WILLIAM EMPSON

CRITICS OF THE WENTIETH CENTURY General Editor: Christopher Norris, University of Wales, College of Cardiff

A.J.GREIMAS AND THE NATURE OF MEANING Ronald Schleifer CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL Robert Sullivan FIGURING LACAN Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious Juliet Flower MacCannell HAROLD BLOOM Towards Historical Rhetorics Peter de Bolla JULIA KRISTEVA John Lechte GEOFFREY HARTMAN Criticism as Answerable Style G.Douglas Atkins INTRODUCING LYOTARD Art and Politics Bill Reading EZRA POUND AS LITERARY CRITIC K.K.Ruthven F.R.LEAVIS Michael Bell DELEUZE AND GUATTARI Ronald Bogue POSTMODERN BRECHT A Re-Presentation Elizabeth Wright THE ECSTASIES OF ROLAND BARTHES Mary Bittner Wiseman PAU L RICOEU R S.H.Clark JURGEN HABERMAS Critic in the Public Sphere Robert C.Holub

WILLIAM EMPSON

Prophet Against Sacrifice

Paul H.Fry

London and New York

First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

© 1991 Paul H.Fry

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Fry, Paul H. William Empson: prophet against sacrifice—(Critics of the twentieth century). 1. English literature. Criticism. Empson, William 1906–1984 I. Title II. Series 820.9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fry, Paul H. William Empson: prophet against sacrifice/Paul H.Fry. p. cm. —(Critics of the twentieth century) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Empson, William, 1906– —Knowledge—Literature. 2. English literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Criticism—Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Critics of the twentieth century (London, England) PR6009.M7Z66 1991 801'.95'092—dc20 91–10018

ISBN 0–415–02482–X (Print edition) ISBN 0–203–06925–0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0–203–21898–1 (Glassbook Format) For Spencer, with love from his Dad

Contents

Editor’s foreword ix Preface and acknowledgments xiii Texts frequently cited xvii

1 Introduction: the scapegoat and the word 1 2 Satanic criticism: Empson and the Romantic tradition 29 3 Advancing logical disorder: Empson on method 55 4 Toward late Empson: the failure of pastoral 88 5 Middle Spirits and Empson’s chain of being 119

Notes 147 Index 169

Editor’s foreword

The twentieth century has produced a remarkable number of gifted and innovative literary critics. Indeed it could be argued that some of the finest literary minds of the age have turned to criticism as the medium best adapted to their complex and speculative range of interests. This has sometimes given rise to regret among those who insist on a clear demarcation between “creative” (primary) writing on the one hand, and “critical” (secondary) texts on the other. Yet this distinction is far from self-evident. It is coming under strain at the moment as novelists and poets grow increasingly aware of the conventions that govern their writing and the challenge of consciously ex-ploiting and subverting those conventions. And the critics for their part—some of them at least—are beginning to question their traditional role as humble servants of the literary text with no further claim upon the reader’s interest or attention. Quite simply, there are texts of literary criticism and theory that, for various reasons— stylistic complexity, historical influence, range of intellectual command—cannot be counted a mere appendage to those other “primary” texts. Of course, there is a logical puzzle here, since (it will be argued) “literary criticism” would never have come into being, and could hardly exist as such, were it not for the body of creative writings that provide its raison d’être. But this is not quite the kind of knockdown argument that it might appear at first glance. For one thing, it conflates some very different orders of priority, assuming that literature always comes first (in the sense that Greek tragedy had to exist before Aristotle could formulate its rules), so that literary texts are for that very reason possessed of superior value. And this argument would seem to find commonsense support in the difficulty of thinking what “literary criticism” could be if it seriously renounced all sense of the

ix William Empson distinction between literary and critical texts. Would it not then find itself in the unfortunate position of a discipline that had willed its own demise by declaring its subject non-existent? But these objections would only hit their mark if there were indeed a special kind of writing called “literature” whose difference from other kinds of writing was enough to put criticism firmly in its place. Otherwise there is nothing in the least self-defeating or paradoxical about a discourse, nominally that of literary criticism, that accrues such interest on its own account as to force some fairly drastic rethinking of its proper powers and limits. The act of crossing over from commentary to literature—or of simply denying the difference between them—becomes quite explicit in the writing of a critic like Geoffrey Hartman. But the signs are already there in such classics as William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), a text whose transformative influence on our habits of reading must surely be ranked with the great creative moments of literary modernism. Only on the most dogmatic view of the difference between “literature” and “criticism” could a work like Seven Types be counted generically an inferior, sub-literary species of production. And the same can be said for many of the critics whose writings and influence this series sets out to explore. Some, like Empson, are conspicuous individuals who belong to no particular school or larger movement. Others, like the Russian Formalists, were part of a communal enterprise and are therefore best understood as representative figures in a complex and evolving dialogue. Then again there are cases of collective identity (like the so-called “Yale deconstructors”) where a mythical group image is invented for largely polemical purposes. (The volumes in this series on Hartman and Bloom should help to dispel the idea that “Yale deconstruction” is anything more than a handy device for collapsing differences and avoiding serious debate.) So there is no question of a series format or house-style that would seek to reduce these differences to a blandly homogeneous treatment. One consequence of recent critical theory is the realization that literary texts have no self-sufficient or autonomous meaning, no existence apart from their after-life of changing interpretations and values. And the same applies to those critical texts whose meaning and significance are subject to constant shifts and realignments of interest. This is not to say that trends in criticism are just a matter of intellectual fashion or the merry-go-round of rising and falling reputations. But it is important to grasp how complex are the forces—the conjunctions of historical and cultural motive—that

x Editor’s foreword affect the first reception and the subsequent fortunes of a critical text. This point has been raised into a systematic programme by critics like Hans-Robert Jauss, practitioners of so-called “reception theory” as a form of historical hermeneutics. The volumes in this series will therefore be concerned not only to expound what is of lasting significance but also to set these critics in the context of present-day argument and debate. In some cases (as with Walter Benjamin) this debate takes the form of a struggle for interpretative power among disciplines with sharply opposed ideological viewpoints. Such controversies cannot simply be ignored in the interests of achieving a clear and balanced account. They point to unresolved tensions and problems which are there in the critic’s work as well as in the rival appropriative readings. In the end there is no way of drawing a neat methodological line between “intrinsic” questions (what the critic really thought) and those other, supposedly “extrinsic” concerns that have to do with influence and reception history. The volumes will vary accordingly in their focus and range of coverage. They will also reflect the ways in which a speculative approach to questions of literary theory has proved to have striking consequences for the human sciences at large. This breaking-down of disciplinary bounds is among the most significant developments in recent critical thinking. As philosophers and historians, among others, come to recognize the rhetorical complexity of the texts they deal with, so literary theory takes on a new dimension of interest and relevance. It is scarcely appropriate to think of a writer like Derrida as practising “literary criticism” in any conventional sense of the term. For one thing, he is as much concerned with “philosophical” as with “literary” texts, and has indeed actively sought to subvert (or deconstruct) such tidy distinctions. A principal object in planning this series was to take full stock of these shifts in the wider intellectual terrain (including the frequent boundary disputes) brought about by critical theory. And, of course, such changes are by no means confined to literary studies, philosophy and the so-called “sciences of man.” It is equally the case in (say) nuclear physics and molecular biology that advances in the one field have decisive implications for the other, so that specialized research often tends (paradoxically) to break down existing divisions of intellectual labour. Such work is typically many years ahead of the academic disciplines and teaching institutions that have obvious reasons of their own for adopting a business-as-usual attitude. One important aspect of modern critical theory is the challenge it presents to these traditional ideas. And lest it be thought

xi William Empson that this is merely a one-sided takeover bid by literary critics, the series will include a number of volumes by authors in those other disciplines, including, for instance, a study of Roland Barthes by an exponent of American “post-analytical” philosophy. We shall not, however, cleave to “theory” as a matter of polemical or principled stance. The series will extend to figures like F.R.Leavis, whose widespread influence went along with an express aversion to literary theory; scholars like Erich Auerbach in the mainstream European tradition; and others who resist assimilation to any clear-cut line of descent. There will also be authoritative volumes on critics such as Northrop Frye and Lionel Trilling, figures who, for various reasons, occupy an ambivalent or essentially contested place in the modern critical tradition. Above all, the series will strive to resist that current polarization of attitudes that sees no common ground of interest between “literary criticism” and “critical theory.”

CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

xii Preface and acknowledgments

William Empson’s criticism has been well served by commentary. Many of the occasional reviewers and some of the authors of retrospective studies have sallied forth from rival camps, and they have not always been kind; but for the most part Empson’s critics have been alert to the seriousness of purpose peeping through the famous off-hand manner, and nearly everyone has admitted that he is one of the most formidably nimble readers of literature in this or any century. So in setting about writing a book on Empson for this series, I had to consider what I could say that would be new, in view of everything that has been said well already (pre-eminently by the editor of the series, Christopher Norris, in his William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism), and not only new but permanently useful, knowing that we will soon have from John Haffenden what “Empson studies” most obviously needs, a biography. What remains worthwhile to do, I think, while we await fresh biographical knowledge, is to give Empson’s intellectual career a somewhat firmer outline. To this end, I have verged at times on something like a phenomenology of the author’s mind, but in the long run I have simply used any means I could think of to render a full account of what and how—and why—Empson thought. As I went on, two partly interconnected revisions of what is currently said about him did seem to force themselves on my attention: first, even though Empson himself was willing on occasion to accept his label of “verbal critic,” I came to feel that the label has distorted our understanding of his purposes, which were ethical from the beginning (“biographical,” in a sense), and has prevented us from seeing that the course of his work, from the earliest to the latest writings, is by no means discontinuous. I see Milton’s God arising from concerns left crucially unresolved in The Structure of Complex Words (they are already simmering in the first two books) and giving

xiii William Empson rise, in turn, to the curiously persistent cosmological concerns of the later books and essays. And second, perhaps because I do see in the late work a gathering momentum rather than a winding down (or flying apart), I place a much higher value—and a proportionately greater emphasis—on Milton’s God in particular (which I take to be intellectually thinner yet more clearsighted than its predecessors), but also on what came after it. Running through it all, I argue, there is devotion to what it seems better to call reasonableness than rationalism, but this ideal is upheld in three successive, sharply divergent “senses” (as Empson would term them in Complex Words): (1) it is reasonable to assume that all mysteries have scientific explanations (in the first three books, where the mystery of sacrifice is dispelled by The Golden Bough as a “pastoral” identification of the one with the many); (2) it is reasonable that the truth remain indistinct (in Milton’s God, where Milton muffles the Christian sacrifice, which now seems unforgivable, in evasiveness and “sublimity”); (3) it is reasonable, truth being out of reach, that no account of life go unheard (in the late books and essays, where one exemplary figure after another refuses to betray the plenitude of existence by sacrificing speculation to orthodoxy). Thus at all times and in every context, what Empson says can be seen as a warning against the perils of renunciation. I have not said this over and over, wishing to avoid tedium, but the reader will find that I could have put it in anywhere, like “lost his little bottle of oil” in The Frogs. I can add only a few images of Empson the man to what has appeared in print, and they may as well be clustered here, each of them being of some interest perhaps to British readers as glimpses of Empson on the American “land mass,” as he would call it: Empson in 1982, standing on the beach at Key Biscayne near Miami, having stripped to his undershorts to swim, telling two children who kept tadpoles that when he was a boy on his Yorkshire estate he always fed his tadpoles raw meat (the children of course went home and fed raw meat to their tadpoles, which immediately died); Empson in Toronto in 1963, sitting down to dinner with Northrop Frye, W.K.Wimsatt, and my informant, who recalls with awe the disquieting spectacle of three giants whose disapproval of each other was perfectly equilateral; and Empson at Yale ten years ago, the only time I ever encountered him, having finished his lecture on Middle Spirits in Doctor Faustus, which was delivered from a rather high dais that had steps on one side but not the other, the side nearest the exit. I had to run off somewhere and did not stay for the questions, but found I had forgotten my

xiv Preface and acknowledgments briefcase and returned for it just when the questions were over. Coming through the door as the applause subsided, I was just in time to break the fall of Empson, who said, or should have said, he “wouldn’t fly again/For quite a bit,” like the poet of “Autumn on Nan- Yueh.” Actually what he said was “Oh. Thank you very much. Sorry.” Naturally, after that, I felt chosen. I have tried to write dispassionately, judiciously, about Empson, but I had better say here that I am an Empson enthusiast, prepared to forgive anything and incapable of severe criticism. He was the only comic genius our line of work has produced (in quoting him I have tried to confirm that as often as possible), and the supreme value he placed on people’s lives was inseparable (as my title is meant to indicate) from the value he placed on life itself. Despite differences that make the comparison seem ludicrous, I cannot help likening Empson to Byron: he of Newstead Abbey, of Cambridge, of Don Juan, and of the Greek adventure was, it seems to me, one of Empson’s most important ancestors. The greatest debts I have incurred in preparing this book are owed to Christopher Norris and Gary Wihl, for their encouragement and their pathbreaking forays into the thickets of Empsonism; to Charles Berger, for giving me the chance to discover what I wanted to say during the Modern Language Association panel he sponsored on Empson and Burke; to the other participants (along with Norris, Wihl, and Berger) on two such panels: Pamela McCallum, Paul Jay, and especially my old classmate Richard Strier; to David Bromwich, Cyrus Hamlin, John Hollander, and the Murfins (Ross, Pam, Justin, and Audrey), for information and personal reminiscence; and, for conversations more timely than they knew, to Richard Brodhead, Jonathan Freedman, Thomas Hyde, David Marshall, my wife and colleague Brigitte Peucker, Candace Waid, and Henry Weinfield. Special mention is due also to the scholarship without which writing seriously about Empson would be impossible: Frank Day’s Sir William Empson: An Annotated Bibliography, Roma Gill’s collection of memoirs (with the fine bibliography by Moira Megaw), and John Haffenden’s copiously informative introductions to Argufying and The Royal Beasts. Chapter 2 is an expanded version of an essay entitled “Empson’s Satan: An Ambiguous Character of the Seventh Type,” to appear in William Empson: The Critical Achievement, ed. Christopher Norris (Cambridge University Press), forthcoming.

xv

Texts frequently cited

The following texts will be cited parenthetically with the abbreviation given below. While it would have been convenient to include John Haffenden’s collection of essays called Argufying in this group (as I have cited it perhaps more frequently than any other work), I have nearly always endnoted that book in order to cite the title, source, and date of the essays as well. (Indeed, rather than adhere strictly to any one endnoting protocol, I have tried throughout to supply whatever information I could imagine a reader wishing for at the moment.)

William Empson, Collected Poems (1949; The Hogarth Press, London, 1984) (Collected Poems) William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David B.Pirie (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986) (Shakespeare) William Empson, Faustus and the Censor: The English Faust-Book and Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus,” ed. John Henry Jones (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1987) (Faustus) William Empson, Milton’s God (1961; rev. edn Chatto & Windus, London, 1965) (Milton’s God) William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; 3rd edn New Directions, New York, 1966) (Seven Types) William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935; New Directions, New York, 1968) (Pastoral) William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (1951; Ann Arbor Paperbacks, Ann Arbor, 1967) (Complex Words) William Empson, Using Biography (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1984) (Biography) William Empson and David Pirie, eds, Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection (Faber & Faber, London, 1972) (Coleridge’s Verse)

xvii William Empson

Roma Gill, ed., William Empson: The Man and His Work (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1974) (William Empson) Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (The Athlone Press, London, 1978) (Philosophy)

xviii 1

Introduction: the scapegoat and the word

It is tempting to begin a book about what Empson wrote by describing an essay he might have written but did not. We can take our cue from Empson himself, in Faustus and the Censor, inventing the lost, unaltered text of Doctor Faustus. The essay Empson did not write would have been called “Aristotle, Eng. Lit., and Tragedy.” It would have argued that the way in which the notion of katharsis has always been interpreted by Eng. Lit. (one of Empson’s milder terms for the academic literary profession since the Second World War) is influenced by the founding of the Christian religion on human sacrifice. After all, much as he came to hate Christianity, Empson still belonged to the generation of T.S.Eliot, and it still seemed natural in the 1930s, after Frazer, to say that “the tragic hero was a king on sacrificial as well as Aristotelian grounds; his death was somehow Christlike” — and then to quote Herrick:

Not like a Thief, shall Thou ascend the mount, But like a Person of some high Account; The Crosse shall be Thy Stage; and Thou shalt there The spacious field have for Thy Theater. (Pastoral, pp. 29, 85)

This hybrid view of tragedy would indicate that either we are at fault for not seeing that catharsis is a response to sacrificial atonement, or that Aristotle himself is not a sufficiently imaginative guide. Perhaps the latter: Empson was most comfortable with the anthropological approach to the classics made popular by Cambridge luminaries like Gilbert Murray (see Complex Words, p. 142: “If we regard it as the root idea of tragedy that the sacrifice of the hero re-unites his tribe with Nature or with supernatural forces…”), and he always took a rather quizzical view of the Poetics,

1 William Empson claiming for example that the notion of “imitation” is unintelligible.1 One reason for this, especially in his later writings, was the evident ease with which Aristotle could be called on for the anti-humanistic, “neo-Christian” practice of sneering at the unworthiness of even the noblest secular motives: “the [inhumane] mistake is to assume that the Aristotelian ‘tragic flaw’ has to be a moral fault instead of a natural limitation.”2 The elaboration of these claims would furnish the bulk of the essay. For detail there would be a diatribe against the Shakespearean and other scholars with whom he had always broken lances, with grudging admiration reserved for A.C.Bradley, whose reflections on “tragic waste” (“the central feeling of tragedy,” says Empson: Pastoral, p. 5) need not be seen, in balance, as glibly redemptive— although from Empson’s standpoint the elegiac Bradley was still much too enthusiastic about the advantages of dying. “[I]t is a fishy game, to play the amateur of tragedy,”3 even though, or perhaps because, “[t]he prime object of tragedy is to make you feel that the death of the hero with whom you identify yourself…is aesthetically satisfying and therefore what you wanted.”4 (Complex Words is the arena on which Empson’s mixed feelings about Bradley are played out; he is mainly concerned in the later work gathered in Essays on Shakespeare with philologists and historians of stagecraft.) And an aside would have been required—though perhaps not given—to acknowledge Kenneth Burke, whose articles on catharsis and the scapegoat, with their wicked assimilation of “vicarage” to the realm of vicarious pleasure, show more clearly than anything else the profound affinity that exists between these two great critics.5 Profound and also unusual: accustomed as we are to fictional and sociological criticism, which accords with Empson and Burke in taking the moral rigidity of anti-humanism for its target, we may forget that literary criticism, by contrast, especially academic literary criticism, has tended in the main—until quite recently—to have quite a different purpose. It is ethical, yes, but only analogically so, with ethics providing a model for the making of interpretive choices in reading; and insofar as it has admitted the consideration of values, literary criticism has generally offered, as constructive heuristics, world views amplified and enlightened by scholarship but only tacitly condoned or criticized. (I write as an American student of criticism, realizing that an Australian reader, say, steeped in the tradition of Leavis, will find what I say very strange.) Kenneth Burke and William Empson stand apart, however, because they are concerned with the

