Abstract
This article explores the ecological resonances of Timon of Athens from today's perspective of the Anthropocene. It introduces a passage from Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon describing the colonial exploration of America in terms of ‘subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true’, towards establishing the subjunctive mood as a characteristic of the play. The point extends beyond grammar: Timon's curses and prayers can be understood as an exercise in subjunctivity expressing Apocalyptic disaster as a consequence of disregardful high consumerism. The subjunctive mood enables correspondence between disasters Timon wills to happen and disasters we fear in the Anthropocene.
‘Misanthropos’ is the name Timon of Athens bestows on himself: ‘I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind’. 1 Etymologically related, the word ‘Anthropocene’ recognises a new geological epoch defined by irreversible alterations of the earth, sea, and sky caused by human intervention. This paper identifies and explores the ecological resonances of William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton's Timon of Athens from today's perspective of the Anthropocene and suggests an interpretative model for doing so. Reflecting the schematic two-part structure of Timon of Athens itself, the essay is one part of a diptych, its counterpart being a study of the play in relation to Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia. 2 The present paper, though second to be published, is not designed to be read as a sequel. Instead, the two studies offer parallel and complementary approaches to navigating Timon’s mentality and its relation to the world he inhabits and sees as ripe for destruction. ‘Misanthropos in the Anthropocene’ touches lightly on Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon, in order to establish the subjunctive mood as a characteristic of the play, expressing fears and futurities in a way that is all too fitting for the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocene epoch is generally said to have started meaningfully with the ‘Great Acceleration’ of human impact on the environment beginning around the middle of the twentieth century. The current scale of climate crisis, depletion, and exhaustion is far beyond anything happening in Shakespeare and Middleton's day. But the possibility is glimpsed. The Anthropocene is sometimes considered to have its origins variously as early as the development of extensive farming in prehistoric times, 3 or with the beginnings of industrial production in the modern age. Erle C. Ellis writes that ‘[t]he human world has always been anthropogenic’. 4 My edition of Timon of Athens accordingly breaks the surface of the topic by relating the play to the classical myth of the Golden Age, best known to early modern writers through the account in Book 1 of Ovid's Metamorphoses. 5 In the tradition epitomised by Shakespeare's favourite writer and developed in Timon of Athens, an ecological awareness is expressed through the transition from gold to silver to iron, whereby the iron instruments of agriculture weaponise humanity's relation to the earth, as manifested in tools such as the plough and the spade. Shakespeare as an early modern writer was able to take Ovid's myth of original damage and join it together with his awareness of incipient technological transformation and expanding trade and plunder on a global scale. The outcome was a play that expresses what Randall Martin neatly calls, with reference to nature's interactions with humans, ‘nature's historicity’, its moulding by the events of human history. 6
Referring to Shakespeare's works generally, Martin argues that Shakespeare ‘analogises’ current ecological concerns such as shifting climate patterns, demographic pressure, and deforestation 7 – meaning that we can discover analogical similarities between his plays and our present situation. A partial explanation can be found in nature's historicity: then leads to now. Nevertheless, the tenuous nature of the analogical line of thinking presents a methodological problem. As Devin Griffiths puts it, ‘For those of us weaned on historicism, the question remains whether the careful study of such changes in the past can help us to comprehend the changes we face today. Doesn’t this risk a presentism that threatens the very particularity of historical concern?’ Griffiths goes on to note that an approach to literature in relation to the Anthropocene substantially raises the stakes for this question. 8 Shakespeare's expansive and capacious geniality is placed under added pressure in the face of a present-day acceleration crisis that would have meant little or nothing to him. What I will suggest in this essay is a critical mechanism that can release the reader from the literality of such forms of interpretation. That mechanism is found in the grammatical form of the subjunctive mood. Timon of Athens uses the subjunctive with a heightened instrumentality that makes it a feature of the play's style. Moreover, this stylistic feature can be taken as a liberation from the literal that is enacted in the play. Timon, and so the play itself, extrapolates from the literal facts of the plot to extreme, uncompromising, and energised forms of thought and feeling.
