in his

cataclysmic, melancholic decline and what emerges from the

experience is incomplete and certainly imperfect. There is no

great act of sacrifice, no heroic battle; there is merely an old

man who foolishly parts with his worldly possessions in the

misbegotten belief that he is bound to a social group he terms

friends and whom he erroneously believes will someday return his

favor. And, when they refuse, he is paralyzed to do anything

other than exile himself in a blaze of rhetoric. Indeed, language

plays a key and, perhaps, decisive role in Timon. Throughout the

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play we are treated to rhetoric that is excessive, bombastic, and

designed to incite. This is not, however, a language that calls

us to a higher endeavor, a language that beckons our sorrow or

pity, or a language that ushers in a new moral order upon the

rupture of the old. To be sure Timon portrays a rupture, but it

is a rupture of Timon’s own doing; it is a rupture with little

redeeming quality or meaning; it is a rupture that one finds hard

pressed to empathize with. In their final encounter in the woods,

it is left to Apemantus—the one person who knows Timon better

than he knows himself—to tell Timon exactly what he has become:

The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends. When thou wast in thy gilt and thy perfume, they mock’d thee for too much curiosity; in thy rags thou know’st none, but art despis’d for the contrary. There’s a medlar for thee; eat it.62

The extremes of Timon’s behavior mark the play not only as a new

aesthetic form, but also as a new politics, the politics of

modernity that is Trauerspiel where no social bonds exist that can

be annihilated. Rather, Benjamin sees in the allegory exemplified

by Timon the social condition of modernity replete with

62 Timon, IV, iii, 301-306.43

suffering, chaos, and violence, but oddly devoid of bonds that

unify, connect, or identify us with one another.

44