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Reserve Text: from Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985. London: Verso, 1986 The Critic as Clown All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into tire simple, then it was not as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that. A mutual transference of qualities between simple and complex takes place, forcing us to revise our initial estimate of both terms, and to ponder the possibility that a translation of the one into the other was made possible only by virtue of a secret complicity between them. If one has a cultural form in which simple characters are made for voice highly-wrought rhetorical discourse, or sophisticated figures to articulate simple feelings, then the political effects of' the form are likely to be ambiguous. On the one hand, it will obviously enact a certain class collaborationism: how reassuring that aristocrats have common human emotions (how much more real and credible it makes them seem), and, conversely, how complimentary to ruling-class discourse that even peasants, once gripped by fundamental passions, can rise simultaneously to such eloquence. On the other hand, the class structure is momentarily destabilized by such dialogism: if the simple can discourse refinedly without detriment to their simplicity, then they are equal to aristocrats in their sophistication -- not as simple as we thought -- and superior to them in what simplicity they do have. And if the refined speak a language of simple feeling, then their suavity elevates such common passions at the same tune as its ironic excess of' them threatens to render it redundant. You cannot really have this dialogical situation other |
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and demystified by the criticism, left poorer but more honest in one sense, but impressively complicated in another. A pastoral transference of qualities has been effected: 'If' my criticism can have something of' the subtlety of the text, then the text may have something of the straightforwardness of my criticism, in which case neither piece of writing is exactly what we thought it was.' The critic is both richer and poorer than the poem, something of a jester its his heavy-footed cavortings before the majesty of the literary, yet also superfluously cerebral and refitted in contrast with the simple passionate spontaneity he analyses. All cultural critics
for Empson are pastoralists, since they cannot escape the occasionally
farcical irony of being fine, delicate and excessively complex about
writing whose power lies ultimately in its embodiment of it 'common
humanity'. They are continually haunted by the irony that the very instruments
which give theta access to those powers also threaten to cut them off
from them. This for Empson is a permanent rather than historical condition:
Some Versions of Pastoral opens with a chapter ore proletarian literature
which denies the real possibility of the genre since 'the artist never
is at one with any public'. But this liberal-Romantic mystification
(what exactly is meant here by 'at one'?) is surely undercut by a glance
at the social history which produced the early Empson. Seven Types
of Ambiguity was published between the Wall Street crash and the
financial collapse of Austria and Germany, when British unemployment
stood at around two million; Some Versions of Pastoral appeared in the
year of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the re-election of a National
Government in Britain and the founding of' the left Book Club. It is
not difficult in this situation to see why the literary intellectual
might have felt somewhat less than at one with his public, or why one
fascinated by the verbal cavillings of minor seventeenth-century poets
might leave experienced some slight need to justify his enterprise.
Pastoral is in a sense Empson's political self-apology, its a form which
exposes the ironic contradictions of' intellectual sophistication and
common wisdom; it is an implicit reflection oil the dazzling pyrotechnics
of Seven Types in a darkening political scene. The real swains,
now, are the hunger marchers. In so far as the pastoral form is generously
capacious, good-humouredly coutai1ting the conflicts it dramatizes,
it is of course, as Raymond Williams has protested, [153] that this spurious harmonization of Class struggle is the heavy political price Empson has momentarily to pay for a politically well-intentioned aesthetic which, in the epoch of wars and revolutions, seeks to return the increasingly fine-drawn analyses of literary critics to their roots in a practical social wisdom. Empson's life-long guerrilla campaign against the whole portentous gamut of formalisms and symbolisms, his brusque dismissal of all meta-physical poetics, is the fruit of a profoundly sociable theory of language which grasps the literary text as discourse rather than langue, refusing purely textual (or 'organically contextual) notions of meaning for an insistence that meanings are inscribed in practical social life before they come to be distilled into poetry. The literacy text for Empson is no organicist mystery but a social enunciation capable of rational paraphrase, open to the routine sympathies and engagements of its readers, turning around terms which crystallize whole social grammars or practical logics of sense. The Empsonian reader is always an active interpreter: ambiguity itself is defined as any verbal nuance "which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language,"(2) and the act of reading depends upon certain tacit social understandings, certain vague rich intimate' apprehensions carried in collective social practice. Interpretation rests upon the rationalist assumption that the human mind, however baffled, complex and divided, is essentially 'sane'; to interpret is to make as large-minded, generous allowance as one can for the way a particular mind, however self-broodingly idiosyncratic, is striving to work through and encompass its own conflicts, which can never be wholly inscrutable precisely because they inhere in a shared social medium -- language itself -- inherently patient of public intelligibility. If criticism is a mug's game it is because such conflicts, 'life' being the multiple, amorphous affair it is, will never endure definitive formulation, never submit to the boundaries of a single sense; but this 'pastoral' sense of the loose, incongruous character of history dignifies human reason rather than tragically defeating it, providing it with the most recalcitrant materials on which to exercise its powers and arrive at the most fulfilling type of (in)adequation. The 'aristocratic' refinements of complex analysis, that is to say, are at once at odds with and enhanced by the basic, unfinished stuff of which critical acumen goes to work -- just as that 'common' stuff at once ironizes the critical gesture itself and, in being revealed by it as in truth inexhaustibly subtle, comes to be on terms with it. Empson, [154] like the Freud by whom he is nervously fascinated, is the kind of rationalist who constantly allows reason to press up against its own stringent limits without for a moment ceasing to trust in its force. In this sense fie fits awkwardly into the straw-target category of rationalism ideologically requisite for the fashionable irrationalism of our own time. Responding to a question about his attitude towards Leavis and New Criticism, Raymond Williams makes an acute comment on the politics of English criticism: I said to people here at Cambridge: in the thirties you were passing severely limiting judgements on Milton and relatively favourable judgements on the metaphysical poets, which in effect redrew the map of 17th-century literature in England. Now you were, of course, making literary judgements - your supporting quotations and analysis prove it, but you were also asking about ways of living through a political and cultural crisis of national dimensions. On the one side, you have a man who totally committed himself to a particular side and cause, who temporarily suspended what you call literature, but in fact not writing, in that conflict. On the other, you have a kind of writing which is highly intelligent and elaborate, that is a way of holding divergent attitudes towards struggle or towards experience together in the mind at the same time. These are two possibilities for any highly conscious person in a period of crisis -- a kind of commitment which involves certain difficulties, certain naiveties, certain styles; and another kind of consciousness, whose complexities are a way of living with the crisis without being openly part of it. I said that when you were making your judgements about these poets, you were not only arguing about their literary practice, you were arguing about your own at that times The dilemma outlined
by Williams here -- one between a highly specialized mode of critical
intelligence which in fore-grounding ironic complexity evades certain
necessarily univocal social commitments, and a plainer, committed writing
prepared to sacrifice such ambivalences in the cause of political responsibility
- is a modern version of the contradictions which, as I have argued
elsewhere, fissure the English critical institution throughout much
of its history.' Criticism has lurched between a 'professional' sophistication
which sequesters it from collective social life, and a political intervention
into that life which at its best (as with Milton) lends it a substantive
function, at its worst (as with Arnold) degenerates into an ineffectually
'amateur' liberal humanism. Williams, one suspects, would place Empson's |
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[155] work firmly on the second side of' his antithesis, and there is much truth in such a judgement. But this would also he to overlook the ironies of pastoral which, while conscious of the socially determined distance between the language of developed consciousness and a common Lebenswelt, nevertheless seeks a basis of* dialogue between theta. If Ernpson's pastoral model is transferred, as it would seem to ask to be, front the anodyne artifice of a courtly drama to the problem of the critical intellectual in modern bourgeois society, it can be made to yield up significances akin rather than alien to Williams's town political case. The author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, that supposed classic of` New Criticism, is also the author of'Milton' God, a work quite prepared to negotiate its way in most un-Eliotic or un-Leavisian fashion through the twists and turns of Milton's religious ideology, powered as it is by a ferociously debunking Voltairean humanism but steadfast in its acknowledgement of Milton's magnificence. One can trace indeed in the radically divided character of Paradise lost - its rational humanism and religious transcendentalism - a veritable allegory of Empson's own