‘New’ Guides to the Historically Perplexed

Summary

IN remarks trumpeted as ‘Last Words on George Herbert’, William Empson declares, ‘I hope it is now clear that I claim to have a great deal of knowledge about Herbert.’ Perhaps these apocalyptic ‘last words’ are not so remarkable, coming from a critic whom the New Historicist hails as ‘Modernism’s Einstein among literary critics’. But as they ring with the clarion tones of logical empiricism, they do not sort well with New Historicist antagonism to traditional norms of ‘objectivity’ and ‘reason’. If ‘seventh-type Empsonian ambiguity is the literary-critical equivalent of quantum mechanics’ (Bate, Genius, p. 315), why shouldn’t Empson have the ‘last words on George Herbert’? Indeed, the hint of finality in these ‘last words’ makes one thing ‘clear’. In the end, l’enfant terrible of New Criticism holds fast to the ‘quantum-mechanics’ predilection of his critical method for psychoanalytic hypotheses: ‘I claim to know … what was going on in Herbert’s mind when he wrote [the poem in question], without his knowledge and against his intention …’

I will be examining assumptions indicated here only by ellipses, but first I want to call attention to the way in which Empson’s seventh type of ambiguity poses the question of historical interpretation at stake in his famous exchange with Rosemond Tuve. For the methodological issue dividing historical from impressionist criticism (whether the latter is known as New Criticism, formalism, close reading, reader response, thick description, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, or deconstruction) has not gone away. Far from it. New Historicist adulation of Empson establishes him as one of that sodality’s enabling figures. Hence, their rapt inattention to the dangers of hyperbole in characterising their progenitor: Empson is their ‘critical guide’, ‘most original’, ‘brilliant’, ‘typically brilliant’, ‘most brilliant’. His literary writings are the critical equivalent of Heisenberg and Einstein combined. Despite the claim that political correctness in the humanities has undermined Western institutions, the pernicious effects of partisan posturing in literary criticism have been mostly harmless. But when New Historicists say that ‘Empson is a better guide to historical criticism than Tuve’ (Strier, Resistant Structures, p. 21), the meaning of such terms as ‘history,’ ‘criticism’ and ‘guidance’ needs clarification.