Some Types of Ambiguity: Charlotte Taylor on William Empson.

WILLIAM EMPSON: VOLUME 1: AMONG THE MANDARINS

BY JOHN HAFFENDEN

NEW YORK: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 695 PAGES. $45.

When Jacques Derrida died last October, his obituary in the New York Times provoked a flutter of controversy. The writer in the Times explained deconstruction as "the method of inquiry that asserted that ... the author's intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself" and suggested that it not only "robbed" literature of "truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence" but could also exculpate an alleged anti-Sernite and Nazi sympathizer (deconstructionist critic Paul de Man). Any number of scholars wrote irate letters protesting this account as a slanderous caricature. Whatever else it proved, the debate showed that methods of interpretation can still get people angry.

When interpretation defies the intuitions of the average reader, it is often perceived as an expression of arrogance. Beneath stock accusations of ivory-tower elitism lies the conviction that rational analysis should not get the better of common sense--that is, the perceptions that we have in common. The arrival of the first volume of John Haffenden's exhaustive and authoritative biography of poet and literary scholar William Empson, then, is timely. For one thing, it shows that the debate rekindled by Derrida's death has been going on, in one form or another, for the better part of a century. More significant, though, Haffenden offers an intimate view of Empson's own grappling with the uses, challenges, and limitations of rational inquiry.

Empson's pioneering work of intensive literary interpretation, Seven Types of Ambiguity, itself met accusations of self-indulgent obscurantism when it was published in 1930. By "ambiguity," Empson meant "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." He proposed to study those moments when the words in a poem seem to mean two or more things at once--to take a brief example, when Shakespeare describes the leafless branches of a tree as "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." Wrote Empson:

  The comparison holds for many reasons; because ruined monastery choirs
  are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row,
  because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth,
  because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building
  crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with
  stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are
  now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of
  winter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by
  choir-boys suits well with Shakespeare's feeling for the object of the
  Sonnets, and for various sociological and historical reasons (the
  protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of puritanism), which it
  would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons,
  and many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all
  combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity
  in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind.

If Empson was not the first to analyze closely the complex workings of poetic language, no one before him had sustained analysis at such dazzling length or in such a systematic manner. Critics protested that his interpretive acrobatics were absurd if not misleading, and that at any rate they offered little help in describing the beauty of a poem or explaining its value.

Seven Types of Ambiguity marks a turning point in twentieth-century literary criticism, but versions of the protests it met with have followed in its wake. Empson has often been credited with inspiring New Criticism, the movement that came to dominate midcentury American universities and that gave us such terms as "intentional fallacy" and "language of paradox" (Empson himself had no desire to claim paternity of the movement). Before deconstruction, the New Critics drew fire for asserting the autonomy of the literary text--in particular the poem, whose words created meaning primarily through reference to one another, Poetry, they argued, must be interpreted without recourse to its author's intentions or its historical context. Detractors maintained instead that analysis, if too close or complex, could make a text mean anything.

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As Haffenden shows, Empson's work has often been misrepresented in such debates. Empson never claimed that the poem must be studied in isolation; his analyses consistently drew on what he believed to be commonsense meanings of words and phrases. He also held it as axiomatic that the critic must concern himself with the author's intentions, for poems interest us precisely because they are responses to experience. At the same time, however, he was dedicated to gleaning as much insight about poetry as he could through methodical interpretation. Even pleasure, he contended, could be analyzed.

Given this conviction, it's no surprise to learn that Empson came to literature late in his studies, from mathematics. At Cambridge, he became keen to join the vibrant literary circles, and while his early efforts to shine yielded mixed results--after one particularly humiliating failure in the formidable debating hall of the Cambridge Union, he resolved to abandon his aspirations and devote himself to the scientific study of jellies--he eventually switched his course of study to literature. His mentor was I. A. Richards, who was then in the process of applying the principles of psychology to the study of literary value. Richards encouraged Empson to develop the analytic method that he had begun to explore, and the result was Seven Types of Ambiguity.

