SOURCE: “The Paradox of Timon's Self-Cursing,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3, Autumn, 1984, pp. 290-304.

[In the essay below, Scott considers liar paradox constructions in Timon's curses on mankind and himself.]

In his essay “how to do things with Austin and Searle”—reprinted with a qualifying comment in Is There a Text in This Class?—Stanley Fish employs speech-act theory to describe the behavior of Coriolanus. Seeking the people's votes for the consulship, Coriolanus refuses to conform to accepted codes of speech and therefore of social conduct, and retorts to his banishers, “I banish you!”¹ Fish says that Coriolanus both evokes expectations of conventional behavior and frustrates them here, undoing what purport to be his own verbal gestures. To Fish, Coriolanus is a special case among Shakespeare's plays. He thinks, therefore, that the opportunities for speech-act analysis of Shakespeare are limited. Coriolanus is “about speech acts, the rules of their performance, the price one pays for obeying those rules, the impossibility of ignoring or refusing them and still remaining a member of the community” (p. 244), he first said, but he has since concluded that it “is a speech-act play for me because it is with speech-act theory in mind that I approached the play in the first place …” (p. 200).

Yet these limits may be needlessly restrictive. I suggest a broadening of the search to other plays that exhibit forms of language that undermine themselves, whether deliberately or not. I recognize that a concern for self-defeating language is an interest of deconstructive criticism—though I am not borrowing deconstructive techniques or terminology (except in play). Instead I seek in certain logical paradoxes, and the problems philosophers have resolving them, a model for one kind of speech that undercuts itself.² In this essay I propose to explore the counterpart to Coriolanus’ banishment, and to his undoing of the verbal forms that he purports to observe. My focus will be on the self-exile of Timon of Athens and the curses he launches at all mankind.

I

Among logical paradoxes—or specifically semantic paradoxes, which turn on questions of meaning and truth—I single out the paradox of the liar, because it concerns most directly the question of the validity of utterance. Though medieval and modern philosophers have phrased the paradox more neatly, I quote it first from a text that may reflect the kind of teaching Shakespeare had at the Stratford grammar school, Thomas Wilson's The Rule of Reason Conteinying the Arte of Logique, first published in 1551:

This is called a liyng argument, for what soeuer ye shal saie, ye must nedes saie amisse. Epimenides a man borne in Crete, saied that the people borne in Crete, were liars, saied he true, or no? If ye saie that he saied truth, I maie well saie, that cannot be well saied: for if the people in Crete be liers, then lied Epimenides, and so his saiyng cannot bee true, because he was a manne there borne, and one of Crete, and saied thei were liers. Again, if ye iudge that the people there, been no liers, then Epimenides saied trueth, euen when he saied, the people of Crete are liers, because he himself was a man of Crete.³

In more modern language, the utterance of this paradox is an instance of what the surface statement asserts to be the case; yet that assertion, that Cretans are liars (or better, that everything they say is false), is undermined by the fact that the assertion itself is made by a Cretan. If this were the only statement by a Cretan, it would be totally self-referential and self-parasitic, and it would contradict itself: if it were true, in other words, it would be false; and if it were false it would be true. Thus Rosalie Colie calls it “the classical paradox of self-reference” (p. 360). Modern logicians often try to remove this and other paradoxes from language—as we, however, need not—because self-reference is likely to arise whenever one states logical rules and truth definitions, and likely to produce unwanted contradictions and undecidables. Because of the ubiquity of self-reference in logical structures, such paradoxes have been much puzzled over by logicians in the last decade and a half.⁴

Though perhaps not of great consequence for philosophers, the grammatical-rhetorical form of the liar paradox may have significance for literary study. Epimenides’ paradox is a paradox only when stated by him or by another Cretan: it is relative (like much dramatic dialogue, and indeed “real” dialogue) to the concrete circumstances of the speech act, though it also refers to other Cretan statements besides itself, if there are any. Less circumstantial (though totally self-referring and still totally bound to its own occurrence) would be “This very sentence is false.” A broader form, “All generalizations are false,” includes but goes a good deal beyond self-reference and the immediate occasion of its assertion.⁵ The generality of this last example brings us near to Timon's unrestricted diatribes; it invites queries of its claim of universal application to generalizations, as well as of its paradoxical self-reference.

Logicians have devised various stratagems for picking and choosing among self-referential statements. These include critiques of the emptiness of self-defining statements, special concepts of prediction, and systematic requirements such as the “grounding” of assertions and truth values at “fixed points.” But since special systems do not directly suit dramatic language, I shall not even try to explain them.⁶ Another tactic is to assume that every statement implicitly asserts its own truth (so that denials in paradoxes are self-contradictory).⁷ Whatever the merits of such a tactic in dealing with paradox, the possibly useful by-product is that all statements (paradoxical or not) are implicitly self-referential. A related technique would treat either an implicit or explicit claim of truth or falsity as being not a self-referential assertion but some other kind of speech act which applies to an assertion, like a confirmation or denial.⁸ Though the concept of implicit speech acts is murky (at least for literary purposes) and needs clarification if it is to be generally applicable, it may nevertheless prove helpful as a tool for analysis of literary situations (analogous to the liar paradox) where a character's circumstances and ability to judge appear to be in conflict with what the character says.⁹ In these situations one is forced to question the character's authority to speak as he does, and one way of doing so is by turning his own words back on him.