The subjunctive
Though climate crisis and ecological disaster are with us, they are still no more than presages of what we fear they will be in the future. They are therefore subjunctive in that they belong to the state of the ‘what if’, the ‘suppose’. They may well transform into the indicative, though as yet they have done so only intermittently. The idea of a rolling historical transmutation from subjunctive to indicative is captured stunningly in the novelist Thomas Pynchon's description of the young and westward-reaching America as unfolded to Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in the eighteenth century: Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?– in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever ‘tis not yet mapp’d, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,– serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for
Mason and Dixon's survey of British North America established the east-west line that still divides north from south in the eastern United States, hewing an avenue marked with boundary stones westwards through the Appalachian forests. In this passage from his fictional account of the survey, Pynchon implies that this slow drawing of the geographical and political unknown into the realm of consciousness finds repeated shifts from the subjunctive of dreamt possibility, ‘all that may yet be true’, to the declarative, a process meeting its end when all the world is charted and possessed. Present-day images of ecological Apocalypse likewise begin in the visions of ‘all that yet may be true’, steadily correlating it with ‘the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair’. Some of yesterday's projected disasters are happening today. Now, the emphasis falls on the ‘Rubbish-Tip’ more than the hopes. The tide has turned on that powerful image running through the American novel from Herman Melville to Pynchon of exploration of the wilderness blindly reaching towards its geographical western limits. We are now aware instead of expanding regions that have been made desolate by humanity to serve the needs of rich but shrinking regions of material civilisation, characterised by high lifestyle at the top juxtaposed with impending ecological stress.
The subjunctive is the wish or fear that is predicated on what might or actually will happen in the future. In Timon of Athens, subjunctives identify the realm of the unfulfilled and the realm of the apparently near-inevitable. Awareness of grammatical form therefore allows readers to extrapolate from the literal content of what Timon actually says, so as to subjunctivise the play itself.
My underlying assumption is therefore that the subjunctive as an aspect of grammar informs the meanings of the text. The significance of the subjunctive is suggested in broad terms in Paul Cefalu and Bryan Reynolds's collection of essays The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, which is subtitled Tarrying with the Subjunctive. They write that ‘[t]he essays collected here tarry with the subjunctive, that is, they engage as-if and what-if hypotheses …’. 10 Criticism here recognises its own projective constructions of meaning, its own subjunctivity – as does the present essay. Other critics have occasionally, and more concretely, discovered a correlation between grammatical forms characteristic of a particular text and the meaning of that text. Hamlet is perhaps the best example. Critics since Maynard Mack, noting opening the question ‘Who's there?’, have suggested that the play itself assumes the mood of sceptical questioning. 11 In a similar vein, George T. Wright noted the exceptional density of hendiadys in Hamlet. 12 The expression of a complex idea through two words separated by ‘and’ acts as a vehicle both for suggesting an enriched but slightly unfocussed mode of thought (‘whips and scorns’) and for allowing a gloss on adventurous word usage (‘poste-haste and rummage’, ‘extravagant and erring’). Hendiadys thus contributes to the richness and unfixity of meaning in that play. More recently, Jonathan P. Lamb finds Hamlet to be shaped by the syntactic element of the parenthesis. 13 Observing the paradoxical Renaissance understanding of the parenthesis as both inclusively necessary and redundant within a sentence, he identifies parenthetic structures and deferrals of plot in Hamlet and highlights soliloquy as a plot-stopping parenthesis. The play's ‘parenthetical features’ suggest its ‘fullness’ – but also its ‘disposability’ (163), as though it stood in danger of being wholly sucked into a vortex of parenthesis. These studies of mood, figure of speech, and sentence structure indicate how richly and variously the grammatical features of a Shakespeare play can inform its meanings. In Timon of Athens, the grammatical feature of the subjunctive comparably relates to meaning. Moreover, the subjunctive describes the relation between historical and presentist approaches and so provides the key to understanding Misanthropos in relation to the Anthropocene.
