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Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Argufying Again
nnyhav - who is reading some interesting chess stuff - emails to inform us that Frank Kermode has a long LRB review of William Empson: Against the Christians
In his later years he paid very little attention to what he knew in his bones to be the disgusting nonsense of French ‘theory’ because he was still engaged in the refutation of the older Wimsattian kind of disgusting nonsense, as practised by adherents of the American New Criticism, by then long out of fashion. It is strange but true that he was long regarded as a founding father of the New Criticism, but that perception derived from its adaptation of Empson’s analytic skills.
And:
A colleague at Penn State notes that ‘he went back at night to a place full of rotting oranges, used tissues and odd socks’, and records that ‘he once, for some minutes, watched my neighbour’s door lamp through my telescope, thinking it Mars.’ Dining with Marshall McLuhan, ‘I thought I had to explain to him that he was worshipping the devil, being a Roman Catholic. It was at his own dinner table, but the ladies had gone for their pee, so it wasn’t really rude.’
If you should ever decide to try out Empson, I would strongly recommend starting with the Haffenden edited volume of his occasional journalism, Argufying
Still, I find his journalistic style bracing and compulsively readable, even when he’s reviewing some long-forgotten book of criticism of a poet I’ve never read, and have no intention of reading. There’s a signature Empson attitude. Analytic, but nose to the ground (not head in the clouds); a controlled and steadily deprecating, not overbearing rationalism. He’s like Isaiah Berlin, but less ... plummy? (Later tonight I’ll think of a better adjective.) He’s got a psychologistic (as opposed to paradoxical) wit, which he deploys not just for the sake of its own flourishing, but to get him where he is going in magnificently economic style. He flourishes directly, hence all the swathes. He lets the air out of balloons, but business-like, not mischief-making, except insofar as the dirigible deflation business is inseparable therefrom. He does ‘radical heterodoxy is just common sense’, so the charges that his bluff common sense is intellectually complacent fail to score. He’s so ... English. Empson was almost certainly the most philosophically sharp and gifted English literary critic of the first half of the 20th Century (that I know). But - quite apart from what you make of the value of his thought, compared to that of, say, Derrida - his personality and temperament, his instinct for arranging the furniture (this should be large, that small, this in the foreground, that in the background) is utterly un-French. Since French style (shall we say?) came to dominate, when philosophical style became dominant, Empson feels oddly marooned and untimely, yet a breath of fresh air ... not old and dusty, despite appearances. Obviously this will be taken (coming from me) as yet another invitation to give up Theory, but I really feel that people could limber up, could pick up analytic chops and intellectual turns from Empson. Try to write like him; see what happens. I concede his views are often compromised by his filially pious attachment to I.A. Richards. But that’s why I like his journalism, which makes of point of letting all that float. Such ineffable stylistic musings as these admit, at most, of illustration, not definition.
Selecting almost at random ... from a review of George Whalley, Poetic Process:
Mr. Whalley draws a radical distinction between the ‘prelogical’, contemplative, integrative processes on which the arts depend and the technical, logical, analytic processes of scientific thought; the first is the more fundamental and inherently involves judgements of value. This does not seem very controversial. But, as he takes it, he has to confuse his own terms even in trying to define them, because ‘poetry constantly strives towards a wholeness in which all technical distinctions interfuse and are obliterated.’ Thus in the highest forms of metaphor ‘the words say exactly what they mean, refer quite explicitly to what they say, and are in no evident way figurative or allusive’ - in fact are not metaphorical. He cites the famous calm at sea:
No use of lanthorns, and in one place lay
Feathers and dust; today and yesterday.The details are ‘resonant’, he says, and I agree, but what use is the term metaphor if it must cover that? It becomes only a cry of praise. In the same way, we find, a rhythm never repeats, no symbolical meaning ever reveals itself completely, a poem though inherently moral is necessarily bad if it expresses a moral, and a myth ought not to tell a story (because ‘narrative order is a logical order,’ and that is the enemy.) As to the highest forms of Imagination, Mr. Whalley has a fine quotation from Coleridge: ‘the poet wishes to express ... the substitution of a sublime feeling for the unimaginable for a mere image,’ as he says, ‘it is only a convenient device to use the term “image” as if we could, by thinking, detach a single image from its matrix of feeling.’ None of it seems at all convenient to me.