Wilson's own way of replying to the liar paradox is simplicity itself, a simple dodge:

this subtletie is thus auoided if ye will saie that where as mencion is made of the people in Crete, yet all are not comprehended vnder thesame, neither is the Proposicion vniuersall, but indefinite, that is to saie, not comprehendying all, but certain, as thus. The people of Crete are liers, trueth it is, that many of theim be liers, and yet Epimenides maie be excepted, and bee a true man of his worde notwithstandyng.

(pp. 216-17)¹⁰

This response does not deal with the problem. Epimenides’ paradox could be made more explicit so that it allows no such exceptions. And the paradox about “this very sentence” is already as explicit as it could be. But Wilson's evasion is symptomatic of what we may be tempted to do with embarrassing generalizations: to tone them down by exclusion, either of their speaker or of the instance governing their assertion.

Our critical strategy in this essay will be to turn utterances in Timon of Athens (among them finally and especially curses) back on their speakers—to consider not only their conscious and sometimes unconscious function as utterances by the characters, but also the ways in which they reflect on their speakers, often undermining them. Our concerns will include the nature of self-reference or self-applicability in the speeches (for instance, a given speech's dependence on the speaker's own circumstances), the authority of the character (how well does his authority hold up to the test of his own words?), and the degree of universality in what is said and the possibility that the speaker wants to make exceptions for himself or for others. And apart from these matters of thought and speech, there will be the question of what counterparts may exist in self-defeating action.

II

Timon's effusions in his days of seeming prosperity obviously ask to be turned back on themselves in the ordinary way of dramatic irony. At the first banquet, in the second scene of the play, he exclaims to the recipients of his generosity:

O, no doubt, my good friends, but the gods themselves have provided that I shall have much help from you. How had you been my friends else? Why have you that charitable title from thousands, did not you chiefly belong to my heart? I have told more of you to myself than you can with modesty speak in your own behalf; and thus far I confirm you. O you gods, think I, what need we have any friends, if we should ne’er have need of ’em? They were the most needless creatures living, should we ne’er have use for ’em, and would most resemble sweet instruments hung up in cases, that keeps their sounds to themselves. Why, I have often wish’d myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you. We are born to do benefits; and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends?

(I.ii.88-103)¹¹

When his wish to be poorer actually begins to come true, Timon is only too ready to see whether his words, and his supposed friends, will hold firm: “in some sort these wants of mine are crown’d, / That I account them blessings; for by these / Shall I try friends” (II.ii.187-89). Unconsciously, perhaps, Timon has been setting up this test, stroking himself with the notion that he could try his companions if he wanted. But he has also unwittingly been moving toward the role of satirist as tempter,¹² whereby his victims are lured into evil and then denounced for it. This role is fulfilled later when Timon invites the sycophants again for a banquet of water and curses, and when, visited by the deputation of senators who need a general against Alcibiades, he sends them back to Athens with an encouragement to hang themselves. Though there is a shock for Timon when the dramatic irony of testing his friends is fulfilled, it is a shock that he has in a sense created, and it confirms for him the superior position he has been arranging for himself: he has the power to test others (a power that is most gratifying, surely, before he has need of it); and once he has succeeded in testing them, he is confirmed in his knowledge that they fail in generosity where he has (albeit self-ruinously) succeeded. Yet we must question whether the test is not more a trial of Timon's behavior in good fortune, of his holding in reserve the power to test, and of his insistence on forcing his generosity on others so as to provoke embarrassment and ingratitude.

Critics have called attention to a revealing instance of this latter practice.¹³ Having inherited a fortune through his father's death, Ventidius wants to repay in double the money that Timon had given to free him from debtor's prison:

Then, as in grateful virtue I am bound
To your free heart, I do return those talents,
Doubled with thanks and service, from whose help
I deriv’d liberty.

(I.ii.5-8)

Timon replies,

O, by no means,
Honest Ventidius. You mistake my love.
I gave it freely ever; and there's none
Can truly say he gives, if he receives.
If our betters play at that game, we must not dare
To imitate them; faults that are rich are fair.

(I.ii.9-14)

Here Timon refuses a free offer from Ventidius. Later, when Timon sends to him in real need, Ventidius has apparently learned not to repay.

In other ways, too, his words here reflect back on Timon. He declines the money because he wants to remain the free giver, untainted by receipt from others. But where does that leave Ventidius? It leaves him morally “bound” so that Timon can remain free; it leaves Ventidius burdened with a sense of obligation that Timon himself finds intolerable. Further, who are the “betters” that TImon mentions? He seems to acknowledge none, nor even (a point that René Girard might make) any equals; nobody else is as rich or as generous as he. Perhaps his phrasing is a minimally polite cover for “your betters, namely me.” It is not surprising, if these are the implications of his words, that Timon's followers do not support him.

