Empson, william seven types of ambiguity

cr: LU < CD _1 6841 < m OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY / Accession No P^r No C $ * Caii ""~ Author Title Tbis book should be returned on or last / SEVEN TYPES'OF AMBIGUITY By the Same Author SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL POEMS (Chatto &T MnJus) THE GATHERING STORM (Faber 5? Faber) Seven Types Of Ambiguity William Empson 1949 Chatto and Windus LONDON FIRST EDITION 1930 SECOND EDITION (REVISED AND RE-SET) 1947 REPRINTED 1949 PUBLISHED BY Chatto and Windus LONDON * Clarke, Irwin and Co TORONTO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Ltd SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 251 that of repeating the original effect, in a plainer form But in an analysis, whose object is to show the modes of action of a poetical effect, the author may safely insist on the obvious because the reader feels willing that the process should be complete Indeed, it is then as arrogant in the author to hint at a subtlety as to explain it too fully; firstly, because he implies that those who not know it already are not worth his notice; secondly, because he assumes^that there is no more to know For some readers may take the subtlety in question for granted, so they will think the hint must refer to something still more subtle Not to explain oneself at length in such a case is a snobbery in the author and excites an opposing snobbery in the reader; It is a distressing and common feature of modern aesthetics, due to disorientation and a forlorn sense that the matter much more no use appealing to the reason of ordinary (it is has one got to keep up one's dignity) than to any unpeople, That is one of the fortunate qualities in the aestheticians reasons why the cult of irrationalism is such a bore analytical is more cheerful than appreciative criticism (both, of course, must be present) precisely because there is less need to agonise is inexplicable ; over these questions of tone It may be said that the business of analysis is to progress from poetical to prosaic, from intuitive to intellectual, knowledge; evidently these are just the same sort of opposites, in that each assumes the other is also there But the idea of this doublet certainly enshrines some of the advantages of analysis, and it may be as well to show how I have been using it You may know be satisfying to for the moment ; precisely how feeling; how to express the thing conceived clearly, but alone, in your mind That, in its appreciation of, and dependence on, the immediate object or state of mind, is poetical knowledge (It is true that poetry is largely the perception of the what it will you are between several such things, but then it is the relations which are known poetically.) You may, on the other hand, be relations able to put the object known into a field of similar objects, in some order, so that it has some degree of balance and safety; you may know several ways of getting to the thing, other things it b it different, enough of its ingredients and the way they like are put together to retain control over the situation if some SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 252 are missing or if the conditions are altered; the thing can be said to your neighbours, and has enough valencies in your mind for it to be connected with a variety of other things into a variety of different classes That, from its administrative point of view, desire to put the thing known into a coherent structure, prosaic knowledge Thus a poetical word is a thing conceived from is its and includes all its meanings; a prosaic word and might have been used differently in itself useful One cannot is flat and conceive observation except in terms of compari- on recognition; immediate and knowledge past experience presuppose one another; thus the question in any particular case must be largely as to what is uppermost in your mind But this way of using the word-pair son, or comparison except as based one an answer against those who say that analysis bad for poetry; it often happens that, for historical reasons or what not, one can no longer appreciate a thing directly by poetical knowledge, and yet can rediscover it in a more controlled form at least gives is by prosaic knowledge But even if we abandon the oppositions between thought and feeling, and attend to the intellectual notion of explanation, the situation is not much more encouraging It is a matter of luck whether or not you have in your language or your supply of intellectual operations anything which, for a particular problem, and this may be true even in a field of known will be of use limitation, for instance, it is a matter of luck whether you can find a construction in Euclidean geometry (it would remain so even whereas in Analytical geometry there will if you always could) always be a way of setting about the proof of a proposition, if it is a recognisably geometrical one, but it is a matter of luck whether or not it is too complicated for human patience And it is only by chance that these two matters of chance will work out ; ; the same in a particular case Things temporarily or permanently inexplicable are not, therefore, to be thought of as essentially different from things that can be explained in some terms you happen think to have at your disposal; nor can different unless there them likely to be you have