critical battles with literary reaction. Empson the ironist and ambiguist is, after all, the critic who) writes in Milton's God that tie feels he can well understand the God of Paradise lost from the inside, having been a propaganda specialist himself during the Second World War. The insult is directed against the Christian God, not against propaganda or political rhetoric. Empson's criticism, that is to say, offers a partial deconstruction of Williams's polarity. That the deconstruction is only partial is surely plain: he is obviously not a 'committed' critic in the style of a Milton, or a Williams. Bill those features of his critical approach which look most lemon-squeezingly Wunsattian are in fact nothing of the sort; pits relentless unravelling of finer and finer shades of verbal meaning is no aridly evasive enterprise of the kind Williams is right to denounce, but itself a political position, inscribed by a whole range of militantly humanistic beliefs -- a trust in the intelligibility and sense-making capacities of the mind even at its most divided, a clogged refusal of symbolistic mystificaticions, a recognition of conflicts and indeterminacies -- which are a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of any more politically radical criticism. Christopher Norris, in his excellent study of Empson, describes his pastoral as 'lift[ing] the subtleties of poetic: argument into a larger, essentially social air';-" but, while this is true, 'ambiguities' for
Empson were in a way this all along, not sealed structures of New Critical ambivalence but interpretative struggles and enigmas consequent upon language's ineradical sociality and correlative roughness, its multipurpose functioning in practical life, its intrinsic openness to alternative social histories and tonalities. Poetry is not for Empson, as for New Criticism and some contemporary deconstruction, the privileged locus of ambiguity or indeterminacy; all language is indeterminate, and this, precisely, is how it is fruitful and productive. Empson's Cambridge is also the Cambridge of Wittgenstein, who reminds us in the Blue and Broom Books that 'We are unable clearly to circumscribe the concepts we use; not because we don't know their real definition, but because there is no "real" definition to them.' Those who seem suddenly to have discovered that the essence of 'literary' language lies in its indeterminacy have obviously not been listening for some years to how the people around them actually talk. Empson's ambiguities, moreover, were never purely rhetorical affairs. They root down into conflicts of impulse and allegiance, in what seems to him the mixed, contradictory character of social being itself, in the friction of' competing ideologies and Social valuations. Paul de Man is not wrong to claim that Empson's work thus manifests a 'deep division of Being itself'; he is mistaken rather in appearing to assimilate Empson's category of 'contradictory meanings' (the seventh type of'ambiguity) to his own model of semantic deadlock (Empson in fact writes breezily that 'any contradiction is likely to have some sensible interpretations'),(7) and in appropriating the English critic's essentially social notions of conflict to his own ontologizing impulse. Summarizing Empson's famous account of Marvell's The Garden, in which the mind, having first discovered a delightful unity with Nature, then moves to transcend and annihilate it, de Man informs us with enviable authority that 'the pastoral theme is, in fact, the only poetic theme, that it is poetry itself'." What he means is that pastoral enacts just that ironic dissociation of' consciousness from its objects which is for him the properly demystified condition of all literature. Pastoral assuages de Man's early-Sartrean horror of' 'inauthenticity' and 'bad faith', that dismal state in which the etre-pour-soi cravenly congeals into the etre-en-soi. 'What is the pastoral convention, then,' he asks, 'if not the eternal separation between the mind that distinguishes, negates, legislates, and the originary simplicity of the natural?' [157] To which the only
answer, even on de Man's own account, is, a good deal more. For a few
lines earlier he has noted that in Marvell's oem the thought which annihilates
Nature is 'green' ; in the very act of dissociation, an equable correspondence
between consciousness and the world is ironically reintroduced by this
softly intrusive modifier, alo9ng with the sense, in Empson's words,
of a 'humble, permanent, undeveloped nature which sustains everything,
and to which everything must return.' De Man actually quotes this sentence
of Empson's but he does not allow it to qualify his own Sartrean dogma
of eternal alienation: he seizes the moment of pastoral which best fits
his own denial of all productive interchange between consciousness and
its surroundings, and then redefines the whole genre-and, for good measure,
poetry itself-solely in these terms. It is amusingly typical of de Man
that he should find even pastoral depressing, and for reasons quite
other than Williams's. Marvell himself, as Empson sees, has no such
puritanical inhibitions: the wit and courage of his poem here lie in
its refusal to absolutize even the moment of the mind's annihilating
transcendence, confident and humourous enough in its own fictions to
be able to reinvoke and indulge the notion of harmonious liaison between
Nature and mind even at this point of mystical fading and dissolution
of the real.