Yet Timon is generous in impulse, and the others register that fact and take advantage of him as long as he has wealth. In the same scene Timon receives gifts from the Lords Lucius and Lucullus, and Lucullus at least will soon gain bounty in return. Afterwards a Senator explains the stratagems of these donors who expect more than they give.

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 moe
Better than he, why, give my horse to Timon,
Ask nothing, give it him, it foals me straight
And able horses.

(II.i.5-10)

Timon forces his superiority on others both by accepting no repayment and by more than reciprocating any gifts he receives. His companions know his habits and gladly make the most of them. They are not reluctant to put themselves in an inferior position. But their resentment of the self-abasement Timon imposes on them comes out when Timon attempts to collect what he had long forgone. The blame for Timon's abandonment must therefore be apportioned both to him and to his followers. And we must not forget that Timon's motives are consciously generous. All these factors must be considered in judging whether, as Timon curses all human beings, his words reflect back on faults of his own, and whether his follies disable him from the right to curse those he has in part lured into ingratitude. Quite early he acknowledges blame even as he is justifying himself: “Unwisely, not ignobly, have I given” (II.ii.179).

Timon moves swiftly from anger at his creditors to bitterness toward his professed friends and from there to general curses. Among his diatribes, the one closest to his own experience is this one based on his perception of the economic and social order:

Who dares, who dares
In purity of manhood stand upright
And say “This man's a flatterer”? If one be,
So are they all; for every grize of fortune
Is smooth’d by that below. The learned pate
Ducks to the golden fool. All's obliquy;
There's nothing level in our cursed natures
But direct villainy. Therefore, be abhorr’d
All feasts, societies, and throngs of men!
His semblable, yea, himself, Timon disdains.

(IV.iii.13-22)

Not only does Timon condemn the flatterer of low degree; he also attacks the recipient of adulation who dares not denounce flattery. So Timon may well disdain himself along with those flatterers who had been below him. If we work backwards in this speech, we find that those differences of degree are arbitrary (another point that might be made by Girard):

Twinn’d brothers of one womb,
Whose procreation, residence, and birth
Scarce is dividant, touch them with several fortunes,
The greater scorns the lesser. Not nature,
To whom all sores lay siege, can bear great fortune
But by contempt of nature.
Raise me this beggar, and deny’t that lord;
The senator shall bear contempt hereditary,
The beggar native honor.
It is the pasture lards the rother's sides,
The want that makes him lean.

(IV.iii.3-13)

Pasturing (which is a matter of fortune), rather than any quality of birth, is what accounts for the differences among men and livestock. All these thoughts support Timon's curse on the order of sun and moon—“O blessed breeding sun, draw from the earth / Rotten humidity; below thy sister's orb / Infect the air!” (IV.iii.1-3)—though, as he later tells the bandits, such disorder is already the ordinary way of nature:

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.

(IV.iii.441-47)

Timon has already called down the plague of social disorder: “Matrons, turn incontinent! / Obedience fail in children! Slaves and fools, / Pluck the grave wrinkled Senate from the bench, / And minister in their steads! …” (IV.i.3-6). As he digs for roots, he finds the gold that might activate his curses better than his words can.¹⁴

III

If Timon sees gold as the incentive that he can use in his efforts to execute his wishes, he also forms in his mind a symbolic aptness for the people he encounters in his exile, people who might be bought with gold to work out Timon's designs. One of these is Alcibiades, the disaffected general now marching against Athens. Timon exclaims “The gods confound them all [i.e. the Athenians] in thy conquest, / And thee after, when thou hast conquer’d! … / That by killing of villains / Thou wast born to conquer my country” (IV.iii.105-6, 108-9). He then offers the bribe: “There's gold to pay thy soldiers. / Make large confusion; and, thy fury spent, / Confounded be thyself!” (IV.iii.129-31). He thinks of Alcibiades as a scourge who will first destroy Timon's enemies and then justly fall for his own evil. In this, Alcibiades is like Timon, who curses not only others but himself. In similar fashion, the whores should punish and be punished:

Be a whore still. They love thee not that use thee;
Give them diseases, leaving with thee their lust.
Be whores still;
And he whose pious breath seeks to convert you,
Be strong in whore, allure him, burn him up;
Let your close fire predominate his smoke,
And be no turncoats.

(IV.iii.84-85, 142-46)

And his advice to the Banditti is much the same:

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.