2 Introduction ruses and subterfuges of consciousness, political and religious in outward form but at bottom ethical. Their criticism produces countless exhibits of human integrity disintegrated, not typically however in the standard works of literature (the “canon” dissected by the recent literary disciples of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche with whom they are frequently and in some ways properly compared), but in the worshipful mediations of literature produced by the mandarins who aid and abet cultural aridity. Their subtlety lies in showing not merely that such mediations exist but that they are all-pervasive, like mildew. Hence the attraction for Empson especially of the quibbles and hair’s- breadth differences of scholarly controversy, where the disclosure of bad faith appears in the placing of a comma. It will be apparent that in approaching Empson as an anatomist of cultural and personal hypocrisies I have chosen to be a lumper not a splitter, in Virginia Woolf’s terms, seeing the manifestly anti- Christian work that begins with Milton’s God as continuous with those earlier works whose titles seem to bespeak attention only to language (to rhetoric and grammar, to genre, and to vocabulary, respectively). I must hasten to add that I am scarcely alone in this; however, the other critics who have grasped this continuity have seemed nonetheless to divide Empson’s career in two because they have placed a lesser value on the later work. This is what led Empson himself to think that Christopher Norris saw no connection between the early and late books, and to complain therefore in his “Postscript” responding to Norris’s seminal William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism: “I have not been entertaining myself with frippery in my old age; I have not even felt a change in my line of interest” (p. 205). But the distance between them is not as great as Empson supposes it: Norris willingly agrees that “Empson’s humanistic rationalism is present in his earliest writings, and forms a coherent and developing background to each of his books” (ibid., p. 2), while Empson proclaiming the utter seamlessness of his intentions is obviously abusing the privilege of hindsight. This he did, by the way, still more disingenuously elsewhere. When he says in 1963, for instance, “I put [Herbert’s] ‘The Sacrifice’ last of the examples in [Seven Types], to stand for the most extreme kind of ambiguity, because it presents Jesus as at the same time forgiving his torturers and condemning them to eternal torture,”6 he blithely revises his early interests in terms of what now seems to him the burning issue, and it is an important task for anyone reviewing his career to decide whether the revision is legitimate or forced.

3 William Empson

Entailed among other things in the argument of the present book is the belief that the undervaluing of Empson’s late work results directly from our tendency to exaggerate the degree to which his interests actually changed after Complex Words, and that this in turn has to do with the honored status we have accorded, in literary studies, to the autotelic aspects of language. It is true that after Complex Words Empson stopped talking about the language of literature—or at least stopped worrying at it—and began talking about biographical and historical evidence for the presence of beliefs and disbeliefs in literature, with the apparent result that neither the literariness of literature nor the complexity of language seemed any more to have a material bearing on the simple litmus test for hypocrisy (the acceptance or rejection of human sacrifice) which the critic seemed bent on administering to the exclusion of all else. What also seemed to be lost was the generous pluralism which had led Empson repeatedly to insist—and to say again as late as 1966—that “the chief benefit from reading literature is to make you realize that different people have held extremely different moral beliefs.”7 With one major exception, commentators have found his focus on Christian anti-humanism either distasteful or comparatively unimportant,8 but it remains a question whether, had the objects of attack been other than what they were, or in any case more various, Empson would not quite readily have been seen to be carrying on work that began in Seven Types and continued through Complex Words, a book which devotes three chapters to the word “honest” and never really has any subject other than the nature of honesty itself. For half of his career, Empson was a verbal critic, yet his subject was never words. As Denis Donoghue writes, conscious of challenging received opinion, “He is completely free from the idolatry of words with which contemporary criticism is beset.”9 What follows is a preliminary survey of the issues successively raised in Empson’s critical books (setting aside for the most part his fascinating shorter pieces, including those collected by John Haffenden in Argufying, 1987) aimed at bringing out the continuity of his intentions while doing justice, at least in brief, to the diversity of his occasions. Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) was written under the lenient supervision of I.A.Richards while Empson was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, having just come to English from mathematics, at a time when his chief ambition was to polish the verses that eventually became Poems (1935). Proceeding none too systematically from submerged, easily neglected multiple senses through increasingly palpable but still reconcilable contradictions and

4 Introduction on to the concluding examples of ambiguities revealing “a division in the author’s mind” (Seven Types, p. vi), Empson was purportedly concerned, as he would not be later, with a phenomenon specific to poetic language (there are useful generalizations in the first chapter about the role of meter and rhythm); but even here it is not clear how he would exclude ambiguity from prose, or whether, indeed, ambiguity thus subtly discovered is not discernible in any speech act whatever.10 In an important early review that Empson took very seriously, his Cambridge classmate James Smith saw clearly that the very fussiness and ingenuity of Empson’s verbal criticism militates against, not in favor of, that formalism which those who think of him as a barmy uncle of the American New Critics still seem to expect from him. The fact is, as Smith rightly grasped it, that any form of attention to local detail which is accretive rather than selective will blur and confuse rather than clarify poetic argument. “A poem is a noumenon rather than a phenomenon,” Smith wrote, and it is him, not Empson, whom the New Critics follow in this their key tenet.11 It is a rare moment when Empson himself declares, as he does in Pastoral (forestalling a Smith’s objections to his ensuing dismemberment of a sonnet), “[t]he niggler is routed here; one has honestly to consider what seems important” (p. 89).12 Granted, then, for Empson a poem is a “phenomenon” —but of what? Of the complexity and, finally—when Freud comes in at the level of the seventh ambiguity—the internal contradictions, not of poems but of the human mind. By this is meant, despite the jeers of Empson’s hermeneutically conservative critics, primarily though not entirely the author’s mind, not the reader’s. The “Wimsatt Law,” as Empson came to call it, vexed him all his life, and it cannot be said that he ever made any very trenchant contribution to the problem of intentionality, but he did see the contours of the problem, and some of its implications, more clearly than his bluff remarks would suggest. In the first place, although it is doubtful whether he knew anything about hermeneutics, he was never a narrow adherent to the author’s “conscious intentions,” and he always followed the principle first laid down by Schleiermacher, namely—as Empson puts it—that “Critics have long been allowed to say that a poem may be something inspired which meant more than the poet knew” (Seven Types, p. xiv). At times this premise appears to extend only as far as the Freudian “pre-conscious” (called “tacit knowledge” by Michael Polanyi and countenanced as “meaning” even by E.D.Hirsch), while at other times the range of intentionality as Empson understands it appears to extend downward to the unconscious and outward to

5 William Empson social determinants; and it is this latitude which has led critics to believe that he was himself indifferent to authorial intention. It is important to remember also that Empson quite understood the logic of the objection to arguments from intention, as is clear from his acknowledgement, in an undated letter, that “[m]aybe, as an intention is only known as it is shown, all references to intentions can in theory be avoided.”13 But, by analogy, he goes on, although we do not actually see forces in the equations given by the science of dynamics, we could not possibly understand dynamics without supposing forces to be at work. For the New Critic, the “poem” is an equation in dynamics with the motivating force left invisible, whereas for Empson the equation is in itself a barren abstraction from the realm of psychological reality to which we gropingly return only with its aid, the possibility of return being the sole value of the equation. Because intention can only be “known as it is shown,” there are times when Empson treats the text, especially the anonymous or generically-defined text, as a kind of stage on which we can discern an implied reader and an implied author, as in the distinction (Pastoral, p. 6) between fairy stories and ballads, which are by and for but not about “the people,” and pastoral, which is about but not by and for. But such implied, shadowy human agents are never conjured up to make the text self-subsistent; they exist at most alongside their real-life counterparts and never replace them. Empson agrees with anti-intentionalist logic, together with most hermeneutic theory, in granting that “success” in the realization of intention “is never complete”: “But it is nearer completeness in a successful piece of literature than in any other use of language” (Biography, p. vii). This is so for Empson not because the piece of literature is the harmonious realization of a complex formal conception, as W.K.Wimsatt himself argued (Empson’s unlovely “piece of literature” avoids the holistic suggestion of Wimsatt’s “poem”), but rather because it is the vehicle reserved for the most intense sincerity and self-honesty of which consciousness is capable. Indeed, it is not ultimately the possibility of understanding alone which is at stake for Empson in defending intentionalism, but the possibility of respect for the authenticity of other thinking minds. Thus the poems of Rochester are “a test case…against some recent critics who have said that one ought to ignore biography,” not because the poems would in that case be misunderstood but because they would simply lack value: “if one didn’t believe Rochester, his poems couldn’t come off properly.”14 By implication, the anti-

6 Introduction intentionalist hypothesis of their being spoken by a “speaker” is pointless and trifling. As always for Empson, then, the issue of intentionalism presents itself simply as an appeal from words to reason. So far from being a logological avatar of deconstruction (with which movement his thinking has considerable practical affinity, as we shall see), Empson never for a moment questions the sturdy Lockian distinction between word and thought still upheld by Richards and the Cambridge philosophers. For him “the defile of the signifier” may be limitless, as his formalist critics complain, but it is always unvaryingly reflective upon, never confluent with, the purely mental signified. The relation between word and thought in Empson is nevertheless not an arbitrary one, as it is for the Saussurean linguist, but is rather governed, in diachronic linguistics as in literary interpretation, by the intentionalist invocation of rational and empirical choice. Thus in the Appendix on Leonard Bloomfield in Complex Words Empson says of the history of sound-change in the word “cuckoo”: “It is not true to say that no criterion of decision had been offered; indeed, Jesperson had offered living evidence, in the shape of a lady who pronounced the first vowel of the word as in ‘but’ and came from a part of Scotland lacking in cuckoos” (Complex Words, p. 435). In view of all these quite obvious descriptive remarks, the critic who is most spectacularly wrong about Empson must surely be Elder Olson, who of course echoes many other critics both of the poems (“crossword puzzles”) and of the criticism but whose error in complaining that Empson puts too much stress on language (“diction”) is unusually vivid and shortsighted in having for its point of view a mentalistic poetics quite as radical as Empson’s own.15 To Empson it was obvious that no one is really a language-bound critic, that we nearly always appeal to intention whether we know it or not, all the more foolishly when we are on our guard against doing so, owing to “a secondary ill-effect of the Wimsatt Law”: “the effort to ignore the author’s Intention makes the critic impute to him some wrong Intention” (Biography, p. 104) —the intention, for instance, to treat a serious conflict of beliefs frivolously by turning it into a triumph of form. It seems clear that Empson’s occasional efforts to shore up his approach with what amounts to a hermeneutic theory were never really necessary to his enterprise, which derives all its tension and energy precisely from the act of leaping in the dark, as he knew perfectly well. It was enough to say, with Johnson and Coleridge

7 William Empson before him, that in honoring literature we are praising the scope of the human mind, hence should keep the mind as fully in view as the static interference of the text will allow. Not the mind as formal principle (or “intentional structure”: that would simply return us to the poem it forms) but the thinking mind observed through the only lens we have at our disposal, that of reading. Empson’s seven types on the face of it are six types of ambiguity followed by one type of ambivalence (“division in the author’s mind”), but many passages in Seven Types could be adduced to show the role played by ambivalence from the beginning.16 The idea, then, that specifically literary considerations are sacrificed to the moralism of the later Empson is not as easy to defend as may appear, simply because it would be so difficult to find any such considerations in the early Empson. When he speaks as a writer of poems, curiously enough, we do find him talking about things that can only be said in poems, about the poem as a uniquely efficacious representation of unresolved conflict, and so on; but as a critic he is always interested in the progress of thought more or less irrespective of format. Again Kenneth Burke is relevant: as a critic, Empson sees literary maneuvers essentially as interesting illustrations of those “dramatistic ratios,” as Burke would call them, which shape human behavior. As to the Christian bogey, by far the most controversial reading in Seven Types, the above-mentioned depiction of Christ on the cross in Herbert’s “The Sacrifice” as a boy stealing fruit in an orchard, gave rise to a controversy with Rosamund Tuve that continued for decades. At first the debate concerned predictable issues governing interpretation—the relevance of Freud, the use and abuse of history, the provenance of convention and genre (Tuve’s specialty: note that here it is she, like Smith, who invokes against Empson a specifically literary mode of semantic determinacy) —but eventually Empson came to see, quite rightly, that it was his opponent’s Christianized horizon alone which made visible everything she was capable of seeing in Herbert’s cultural milieu.17 Tuve, he wrote in 1963, “seemed disposed to treat me as a pagan stumbling towards the light. Clearer now about what the light illuminates, I am keen to stumble away from it.”18 And at that point he was “the later Empson.” Some Versions of Pastoral (1935: the American edition of 1938 was blandly and misleadingly called English Pastoral Poetry) elaborates the multiple senses of expression in Seven Types into an account of mutually reflective social perspectives in literature. A central idea in the new book, “the pastoral process of putting the complex in the

8 Introduction simple” (“‘the fool sees true’”: Pastoral, pp. 22, 10), can be read as an expiation of the allegedly excessive ingenuity of Seven Types, as it were routing the niggler in himself. “Pastoral,” writes Norris, “is ‘about’ the complex man (often referred to in late chapters as ‘the critic’) and his half-guilty pleasure in the equivocal business of ‘interpreting’ his simple counterpart.”19 But the connection between Pastoral and the first book is at once more subtle and more fundamental: at the heart of the new book is the theme of ambivalence—of classes, professions, and regions (country and city) toward each other, of the individual and society toward each other, of gods and men toward each other, of men toward nature, and—not least—of the author toward his material, which always reinforces some form or another of false and sometimes pernicious consciousness. Thus “pastoral” is a kind of theoretical synecdoche for ambiguity, enabling Empson to formulate a clearer and broader framework for the first book while taking up only one of the seven types, the seventh. Much of the book was written during Empson’s years teaching in Japan, whither he had repaired after his dismissal from his graduate post at Cambridge, in 1929, when it was discovered that he had been entertaining a woman in his rooms.20 We need not trace Empson’s emergent political concerns, or even his irreverence toward social and literary conventions, solely back to his victimization on this occasion in order to see that his life would have gone very differently had it not occurred. For one thing, had he become, as predicted, a Cambridge don, his anti- professionalism would have been much harder to cultivate. And there is very little in his life’s work, after all, which is unrelated to the hatred of puritans, pharisees, and plain hypocrites that this episode must have enlivened. His lack of evident self-pity, and his continued capacity for shrewd detachment from the fallibly generous-spirited Tom Joneses of life and letters with whom he nevertheless openly identified, has most to do with the urbane off- handedness which is the hallmark of his social class.21 It is in- conceivable that he was not incurably embittered by his expulsion, and the bemused detachment of the poem called “Warning to Undergraduates” he wrote on his Yorkshire estate in the ensuing weeks should not lead us to think otherwise.22 However, it would be foolish to reduce Empson’s politics to personal experience alone. For one thing, the ominous growth of nationalism and power worship in Japan distressed him (see Milton’s God, p. 13) and no doubt led him to think afresh about the

9 William Empson equilibrium and the complex reciprocity of power relations in his own country, and also about those mysteries of identification whereby individuals or classes can make themselves universals. Japanese nationalism embodied in the Emperor is an example of the pastoral pars pro toto which he may have found too obvious to mention. And then—it must also be said—the fact that Empson’s most politically-oriented, Left-leaning work appeared in the 1930s, when he was scarcely alone in saying that “literature is a social process” (Pastoral, p. 19), is of course no accident. His stubborn individuality was, indeed, not so much a buffer against as a foil for all the influences that made him as much as anyone a creature of his times—not only in politics but in those influences that filter through fashionable reading: Frazer’s Hanged Man is as important in Pastoral as it was in The Waste Land, and the pastoral hero of 1935, assimilable to Christ as readily as to the tragic hero or the king, is already the tortured scapegoat of later years. With this interesting difference, however: whereas Pastoral concerns the permeability of roles and the readiness with which the political sense of representation pervades the symbols and plots of literature, with the result that the various social perspectives are both specularities and parallelisms (and finally inter-identities), the work beginning with Milton’s God (work dating from Empson’s return from China in 1953) seems rather to be about the failure of this process, about the isolation of a scapegoat who is no longer representative in an imaginatively satisfactory way but is only a sop hypocritically thrown to Cerberus—or lion thrown to the Christians. (In the fourth chapter I shall trace Empson’s gradual loss of faith in the efficacy of symbolic identification in some detail.) The later work, then, while it is less overtly political than Pastoral and has little more to say of Marx, Gorky, and Russia,23 seems if anything more stridently to urge social vengeance, the sacrificial victim of injustice being no longer vested with that absorptive or redemptive authority (redeeming human sin in the West, natural catastrophe in the East) which the “trick of pastoral” had accorded it. Empson knew it was a trick in the 1930s (the word is everywhere in Pastoral), but unlike Marx he seemed at least intermittently cordial toward false consciousness, largely agreeing even with those who see illusion as a necessary opiate. For the most part it is with admiration that he analyzes the ways in which literature makes what is socially arbitrary look natural, at least until he gets to the nineteenth century (warning signals having been given in

