The Verbal Analysis

Author(s): William Empson

Source: The Kenyon Review , Autumn, 1950, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Autumn, 1950), pp. 594-601
Published by: Kenyon College

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/4333185

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Kenyon College is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Kenyon Review

This content downloaded from

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:37 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 594 KENYON REVIEW

of neurosis in our intellectual life have seldom been so numerous

or so appealing. They present themselves to the mind as genuine-
ly profound and inescapable crises of the human spirit. And with
the pride which makes us forget how exceedingly rare and precious
are the genuine crises of the spirit, we run after these plentiful
chimeras, leaving will and intellect unfit for any business except
to observe the debility which creeps over them.
History has made it difficult to construct particular political
programs. But we can begin by reinstating in our criticism the
idea of politics itself. As I understand it, this is the principal task
of literary critics in our present American democracy.

IV. by William Empson-

THE VERBAL ANALYSIS

Wl T HEN I was asked by letter to contribute to the symposium

from Peking, my first impulse was to say that I didn't
believe in having any Credo; a critic ought to trust his own nose,
like the hunting dog, and if he lets any kind of theory or principle
distract him from that, he is not doing his work. This does seem
to me the deepest truth about the matter; but the bottom, as Mr.
T. S. Eliot remarked, is a great way down. There is the same posi-
tion about a moral or ethical theory; however firm your belief in it,
and however definite its ruling on a particular case, you still have
to see whether your feelings can be brought to accept the results in
that case. If they can't, well, you may be wrong, but if it gets
too bad, you have to give up the theory. All the same, there is
clearly a need for such theories; for one thing, without a tolerable
supply of handy generalizations you can't stretch your mind to see
all round a particular case. And the theory alters the feelings no

This content downloaded from

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:37 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 WILLIAM EMPSON 595

less than the feelings alter the t

The metaphor to keep in mind
Taste. It has become less obvious
cause of a kind of traffic jam in
which nobody need be blamed for. We know a good deal more
than we did about the human mind, and expect a writer to work
from the whole body of his experience, so that references to psy-
chological and sociological and anthropological affairs may very
properly be cropping up; and the critic is to expect the same things
in earlier writers even if used 'unconsciously." Also we have only
recently begun to try and appreciate all the arts of all periods of
all countries, or rather to try and pick out from them representative
high-standard cases, fix in our minds the whole range of possible
achievement; and meanwhile we have had on our hands the results
of the first attempts at universal education ever made. People
were bound to look round for some System which would give quick
answers and break up some local traffic jam, often very usefully.
Going back to the metaphor of Taste, however, any such theory
needs to be regarded as a salt or what not which is to be dissolved
into the blood; in its crystal form, when it is portable or transfer-
able, it is quite useless for the ultimate purpose; it must be
digested, but it may none the less really be needed. What the
thing is all about, the test of the value of learning these theories, is
when a foreign body is masticated and brought up to the taste buds
(or palped, if you prefer, by the "tact" of an exploring fingertip);
there is a diffusion across a skin, which needs to hold firm, but
there is an otherwise direct action between the foreign body and
the living blood (for the finger you would say the living nerves).
It often strikes me that students going through the kind of
critical course I think good are liable to get into a mood of exces-
sive anxiety about their own capacity for tasting, and that others
(probably the ones with less natural taste to be anxious about)
tend to complain fretfully that the machine offered them is not a
completely reliable machine, such as would be guaranteed to save

This content downloaded from

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:37 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 596 KENYON REVIEW

them from having to risk tasting anything at all. Of course the

second feeling is ridiculous; even with the most self-acting mod-
ern machine, some real human being has to check whether it is out
of order or broken down. The first is not absurd, and any serious
type of training has to be watched for the same danger; it begins
to give bad results if it is screwed up to the point of excessive
strain, excessive, that is, for the particular people concerned. And
of course in any training for literary criticism one needs to get quite
clear, what I think usually is clear to those concerned, that they
are expected to use their own Taste, and that it would be a very
bad sign if they never disagreed with Teacher.
Another trouble that seems to crop up is the idea that poetry is
good in proportion as it is complicated, or simply hard to con-
strue; it seems quite a common delusion, and always shocks me
when expressed. And yet I suppose it is very near my own position;
in any case it joins on to 1. A. Richards' Theory of Value as the
satisfaction of more impulses rather than less, and T. S. Eliot's
struggle to find a poetic idiom adequate to the complexity of
modern life. But, without disagreeing with these figures at all,
it is necessary to see the point of the reply of Wordsworth:
The gods approve
The depth and not the tumult of the soul.