(IV.iii.449-54)

The gold is at once the motive Timon supplies his scourges, a puzzlingly moderating force (“Steal less for this I give you”), and their potential undoing. Timon is aware that the lure he is using may actually work against his aim by sating greed—yet he trusts that in the final analysis greed will prove limitless and will work general ruin.¹⁵

The entrance of the Steward seems to break the pattern. The Steward is the one good and loyal person Timon encounters—to be contrasted with his false friends of higher status—and Timon must unwillingly make an exception to his general curse:

Forgive my general and exceptless rashness,
You perpetual-sober gods! I do proclaim
One honest man—mistake me not, but one;
No more, I pray—and he's a steward.
How fain would I have hated all mankind!
And thou redeem’st thyself. But all, save thee,
I fell with curses.

(IV.iii.500-506)

Yet Timon must still test his suspicions to see whether even this servant is like his old flattering lords:

Is not thy kindness subtle, covetous,
If not a usuring kindness, and, as rich men deal gifts,
Expecting in return twenty for one?

(IV.iii.513-15)

The Steward's reply is pure selflessness, a wish for Timon's renewed wealth:

believe it,
My most honor’d lord,
For any benefit that points to me,
Either in hope or present, I’d exchange
For this one wish, that you had power and wealth
To requite me by making rich yourself.

(IV.iii.522-27)

The requital the Steward longs for is simply the joy of seeing Timon in fortune. But, whether in his blind cynicism or in a crafty temptation, Timon mistakes the Steward's motives for those of one who believes that an again-wealthy Timon might give something to him:

Look thee, ’tis so! Thou singly honest man,
Here, take. [Offers gold.] The gods
out of my misery
Has sent thee treasure.

(IV.iii.528-30)¹⁶

And the proviso reminds us that Timon's curse still holds for everyone else:

Go, live rich and happy,
But thus condition’d: thou shalt build from men;
Hate all, curse all, show charity to none,
But let the famish’d flesh slide from the bone
Ere thou relieve the beggar. Give to dogs
What thou deniest to men.

(IV.iii.530-35)

For Timon, the consequence of finding this exception to his view of man is that he must corrupt it—if not to prove it flawed, at least to try to enforce behavior like his own. He is rewarding the one honest man he finds, as if he were reasserting a moral order; yet he tries to nullify the order he finds, for his means of reward and corruption (which depend, after all, on societal values) are one and the same.¹⁷

IV

Timon is remarkably ineffectual in his efforts to buy the enactment of his curses of general destruction and self-destruction. Alcibiades makes peace with Athens, the bandits are so repelled by Timon that they vow to reform themselves and Athens, and (if our text is right) the Steward apparently disregards the command to retreat to solitary wealth and stays to attend Timon.¹⁸ The whores do take the money and presumably continue to spread disease, but they evidently don’t care at all for the prescription Timon gives for their role. Timon's attempt at action through others leaves him almost alone and unremarked by the world, just as he was when cursing. Reports about Timon's wealth (a consequence of these bribes), combined with Athens’ need for a general to oppose Alcibiades, give Timon a flurry of attention later, and he has a chance to declare his indifference to Athens and his scorn for her citizenry. But if any act or word is ultimately to be effective for him, it must be the self-undoing act of death. Lacking proxy enactments of his self-cursing, Timon can only let the deed fall, however it will and however it really does, on himself.

As he first enters in the scene that we have been considering, Alcibiades, not yet recognizing Timon, puts what must be for us a basic challenge to Timon's attitude: “What is thy name? Is man so hateful to thee, / That art thyself a man?” (IV.iii.52-53). This must mean, at least in the first instance, “Are you willing to speak against your own natural ties so severely as to condemn yourself with all mankind?” Timon answers as Misanthropos, taking on an allegorical function, and we know that he does indeed curse himself with others. But there is another question about Timon's right to curse, which we may now superimpose on Alcibiades’ meaning: “Sharing in the follies of mankind which you would condemn (and having shown yourself susceptible to some particular follies which have tempted others to the faults that enrage you), who are you to judge mankind?” Timon's curses, being unalterably self-referential (he cannot really impersonate an allegorical role), are relative to the conditions and fact of their utterance, as in another way the liar paradox can be.

Although this situation may allow us no way of absolutely validating Timon's authority to curse, it nevertheless remains true that he gains credibility by comparison with others: the three-pronged fork in the road offers us the paths of Alcibiades, Apemantus, and Timon.¹⁹ Though disaffected from Athens, Alcibiades hardly makes the universal quarrel of his wrongs that Timon does, except as part of the rhetoric of negotiation. His plea, he must admit, is for a murderer (though in a duel), and his extenuations are founded on the risks of a soldier's life, and on nothing more widely applicable. Alcibiades’ response to banishment shows that he seizes the pretext of asserting the viewpoint of soldiers toward their political masters:

Banishment!
It comes not ill; I hate not to be banish’d.
It is a cause worthy my spleen and fury,
That I may strike at Athens. I’ll cheer up
My discontented troops, and lay for hearts.
’Tis honor with most lands to be at odds.
Soldiers should brook as little wrongs as gods.