For readers well-versed in languages such as French, the subjunctive is familiar. Anglophone readers may need some explanation. The subjunctive is a mood, that is, it belongs to the same system for classifying verbs as the indicative (‘I like it’), the interrogative (‘Who are you?’), and the imperative (‘Get out of here’). In English, it is a survival from earlier states of the language, such as early modern English as spoken by Shakespeare – vestigial in that it does not operate as a complete set of forms; vestigial in that the remaining uses tend to be found in set phrases; and vestigial in that in many cases, the indicative is likely to be used instead. Typical survivals are in prayer (‘Hallowed be thy name’, ‘Bless you’), wishing (‘I wish it were true’), and hypothesisation (‘if it were true’): not things as they are, but rather things as they are desired or posited possibly to be. The fundamental characteristic is what Barbara Strang calls ‘non-actuality’. 14 In Shakespeare's time, its use was more widespread, encompassing wish more broadly (‘Never come such division ‘twixt our souls’, Julius Caesar, 4.2.287), exhortation (‘Who hateth him, and honours not his father … Shake he his weapon at us, and pass by’, 2 Henry VI, 4.7.169–71), command in subordinate clauses (‘Tell him … He bear himself with honourable action’, Taming of the Shrew, Ind.1.107–8), and conditionality (‘live thou, I live’, Merchant of Venice, 3.2.61). 15 None of these formulations would be expected in current English.
The form of the present subjunctive is the same as the imperative: ‘if it be true’ (subjunctive), ‘be quick’ (imperative). This can lead to ambiguity, especially in the case of prayer. The Lord's Prayer begins with unambiguous subjunctives: ‘Hallowed be thy name’, ‘Thy kingdom come’, and ‘Thy will be done’. To a present-day English speaker, the verbs that follow look imperative: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, ‘Forgive us our trespasses’, ‘Lead us not into temptation’, and ‘Deliver us from evil’, but in these utterances too God is petitioned.
Subjunctivity
Shakespeare's language generally has subjunctivity at its core. Tangential expressions of the kind ‘O that …’, ‘If it were …’ are crucial to the Shakespearian expression of thought and feeling as they both engage with the character's material world and conjure up a sense of scrutiny, extrapolation, aspiration, and distance. Subjunctivity encompasses desire, longing, fantasy, regret, and much more. The specific point about Timon of Athens – and it is a point about Middleton's writing as well as Shakespeare's – is that subjunctives are constellated as prayer-like utterances, negated prayers. 16 Thus, they are organised and formalised. Timon articulates three formal anti-prayers, all addressed to the gods and ending ‘Amen’: 17 the speech strikingly headed ‘Apermantus Grace’ in the Folio, beginning ‘Immortal gods, I crave no pelf’ (2.60–8; attributed to Middleton), Timon's ‘O thou wall / That girdles in these wolves’ (12.1–40), and his long tirade ending ‘And gold confound you howsoe’er. Amen’ (14.423–8). There are other prayers, such as Alcibiades’ ‘Now the gods keep you old enough that you may live / Only in bone, that none may look on you!’ (10.102–3), or Timon's inverted grace in the mock-banquet scene: ‘The gods require our thanks: / You great benefactors, sprinkle our society with thankfulness …’ (11.68–70). These are all anchor points for the subjunctive. Timon of Athens inhabits the subjunctive way of thought in ways that extend beyond prayers such as these to its admonitory premises. If you give endlessly, you will reconstruct the people you love as the people you hate. If you act as though you were infinitely rich, you will become infinitely poor. If you pretend that material things have no origin, you will be confronted with origin.
Yet the play might leave us puzzled as to how to reconcile the emotion and pathos of Timon's suffering with its irrationality, its extremity, and its sheer offensiveness. Meanings are not grounded in any ordinary way. Instead, trajectories of meaning extrapolate away from the dramatic situation into areas of cataclysmic thought and wild feeling that lie far beyond the facts of the situation. There seems to be no way back to a reality grounded in human relationships. Uniquely, the play, like its protagonist, escapes from what Apemantus calls the ‘middle of humanity’, a middle that lacks substance and therefore lacks gravitational pull. This escape from the literal into a realm of extrapolation is what I label as subjunctivity. 18
The first banquet scene (Sc. 2), evidently written by Middleton, is built on the fanciful premise that wishes can and will be fulfilled, in defiance of materiality and basic economics: If I want gold, steal but a beggar's dog And give it Timon, why, the dog coins gold. If I would sell my horse and buy twenty more Better than he, why, give my horse to Timon – Ask nothing, give it him – it foals me straight And able horses. (3.5–10)
The verbs ‘steal’, ‘give’, ‘ask’, and, again, ‘give’ are all subjunctives, formed under the governing condition of ‘if’. 19 The speaker, a senator, is making the point that ‘[i]t cannot hold’: it can’t go on. Sustainability is impossible when desire is constantly actualised without limit. The middle of the play dramatises the emptiness that follows. In the debtor scenes, that emptiness is materialised in the box that Timon's servant Flaminius brings to receive a loan from Lucullus. Lucullus imagines that it contains a precious gift. This misinterpretation is exposed by transforming the box into a metonymic figure for its own emptiness: ‘Faith, nothing but an empty box, sir’ exclaims Flaminius (5.16); in other words, nothing but nothing. So it remains, as Lucullus refuses to replenish it. The opening of the box is the hinge of the play itself. It is no longer possible for Timon's friends to give subjunctively in hope of hugely inflated returns. Both for its place within the sequence of events and for its meaning as an enclosing object whose content is transformed, the empty box strongly anticipates Timon's reconfiguration of the wall of Athens as no longer an enclosure that protects rich civilisation from the savage rawness of nature, but now, as he leaves the city, a fence that girdles in human wolves. 20
After the box has been opened, physical acts of throwing reinforce the idea that Timon's subjunctives are acts of aggression. In the mock-banquet scene just before Timon leaves Athens, Timon throws stones at his guests, his former friends: ‘One day he gives us diamonds, next day stones’ (11.114). In the woods, Timon throws gold into the camp followers’ aprons (14.133–6). He says to Apemantus, ‘Were I like thee, I’d throw away myself’ (14.220). Soon after, he considers throwing a stone at him and may do so: ‘I am sorry I shall lose a stone by thee’ (4.371). The sardonic joke is extended when the Poet and Painter arrive optimistically hoping for a piece of Timon's gold and are hailed with stones instead: ‘Hence! You are an alchemist; make gold of that’ (14.647–50). The image of the projectile relates to Timon's use of language itself, which is projective in its use of invective as something that can be hurled at enemies like stones. More abstractly, the ideas he expresses are violent extrapolations. In other words, to return this point to grammatical terms, the play here, as elsewhere, is an exercise in subjunctive thought.
Curses
Initiating the second half of the play, Timon leaves Athens uttering an extended invective, one of the formalised anti-prayers mentioned already. It begins: Tim. Let me looke backe vpon thee. O thou Wall That girdles in those Wolues, diue in the earth, And fence not Athens. Matrons, turne incontinent, Obedience fayle in Children:
After a crescendo of such examples, it concludes: Timon will to the Woods, where he shall finde Th’ vnkindest Beast, more kinder then Mankinde. The Gods confound (heare me you good Gods all) Th’ Athenians both within and out that Wall: And graunt as Timon growes, his hate may grow To the whole race of Mankinde, high and low. Amen. (12.1–41)
The punctuation in the source text, the 1623 First Folio, probably owes more to the compositors than the author; it offers nevertheless a possible clue as to the mood of the verbs, and so the original spellings and punctuation are therefore here, by exception, preserved. The speech manifestly takes the form of a prayer: ‘The gods confound – hear me you good gods all’ and, most crucially, the final ‘Amen’. Signals of the subjunctive are plain and unignorable. Timon's opening words ‘Let me’ as an equivalent to the subjunctive encourage the reader to accept the subjunctivity of the passage as a whole. The speech nevertheless exploits the instability of the subjunctive/imperative boundary. When Timon calls on the wall to dive in the earth, the vocative ‘O thou Wall’ sets up an imperative, but he speaks of something he desires rather than something that he commands to happen. In the Folio text, ‘Matrons, turn incontinent’ (‘respectable married women, turn to unrestrained sexual libertinism’, as if the walls of Athens represent symbolic laws of moral conduct that collapse if the walls collapse) is punctuated as if an imperative, but a subjunctive is just as likely. In ‘Obedience fayle in Children’, ‘Obedience’ could conceivably address Obedience personified, but there is no comma after the agent noun, suggesting a subjunctive ‘May obedience fail in children’. Perhaps the ambiguity in examples such as this is the whole point. The speech continues in this vein, using subjunctivity to express both petition and wished-for command, exploiting the uncertain boundary between formal subjunctives and formal imperatives, and so articulating not only the savagery of anger but also the impotence of the angry man.
Like many of Timon's tirades, the speech is difficult to moderate in terms of the ethical and emotional response it invites. Timon is unselective to excess: he does not target those who have offended him. His purpose is to extrapolate away from his false friends ‘To the whole race of mankind, high and low’ – and clearly ‘mankind’ is not being used as a gendered term. Timon of Athens inhabits, or rather creates, a world of subjunctive thought characterised by extrapolation, projection, and experiment. Timon while in Athens tries to find emotion and even invents it in artificial form: his generosity, his love for his brothers, and his tears are all incomprehensible and artificial substitutes for emotion as we know it. His rage in the woods is, like Timon himself, stripped back and bare, monumental in its way. But for all their blazing sincerity, his outbursts are preposterous, excessive, unnuanced, and spoken as if written to order: ‘Give me excess of it’.
His curses cannot be realised – unless, that is, we enter the Apocalyptic frame of reference because our own circumstances tell us to do so. From this vantage, we might not see Timon as a ridiculous spectacle, but instead embrace the subjunctive as the mood that speaks urgently of impossibilities that have suddenly become not only possible but real – in ways that we can scarcely yet imagine. Seen in this way, Timon of Athens stages a cancellation of the subjunctive: the impossible, the destructive cataclysm beyond our imagination, has become possible. If the play is read subjunctively, if, for example, we project it upon the reality of environmental catastrophe, the postulate shifts into the place of the real, as the extreme environmental predictions that traditionally belong to the ‘what if’ of science fiction (see n. 18) have become an impending or present reality, albeit a reality that we as yet cannot fully comprehend.
Before and after
Timon loves by giving, god-like up to a point. The horse may not have been pregnant, for Timon's acceptance of it is in itself an act of generation, creating multiple other horses that are given in return, parodying Christ's miracle of the loaves and fishes. Such lines present a paradox based on the apparent miracle as a false appearance. Amazingly, ‘Plutus the god of gold / Is but his steward’ (1.279–80). If it were really so, who would need nature? Timon's refusal to recognise the origin of things is his fatal weakness. The course of the play is a reminder that things come from somewhere. However lovingly expressed, excessive extravagance is a kind of hidden violence that demands actualisation by displacing consequence into the future. Resources are finite. Considered thus, Timon's subjunctive curses convey the otherwise repressed harm done within the insulated bubble of super-rich lifestyle but imposed on society at large.
As these images of Plutus, the horse, and the dog suggest, sexual reproduction has been replaced by ‘magic of bounty’ as the principle by which increase is achieved. 22 In the mesmerizing confusion whereby objects are constituted as gifts seemingly originating with the giver, the true origin of things and ultimately of people has been completely occluded. Friends, all male, form what Timon imagines as a community of brothers. Women belong elsewhere, figuring on stage only as entertainers, whether as masquers at a banquet or sex workers in an army. The word ‘magic’ denotes an occlusion of origin and process, a forgetfulness of where things come from and how things happen.
If the ‘magic’ in the woods is that Timon rediscovers gold, gold has been demystified to be revealed, with onstage materiality, as product of the earth. Magic has been reduced to a sardonic joke: ‘Ha, you gods! Why this, what, this, you gods?’ Timon protests (14.31). The physical hole in the ground resonates in the Anthropocene as a rediscovery of depth: origin of resources, consequences, absurdification of consumer lifestyle, and permanent imprint on the earth. In the play, that discovery involves deracination from the deracinated city, to discover roots in the woods. Whether digging up edible roots for sustenance or gold as the root of evil, Timon is now conscious of the origin of things.