reason to is a great deal about the inexplicable things that you already know Explanations of literary matters, to elaborate a perhaps rather trivial analogy, involving as they much apparently random invention, are SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY more 253 Pure than Analytical geometry, and, if you cannot think of a construction, that may show that you would be wise to use a different set of methods, but cannot show the problem is like of a new kind have been insisting on this because it seems important that people should believe that such explanations are possible, even if they have never yet been performed; but the analogy is useful in another way, through giving the notion of a construction I Continually, in order to paraphrase a piece of verse, it is necessary to drag in some quite irrelevant conceptions; thus I have often been puzzied by finding it necessary to go and look things up machinery to express distinctions that were in order to find already in my mind; indeed, this is involved in the very notion of that activity, for how else would one know what to look up ? Such machinery is necessary, partly so as to look as if you knew what you were talking about, partly as a matter of 'style,' and partly from the basic assumption of prose that all the parts of speech must have some meaning (These three give the same idea with increasing generality.) Otherwise, one would be continually stating relations between unknown or indefinite objects, or only stating something about such relations, themselves unknown and indefinite, in a way which probably reflects accurately the nature of your statement, but to which only the pure mathematician is accustomed So that many of my explanations may be demonstrably wrong, and yet efficient for their purpose, and vice versa The notion of a construction also shows the dangers of the process it describes With a moderate intellectual apparatus one should be able to draw irrelevant distinctions without limit, and even those that are of linguistic interest need not be of interest to a reader of the poem When a poem refers simply and unambiguously to a field it is usually possible to plant a hedge across the field, and say triumphantly that two contiguous fields were being described by an ambiguity This may be of some use in that it shows the suppose that there field to is have extension, but one must not anything in a right apprehension of the which corresponds to one's own hedge Thus I think my seven types form an immediately useful set of distinctions, but to a more serious analysis they would probably appear trivial field 254 SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY I call them to be distinguished from one another merely as a means of stringing examples, but because, in complicated matters, any distinction between cases, however irrelevant, may serve to heighten one's consciousness of the and hardly useful, not cases themselves Since, however, I admit that the analysis of a poem can only be a long way of saying what is said anyhow by the poem it analyses, that it does not show how the devices it describes can be invented or used, that it gives no source of information about them which can replace that of normal sensibility, and that it is only tolerable in so far as it is in some way useful, I suppose I ought, in conclusion, to say what use I think it can be It need not be any Normal sensibility is a tissue of what has been conscious theory made habitual and returned to the pre-conscious, and, therefore, conscious theory may make an addition to sensibility even though it draws no (or no true) conclusion, formulates no general theory, in the scientific sense, which and makes quickly available the results which it Such an advance in the machinery of description makes a reader feel stronger about his appreciations, more reliably able to distinguish the private or accidental from the critically important or repeatable, more confident of the reality reconciles describes (that is, the transferability) of his experiences; adds, in short, in the mind of the reader to the things there to be described, whether or not it makes those particular things more describable is needed for literary satisfaction is not, 'this is beautiful because of such and such a theory/ but 'this is all right; I am I know the kind of way in which feeling correctly about this it is meant to be affecting me.' Of course, this distinction is not new, but it needs repeating; indeed, one often finds the surrealist type of critic saying that poetry would have been just the same if no criticism had ever been written So Pope, for instance, would have written just the same if he had had no critical dogmas Now it is unwise to say blankly that a theorist is talking nonsense (for instance, it is no use saying that all men are not equal) because he may consciously be making a paradox to imply a larger truth; thus, even here, there would be a little truth in saying that Pope could afford to forget his dogmas, so deeply had they become part of h'*s What ; SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY sensibility And certainly one is again faced with the 255 problem about the hen and the egg; the dogma produces the sensibility, but it oust itself have been produced by it But to say that the dogma does not influence the sensibility is absurd People only say it when they are