(III.v.116-22)²⁰

Alcibiades’ companionship with prostitutes may be in part an expression of his contempt for the world around him (in the fashion of both The Beggar's Opera and The Threepenny Opera), but it undercuts his own position as he castigates negotiators for the “coward and lascivious town” of Athens:

Till now you have gone on and fill’d the time
With all licentious measure, making your wills
The scope of justice; till now myself and such
As slept within the shadow of your power
Have wander’d with our travers’d arms, and breath’d
Our sufferance vainly.

(V.iv.3-8)

Alcibiades’ own character and situation more directly undermine his words than do those of Timon. Having specific objectives in mind, he settles with Athens—and as part of the bargain singles out the enemies of Timon. But welcome as peace may be at the end of the play, it leaves us wondering whether this settlement can really address the causes that had enraged Timon and whether such an opportunist as Alcibiades really cares about the evils that were the matter of Timon's curses.²¹

A harder, if less attractive, challenge is put by the cynic philosopher Apemantus. Though he is dismissed by others (and must be partially discounted by us) as nothing more than a professional railer, he quickly establishes credentials as a critic of Timon's relation to his followers: “O you gods, what a number of men eats Timon, and he sees ’em not” (I.ii.39-40). And though he is speaking of poets rather than greedy lords, his words also touch Timon and his followers when he says “He that loves to be flatter’d is worthy o’ th’ flatterer” (I.i.237-38).²² Yet it appears, from his usual behavior, that Appemantus thinks that to be on good terms with anyone is either to be flattered or to be a flatterer. So what is left as a way of life? His answer seems to come in his reply to Timon's welcome: “No, / You shall not make me welcome. / I come to have thee thrust me out of doors” (I.ii.24-26). Apemantus is the inverse of a flatterer; he is someone who is dependent on hard treatment by others. His attacks provoke it, and the treatment he receives confirms for him his view of human nature. It is important for us to remember, when Apemantus is advising Timon, that his need for his own expected response from others is as great as that of the flatterer.

V

To understand the confrontation of Apemantus and Timon, it will help us to return to specific varieties of the liar paradox, for some of them consist of dialogue. A modern example of the liar paradox is the following:

Nixon:
Everything John Dean says about Watergate is true.
Dean:
Everything Nixon says about Watergate is false.(23)

If each of these statements is taken as an instance of something its author says about Watergate, and if each speaker is given equal credence (for instance, if no other evidence can be adduced to determine the veracity of either), the two statements are at a standoff. Dean undermines Nixon, but in the process he weakens testimony that would support his own reliability. Another example would have Nixon say that everything Dean says is false, and would have Dean reply the same to Nixon. In this case, if we suppose that neither witness says anything else, if both witnesses are presumed to be of equal credibility, and if we must choose one or the other, we have no authority for a decision. (What might be the shortest conceivable self-deconstructing play might consist solely of this trading of accusations—or rather of deleted epithets, which nevertheless leave their traces).

Both Watergate models express possible relations between Timon and Apemantus when they meet in the woods. Apemantus has scorned Timon's bounteous mood; now that Timon too is cursing, will Apemantus find his words true? In fact the two attack each other, more in accord with the second example, though their quarrel is not over truth but over the reason why each is in his present condition (both conditions being somewhat similar). In the dispute over reasons, each strikes at the other's authority to curse mankind: Apemantus complains that Timon does so out of sheer necessity rather than choice; Timon asserts that Apemantus merely “flatters misery” (IV.iii.236), that is, takes a cynical position for the mere love of it. Perhaps the worst that Apemantus can say is “Thou are too bad to curse” (IV.iii.365, a response to Timon's “Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon”). Taken strictly, this is paradoxical: what degree of goodness is needed in the object of a curse to make the curse worthwhile? Is there, as in Milton's Satan, a flicker of envious admiration in Apemantus’ cursing?

Although both Timon and Apemantus curse universally, there is, apart from this hint of possible envy, an indication of self-regard in Apemantus that suggests that he would make himself a partial exception to the curse. Saying grace at the first banquet, he prays openly for himself alone: “Grant I may never prove so fond / To trust man on his oath or bond, … Or a keeper with my freedom, / Or my friends, if I should need ’em” (I.ii.64-65, 68-69). In contrast, though Timon's grace for the feast of hot water is patterned on his own experience, he leaves himself out and seems unconcerned with self-protection:

You great benefactors, sprinkle our society with thankfulness. For your own gifts, make yourselves prais’d; but reserve still to give, lest your deities be despis’d. Lend to each man enough, that one need not lend to another; for, were your god-heads 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.

(III.vi.70-79)

On this showing Timon has an integrity that Apemantus lacks.²⁴ The contrast between his present integrity and all of Apemantus’ behavior should also help us to see that, given a choice in the limited world of this play, we find Timon's past folly to be something that actually increases the credibility of his cursing: better a fool as he has been than a knave like Apemantus.