10 Introduction the reading of Gray and the chapter on The Beggar’s Opera), where he sees the hearty rationalizations of and by the lower orders, always essentially the nostalgia of the complex for the simple, destroyed by industrialism (presumably: the argument is not explicit) and lamentably displaced onto what he calls “child-cult.”24 It is interesting to see his generation’s condescension toward the nineteenth century (in Seven Types, p. 20, he mocked the Romantics’ need for a “tap-root” back to infancy) thus recast in plausibly challenging political terms. The degree of Empson’s sympathy with Marxist criticism in Pastoral can be gauged quite precisely from the brilliant opening remarks on the “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen” stanza in Gray’s Elegy, remarks which pointedly place the technique of Seven Types at the service of social commentary. This is a reading in two paragraphs, the first of which is “Marxist,” reminding us of Gray’s pre-Napoleonic admission that in eighteenth-century England there is no “carrière ouverte aux talents,” an admission papered over however by Gray’s strenuous effort, via the natural blooming of flowers and the natural serenity of gems, to suggest that arbitrary social exclusions are natural and inevitable. Thus far there is nothing that any politicized historical critic of our day could refine upon or wish to alter; but in the next paragraph we find the turn of thought which goes far to undermine what precedes it: “And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers” (p. 5). Empson always insisted that he was an historical critic, and there is no doubt that his intermittent research enthusiasms were spurred by the wish to establish his philological credentials. Still, though, it was passages like this one, with its appeal to the “permanent,” which gave his critics another target to shoot at.25 Yet the passage is easily defended as a mark of that very breadth of moral sympathy (the bourgeois illusion is exposed, but illusion is necessary, and this is only one illusion of many, all of which are colored by truth) which is less rather than more in evidence in the later work. And in Empson’s universalism, which is quite cheerfully offered, with no sense of contradiction, as the universalism of his own moment, there is none of that objectifying of the past—as though it had nothing to teach— which is a weakness of traditional historiography. Empson anticipates the radical perspectivism of current anthropology in saying that when we consider remote times and places

11 William Empson

[t]here is a tendency to imply ‘They, the objects of study, have very quaint ideas; but we, the English-speakers or the scientific world, have sensible and transparent ones’; whereas we may only be understanding the foreign ideas, if at all, through a similar complexity in our own. (Complex Words, p. 73)

There is even a complex moment when Empson historicizes by defending another epoch’s—his favorite’s—tendency not to historicize, and thus to keep permanent human realities squarely in view: “I don’t think the Elizabethans were as conscious of historical changes as all that.”26 As Philip Hobsbaum writes, with Tuve in mind, Empson “reads Herbert and the other classics as we read the living.”27 Empson to this end begins his late attack on John Carey by reducing all the priestly formulations of the hermeneutic circle to his own mode of gruff homily: “Surely, if a critic reads in nothing, he has nothing to say.”28 Empson normally respects what many would now call the “essentialist” category of the “human,” defining “man” categorically as a rational animal who is always slandered by any imputation of inability to act decently (this is an Empson keyword) —and what matters most to him always therefore seems unattached to time or place, the effects of which he is apt to minimize: “it never ceases to be startling,” he wrote in reviewing two books on ancient cities, “when you are faced with the details of life in these great towns, to see how little things have changed.”29 Satan’s having the courage to act on his convictions “has been an essential bit of equipment since the human mind was first evolved” (Milton’s God, p. 47); and thus we find Empson defending his reading of Marvell’s “The Garden” in Pastoral against the critique of Frank Kermode by saying that “Marvell was playing with deeply rooted ideas, so native to human life that any full civilization would arrive at them.”30 The trace of value-preference implied in that “full” is not accidental; Empson would say that the ideal of humanism is latent at all times but brought to fulfillment (he can be very frank about this) by cultures and classes not unlike his own. Thus it is that at the end of Pastoral, almost as the last word in this his most class-conscious book, he defends the alleged “snobbery” of the Alice books as a fundamental sense of manners that “would be recognised in a degree by any tolerable society” (Pastoral, p. 293). In ensuing chapters there will be plenty of occasion to return to the business of “positioning” Empson’s largely unconcealed social perspective more fully.

12 Introduction

Not by accident, Empson in the defense of Marvell just cited uses the word “native,” somewhat provocatively, very soon after the publication of his third book, The Structure of Complex Words, which in a preliminary discussion distinguishes between fundamental and historically determined meanings of that word (pp. 49–50: providing, among other things, a splendid early model for today’s analyses of the rhetoric of colonialism, one which is more pointed and precise even than his memorable picture of Mr Bertram in Mansfield Park piously banning his children’s home theatricals having “just returned home from his slave plantation in Antigua”31). To be native is to be snobbishly “other” with respect to interlopers and parvenus or to be viewed exploitatively as other by the forces of colonization, and these are both meanings that have an historical trajectory; at the same time, however—and here is the turn resembling the rebuke to historicism in Pastoral cited above—to be native is to be inherent, implicit, fundamental, and it is in that anti-historicist sense that Empson pointedly uses the word in saying that the values balanced in “The Garden” are “native to human life.”32 Returning to the insistence in Seven Types that notions of “pure sound” improperly isolate emotion from the context of meaning, and joining that insistence now to the Pastoral question whether and how that context is historically conditioned, Complex Words is an anatomy of the way in which keywords help to shape boundaries of morally and socially authentic selfhood. Bifurcations of “Mood” within the words form modes of comparison and ostracism which keep in view, indeed frequently sharpen and particularize, the class specularity theme of Pastoral—so that to be “native” is to be class- bound at either of two social extremes—while the complexity of this process lends a sense of indeterminacy, of meaning-explosion, which returns us to the atmosphere of Seven Types. The immediate provocation for Complex Words, insofar as one can infer such a thing from Empson’s final arrangement of its materials, produced at intervals over a ten-year period (much of the time bivouacking through the hills of China with the rest of the Peking University), was the belief that his mentor Richards had got the relation between emotions and statements wrong, the result being the dangerous doctrine that “emotional beliefs” invested in the “pseudo-statements” of poetry are separable from the “intellectual beliefs” embodied in the statements of science. If Keats “leads up with clear marks of solemnity to saying that Beauty is Truth he does not want to be told, any more than anyone

13 William Empson else, that ‘of course’ he meant nothing at all except to excite Emotion” (Complex Words, p. 7). Once again Empson is attacking the notion of autotelic expression which would isolate the poet from the rest of us (“any more than anyone else”) as a frivolous aesthete who thinks it vulgar to express conviction. Empson thought we had been driven to this sort of hieraticism, which all the great universities featured when he went up to Cambridge (where “Q,” Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, had been its pure embodiment), by an opposite and equally extreme tendency, the fanatic rationalism of ancestral expositors like Bentley, who “scared later English critics into an anxiety to show that they were sympathetic and did not mind about the sense” (Pastoral, p. 152). The opening pages of Complex Words, against Richards, were written not accidentally for the Kenyon Review in 1948, when Empson took a summer residency at Kenyon College and formed a closer acquaintance with the circle of New Critics there, headed by the Kenyon editor, John Crowe Ransom. We can see Complex Words, then, as a summa against that mode of “verbal criticism” which derived from Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism rather than from Seven Types (itself covertly a revision of Richards); and the issue drawn concerns the concept of autonomous meaning, formally determined, as Ransom had defined it in The World’s Body (1938) and The New Criticism (1941). The “world” of Ransom’s earlier title was neither a dwelling-place nor a perspective but a principle of fullness and inner logic, an ontologically-independent entity, derived from Richards’s Arnoldian belief that coherent “Pseudo-Statements” are required to preserve man’s psychological well-being in a dehumanized universe; on this view literature is judged as an analogue of the real world, perhaps preposterous but coherent as truth itself, and not as a concerned attitude toward the real world in which coherence may not be achieved but conflict is held successfully in suspension, its impasses at arm’s length. Empson held the latter view, and Complex Words is his major effort to expound it, complete with the “little bits of machinery” which to most have seemed irreducible to a system, perhaps because they are themselves a reflection of the unsystematic way in which the expression of meaning, even in poetry, goes about its business. A word or two more is in order about Empson’s lack of interest in ontological objects, verbal icons, well-wrought urns, and the like. As Jonathan Culler writes, Empsonian ambiguities “derive precisely from the continuity between language in poems and language in other situations,”33 meaning by “precisely” that the presumed higher density

14 Introduction of poems alerts us to effects we can also find, once alerted, in ordinary language—the calisthenic training of Seven Types as it were putting the mind in trim for the marathon of Complex Words, where words like “quite,” “just,” “no doubt,” and “certainly” are sifted for their intricate semantic ore. And conversely, as we have seen and as Christopher Norris aptly remarks, Empson continues in the latter book to reverse the argument of Richards about pseudo-statements “by finding the ‘machinery’ of logical thought at work within poetry itself.”34 It is not accurate, however, concerning either Richards or Empson’s sense of him, to hold that Richards for his part actually views poems as verbal microcosms. Empson is at pains to say that in Science and Poetry Richards presents pseudo-statements “as an alternative to the idea that false statements in poetry belong to ‘a supposed universe of discourse, a world of make-believe, of imagination, of recognised fictions common to the poet and his readers’” (Complex Words, p. 13). But, Empson continues, Richards “went on (wrongly, I think) to say that ‘except occasionally and by accident, logic does not enter at all’” (ibid.). Here is the exact point of divergence: while neither Empson nor Richards, unlike the American New Critics, placed any emphasis on the “internal logic” or discrete coherence of poetry, agreeing that it refers primarily to reality, not to itself, Empson resists Richards’s implication that it has no intellectual responsibility of any kind, replying to what Richards had said of “emotions in words” that “[n]ormally they are dependent on a Sense which is believed to deserve them” (ibid., p. 35); in short, that in poetry their claim to truth and to respect differs not at all from that of emotions (and “moods” and “pregnancies”) in factual statements. Thus it is with both Richards and his New-Critical descendants in mind that Empson replies to the Times Literary Supplement reviewer of Milton’s God who said that “instead of questioning the morality of the epic, I should have laid ‘a heavier stress on the terrible conclusiveness of Disobedience within the scheme of Paradise Lost’”: “But I deny that a poem is a private self-subsisting world of this kind.”35 Empson is aware that in various formal ways literature can be defined discretely, and would not have been surprised to encounter, for example, John Searle on the “pretended asserted illocution” of “fictional discourse”:36 “It can no doubt be objected that I am using truth in some peculiar literary sense here,” but, he goes on to say, “[t]he distinction seems to me extraordinarily hard to draw” (Complex Words, p. 14). Empson sees no use in any case for the category of the provisional or quoted truth-claim (why not take

15 William Empson responsibility for it? he would say), and by the same token, as we have seen, he opposes the New-Critical doctrine of the “speaker,” persona, or lyric protagonist which derives equally from the “masks” of Yeats and Pound and from the distinction of Eliot, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” between personal emotion and poetic feeling. Cleanth Brooks, Empson says ironically, returning to Keats’s Grecian Urn at the end of Complex Words, “is not very patient with personal expressions of feeling from a writer who is engaged in building one of these complicated structures” (ibid., p. 369).37 This last phrase may suggest that the rather flat title of Empson’s book has a hidden negative meaning, with “Words” to be symbolized according to his scheme as “-A,” for “deliberate exclusion of Sense A from a use of the word”: the submerged title of this book, we are then to infer, is Not the Structure of Complex Poems. Just as his critics charged him with ignoring literature as such, so he charged them with smothering “argufying” under the blanket of the literary. Pastoral had called literature a social process, but now he wants to say, more decisively in revolt from formalism, that “language,” in all of its manifestations whatsoever, “is essentially a social product” (ibid., p. 18). Not just the New Critics and those who invoke “conventions,” like Tuve, suppress the will to mean of individual authors; the Chicagoans too, more surprisingly but quite tellingly, stand accused of having found their own way, via the categorical license they took from Aristotle, to avoid the scandalous immediacy of real meanings that may matter to an audience: “Where Mr Crane becomes absurd, I think, is in assuming that because Macbeth is ‘imitative’ it can’t be ‘didactic’ as well…I think this quaint belief in the mind of Mr Crane belongs to the naughty nineties and not to Aristotle at all.”38 Crane may seem prim and pedantic, in other words, but he is still an aesthete. From Richards Empson had learned to distrust the “phantom aesthetic state” (as it is called in Principles of Literary Criticism), and learned perhaps also—though this is less clear—to trace this state back through the nineteenth century to Kant. The effect of the remark on Crane is cunningly to merge the Chicagoans with the New Critics (the two schools normally viewed each other as enemies), suggesting that modern notions of unity derive not from Aristotle’s “imitation of an action, complete and of a certain magnitude,” but from the “purposive, not purposeful, manifold” of the Critique of Judgment, which enters the English mainstream, swimming there with some awkwardness and embarrassment, by way of Coleridge. These are the clustered concepts on which

16 Introduction traditional criticism has endlessly ruminated, and Empson is in nothing more remarkable, at least from the standpoint of a sympathetic American writer, than in his brusque treatment of them.39 Complex Words will seem to put the greatest strain on my contention that Empson was not a “language critic.” Two main points, though, support my argument: first, that here even more than hitherto all emphases are shaped by an underlying concern for character; and second, that Empson’s mentalistic focus is enabled by his choice of words rather than sentences as units for analysis. The first point can be grounded, at some risk of misunderstanding but with commensurate interest, in the rather enigmatic words of Empson’s review of George Rylands’s Words and Poetry written for Granta in 1928:

There is a charming introduction by Lytton Strachey, about Poetry being written with words, but it is a tiresome dogma…. In fact, all the bad poetry of the moment seems to be written with words; I believe myself poetry is written with the sort of joke you find in hymns. (Argufying, p. 69)

Although I am not sure I can reconstruct the arch undergraduate conversation which drifts within earshot here, I take this to mean that poetry written as an exercise in wordplay (his own verbal fireworks had not yet acquired that reputation) is empty stuff, a mere “complicated structure,” whereas the true occasion of poetry is the longing for the reciprocal attention of other minds, a longing made absurd in hymns by the non-existence of the other mind addressed but marking for that very reason the poignancy and urgency of all poetry projecting its words into silence. On this view, not just the drama but all poetry—indeed, all uttered language by 1951—is at bottom a stage where characters confront each other and perhaps meet; but in developing this idea with his greatest persistence in Complex Words Empson will naturally find his attention drawn most by the drama. It is in the four chapters purportedly on keywords in Shakespeare plays (“Fool in Lear,” “Timon’s Dog,” “Honest in Othello,” “Sense in Measure for Measure”) that the tension between the apparent topic, words, and the actual topic, character, is greatest. Each of these chapters is preceded by chapters that are at least in part sociolectical surveys of the word in question; and one is struck in reading the chapters on the plays by how little is

17 William Empson added to the verbal complexities already worked out—by how difficult it is, in fact, for Empson to keep the words steadily before him. The most telling moment comes at the end of “Fool in Lear,” when Empson decides that much of what “fool” had come to mean in Shakespeare’s time, and at times elsewhere in Shakespeare (specifically the “Erasmus fool,” “superlatively wise and holy”) does not actually apply to the character of Lear: “It seems hard to deny that this idea is knocking about, and yet I think it belongs to the play rather than the character” (Complex Words, p. 157). Words, that is, have an undeniable life of their own, especially when treated as part of the image patterns made popular by Caroline Spurgeon and others, but the lives of words in their self-referential aspect, even the very words singled out for special attention, are not organically unified with or internal to the lives that people the stage. Lear is an old blowhard who has really learned very little, Empson argues; not so much a mere fool as an ordinary person whose mind has failed to grasp the difficulty of renunciation (an idea of George Orwell’s that shapes his reading), one who is memorable mainly for the sheer copiousness of his experience; and the Fool too is no saint, but no fool either, clinging loyally to Lear at least in part to save his own skin. What Empson’s brilliant and convincing analysis serves to show, in fact, is that a keyword, however “complex,” can be positively misleading, or at least shackling, if we expect it to unlock the secrets of lived experience. Empson is clearer about this peculiarly subversive tendency in his mode of analysis in the Othello chapter, where he writes disarmingly:

I have gone into the matter [of Iago’s character] at perhaps tedious length without using the word ‘honest’ at all, because there seems a suggestion of trickery or triviality about saying that the character is only made plausible by puns on one word. (ibid., p. 235)

The reason why this recurrent division of purpose, so obvious at moments like this, has not been clearer to Empson’s readers, or perhaps even to Empson himself, is that his mentalism is frequently obscured by the bristling appearance of his “machinery,” which was aimed, again, at disproving that any aspect of language is either wholly aesthetic (“pure sound”) or wholly “emotive” (in the Ricardian sense of “non-cognitive”). In the first chapter, pointedly called “Feelings in Words,” Empson grapples inconclusively with the problem raised by his preposition: “Being ‘in’ the word is of course a matter of degree” (ibid., p. 25).

18 Introduction

Some degree does always seem to be involved, even for the lexicographer, who is urged to recognize the emotions “in” words more fully, with the apparently negligible risk that in the context of a dictionary “it might be argued that an Emotion is simply one of the kinds of Implication” (ibid., p. 31). One does not balk at this, if only because everyday language bears out the elision, but it remains one of those moments which cast the “structure” of the machinery in doubt. If an emotion viewed as the property of a word is an implication, why are not “sense” (implied meaning), “existence-assertion” (implied truth-claim), “mood” (implied attitude toward auditor, hence toward self), and “pregnancy” (implied range) implications to an equal extent, leaving the analyst of the word in itself little use for more than one term, “signification,” which Empson never uses? It is only when all of these implications (perhaps even including “implication” itself) are taken out of the word and located in something like an intentional structure that the bits of machinery become substantive and useful. And that, I would suggest, is what Empson really meant to do; or if he did not, the wonderful cogency of his practical semantics depends on its being done for him now. The confusion leaving this matter in doubt arises actually from one of his keywords, “sense,” which on his own showing in a series of chapters is variably somatic (feeling), semantic (meaning), and semiotic (signification, which comes closest to being “in” words); and this confusion is oddly compounded by his never at any time reflecting that it may be the complexity of “sense,” sliding back and forth between body and mind in his analyses of the word, which causes it to slide back and forth between its metalingual status as keyword and its unexamined role in the prose of his theoretical preamble. Confusing theory and practice in an eerie Möbius strip effect, the very last sentence of “Feelings in Words” is a joke which seems to confess more than it admits: “what I have to avoid is often ‘the sense “sense” of sense’, a phrase which can leave no impression on the mind except that of a sordid form of lunacy” (ibid., p. 38). Scarcely confined to Empson, the confusion begins with Hobbes and can be said to constitute the empirical tradition to which Empson belongs—together with Wordsworth, in whose Prelude Empson sees tricks with “sense” reaching new depths of legerdemain. But there is a very great advantage in this confusion: in much of the rest of this book I shall argue that in everything from pastoral perspectivism to Middle Spirits—to name two Empsonian themes— “sense” is a muddle, as he himself would call it, from which the broadest coherence of his thought paradoxically emerges, serving to