de Man (as we shall see in a moment) is here out to worst. Few words have rung more ominously in Marxist ears than natural, and we have all long; since learnt to rehearse the proper objections to it with Pavlovian precision. Having learnt the lesson, however, it is surely time to move on, rather than remaining like de Man fixated in the moment of bleak recognition that aardvarks are not people, and then repeating that traumatic moment compulsively. Since the consolations identity have been unmasked as mythical (and pastoral, wrenched by a certain reading, can contribute to that end), we are liberated to inquire what fertile pacts and allegiances between Nature and humanity might in fact be generated, as the ecology movement has for some time been inquiring. The work of Sebastiano Timpanaro, Raymond Williams and Norman Geras, not to speak of the drama and prefaces of' Edward Bond,(9) does not cancel the important caveats of historicist Marxism on this score, but at its best takes us through and beyond them to the point where the concepts of Nature, and human nature, are not merely to be dismissed as ideological fictions but to be theoretically reconstructed. Pastoral asserts that some conditions and styles of feeling are more natural than others, and provided we do not absolutize the term there is no reason why it should not remain, as it has for long traditionally been, an integral part of radical social criticism. There seems something strangely self-thwarting about a culturalist or historicist Marxism which sternly forbids itself to describe as 'unnatural' a wholly reclusive life, or a society which found sunshine disgusting. The political implications of de Man's misreading of Empson are ominous. For if' the ironies of pastoral are allegorical of the critic's relation to society, or indeed of the relation of all intellectual to manual labour, then it is the uncrossable gulf between them which de Man wishes to reaffirm. This is one reason why is reflections on Empson culminate abruptly, though not wholly unpredictably, in an assault on Marxism, which is of course for de Man (if not for 90 per cent of Marxists) an impossible poetic ream of utter reconciliation between world and mind. In so far as Empson himself criticizes this drive as 'premature' in his chapter on proletarian literature, tie has laid himself wide open to such enlistment; but one cannot imagine that he would support the tragic philosophy which is de Man's only alternative to the loss of the impossible. 'The problem of separation', de Man writes, 'inheres in Being, which means that social forms of
separation derive from ontological and metaphysical attitudes. For poetry, the divide exists forever.'(10) It is very hard to see why, if the idea of some total identity between Nature and society is plainly absurd, the absence of it should be considered somehow tragic. Many human beings would quite like to live forever, but not all of them find it tragic that they will not. Some people feel repulsed and alienated by staring at the roots of trees, while others just sit down and have a picnic. The non-identity of consciousness and being is a fact, which may he construed tragically or not depending on how far you are still .secretly in thrall to a vision of unity. The sharpest difference between de Man and Empson on this point is that for Empson the non-coincidence of mind and world, the sophisticated and simple, is not in itself tragic at all, though it may from time to time involve tragedy. It is true that in his remark that the poet is never at one with his or her public lie suggests a transhistorical estrangement upon which de Man can then pounce, turning the point for good measure against the early Marxian Barthes; but for Empson the writer's lack of identity with an audience is simply a fact, not the basis of some melancholic ontology. For de Man it is an unquestioned good that consciousness should keep free of its objects, that the critic refuse all definitive identification; for Empson the typically pastoral attitude is a more ambiguous one: 'I (the artist/critic/intellectual) am in one way better (than the worker/peasant), in another way not as good.' Or, as he puts it more accurately elsewhere: 'Some people are more delicate and complex than others, and ... if such people can keep this distinction from doing harm it is a good thing, though a small thing by comparison with our common humanity."' The fact that in a given society some individuals have the means and opportunity to be more cultured than others is not to be guiltily repressed; this indeed would be the Sartrean bad faith or false identification whereby the intellectual seeks to empty himself into the etre-en-soi of the masses. Part of the implicit courage of Some Versions, one feels, is exactly its ironic resistance to the Romantic versions of this most thirties of theses, which was powerfully in the political air, and from which the opening chapter on proletarian literature immediately takes its distance. But this is not to leave oneself with no option but Romantic alienation, endorsing the eternal isolation of the refined critic and the unchangeable lowliness of the common people. Some Versions begins with a brilliant critique of Gray's [160] 'Elegy' which demonstrates ,just how the poem's imagery tries to trick us into accepting the obscurity of the rural poor as somehow inevitable. Though distinctions of sophistication and simplicity exist, Empson's crucial, most undeManian point is that they are a poor thing in contrast with our 'common humanity'. Pastoral, in manifesting such distinctions, is more than a ruling-class conspiracy because it also reveals them