trying to put the sensibility in a peculiar dogma The conflict between the and aesthetic points of view, between which I have been state of control over the scientific trying to arbitrate, gives them a reason; people feel uncertain as to wha^ sort of validity a critical dogma can have, how far one ought to Le trying to be independent of one's own age, how far one ought to be trying to be independent of one's own preferences, and not want their sensibility to be justified by reasons because they are afraid that once they start reasoning they will fall into the wrong point of view Another such cause, arising out of this, has been mentioned already; it is only recently that the public, as a whole, has come to admire a great variety of different styles of poetry, requiring a great variety of critical dogmas, simultaneously, so as to need not so much a single habit for the reading of poetry as a sort of understanding which enables one to jump neatly from one style to another This produces a sort of anxious watchfulness over the feelings excited by poetry; it is important not to forget what sort of poetry this is and so allow oneself to have the wrong feelings For such reasons, then, necessary for us to protect our sensibility against critical dogma, but it is just because of this that the reassurance given by some machinery for analysis has it is become so necessary in its turn Thus I suppose that all presentday readers of poetry would agree that some modern poets are charlatans, though different people would attach this floating suspicion to different poets but they have no positive machinery, ; such as Dr Johnson thought he had, to a great extent rightly, by which such a fact could be proved It is not that such machinery is unknown so much as that it is unpopular people feel that, because it must always be inadequate, it must always be unfair The result is a certain lack of positive satisfaction in the reading of any poetry; doubt becomes a permanent background of the mind, both as to whether the thing is being interpreted ightly and as to whether, if it is, one ought to allow one; self to feel pleased Evidently, in the lack of any machinery of SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY 256 analysis, such as can be thought moderately reliable, to decide whether one's attitude is right, this leads to a sterility of emotion such as makes it hardly worth while to read the poetrj at all It is not surprising, then, that this age should need, if not really an explanation of any one sort of poetry, still the general assurance which comes of a belief that all sorts of poetry may be conceived as explicable I should claim, then, that for those novelties, having to It who find this book contains make poetry more beautiful, without their ever remember the novelties, or endeavour to apply them seems a it will sufficient apology for many niggling pages INDEX Anon., 48, 114, 162 Marlowe, 31, 206 Beerbohm, Max, 176-7 Marvell, 80, 104-6, 166-73 Meredith, 20 Milton, 12, 102-4, Ir Brooke, Rupert, 205 Browning, 20, 28 Byron, ~* Nash, 25-7, 115 Nicolson, Harold, 20 Carew, 105, 173 Chaucer, 58-68, 74 Coleridge, 20, 238 Crashaw, 116, 217-24, 240, 246 Donne, 51, 71, 124, Paget, Sir Richard, 14-15, 250 Peacock, 22 Pope, 22, 70-4, 83, 108, 117, 125-8, 149-51, 185, 203-4, 241 Proust, 131, 245, 249 Punch, 65 139-47, 199-200 Dryden, 7, 74-6, 106-7, 219, 222 Eliot, I T S., 62, 77-9, 88, 9%~9> 157-60 Racine, Read, Herbert, Richards, I A., 148, 225, 238 Fitzgerald, 182 Ford, 155 Freud, 162, 194, 223, 226 Scott, Sir Walter, 118 Shakespeare, 46, 49, 59, 80-8, Gibbon, 71 Gray, 77, 121-3 Grierson, H J C., 155, 206 AWs 140 Well that Ends Well, 95, 99 Conolanus, 42-3, 90, 207 Hamlet, 91, 96-7, 211-14 i Henry IV, 93, 97, 116, 206 Herbert, 118-19, 129-31, 175, 183-4, 218, 224, 226-33 Herrick, 162 Hood, 109-12 Hopkins, G M., 148, 225 Housman, A E., 32 Henry V, 112-13 Lear, 45, 89 Macbeth, 18-20, 45, 49, 82-3, 101, 200-3, 209 Measure for Measure, 84, 92, Johnson, 12, 68, 87, 107-8, 114, 12 -3, 199, 244, 255 Jonson, 27, 242 100, 155, 180, 202 Merchant of Venice, 43-4 Keats, 20, 205, 214-17 Othello, 90, 93, 94, 185-6 Sonnets, 2, 50-6, 86, 133-8 Troilus and Cressida, 93, 99, Lovelace 209- o Lyly, 168 178-180, 209 Twelfth Night, 98 257 INDEX 2S Shelley, 20, 156-61, Vaughan, 174-5 "166 Vergil, 10 Sidney, 34-8 Sitwell, Edith, 12-14 Spenser, 33-4, 173, 151, 207-8 Stein, Gertrude, Waley, Arthur, 23 Swinburne, Wordsworth, 20, 151-4, 190 13, 20, 163-5, 2U WildCi Qscar, 187 Synge, 4-5, 38-42 Tennyson, 1 20, 182 Theobald, 83-6 , Yeats, W B., 187-90 Young, 108 Printed in Great Britain at Hopetoun Street, Edinburgh, by T and A CONSTABLE LTD Printers to the University of Edinburgh ... returned on or last / SEVEN TYPES' OF AMBIGUITY By the Same Author SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL POEMS (Chatto &T MnJus) THE GATHERING STORM (Faber 5? Faber) Seven Types Of Ambiguity William Empson 1949... students off the book It is clear that we have to exercise a deal of skill in cutting out implications that aren't good wanted in SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY xiii reading poems, and the proof of our... to such or such a degree The student of to ; SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY xii poetry, on the other hand, has as his first business the passing of a judgement of value It is not his main, or even