Empson

I've grown much more comfortable with Empson. I've always been amazed at his work (and his poetry, for that matter, of which I always want to read more), and liked it a lot, but have also been a little hedgy about his larger views of things mostly because I see him so pigeonholed in theoretical circles, and these views so distorted in relation to Richards especially:

[For Richards,] poetic language is purely affective and, therefore, can never lead to cognition, since it has no verifiable referential value in reference to an external object. [... (Nothing in this last statement is true, by the way--MJ) ...] The route may be different, but the starting point is the same as Roland Barthes. [...] By bringing down poetic language to the level of the language of communication, and in its steadfast refusal to grant aesthetic experience any difference from other human experiences, [Richards' view] is opposed to any attempt to confer upon poetry an excessively exalted function, while still preserving for it the freshness and originality of invention.

But what happens when one studies poetry a little closer following these instructions? A surprising answer is to be found in the work of William Empson, a brilliant student of Richards. [Empson says what] metaphor does is [...] instead of setting up an adequation between two experiences and thereby fixing the mind on the repose of an established equation, it deploys the initial experience into an infinity of associated experiences that spring from it. In the manner of a vibration spreading in infinitude from its center, metaphor is endowed with the capacity to situate the experience at the heart of a universe that it generates. [...] Far from referring to an object that would be its cause, the poetic sign sets in motion an imaging activity that refers to no object in particular. The "meaning" of the metaphor is that it does not "mean" in any definite manner.

[It is an "ambiguity," of course...]

In the seventh and last type of ambiguity [that Empson classifies in Seven Types], the form blows up under our very eyes. This occurs when the text implies not merely distinct significations but significations that, against the will of their author, are mutually exclusive. And here Empson's advance beyond the teachings of his master becomes apparent. For under the outward appearance of a simple list classifying randome examples, chapter seven develops a thought Richards never wanted to consider: true poetic ambiguity proceeds from the deep division of Being itself, and poetry does no more than state and repeat this division. Richards did recognize the existence of conflicts, but he invoked Coleridge, not without some simplification, to the appeal to the reassuring notion of art as the reconciliation of opposites. Empson's less serene mind is not content with this formula.
-Paul de Man, "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," 233-237 in Blindness and Insight.

I quote so much from de Man's bizarrely skewed introduction to the American formalist tradition for people on the Continent, not at all in order to imply that everyone (or even anyone) thinks about Empson along these lines. In fact, most people who appreciate him (like those who appreciate Barthes) really don't distort him at all, because Empson works so intuitively. But when it comes time to express themselves more abstractly about this appreciation, it usually is with some hesitation or at the expense of Richards that they do so. This is fine, actually, because they also understand Richards practically, and have a sense of the unwieldiness of his system (along with a sense that it's benefits are not chiefly in removing reference--which it does not do in Richards--or dethroning poetry, which could only really be the concerns of a de Man). And most of the time, this ends up only in a comment about the brilliance and general rightness of his larger views on his subject matter: Elizabethan drama, or Milton--or Pastoral, which de Man notably has to completely dismiss as unimportant or inessential, even "deceitful":

What is the pastoral convention, then, if not the eternal separation between the mind that distinguishes, negates, legislates, and the originary simplicity of the natural? [...]There is no doubt that the pastoral theme is, in fact, the only poetic theme, that it is poetry itself. Under the deceitful title of a genre study, Empson has actually written an ontology of the poetic, but wrapped it, as is his wont, in some extraneous matter that may well conceal the essential.
-"The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," 239.

Someone, somewhere, is still thinking that this is a brilliant "reading" of Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral, precisely because it has such astounding antipathy towards what is actually meaningful for a real literary critic: if you can regard what Empson says about pastoral as a genre as "extraneous matter," you really have to have given up on "the poetic" (and poetry) a long time ago. Empson in that book actually articulates what his "versions" (something already more subtle than the caricature of "genre" into which de Man collapses them, the better to make his misreading convincing--it's the same move he makes everywhere) have to do with the possibility and future of poetry.