as continually ironized and encompassed by a wider ambience, a general sustaining Nature as it were, which transcends them in its importance. What makes us uniquely different individuals, as Derek Parfit argues in his Reasons and Persons, is just not important enough a basis on which to build an ethics -- or, one might add, a politics.' a Pastoral knows a moment of (potentially tragic) separation of mind from world, the cultivated from the simple, self-reflexivity from spontaneity; but it includes this moment within a richer, more complex relationship in which it is recognized that the intellectual must be taught by the masses, that the rich are poorer as well as richer than the common people, and that even the intellectual-hard thought it sometimes is to credit it-shares a common humanity with others, which ultimately overrides whatever demarcates him or her from them. The critic who recognizes all this is the critic as clown, and one of his several names in our time is William Empson. Paul de Man, for his part, inherits from Nietzche a notion of action as mindless spontaneity (practice as 'pure forgetting') which however qualified (de Man goes on to deconstruct that 'pure') puts it eternally at odds with the complexities of' theory.' (13) It is a nineteenth-century irrationalist current which emerges at its most disreputable in such writers as Conrad, and which leaves its mark on the work of Louis Althusser. De Man's epistemology of' dissociated spirit most certainly entails a politics of intellectual elitism. For among the objects of consciousness are, of course, mass movements and political commitments, and the modern bourgeois-liberal critic can attain some negative authenticity only in that ironic gesture by which, in separating himself from such empirical engagements, he names them all as ineradicably inauthentic. 'The ironic language splits the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a [161]
This is not the case with Empson's mode of irony. For whereas de Man is the patrician who ironizes the ideological doxa of the peasant, Empson views the matter in a kind of Bakhtinian reversal: it is the canny sense of'the peasant which must keep the ideologizing clerk in check. In a deeply Wittgenstemian gesture, the intellectual's fatal penchant to ride hobbyhorses (a saddening feature, it must be confessed, of the later Empson himself) must be prised open to the therapeutic influence of how language is practically used, exposed to the resources of' that collective social wisdom crystallized in its key terms ('complex words'). It is as it were, the common people, or at least common readers, who live ambiguously, innately suspicious of ideological |
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[162]
formalism which
would prematurely synthesize such inconclusiveness; and Empson as critic
is Spokesperson of this 'good sense.' Pastoral is a form of the people
not because it is written or read by them, or because it figures them
other than in absurdly or offensively stylized ways, but because it
has about it a kind of 'productive looseness' (Chris(opher Norris) which
is the structural mark of this state of ideological conflict and division.
The phrase 'productive looseness' has a Brechtian ring to it, and the
connection seems less surprising; once we remember the two men's fascination
with John Gay's Beggar's Opera. 'Putting the complex into the simple'
is, after all, a snap enough definition of Contradictions for Brecht were not only sometimes intolerable but also, as he once said with reference to Hegel, a joke'. The jokiness of both Brecht and Empson - the one self consciously plebeian, the other iconoclastically English-strikes a quite different social tone from the high European humourlessness of a de Man. Empson writes in Some Versions of Soviet performance of Hamlet (that most de Manian of dramas) which the audience spontaneously decided was farce. Such people, Empson reflects, 'may well hold out against the melancholy of old Russia, and for them there may be dangerous implications in any tragedy, which other people do not see'.` 1 think Christopher Norris is right to suggest that Empson may well have approved of such a response to the play. Tragedy for Empson is an heroic mode associated with aristocratic absolutism and ascetic self-renunciation, deeply at odds with his own ironic [163] humanism; and in this humanistic suspicion of tragedy tie is again very close to Brecht. Like Brecht, the alternative Iorni he offers is not some crass comic triumphalism but, its Norris argues of the quality of his 'complex words' (1001% 'clog', 'honest' and so on), 'a clown-to-earth quality of'healthy scepticism which ... permits their users to build up a trust in human nature on a shared knowledge of its needs, and attendant weaknesses'. (16) This too is a pastoral mode of" feeling: you must love and admire the 'high' human qualities of truth, beauty, virtue and courage, but you must not be text downcast if people fail to live up to them, or terrorize them with these ideals to a point which stakes their weaknesses painful to them. 