VI

The notion that Apemantus always craves the rejection of others is relevant to his strangest advice to Timon. When he visits Timon in the woods, Apemantus urges Timon not to imitate him but rather to become, as a kind of revenge, the thing that Apemantus has always scorned and Timon has now found to be an enemy, a flatterer:

Shame not these woods
By putting on the cunning of a carper.
Be thou a flatterer now, and seek to thrive
By that which has undone thee. Hinge thy knee,
And let his very breath whom thou’lt observe
Blow off thy cap; praise his most vicious strain,
And call it excellent. Thou wast told thus;
Thou gav’st thine ears, like tapsters that bade welcome,
To knaves and all approachers. ’Tis most just
That thou turn rascal; hadst thou wealth again,
Rascals should have’t. Do not assume my likeness.

(IV.iii.210-20)

This attraction of opposites in Apemantus’ mind recalls what Apemantus and the flatterer have in common: their dependence on others. Since Apemantus has earlier shown that the flatterer and the flattered are equally lowly, this advice might suit Timon's wish for a form of self-destruction that also brings down others: in debasing oneself, one would also debase others. But it is surely to Timon's credit that he does not lower himself in this way.

VII

The calling of poet or painter offers multiple occasions for lying. In what must be a close relative of the liar paradox, Apemantus addresses the Poet thus:

Apemantus:
Art not a poet?
Poet:
Yes.
Apemantus:
Then thou liest. Look in thy last work, where thou hast feigned him
a worthy fellow.
Poet:
That's not feigned; he is so.
Apemantus:
Yes, he is worthy of thee, and to pay thee for thy labor. He that loves
to be flatter’d is worthy o’ the’ flatterer.

(I.i.231-38)

There is first the accusation that Sidney was at pains to deny, namely that the poet lies in the very nature of the way he prosecutes his craft. But this charge is here particularized: the Poet in this play lies also in the sense that he basely magnifies Timon's virtues. It is obvious from the preceding dialogue of Poet and Painter that, like the lords who make gifts to Timon as a way of speculating on richer gifts in return, the Poet and the Painter present him with flattering works in expectation of bountiful patronage. But what proof can Apemantus offer to demonstrate this flattery? He can offer the circular argument that Timon is worth no more than the Poet because both are involved in flattery, that the Poet is a liar, and that therefore Timon is not worthy and the Poet is lying by flattering him.²⁵ Near the end of the play Timon also finds both artists to be flatterers, and in terms that touch the very fictive nature of all art: the Painter draws “a counterfeit / Best in all Athens,” and the Poet, “for [his] fiction,” writes verse that “swells with stuff so fine and smooth” that he seems “natural” in his art (V.i.78-83). Yet there is after all a truth in this lying: the Poet's allegory of the fall from Fortune's hill (which the Painter swears he has often depicted) is the prologue to Shakespeare's own more complex tale of Timon's fall and embitterment.²⁶ But the true lies of the two artists are presumably dulled in their effect (and therefore somehow made acceptable as flattery) because, as the Painter says, they are trite. As audience we have an obligation not to let Shakespeare's own better art be similarly neutralized.

VIII

A few years before reader-response criticism came into full vogue, Rosalie Colie wrote as follows:

paradoxes are, in fact, of all the rhetorical and literary forms the least self-contained. Paradox relies utterly upon its action in audience or beholder or reader. Paradox requires a beholder willing to share in its action and by thus sharing in it to prolong that action. … by drawing attention to its own form and technique it demands a “wondrer,” a reader to admire it and to wonder about it.

(pp. 518-19)

The plight of Timon and the alternatives set before us by other characters in the play must raise many questions that perpetuate paradox in Colie's sense. Of Timon's initial situation we may ask, generalizing the problems: is it possible to maintain generous impulses without the ego struggles of flatterers and flattered? is it possible even to have a social order (on whatever basis it is founded) without such struggles becoming debilitating? The comparisons of Timon and Apemantus (initial trust versus initial hostility toward fellow human beings) and of Timon and Alcibiades (intransigence contrasted with conciliation) could obviously be applied with no resolution by the audience. And do we accept that Timon's curses fall on us? Having labored thus far to include Timon in all he says, we must not finally hold ourselves back from his dilemmas. We cannot escape his curses.

If the art works marked on paper or canvas (or enacted on stage) have their paradoxes, so also must another artifact in Shakespeare's play, the messages that Timon left in stone for the posterity he hated. Doubtless (whatever the paradoxical critic might hope) Shakespeare merely neglected to cancel one of the contradictory epitaphs, just as he neglected cancellations in other texts. He probably thought that no audience would trouble to ask who buried Timon or carved the inscriptions. But however the puzzles arose, they may prompt questions: what sort of record would be left by a man who cursed himself along with all mankind? and could he even decide whether he wanted to be named? He is no Hamlet or Othello; he is not concerned that he be reported truly. He entreats his lips to “let sour words go by and language end!” (V.i.219—the Folio says “foure words”). Yet in this same (final) speech he urges the Athenians to find an “oracle” on his tombstone. He cannot cease to communicate with—and perhaps thus minimally to care about—his fellow creatures; but he resolves to do so in writing, and leave the response to the reader.²⁷ Besides the ambiguity about whether Timon names himself, there is a difference in the reader's involvement: whether the reader receives Timon's curse (“A plague consume you wicked caitiffs left!”) or is simply offered the opportunity to curse Timon (“Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait”). It is fitting that (by whatever accident) the text leaves us with a self-contradictory Derridean inscription, from an author Timon who is (mysteriously but premeditatedly) both absent and dead.