19 William Empson create rich intermediary registers of being that keep the easy rigors of idealism and somatic materialism at arm’s length. The effect of this muddle on his attitude toward words, meanwhile, is quite surprisingly to make him wish they were something else, something far less arbitrary and independent than words must after all continue to be: “a man tends finally to make up his mind, in a practical question of human relations, much more in terms of…vague rich intimate words than in the clear words of his official language” (ibid., p. 158).40 Words, that is, which dissolve, via sense, into feelings.41 If he had not in some measure wanted this to happen to words, I am convinced—to turn to my second point—that he would not have taken words for his unit of study at all, but chosen, instead, that linguistic unit which can bypass mentalism when confined to syntactical analysis: namely, the sentence. There is a great deal in his work that seems to entertain this possibility, especially his enlistment in the campaign of Ogden and Richards for Basic English. In the very interesting essay of 1940, “Basic English and Wordsworth” (the poet by whom Empson was always fascinated because he could not help seeing featured in “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude his own partly suppressed confusions), we find him explaining the advantage, as an interpretive tool, of translating poetic and other complex expressions into the bare-bones grammar and vocabulary of Basic. Adherence to the radical referentialism of the Cambridge logical positivists is certainly his chief motive, as it was for Richards, and this would seem to make him even less word- centered, the efficacy of paraphrase constituting a kind of proof that “meaning” is psychological, not textual. But the activity of paraphrase, viewed as a process, would seem actually to point in the opposite direction, to suggest that it is not meaning but words to which words refer: that which is “around” the phrase is another phrase. It is with this understanding, not with the extreme implication that there is no such thing as meaning but suggesting rather that meaning can only be analyzed as an immanence of “its” representation (“only known as it is shown”), that the intentional milieu studied by the Ordinary Language philosophers and the “deep structure” disclosed by Chomskyan linguistics are mapped out in metalingual sentences or symbolic equations. In isolating words intermittently from their use in sentences, Empson on the other hand can enfold them in a penumbra that at least seems psychological,42 whereas if he had developed, instead of his “bits of machinery,” a method of sorting meanings by putting words in sentences (a system of paraphrases in Basic, for

20 Introduction example, must have seemed a tempting alternative), he could never for a moment have suppressed the brute fact of exposition, which is that meaning is a matter of putting words into other words. Comparable to his hedging with the word “sense” is the uncertain play of the word “context” somewhere between language and mental atmosphere in the following passage—in which, without this hedging, he might have surprised himself into suspecting that as a methodological choice the isolation of words as units of meaning was questionable:

I do not know whether any experiments have been done on which meanings people think of first when a word is given without context, but I should expect the results to be very mixed; the technique seems a psycho-analytic rather than a linguistic one. (Complex Words, p. 47)

And so it is. Six keywords are chosen for at least one chapter’s worth of study each, and together they comprise a history, from the Renaissance to the present, of the way in which English-speakers have formulated the integrity of selfhood over against the world and other selves. Three words are characterological (Fool, Dog, and Honest) and three are epistemological (All, Wit, and Sense), the two triads to some extent covering parallel ground. Thus “Fool” and “All” illustrate the frame of mind to which the radical reductions of pastoral seem adequate modes of knowledge; folly in Erasmus is at once a subversive perspective and an all- comprehending insightfulness, while “All” in Milton is at once a sign of paranoid psychosis and a word (embedded in “Fall”) signifying the central Miltonic principle of much ensuing from little. “Dog” and “Wit” together run the gamut of confused admiration and opprobrium with which the Restoration rogue aristocrat forms moral and intellectual estimates of himself and others. “Honest” and “Sense,” the hardest words with the broadest historical range, given three chapters each, yield kindred meditations on the ways in which consciousness struggles to achieve unblinkered immediacy to truth and experience. Underlying all six terms, arguably, is the word “natural” (the fool is a “natural,” all is “nature,” dogs are natural, wit is natural, honesty and sense are both guarantors of the nature of things), and Empson indeed devotes a good deal of space to the question

21 William Empson whether realizing one’s own nature is accomplished in conformance with external nature, as in Confucian or Aristotelian thought, or in opposition to it, as in Buddhism and Christianity. Running through all this is the problem of “false identity” (“A is B”) at the heart of all predication (see ibid., p. 350), modulating toward superstition in the epistemological domain and false consciousness in the moral. With this linguistically founded relativism in view, Empson’s evaluatively versatile and generous- spirited aim (he avoids contempt for most beliefs because, he says, there is no knowing the difference between “conscious and unconscious hypocrites”: ibid., p. 165) is to show, for each pair of terms, both the limits and the adequacy of their meanings; “fool” and “all” enable both superstition and Occamite clarity, “dog” and “wit” constitute both a critique and a final elegant codification of an increasingly strained class system, and “honest” and “sense,” forms of cognitive pluralism opposed to the idée fixe (fool and all) and to socially homogenized thought (dog and wit), respectively, disclose both the muddles and the genuine advances in every facet of self-knowledge. All six terms are mystified and partial, yet each also indicates a mode of truth-telling, or “blowing the gaff”: speaking of “candid,” Empson says “[t]he word offers a remarkably different ideal of the truth-teller from the fool as clown or the honest man or the wit or the man of sense” (ibid., p. 309). Clearly all six terms, contradictions and all, are more than a little germane to Empson’s own personality, both as he sees it and as he knows others to see it (whereas “native,” “delicate” and other words discussed in passing are not), and it should not then be surprising that a book devoted to the analysis of self-conception becomes at the same time a wonderfully suggestive moral and intellectual autobiography. We are tempted to write such things either in calm of mind, all passion spent, or in times of personal turmoil, and Complex Words is certainly an instance of the latter case. It is the seething yet majestic crest of a wave that was to break when Empson returned once and for all to England in 1953. At stake, we can see in retrospect, was his provisional faith in the doctrine of the scapegoat which had hitherto seemed to him to invest the universe with a kind of moral and eschatological economy, never in its specifically Christian form but always rather when mediated by Frazerian syncretism—making Christianity itself seem poetic, even necessary—or by the Freudian overdetermination of the father. The scapegoat is not as prominent in Complex Words as in the first two books, perhaps because the war may

22 Introduction have raised vivid questions in the mind of even a willing and enthusiastic radio propagandist about the facility with which people could be made to “die for” things (you could just as easily argue, though, that participating in his country’s Finest Hour postponed the ensuing bitterness), but partly also because the theme of the scapegoat has been absorbed into a seemingly unrelated issue, the problem of predication in language. The “trick” of Pastoral survives here as the protean trick which pervades all language, the assertion in rhetoric (metaphor) and grammar (predicate and copula) that A is B. Only if we accept the fallacy that Empson is a “verbal critic” can we avoid seeing that in thus laying bare the arbitrary structure of all belief systems as an inescapable universal Empson has succeeded in identifying the broadest possible context for understanding the cultural persistence of sacrificial victims. In Complex Words he declares, clinging to the unruffled attitude he would soon abandon, that the problem is not a tragically threatening one even though it is dangerous and should be monitored: “I suppose I really meant to argue all along that the human mind, that is, the public human mind as expressed in language, is not irredeemably lunatic and cannot be made so” (p. 83). From the time he took his teaching position at Sheffield, he was not so sure, for reasons that I can only guess at (see pp. 117–18), reasons surely not exhausted in citing either the pressures of historical change (he blamed the resurgence of Christianity on anti- communism, and struggled not to find 1984 prophetic), his expressions of surprise at his colleagues’ turn to irrationalism in his absence, or any internal logic discernible in the development of his own work. Indeed, Complex Words arrives at a pinnacle of dispassionate analysis from which there was no obviously pressing reason to descend. But as soon as Complex Words had appeared he came down from Olympus, sleeves rolled up, and began laying about him against his generation’s equivalent of what we now call the neo-conservatives.43 He started lecturing on Shakespeare at Sheffield (see Shakespeare, p. 183), and the first major essays of this period, on Falstaff, Macbeth, and Hamlet (collected in the Essays on Shakespeare, 1986), seem more like conclusions of unfinished business in Complex Words than promises of something new; yet they do in fact look forward. Falstaff and Hal, Empson argues, are too big to encompass from any one standpoint, and Falstaff in any case is not so much an ethical or political anatomy as a victim of disappointed love; the atmosphere of Macbeth is deliberately confused and obscure, a fog, in short, and Dover Wilson was wrong