'tragedy moves within the high-minded terrorism of such ideals; however 'deep', it is arguably narrower, more violent in its implacable expectations, than that large-minded plebeian wisdom which, without a breath of cynicism (the mere flip-side of such idealism) knows when not to ask too much of others. Empson's own companion-able literary style is anti-heroic in this sense, designed not to intimidate a reader; Milton's God pushes raciness and iconoclasts to the very brink of academic indecorousness. Brecht's anti-tragic awareness that there are always other possibilities parallels Empson's reading of the 'Metaphysical' poets as constantly entertaining further possible levels of meaning, ironically including within a poetu its acts of exclusion. Brecht's belief that an effective play ought always to convey a sense of the (potentially contradictory) meanings it excludes, [tie pressure of a further possible productivity, is classically Empsonian. The fact that there is always more productivity where that came from should not be confused with the infinite regress of 'a certain mode of deconstruction. For Empson, interpretation is certainly in principle inexhaustible, and the limitation of the various types of ambiguity to a mere seven is tnore a joke at the expense of magical numbers that a serious taxonomy. That there is some continuity between Empson the liberal humanist and the anti-humanist deconstructionist is signalled in Norris's summary of his critical 'method': 'He seems constantly on the verge of defining the complex implications, verbal or generic, which might satisfy, by somehow pinning down, his sense of the poem's richness. Yet he constantly relegates this purpose, detecting behind these provisional structures a series of ironies and "placing" attitudes which prevent their treatment as an integrating function of form.(17) This could clearly be said of Derrida [164] or de Man; indeed the affinity is well enough mapped in Christopher Norris's own evolution from a sympathetic critic of Empson to an exponent of deconstruction. Yet such a trajectory tends also to impoverish Empson's work, isolating him as the author of Seven Types and pruning away (or conveniently repressing) the more 'sociable', proto-political later writing. The shift from Seven Types to The Structure of Complex Words, from 'Metaphysical' to "augustan", "wit" to "sense", reflects a growing recognition on Empson's part that wit and ambiguity, however idiosyncratically "brilliant,", are nurtured by collective contexts of tacit significances, as in that Popeian "good sense" which marks the inscription of social logics within individual "wit." All discourse for Empson is inscribed by such social rationalities however much it may disrupt and transgress them; and this is why he turns in Complex Words to a period (the eighteenth century) in which the inherent sociableness of language, for all its normative violence, is more clearly apparent than in the seventeenth century of New Criticism. His appeal here, that is to say, is to "common sense"; but though his work is shot through with the limitations of this most English of vices (it lacks, for example, almost any concept of ideology), it also goes some way towards refurbishing the concept. "Common sense" in Empson is often enough his airy impatience with theory, a brisck plain-minded reliance on "what the author probably meant"; if he is one of the few English critics to have taken the pressure of Freud, he does so with notable unease and discomfort. Yet at its best his writing demonstrates just how thin a line there can be between such anaemic commonsensicality and the richer Gramscian idea of proletarian "good sense", the routine practical wisdom of those who, more intimate with the material world than their rulers, are less likely to be mystified by high-sounding rhetoric. When Empson declares his pastoral faith that'the most refined desires are inherent in the plainest, and would be false if' they weren't','" he is very close to a kind of' Bakhtinian populism; indeed the remark is made in the context of'discussing one of Shakespeare's clowns. It is Swift who for Empson presses this deconstruction of body and spirit, savagery and sophistication, degrading to an extreme limit, [165] For 'Swift', here, one might well read 'Freud'. To contrast Empson
with a later middle-class critic like de Man is, most crucially, to
contrast a pre-fas(ist liberal intellectual with a post-fascist one.
Two of Empson's most substantial works were written before the full
fury of' European fascism was unleashed; and we might well wonder whether
his belief in the essential sanity and generosity of the human mind
is not in part dependent on that chronology. Empson's brisk untheoretical
commonsensicality, his relatively sanguine trust in routine rationality,
are serious limitations to any Marxist appropriation of his work. De
Mart, as I have argued elsewhere, is most interestingly viewed in the
light of a bitter 'post-ideological' scepticism which belongs to the
post-fascist epoch;" and Empson's buoyant Enlightenment rationality
is just what lie is out to embarrass. If neither position can be unequivocally
adopted by Marxism, it remains true that Empson poses for us the more
serious challenge, at least in this sense: that he reminds us forcibly,
with what he himself would call a "pastoral flatness", of
just what complexity and ambiguity any programme of social transformation
must encompass, without regarding that transformative end as in any
sense unworthy. At the same time it is part of Empson's courage, and
evidence of the seeds of socialism which can be detected in his work,
that lie finally refuses that liberal fetishizing of' difference and
ambivalence which still serves the cause of political oppression. To
paraphrase his own version of' pastoral, with a vigilant eye on the
mystificatory more delicate and complex than others, and this need not
matter, indeed is a positive enrichment, provided such distinctions
do not do social harm. But the most seductive subtleties, the most dazzling
displays of' heroism, virtue and intelligence, are a poor thing compared
to our shared humanity, and when- |
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