Timon's last day
Timon emerges from his cave at the beginning of the scene, greeting the sun in a speech that parodies the Christian Matins in blasphemous prayer: O blessèd breeding sun, draw from the earth Rotten humidity; below thy sister's orb Infect the air. (14.1–3)
According to the Bible, God ‘doeth great things and unsearchable, and marvellous things without number. He giveth rain upon the earth and poureth water upon the streets’ (Job 5:9–10). Timon removes the giving God, and this exposes nature as an entity that exists in a state of taking. As the scene develops, the sun continues to shine on Timon, and the moon draws light from it by the same malign attractive force by which it pulls the tides: I’ll example you with thievery. The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea. The moon's an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun. The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears. The earth's a thief, That feeds and breeds by a composture stol’n From gen’ral excrement. Each thing's a thief. (14.434–41)
This vision too utterly lacks any principle of divine influence. With radical sweep, Timon places the mechanics of the heavens within a human principle based on property, extending to the earth and the celestial bodies around it an anarchistic logic whereby property is theft. Taking from the earth itself is simply taking lessons from the earth if ‘[t]he earth's a thief’. ‘I’ll example you with thievery’, he tells the thieves, meaning that he will show them that they are not aberrations but instances of a general and variously exampled state of being. Though there cannot be a concept of theft without a concept of lawful possession, law is itself dysfunctional: ‘The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power / Has unchecked theft’ (14.443–4). Timon's ‘laws’, plural and therefore contingent, are thrown into relief by the non-concordant verb: ‘the laws … has’. 26 Depending on how one understands ‘unchecked’, the laws themselves have unlimited power to steal, or they leave theft unrestrained. 27 Either of these unnervingly open possibilities excludes any view of law in abstract as a fixed and unalterable principle; Timon instead sees specific iterations, characterised by ‘rough power’. The only position left for lawfulness is that of an unprincipled screen behind which theft hides. So it must be if the traditionally governing celestial bodies are themselves governed by theft.
Timon's fallacy here is of the pathetic kind: nature is attributed with a human quality (a negative one) and then becomes the source of justification for human behaviour. However, as Timon's experience might suggest, it is illogical and pointless to blame the earth for what we do. The moon lacks the kind of human-like agency that Timon attributes to it when calling it a thief. It reflects light, but it does not in any meaningful way steal light. Timon therefore disrupts the theology whereby the earth and heavenly bodies are ordained by grace for the benefit of humankind. The rupture adds fuel to the terrifying poetry of Timon's speeches. But his thinking is fundamentally casuistic and potentially lets humanity off the hook. ‘I’ll example you with thievery’ implies that nature is the misanthropist's emblem-book. If the sun and the moon and the sea and the earth are thieves, it may follow inevitably that humans will also be thieves. If we expose this reasoning as casuistic, what excuse is left for humankind? By an adjustment of thinking from the magical to the material, we can see that we are not given what we need by the earth, but we take what we want from it.
The scene that began with Timon's version of Matins, and developed with Timon's versions of wealth-producing labour and disbursements of wealth, ends with an Evensong that leads to his grave. His final view of the world around him is disenchanted and shows it in a state of what seems to be terminal collapse. Come not to me again, but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood, Who once a day with his embossèd froth The turbulent surge shall cover. Thither come, And let my gravestone be your oracle. Lips, let four words go by, and language end. (14.748–54)
For Timon, the ‘everlasting mansion’ is of course the grave. It echoes ‘I mean to make some building on the place’ in Plutarch's account of Timon, but the comparison with the source illuminates a trajectory away from the literal house. Plans to construct a building are replaced with a death-wish, torn between the ‘mansion’ as a dwelling in the ‘house’ of the Biblical heaven 28 and as an earthly equivalent of the ‘marbled mansion’ of the sky (14.192). The sense of enclosure echoes the Timon's magnificent house earlier in the play, or the empty box, or the walled city of Athens, or Timon's ‘close’ (i.e., enclosure; 14.740). When Timon refigures his speaking body as the words on a stone that is recurrently drowned by the sea, he expands on the paradox of a material and earth-bound ‘mansion’ that is ‘everlasting’. The mechanics of Timon's death and self-burial below his tombstone in the tidal zone of the sea lie beyond rationalisation and representation. The grave is an enigmatic image of Timon metamorphosed into a stone, his invective petrified as engraved words. Timon's gravestone mimics the fabled church towers of drowned villages. His turbulence of life is transposed to the ‘turbulent’ sea.