Indeed "depth analysis" is probably the best way out of this limit-
ing critical impasse. If you realize the weight of the latent politics
in Wordsworth's apparently simple descriptions of Nature, both in
the metaphors used and in the intense political experiences he had
actually gone through before arriving at them, you are no longer
likely to complain (of the Prelude, at any rate) that he is only
serving up apple-dumplings at his state banquet. It may be, as
some critics would object, that this would only mean going off on
another side-line (though I do not believe so myself) but it would
at least be a reassurance allowing taste to act on the verse without
being put off by its absence of surface complexity.

This content downloaded from

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:37 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 WILLIAM EMPSON 597

The essential thing is to get the process the right way up. If
the reader feels a passage is good, let him by all means direct his
attention to considering what the profound complexities are, which
his theory leads him to expect there; the trouble is when he pre-
sumes it cannot be good if it does not seem complex.
I am thus very little willing to sympathize, in one way or an-
other, with critics who feel objections (or a crusading spirit)
against analytical study of literary texts. But I cannot believe they
mean to go to the startling lengths they sometimes imply. There
is an important distinction to be made here, one that Mr. Ransom
was pointing out not long ago. It is all very well to say that the
learner may learn to use his own taste, and therefore must be
simply "exposed" to the work of art in question; but you have still
got to get him exposed to it. As is particularly clear with children
from homes where they don't read poetry, but also sometimes true
I am afraid of all of us, it is quite possible to be confronted with
a work of art and not see what the point of it is, what it is trying to
do, how one part of it is supposed to affect another. There is room
for a great deal of exposition, in which the business of the critic is
simply to show how the machine is meant to work, and therefore to
show all its working parts in turn. This is the kind of criticism
I am specially interested in, and I think it is often really needed.
Anyone who objects to it because it does not try to give a Final
Valuation of the work, in relation to all other work, seems to me
merely irrelevant. Where I should heartily agree with him would
be if he said that, after all this supplying of the reader or the stu-
dent with the machine, the vital question is whether he can make
it go, whether he gets the experience in question; and also, for that
matter, whether it leaves him better equipped to do the same thing
on another occasion of his own accord.
Going back to the question of Valuation: I do not mean to say,
what would be a very foolish thing to say, that criticism has noth-
ing to do with valuation. It has to do with it all the time, because
you cannot even say just how some element works without suggest-

This content downloaded from

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:37 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 598 KENYON REVIEW

ing how well it works. But to assess the value of the poem as a
whole is not the primary purpose of this kind of criticism, or at
any rate ought only to emerge from the analysis as a whole. There is
a tendency to feel that, if the critic is offering a really efficient
machine, it ought to be able to say whether marmalade is better
than sausages; but even the most expert cook cannot say that; some-
times you want one, sometimes the other. Especially in our own
age, the first to make a serious effort to appreciate the whole variety
of good literature, this kind of absolutism seems to me comical. In
any case, there is no question of the critics providing a Last Judg-
ment about the works of the past; Mr. T. S. Eliot once remarked
that a critic could only hope to illuminate the work of a past period
from the point of view of his own. The metaphor deserves pond-
ering, because it is not denied that he gives real light such as may
clarify the work for a still later generation, but only that he can
claim to look from all possible historical or cultural points of
view at once. As to the poems of his own generation, surely there
can be no boubt that he ought to judge them, after proper mastica-
tion, by his own Taste; any theories he may have, based on the ex-
perience of the past, are precisely what the new work ought to be
testing. Finally I do not deny that it may be a splendid thing to have
a grand synthesis of human experience, a single coherent Theory
of Value which could be applied to all works of art and presumably
to all human situations; but it seems hardly reasonable to grumble,
in the present state of affairs, that nobody has provided one; and
if it did exist it would clearly be a philosophical synthesis rather
than a literary one.
The kind of criticism that most interests me, verbal analysis or
whatever one calls it, is concerned to examine what goes on al-
ready in the mind of a fit reader; sometimes bringing it up from
levels of unconsciousness deep enough to make it look rather sur-
prising, but even so not expected to make much difference to the
feelings of the fit reader after he has got over this surprise. Like
all theories about the action of the mind, in short, there is a sense