This is only to say that while the practical users of Empson know what he is up to, there is a theoretical context that takes advantage of this. So the (correct) championing of Empson gets slightly twisted into a ineffective attack of the formalist tradition (when Empson is actually a much more effective attacker than this), usually via a theoretical overemphasis on his types of "ambiguity." Empson is aligned with the close-readers, and then falls in slowly with the textualists, and then with the underminers of meaning. De Man here, as he always does, motivates all these unfortunate misapprehensions into a full-blown lie, and so I present it as a caricature, really, more than anything actually believed by anyone with any shred of practical knowledge about literary criticism and figures involved who is also interested in theory (no one except de Man really thinks Empson is a deconstructionist).

I also quote it because you can see some of the feelings that get used in this process: de Man (as John Guillory points out) was adept at collecting them and using them to cultivate resentment, so it's no surprise we find this work here. "Here Empson's advance beyond the teachings of his master becomes apparent," and Richard's apparent "appeal to the reassuring notion" are caricatures still, but unlike the actual theory they are a little closer to how we feel (they have to be, in order for them to shore up such a joke of a narrative), and are a little closer to what allows a theoretical pigeonholing of Empson and Richards to take place. The whole thing is not unlike Dryden and Pope, which is a notoriously one-sided comparison to begin with: the invocation of the master-student relationship ("master"! how overblown!) is serves this purpose most of the time.

But to the point: the key is "ambiguity," misunderstood by de Man as a non-referential play of language, stemming from a (de Man would put a "no doubt," or "necessarily" here) metonymic relationship between tenor and vehicle at the heart of metaphor. This is so off-the-wall that we just have to dismiss it to get anywhere: it patently ignores anything in the later work, and especially the doctrine of Mutual Metaphor, outlined in The Structure of Complex Words (a doctrine which actually makes allegory a species of metaphor, completely at cross-purposes with the anti-mimetic doctrine de Man is trying to push it towards). It also ignores anything hinting towards this doctrine in Seven Types itself (de Man calls everything but the seventh type of ambiguity "pseudo-types" of ambiguity, which should alert us that this claim itself is just an outright falsehood). But my point is that de Man is operating at the same sites that the theorizers of Empson's undermining of language do: the emphasis on ambiguity takes away from the bounds set to the ambiguity--not by the types themselves, but by the work of words, of language. This does not proceed in a Richards-like way, but--and here's my point--with an eye to what we do when we use language and begin to analyze it:

Much of our thinking has to be done in a summary practical way, trusting to a general sense of the whole situation in the background; we get a feeling that the rest of the situation is within call, so that we can concentrate our attention on one aspect, and this feeling is often trustworthy.
-The Structure of Complex Words, 1

This is an argument for the deeper consideration of the feelings themselves Complex Words will accomplish, and so the "often" is not meant to qualify the trustworthiness of the whole practical procedure. It is meant to stake out an area where we need closer attention to what we're doing beyond the practical, with a knowledge that "much of our thinking has to be done in a summary practical way." This general opinion of Empson is what the practical people appreciate in him, but which is hard itself to understand theoretically in an environment that likes to think generalization is impossible (and that also is willing to let such generalizations pass as "[for Richards] poetic language is purely affective," which is again a gross simplification and distortion of everything interesting and, wrong, yes, but also complex in Richards' understanding of poetry as "pseudo-statement"--I'll speak more of this next time, but now the name with its emphasis on "statement" should be enough to show you how stupid it is to equate Richards remarks with the "purely affective": indeed Empson in Complex Words shows how stupid it is himself, and how it ignores the real problems!). In the absence of this, we say the level at which Empson outlines the workings of language has to be undermining any generalization it could possibly make, and here we go wrong. I'll comment more on exactly what Empson is doing in another post. For now, I'll just leave this as an outline of where the problems in understanding him and his relation to Richards actually are.