23 William Empson to conjecture that there must have been explanatory scenes leading up to the murder; and Hamlet, too, is sustained by the deliberate withholding of clear motive, a play insisting at every level on the theatricality and inauthenticity of selfhood.44 What is new in all three essays, then, and what marks their importance, is a rebuke to the positivism he had learned at Cambridge, with its insistence that there is a scientific explanation for any mystery. Empson now typically professes himself baffled, but prefers (still in the mode of explanation) to see his predicament as the thematization of bafflement in Shakespeare, thus for the first time countenancing the notion that genius can see farther, albeit obscurely, than rationality can. The stage is set for Milton’s God. This acknowledgment of what I shall call the sublime in Chapter 4 is a way of throwing up one’s hands before the sacrificial mysteries— Does rejecting a friend purify the state? Is there substance in primogeniture? How should the father be obeyed? — hitherto dispelled by the planting and harvest rituals which had seemed sufficiently scientific explanations. Milton’s God is known, rightly in the case of the last chapter, as Empson’s attack on Christianity; but what this view of the book distorts is the contrast, when Milton is at his best (“struggling to make his God less wicked”: Milton’s God, p. 11), between the history of Christianity and Milton’s revision of its cosmology. Even when Milton remains hagridden by the intractable elements of his story, Empson argues, there is still a tension, if not a contrast, between received religion and the poet’s sense of justice. Milton makes God less wicked, Empson argues from somewhat tenuous evidence, by planning to have him “abdicate” at the Millennium, thus exonerating him from the sadism of planning to take personal pleasure in man’s eternal torment;45 the fact that the theology of this argument is utterly obscure, Empson feels, is what makes it useful for Milton’s purpose. As I shall try to show more fully in Chapter 3, what Empson sees Milton embracing, in an all-out effort to evade the sheer nastiness of his subject, is the sort of obscurantism which is only rational in the face of our profound cosmological uncertainties. Empson at this point in his career, always reaching for the most sublime explanation (as he says repeatedly of his author in Milton’s God: see pp. 129, 159, 189), takes just the same course. It is all quite deliberate, I believe, and a good deal depends on saying that it is deliberate in Milton too, departing in this regard from the earlier verdict in Complex Words (p. 104): “that his feelings were crying out against his appalling theology…was I think not obvious

24 Introduction to him.”46 Milton’s God is a splendid book, thinner and crankier than anything preceding it in Empson’s career, hence normally identified as the beginning of a sharp intellectual decline; but I find it superior even to Complex Words for the full honesty of its self- accounting, with every weight and force in the author’s mind held openly in balance with every other, all without the enabling comfort of Empson’s long-standing, hitherto stalwart belief that problems exist, as in mathematics, only to be solved. The permanent effect of this Keatsian phase of negative capability in Empson’s thinking, when he was caught in the penetralium of a mystery without any irritable reaching after fact and reason, is by no means a happy quietude or complacency of unknowing. Indeed, after Milton’s God one hears little more talk of sublimity. What Empson seems most usefully to have learned from having ceased to believe that there is any efficacy in the proposition “A is B” is not that all is grass or that all is fire (he denied any personal belief in the Buddhist Fire Sermon he had placed at the head of his 1949 Collected Poems) ,47 but rather that it is just as much the case that all explanations are rational as that none are. No longer merely withholding contempt from bizarre views, he now seems actually to prefer them. He becomes fascinated with the diversity of known planets and possible worlds, poised in Donne as at present between fantasy and astronomy (see his major late essays on Donne); with the baroque exuberance of early scientific theories, intermingled with and enabled by alchemy and white magic (materials which resurface in his anti-Christian readings of Yeats); with arcana and cabbala of all kinds (already surfacing in the Milton book, and central to the late work on Marlowe, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Yeats); with the high-wire acts of conjectural biography, confirming the plurality of other minds (most fantastically perhaps in the excurses on Marvell, Dryden, and Joyce in Using Biography, 1984); and with the mediation of the stark metaphysical opposites on which orthodoxy reposes by ontological hybrids known traditionally as Middle Spirits—everywhere in the late work but climactically, of course, in the posthumous Faustus and the Censor (1987). Such beliefs appealed to him at least as much for moral as for cognitive reasons. What he had acquired from his sojourn in the East, from the war, and finally from the cold war, was a violent dislike of censorship, not on principled constitutional grounds, and certainly not because he enjoyed seeing rubbish pass for truth, but because it had become so clear to him that truth, whatever it is, is an untidy thing, wild, sprawling, and biological, hence inimical to

25 William Empson the ideals of order, fixed and transcendental, on which conventional statecraft is founded. Beyond state censorship there is the more elusive silencing by the disapproval of groups, by opinions, sanctioned in university settings, which may in themselves be subversive and are disenfranchised in other quarters but still constitute doxological norms against which truly independent thinking becomes invisible. Empson had little chance to study this phenomenon in history because infra-societal institutions have never before been so curiously at odds with each other as they are today, but what he saw and hated among his new colleagues after the war, a cultural conservatism considerably more rigid than anything called for by the state, is really an instance of it. Today it is just the opposite, with universities throughout the West increasingly to the left of their governments but enforcing (as control of promotion and publication passes to a new generation) a counter-conformism of their own; and one cannot imagine that Empson would like what he saw today any better, despite the neo- conservatives’ having for the most part decamped from the university to the state. That he was much preoccupied with censorship in his late writings is very probably a mild paranoiac symptom, although his announced reason is rational enough (he cannot understand why modern scholars “are unable to imagine living under a censorship or making an effort to avoid trouble with Thought Police”: Shakespeare, p. 93), but that does not diminish the epistemological and moral importance of his last themes. The wild profusion of his scientific, hermetic, and biographical materials is just the point, aimed directly at censorship of all kinds. It is all much too luxuriant to summarize here, and I shall try to make as much sense of it as I can in my fifth and final chapter, concluding this one with a word about Empson’s last book-length project, Faustus. The cogency of the thesis I leave, here as always, to the experts, remarking only that in his editor and sometime assistant John Henry Jones Empson had in his corner a scholarly authority who seems largely sympathetic with his aims. Empson argues that Marlowe rewrote the cautionary tale told by the German Faust-Book so as to make it consistent with his “atheism,” that is, with the disbelief in hell and the sacraments that would later be called Deism (the same freethinking with which, in Biography, Empson also tried to align Dryden). Marlowe’s task was made imaginatively and intellectually easier, Empson says, by the fact that the translator of the Faust-Book, “P.F.Gent.,” whom

26 Introduction

Marlowe may have known familiarly, had already insinuated much of what needed to be said. Only the censor needed to be eluded, together with the modern neo-Christian scholars. Working backwards from the belief that Faustus’s last words in the A-text, “Ah, Mephastophilis,” are an expression of intense relief and must mean that he has escaped hell, Empson reconstructs the story as follows: “Meph” is not a devil but a Middle Spirit without a soul, one of “the longaevi,” who “lived longer than we do, but then died completely, like the beasts” (Faustus, p. 99), who wants Faust’s soul not for Lucifer but— hoping for immortality—for himself, hence pretends to be a devil in order to strike the bargain. (Lacking diabolical omniscience, he is constantly in difficulties answering Faust’s questions.) Faust meanwhile knows at first that Meph is no devil (how else to explain the fatuity of “Come, I think hell’s a fable”?), but is soon convinced that he is one after all by a diabolical tableau Meph puts on with his friends to fend off the constant threat of Faust’s repentance. (Empson does not make clear how the pact could be binding if it is not backed by diabolical, or ultimately divine, authority. Or, conversely, if it is enough for Meph to possess Faust’s blood to have taken his soul, it is not clear why he need fear his repentance.) For the rest of the play Faust is in despair, only to realize at the last minute, when Meph comes toward him with open arms, that there is indeed no hell and that he has only to relinquish his soul, as promised, in order to sink gratefully into oblivion, “like little water drops,/And fall into the ocean, ne’er to be found,” exactly in accordance with the doctrine of a sect (known also to Donne) called the Family of Love. It seems improbable to say the least; but the play could be acted this way (Empson explains how, very carefully); and read by this light it does indeed have an attractive speculative interest about it, and a good deal of the apparent silliness and hackwork usually ascribed to the “memorial reconstruction” of actors after Marlowe’s death does seem somewhat better motivated. Above all it is rich in suggestion and consolation for Empson himself. Faustus as he reads it celebrates Marlowe’s triumph over censorship, both in fact (the censorship of Edmund Tilney) and in theme (the censorship imposed on Christian faith, here and in the hereafter). It is also, in a closely related sense, William Empson’s meditation on death, on the possibility that the radioactive half-life of all things may cushion the abruptness of our demise (in becoming a Middle Spirit Faust ought to have bought some two

27 William Empson thousand years, but this seems not to be the case in this one instance, relief to have escaped hell being compensation enough) while protecting us from the twin indignity of eternal police states, whether singing hosannas or gnashing our teeth. (Why Meph should prefer either of these conditions to his own, if they are so plainly wretched, is another question that needs answering.) What Doctor Faustus dramatizes for Empson, then, is the wish for sheer oblivion, with its comfortable sense of biological belonging, which makes him indifferent to the Christian promise of immortality in any form, and causes him to admire the Bodhisattvas of Buddhism more than Christ because “they have sacrificed their deaths for the sake of man, not their lives.”48 The truth in any case comes to Faustus not in a word but in an exhalation (“ah”), and the permeability of matter and spirit in Empson’s chain of being ensures a continuity among all existent things which replaces the synthetic unity made available, until Milton’s God, by the efficacy of symbolic identification. Life, not its representations, is what lives, and Empson’s sole remaining sacrificial victim is the very thing many commentators have supposed him to preserve at all costs: the word.

28