He says rather gracefully in the foreword that he went through the book trying to take out his ‘note of asperity’ against science, but felt he couldn’t, because there is so much materialism in North America (he writes from Toronto) which no doubt is invading Europe now. The word material has become fascinatingly confused. All that sexiness on the campus, that craving for a shiny motor-car - those states of mind are material; but a printed page by Mr. Whalley, when he has got into a real muddle - that’s a spiritual thing like a star. My students in Peking, dialectical materialists of course, their eyes shining with idealism and mutual aid, taking their asceticism for granted, would sometimes write down in two consecutive sentences that the Americans were wicked because they were so material an that the Russians were good because they were so material. When I pointed this out, they quite saw it was against the rules but only wanted to know how to express the sentiment correctly. it does not seem to have much to do with science. (pp. 117-8).
I think contemporary academic critics would write better if they worried that they might get cold water poured on them by reviewers writing in the style of William Empson. Very brisk and bracing.
Comments
I’ve read a great deal of Empson (my SF History is very heavily indebted to his Renaissance criticism, somewhat to its disadvantage I’m afraid [my fault, that, not Empson’s]) and I love him; he expresses a consistent, fertile thought-provoking-ness in beautiful, witty and engaging prose. He is contrarian of course, but despite the wacky stories from his personal life reported in Haffendon’s biog (telling Catholics to their face they’re worshipping the Devil and so on) in print he comes over as surprisingly polite contrarian; no ‘you’re a fucking idiot’ from him, it’s all Mr X says this and Mr X’s sincerity is admirable although etc etc. Maybe it’s just the general cultural idiom in which he worked, that now old-fashioned Englishness where rudeness is so elegantly and complimentary that you’d hardly notice it is rudeness. But unlike (casting around for an example) Christopher Hitchens, whose writing sort-of sets your back up even when you agree with what he’s saying. Empson manages never to be annoying, even when he’s saying the most pungently outrageous or critical things.
But the joy of a contrarian is that he works well with apparent opposites. Just as Deleuze can take a figure like Leibniz, who by any standard really ought to be utterly opposed to everything Deleuzian—and dress him up in the Deleuzian livery, so all sorts of discourses of Theory could do interesting things with Empson, I think.
I love Empson. I’d also make out a case for Some Forms of Pastoral as a copper bottomed masterpiece of literary criticism.
When I read Kermode’s LRB review I was struck by how much his row with I A Richards worked over ground that Scott’s Keatsian ponderings are revisiting.
Briefly, Richards stood by his views on cognitive and emotive language and the idea of the ‘pseudo-statement’, which rendered irrelevant questions as to the truth of statements in poetry. Pseudo-statements are ‘not necessarily false . . . merely a form of words whose scientific truth or falsity is irrelevant to the purpose in hand’. But Empson refused to distinguish between pseudo-statements and lies. Richards was wrong to say that ‘the Emotions of the words in poetry are independent of the sense.’ On that view ‘the function of poetry is to call out an Attitude which is not dependent on any belief open to disproof by facts.’ And this position Empson rejects. However complex the words he undertakes to study, the critic should always be thinking of an author who really means them; if he doesn’t, he may be just as guilty of lying as he would be if using such language in the ordinary way and not in a poem. Empson admits that ‘we can enjoy the literary expression of beliefs which we don’t hold’ but in that case ‘we imagine some other person who holds them, an author or a character.’ This works even if we think we know the author himself or herself did not believe them; the character does, and we can see what it means to hold them.
Which is to say, when Keats talks of an urn that he’s conjured out of his head, and which therefore he knows better than anybody, and then goes through all these poetic ‘what’s this? what’s going on?’ contortions, is it ‘merely a form of words whose scientific truth or falsity is irrelevant to the purpose in hand’ or is it actually a kind of lie?
"Pastoral” really is great, isn’t it? This morning I checked Amazon to see if, by chance, anyone had decided to buy “Argufying” on the strength of my recommendation. Yesterday there were two used copies for sale! Today there were three! I’m moving the market! People are being reminded they have that old copy of Empson and are selling! (oh well.)
No ‘you’re a fucking idiot’ from him....
I don’t think that we should hold that against him, however.
John H: “This morning I checked Amazon to see if, by chance, anyone had decided to buy “Argufying” on the strength of my recommendation. Yesterday there were two used copies for sale! Today there were three! I’m moving the market!“
Which reminds me to thank you for your forebearance in not recommending people purchase any copies of my novels. Much appreciated.
John E: Well, no. Quite.