But if Empson's background tempts us to see Seven Types as an appeal to scientific method or mathematical logic, his work is saturated with an awareness of all that analysis can't explain. This sense of limitation comes through most clearly in Empson's poetry, which confronts the difficulty of achieving insight into the spiritual and moral complexity of the human condition. In "This Last Pain" (1935), he compares the individual seeking answers to such questions to an inquisitive and impertinent servant: "Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul, / May know her happiness by eye to hole." The schemata we invent to represent spiritual meanings are fictions, and all we can know is the mechanism by which the magnificent illusion is created:

  All those large dreams by which men long
         live well
  Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell;
    This then is real, I have implied
    A painted, small, transparent slide.

Science, in Empson's view, only heightened the difficulty facing the ever-aspiring human imagination. Far from offering rational explanations of experience, such advances as the theory of relativity challenged us to consider metaphysics and morals in a different light.

Seven Types of Ambiguity might have become the foundation of a conventional academic career, but Empson was expelled from Cambridge before he completed the text. He had just been granted a fellowship for postgraduate study when it was discovered that he had been carrying on an affair with a woman (he also had involvements with men) in his university lodgings. Empson found himself finishing his manuscript in a squalid rented room in London while worrying over what to do next. Despite the attention his book garnered, he couldn't get a teaching post in England and so finally accepted one in Japan.

Empson worked for three years as a professor of English at the University of Literature and Science in Tokyo. Later he would return to the Far East to teach in China. His time there coincided with the crisis points in the conflict then gripping Asia, and he endured a variety of adverse conditions. He arrived in Tokyo in August 1931, only a few weeks before Japan launched its invasion of Manchuria. In 1937, when he was appointed to teach for three years at Peking University, he arrived just as the Sino-Japanese war erupted. The Japanese military destroyed the university facilities, and students and faculty joined the masses fleeing the occupied areas for inland China. The academic exiles found their way to Changsha, where they joined forces with similarly displaced students and teachers from Tsinghua University and Nankai University to form the "Temporary University." The faculty had practically no books, and living conditions were often difficult (later, after a second relocation, Empson would find himself using his blackboard, propped up on supports, as a bed), but Empson and his fellow teachers continued to devote themselves to the business of education. His students were equally devoted to his lectures, and amazed by his ability to recite long passages of Paradise Lost from memory.

Haffenden often loads his narrative with a cumbersome amount of detail, but his liveliest pages recount Empson's years in Japan and China (this first volume ends in 1939, with Empson's return from China to an England on the brink of war). The scholar not only faced adversity with remarkable hardiness, but profited from the difficulties of teaching in an unfamiliar culture. When he asked his Japanese students to write an essay on irony in Mrs. Dalloway--in particular, the effect of soldier Septimus Warren Smith's suicide at the climax of Clarissa Dalloway's party--they declined to do so. With their country in the grip of nationalism, they feared the question might lead them into politically suspect territory. Empson was brought up short by the extent of their anxiety; he mulled the topic over and wrote his own essay, which contained the seeds of his second major critical work, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). The pastoral literary form, he argued, represents the divisions between rich and poor, insider and outsider; and any given pastoral work may criticize or apologize for these divisions through its portrayal of the tensions between competing groups and values.

Noting that a Japanese student of his had written that ballads should be "vulgar," Empson observed that the mistakes made by nonnative English speakers often arose from the use of a word in its strictly accurate sense, without regard for its value-laden overtones. The word vulgar means "common"--in other words, ballads, as the students understood, use ordinary rather than elevated diction--but it also, in this case, derides a social class. Empson became increasingly interested in analyzing the relations among the multiple kinds of meaning a single word carries. During his years in China, he worked on the series of essays that would eventually become The Structure of Complex Words (1951).

The projects that Empson undertook after Seven Types of Ambiguity show him extending the ground his analytic methods could cover. Some Versions of Pastoral addresses social ironies through an analysis of literary ones, while The Structure of Complex Words explores the expanding horizon of meaning any given word possesses. As one reads Empson's criticism, the principle of ambiguity seems to enlarge to become nothing less than a theory of the human condition. A description Empson once offered of his poetry might serve as the motto for his criticism: "to convey a mental state of great tension, in which conflicting impulses have no longer any barriers between them and therefore the strangeness of the world is felt very acutely."

Charlotte Taylor is a writer based in New York.