However, the waves are ‘embossed’ – that is, they resemble the foam exhaled from the mouth of an exhausted animal as it is hunted to death. Francis Bacon cited the Pythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana as saying that ‘the ebbing and flowing of the sea was the respiration of the world’. 29 The tidal alternation between the exposed death-object and the unbroken sea is the world at its last gasp. The language seems to post-date the era of thriving biological life. In this image, the living, feeling, speaking body, a thoughtless participant in environmental theft, is replaced. Language is deferred to stone, where it is revealed, thanks to the downward sag of what is otherwise called the ‘flood’, in that natural diastolic action that Timon had previously captured and placed under the heading of thievery.
We remain in the realm of subjunctivity: ‘let my gravestone be your oracle’, ‘let four words go by, and language end’. The end of Timon's language in these last words implies the end of the breath of life, the end of projective desire, and specifically the end of one man's contamination of the earth by his extractive and consuming existence.
In confronting this negativity, we may think of Timon as the exception, the misanthrope in a world of people who, if not nicer, at least are better reconciled to each other. But this would make light of the play's demonstration that Timon can be an exception only through the absurd something-for-nothing social contract he has with his friends. Timon's final wish is that his own death should be the example to everyone else: first ‘Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree / From high to low throughout’ to hang themselves (14.743–4, 747), and then ‘Graves only be men's works’ (14.757), let graves be the only outcomes of human existence and endeavour.
Afterwords
For himself at least, Timon's death on the heels of these words translates the subjunctive to the indicative. ‘Let my gravestone be your oracle’ becomes ‘Timon is dead’ (16.3, 17.66) and ‘dead / Is noble Timon, of whose memory / Hereafter more’ (17.80–2). Relative to Timon's wishes, it is only by irony that a soldier takes a wax impression of the words on Timon's grave to Athens, so that they can be read and spoken aloud with human breath. 30 As read out by Alcibiades, they represent Timon's final anti-prayer: ‘A plague consume you wicked caitiffs left!’ (17.72). The material embodiment of Timon's words in the impression of the gravestone prompts Alcibiades to forgive faults – either Timon's faults or those of his enemies – and yet resists his managerial desire to move on to normality. The curse, having been transported from shoreline to city, remains physically present in public view of both the Athenians onstage and the play's audience. The emblematic force of the tale of Timon cannot be ignored.
This raises the question: emblematic of what? The present reading suggests this: emblematic of the power of the subjunctive to cut through the surface of the material world, to reveal the relation between human and environment, to project the bleak consequences that follow from unleashing the resources of the earth without restraint. If, prompted by Timon's own mood, we read Timon of Athens subjunctively, we can say that his curses need not be only the invective of an individual, but also a revelation that material excess leads to disaster. Noting that Timon's discovery of gold potentially empowers his fantasies of destruction, we can read the woods beyond Athens as a symbol of an injured earth that, in Timon's vision, returns human damage onto humans. We can read Timon's self-made grave as a portent of self-destroying humanity. Turning the axis of Pynchon's grand image of Mason and Dixon driving a straight westward line through the Appalachian wilderness, we can explore backwards in time, on terms that both preserve the text and find in it a literature for the time we live in. The key point about this particular play is its strong conjunction of a grammatical mood and themes relating to human interaction with the biosphere. Timon of Athens by these criteria seems particularly forceful in depicting a causality between conscious but mindless extravagance and the unleashing of destruction.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