Notes

1. Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 197-245.

2. Some comments of J. L. Austin illustrate connections among these strange phenomena of language. Of insincerity—which Fish shows (e.g. p. 205) to be one of the problems with Coriolanus’ speech acts—Austin says, “The insincerity of an assertion is the same as the insincerity of a promise. ‘I promise but do not intend’ is parallel to ‘it is the case but I do not believe it’ …”—How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), p. 50. This latter example (known as Moore's paradox) Austin elsewhere compares to such semantic paradoxes as the liar and its obverse the truth-teller: “Those of the so-called ‘logical paradoxes’ (hardly a genuine class) which concern ‘true’ and ‘false’ are not to be reduced to cases of self-contradiction, any more than ‘S but I do not believe it’ is. A statement to the effect that it is itself true is every bit as absurd as one to the effect that it is itself false”—“Truth,” in Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 97 n. Austin is concerned to show other “unhappinesses” in the use of language in addition to logical contradiction—e.g., self-referential emptiness and insincerity (whether in promises or assertions of fact). I suggest that for literary purposes we compare these and other features of language that seem to work against their ostensible purpose. Self-undercutting speech in Hamlet is related to the psychology of the double bind and to the liar paradox by Anna K. Nardo, “Hamlet, ‘A Man to Double Business Bound,’” Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), 181-99.

3. 1553 edition, ed. Richard S. Sprague (Northridge, Cal.: San Fernando Valley State College, 1972), p. 216. Wilson's popularity is described by Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956), p. 29, and his popularity and typicality are discussed by T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1944), II, 40, 42-43, 67. As Howell mentions (pp. 30-31), Wilson's editions of 1553 and later contain a quotation from Udall's Ralph Roister Doister, III.iv and v. This passage is a mispunctuated letter like Peter Quince's prologue to the play of Pyramus and Thisby; see the note to A Midsummer Night's Dream, V.i. 108 ff. by Harold F. Brooks in the Arden edition (1979), which also cites Riche's Farewell to the Military Profession. Later Shakespeare could have found allusions to the liar paradox in Florio's Montaigne, as has been shown by Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), p. 391 n; the relevance of Montaigne to Timon is argued by Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1950), pp. 65-67. It seems almost certain that Shakespeare knew the paradox.

4. Recent treatments include The Paradox of the Liar, ed. Robert L. Martin (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970); A. N. Prior, Objects of Thought, ed. P. T. Geach and A.J.P. Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); J. L. Mackie, Truth, Probability, and Paradox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); and James Cargile, Paradoxes: A Study in Form and Predication (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979). The seriousness of the subject may be indicated by the facts that Martin's book was originally a symposium and that Mackie and Cargile, besides featuring paradox in their titles, treat it in final chapters which refer frequently to preceding arguments. Indirect relations between the liar paradox (especially its self-referentiality) and number theory, visual and musical aesthetics, and computer programming are suggested by Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach (New York: Basic Books, 1979), esp. p. 17.

5. These formulations are close to some given by the fourteenth-century scholastic John Buridan. See G. E. Hughes's text/translation/commentary John Buridan on Self-Reference (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), Sophisms 11 (“What I am saying is false”) and 7 (“Every proposition is false”). Hughes finds a logically acute plan in the variations Buridan presents. My actual wording “This very sentence is false” is from Newton Garver, “The Range of Truth and Falsity,” in The Paradox of the Liar, p. 123. Other ancient and medieval formulations and solutions are given by I. M. Bocheński, A History of Formal Logic, trans. and ed. Ivo Thomas (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1961), pp. 130-33, 237-51.

6. Mackie, pp. 259-60; Cargile, pp. 284-85; Saul Kripke, “Outline of a Theory of Truth,” The Journal of Philosophy, 72, no. 19 (6 Nov. 1975), 690-716. Kripke's article was called to my attention by Donald Brownstein.

7. Buridan on Sophism 7: “self-contradictory” represents his early means of rejecting the paradox; his later approach cannot be so easily labeled. See the sections numbered 7.7.1, 7.7.2, and 7.7.3 in the translation, and Hughes’ commentary, pp. 167-71; also see Prior, p. 106, and his British Academy lecture on Buridan (1962); and E. J. Ashworth, Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), pp. 106-7.

8. P. F. Strawson, “Truth,” in Philosophy and Analysis, ed. Margaret MacDonald (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954), pp. 271-74; but the application to the Epimenides paradox is not clear. Cargile gives a critique, pp. 267-78. In speech acts generally (not necessarily in paradox) Austin's criterion of sincerity involves an implicit element which is supposed to rule out self-undercutting speech: “saying that ‘the cat is on the mat’ … is not possible along with saying ‘I do not believe that it is’; the assertion implies a belief”—How to Do Things, p. 49. Compare note 2 above.

9. Fish discusses some of the earlier treatments of speech acts (not from this perspective). See also Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech-Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977). Implicit speech acts are incorporated into generative grammar by Jerrold M. Sadock, Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts (New York: Academic Press, 1974). The concept of implicit speech acts, and some “systematic” ways of dealing with paradox, may help to sort out multiple ironies and metadramatic references.

10. Ashworth points out scholastic and Renaissance humanistic treatments, including some by Melanchthon, which resemble this, and she shows their weakness (pp. 104-5, 114-15).

11. Quotations are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (Glenview, Ill.: Scott Foresman, 1980).

12. Cf. Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 109, 211 (the latter in connection with Marston's Malcontent). Kernan does not consider Timon a tempter.

13. J. C. Maxwell in the New Cambridge edition (1957), pp. xxxv-xxxvi; Richard Fly, Shakespeare's Mediated World (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1976), pp. 129-30.

14. These last-quoted speeches and Timon's concept of the workings of gold are placed in a pattern by Winifred M. T. Nowottny, “Acts IV and V of Timon of Athens,” SQ, 10 (1959), 493-97.

15. These three attempts to buy destruction and self-destruction are related to Timon's own attitudes by Fly, pp. 138-39.

16. Here, though not before, I agree with Rolf Soellner that Timon's word “honest” is sardonic—Timon of Athens: Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1979), p. 45.

17. On gold, see especially Kenneth Muir, “Timon of Athens and the Cash-Nexus,” Modern Quarterly Miscellany, 1 (1946), 57-76; the article by Nowottny in note 14; and David M. Bergeron, “Alchemy and Timon of Athens,” CLA Journal, 13 (1970), 364-73. Ruth Levitsky sees Timon's failure to recant here as a departure from a morality pattern—“Timon: Shakespeare's Magnyfycence and an Embryonic Lear,” Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 115-16.

18. In the Arden edition (1959) H. J. Oliver emphasizes that the Steward's loyalty undermines the justness for us of Timon's misanthropy (pp. 1-1i). Kernan too finds a need for pity and for exceptions to the satiric view (pp. 203-4).

19. A somewhat different, but compatible, counterpointing of characters is suggested by Oliver, pp. xlviii-xlix. See also Levitsky, pp. 111-19.

20. Soellner (p. 56) aptly contrasts Timon's repulsion by Alcibiades’ disloyalty (IV.iii.108-9, previously quoted). He also (p. 58) makes a comment similar to my next one.

21. Soellner rightly advises against idealizing Alcibiades and casts doubt on the value of the settlement (pp. 53-63).

22. Fly credits Apemantus’ insights to his “almost pure distillation” in himself of the hostilities between Timon and the others; Apemantus needs to trade insults with society in order to measure his assumed superiority (p. 132).

23. This is Buridan's ninth sophism (see note 5), adapted to a topic discussed by Kripke (note 6). The next example, from Kripke (p. 696), corresponds to Buridan's Sophism 8. My analysis is indebted to Kripke and to Hughes’ comments on Buridan.

24. Soellner (p. 95) also finds Apemantus inferior to Timon because of greater vanity; in contrast, Maurice Charney in the Signet edition (New York: New American Library, 1965) objects to Timon's “petulant self-hate” and “insufferable snobbishness” (p. xxix).

25. Circularity is related to the truth-teller paradox (“This very sentence is true”): for comparison, suppose Nixon and Dean had each said that all the other's statements were true, and each assertion was claimed to assure the other's veracity. On the truth-teller, see Austin as quoted in note 2, and Mackie, pp. 260-62.

26. Soellner's comment (p. 132) on the surface and underlying meanings of I.i.59-62 illuminates the double meaning of the allegory. De casibus tragedy and the morality play, particularly Everyman, are discussed by David Bergeron, “Timon of Athens and Morality Drama,” CLA Journal, 10 (1967), 181-88, and Anne Lancashire, “Timon of Athens: Shakespeare's Dr. Faustus,” SQ, 21 (1970), 35-44. Various genres are mentioned by William W. E. Slights, “Genera mixta and Timon of Athens,” Studies in Philology, 74 (1977), 39-62. Levitsky allegorizes the failure of fortitude.

27. The typicality of these “literary artifacts” as expressions of Timon's character is noted by Lesley W. Brill, “Truth and Timon of Athens,” Modern Language Quarterly, 40 (1979), 26. This last communication qualifies the “absolute negation” found in Timon by Maire Jaanus Kurrik, in Literature and Negation (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 15-19. With apt citations from Nietzsche and from 1 Cor. xiii.2-3, Kurrik argues that “denial and negation of the self” is an extension of “denial of the other,” i.e., mankind (p. 16).