This content downloaded from

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:37 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 WILLIAM EMPSON 599

in which it does not need to be

ready acting on it all the time. The only use of it is when some-
thing goes wrong; but this is true of a good deal of knowledge,
such as the ordinary car-driver's knowledge of the working of the
carburetor. A quite practical problem therefore often arises, as to
how much of the analysis needs to be written down; often a very
great deal could be written down which though true doesn't need
saying (except indeed to forestall a certain type of objecter, who
likes to tell the critic he was ignorant of what was too obvious to
need saying). If you are trying to tell your audience what it is
missing, what the Elizabethans for example would feel about a
passage whose language has been dulled, it is clear that you need to
know your audience as well as your topic. I should think indeed
that a profound enough criticism could extract an entire cultural
history from a simple lyric, rather like Lancelot Andrewes and his
fellow preachers, "dividing the Word of God," who were in the
habit of extracting all Protestant theology from a single text. A
critic obviously does not need to do this kind of thing often, if at
all; it is not really a convenient way to teach cultural history.
But it is not my fault, or the fault of any other analytical critic,
that our equipment threatens to make us become bores; it is won-
derful how many ways there are to be a bore, and almost any line
of intellectual effort, however true and useful, presents this threat.
I do not know that any of us would deny that we had better try to
keep to saying what is worth saying.
The business about digging up the Unconscious, at its various
levels, has a separate difficulty of exposition. For example Mr.
Elder Olsen , in a recent number of Modern Philology, was ob-
jecting to a passage I had written long ago (my Ambiguity, p. 49)
about some remarks of Macbeth:

If th' Assassination
Could trammell up the Consequence, and catch
With his surcease, Success. . ..

This content downloaded from

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:37 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 600 KENYON REVIEW

He seemed particularly irritate

technical term used about netting birds, hobbling horses in some
particular way, hooking up pots, levering, and running trolleys on
rails." This and similar remarks about other words in the speech
he called "a meaningless and tasteless muddle," because these
meanings are clearly not all meant to appear. But I do not think
I have ever heard anyone use the word trammell in ordinary life;
it still seems to me sensible to go to the dictionary and find what
sort of thing it "meant" to an Elizabethan. These extra meanings
are present, not in any deep unconscious, but in the preconscious
levels where we handle lexicon and grammar, in our ordinary talk,
at the speed we do (surely the various current uses of a word must
be in the mind somehow, or how can we pick out the right one so
quickly?). These current uses of the word appear to Shakespeare
or his audience as a kind of feeling about what you could do with
it; and the literary effect here, though simple in its way, is I think
very strong. Macbeth is trying to feel that this is only a kind of
engineering problem; if only he can get the murder done efficiently,
he thinks, all this fog will lift and he will be able to see clearly
again. Both the mechanical analogy and its underlying complexity
still seem to me very direct parts of the speech. You may say, no
doubt, that I ought to have indicated how far these meanings were
supposed to be "unconscious," but if I had done that all through
it would have made the book much longer without really making
it clearer. Mr. Olsen goes on to argue, from a kind of Aristotelian
position I think, that the context of the dramatic character, and the
stage reached in the structure of the planned work of art, are both
extremely relevant to a literary effect, without being part of the
meaning of the words used there. This is merely a question of
definition; I should include among what a passage "meant" (to a
fit reader) its whole literary effect, from whatever cause, and I
claim I was patently considering that here in saying what the words
"meant." What I would be inclined to claim, after this point of
definition had been overcome, is that cases arise where we have

This content downloaded from

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:37 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 WILLIAM EMPSON 601

forgotten how the whole structure would strike a contemporary,

and are doubtful between one theory and another (so far from its
always being obvious as Mr. Olsen appears to assert) and then we
can decide between such theories by examining minor word-point-
ers which at the time merely "fitted in" and did not seem important.
I hope that this more or less covers the points at issue; but I
have not yet approached a passage in the original letter which
asked me to discuss the co-operative work of critics, and the social
responsibilities which their method of work requires them to as-
sume, as well as the vital philosophy from which it must have pro-
ceeded. I do not wish to appear flippant, but cannot at the moment
raise the spirits to answer in the high tone which these questions
deserve. As to co-operation, I hope I don't refuse it, but I have
noticed that, when you give a party, the best thing is not to rush
at everybody and try to force them to talk to each other; in a party
that goes unexpectedly well (in the way of making disparate
groups talk to each other) you often notice that the host has been
stuck away in the corner most of the time, talking to some expert
about a technical point he is really interested in. As to responsi-
bility, there was an earnest lady in the last war who took the op-
portunity of an introduction to President Roosevelt to urge upon
him the great weight of the responsibility which she trusted he
was properly conscious of, and his only reply (with a rudeness
quite unusual to him) was an impatient movement of his hand.
Obviously it would have made his judgment fatally bad if he wor-
ried all the time about his responsibilities. Even in so humble a
walk of life as literary criticism, it seems to me, a man might feel
the same; the best thing for him to do as a critic is to do his work
as best he can, and he has still plenty of responsibilities as a so-
cial being. But of course I do not mean to deny that he really
has responsibilities as a critic too. It seems clear that critics have
been making a steady effort to act on them.

[This Symposium will be continued by other critics. - Editors.]

This content downloaded from

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:37 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms