4

The Limits of Poetic Consciousness

It is clear, then, that Empson knows Graves’s pre-Riding work very well before meeting with Richards and discussing with him the method of the “‘Robert Graves’ school of criticism,” and we can see that he has paid particular attention to Graves’s theories about the conflicted nature of human consciousness in general and of poetic consciousness in particular. One of Graves’s main interests in his early work is to explain the limits of conscious control in the creation of poetry, as it is for Empson in many parts of Seven Types of Ambiguity, and in Chapter Three especially. For Graves, of course, conflicting meanings in a poem are a sign of conflicted consciousness in the poet. And his understanding of the relationship between conflict and poetry precludes the possibility of the poet’s becoming completely aware of his conflict if his poetry is to remain true. In Chapter Three of Seven Types of Ambiguity, however, Empson strives to identify a type of ambiguity that is entirely conscious, implicitly in opposition to Graves’s claims for the comprehensiveness of his conflict theory. And in Chapter Seven, he offers in “a doctrinal poem by George Herbert,” “The Sacrifice,” an example of conflict so thoroughly impersonalized as theological doctrine as to prevent the expression of personal conflict in the poem: “the theological system is accepted so completely that the poet is only its mouthpiece … [T] o this extent, the poem is outside the ‘conflict’ theory of poetry.”¹

The persuasiveness of Graves’s account of conflict in poetry, however, seems to leave Empson conceding by each chapter’s end that the extreme kind of poetic consciousness he places outside of Graves’s conflict theory is merely a theoretical limit. It is perhaps impossible of actualization: “‘trying not to be ambiguous’ is itself very indefinite and treacherous; it involves problems of all kinds as to what a poet can try to do, how much of his activity he is conscious of, and how much of his activity he could become conscious of if he tried.”² And such a degree of poetic consciousness would certainly be difficult for the critic to discern and determine: “Certainly it is hard to say whether a poet is conscious of a particular implication in his work, he has so many other things to think of.”³ It seems that ambiguous meanings in a poem are always potentially, even if indeterminably, a sign of at least minimally conflicted consciousness in the poet.

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Early in Poetic Unreason, in a chapter called “A Theory of Consciousness,” Graves explains the need to revise the distinction that he had assumed in On English Poetry between the conscious and the unconscious:

Hitherto I held that there were two varieties of action and two varieties of thought, in either case known as conscious and unconscious, and that in consciousness and unconsciousness, thought and action derived from each other. In action I distinguished between the “conscious” or deliberate action of, say, striking a golf ball in a particular manner, and what is called the “unconscious” or unwitting action of, say, slightly frowning when an opponent holes an unlikely putt. In thought, I distinguished between, say, a deliberate poetic allegory in the established tradition and an unwitting uprush of inspired poetry when in an actual state of dream. These certainly are distinctions with a meaning, but my fault as it appears now was that of believing all mental activity to belong to one or the other category.⁴

Graves now asserts that there is another degree of unconsciousness, a state of non-consciousness beyond the unwitting: “I now hold that consciousness and un- or non-consciousness can be distinguished, but in a wider sense than merely as the unwitting and deliberate; that the nature of non-consciousness is that we can never have any knowledge of its character as we may eventually have knowledge of the unwitting.”⁵ Finding that “consciousness is not an even flow like a looking-glass vista,” “in any series of action – knowledge – thought … there is continuous discrepancy between like units,” Graves introduces this new aspect of non-consciousness to explain gaps in consciousness: “to me the only way of accounting for these discrepancies is the intervention of a continuously interrupting and continuously interrupted sequence of non-conscious activity, of which knowledge can never, as I have suggested, appear, but which must be postulated if the logical concatenation of cause and effect is to be maintained.”⁶

Graves’s reasoning is of the sort that poststructuralists would call “logocentric”: discrepancy in meaning is taken to be a sign of that in which discrepancy is resolved. Yet his observation that the failure of signifiers to converge upon a single signified is an inescapable fact of life is consistent with the same sort of insight into sign systems that Saussure offered a generation earlier, and that Derrida would offer a generation or two later. As it is, Graves’s thinking here preserves a vaguely theological meta-narrative in which non-consciousness is the first and transcendent signifier: “Action does not directly proceed from thought, nor knowledge from action, nor thought from knowledge, but these phases of consciousness are each derived from moments of non-conscious activity, a sort of invisible property-shifting between each phase.”⁷ Non-consciousness is effectively a construct that Graves invents to preserve order in the midst of the disorder he cannot otherwise explain.

In his concluding chapter, Empson reasons along very similar lines but much more self-consciously. Empson’s encounter with interpretive disorder is framed in terms of a theoretical question about “the problem as to belief in poetry,” that is “whether it is necessary to share the opinions of the poet if you are to understand his sensibility,” and is answered in terms of vaguely sociological observations:

In the last few generations literary people have been trained socially to pick up hints at once about people’s opinions, and to accept them, while in the company of their owners, with as little fuss as possible; I might say, putting this more strongly, that in the present state of indecision of the cultured world people do, in fact, hold all the beliefs, however contradictory, that turn up in poetry, in the sense that they are liable to use them all in coming to decisions. It is for reasons of this sort that the habit of reading a wide variety of different sorts of poetry, which has, after all, only recently been contracted by any public as a whole, gives to the act of appreciation a puzzling complexity, tends to make people less sure of their own minds, and makes it necessary to be able to fall back on some intelligible process of interpretation.⁸

In such a context, Empson suggests, “any intellectual framework that seems relevant is very encouraging … whether it actually ‘explains’ anything or not; if you feel that your reactions could be put into a rational scheme that you can roughly imagine, you become willing, for instance, to abandon yourself to the ecstasies of the Romantic Movement … with much less fear for your critical self-respect.”⁹ Empson duly considers his own practice: “The same machinery of reassurance, I suppose, is sought for in my use of phrases like ‘outside the focus of consciousness,’ meaning something imagined as other than the pre-, the un-, the sub-, the non-, and the half-, conscious, but defensible in the same sorts of ways.”¹⁰ By his own contribution of an “outside-consciousness” to a list that includes Graves’s “non-consciousness,” Empson clearly recognizes both that Graves defines his property-shifting non-consciousness as a reassuring dodge in the direction of that which is intellectually explicable and that he himself has performed the same dodge for the same reassurance; indeed, he argues that “To give a reassurance of this kind … is the main function of analytical criticism.”¹¹

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Graves’s hypothesis of a variously and multiply signifying nonconsciousness becomes the engine of Graves’s conflict theory of poetry: “When we say that two experiences are continuous, we mean no more than this, that we do not know what the new experience is going to be, but that when it has come, we have to say that it is continuous with its predecessor. The nature of the particular continuity can only be given after the event. In the same way a poem will never be a copy of the poet’s past life. It will be a new experience, but it will be continuous with his past life in the sense that but for this, it could itself never have come into existence. The precise form the poem will take cannot be known until it has taken that form. Non-conscious experience can never be dictated to by a predicting consciousness.”¹² This hypothesis allows him to explain both how so much more meaning than the poet deliberately intends can get into a poem and how so much more meaning than the poet can ever understand remains always to be discovered in the poem by future readers, including the poet himself.

The “continuous discrepancy between the units” “in any series of action – knowledge – thought,” on the one hand, and the ostensibly necessary postulate of a continuous non-consciousness within which such units cohere, on the other, leaves consciousness constructing a narrative of continuity after the event.¹³ The only element that Graves rules out of such a narrative is identity: “no action is merely reproduction of a previous action”; “no thought or mental picture can recur identically”; “a poem will never be a copy of the poet’s past life.”¹⁴ And so a poem can never be identical with a poet’s conscious intention, whether consciousness of that intention precedes the composition of the poem ( “Non-conscious experience can never be dictated to by a predicting consciousness”), or whether consciousness of that intention seems coincident with the composition of the poem ( “The precise form the poem will take cannot be known until it has taken form”).¹⁵

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Riding re-presents these ideas in terms of the distinctive critical and philosophical idiom she developed in Contemporaries and Snobs (1927) and Anarchism Is Not Enough (1928), books that she was writing while collaborating with Graves on A Survey of Modernist Poetry and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies from 1926 to 1928. Her work at this time shows, like Empson’s, how Graves’s early work established the question of the relationship between the poet’s intention and the poem itself as a topic for contemporary theorists to consider.

In Contemporaries and Snobs, Riding repudiates “poetry whose only subject is the psychology of the poet and whose final value is scientific.”¹⁶ Such poetry gives rise to the false poem – a poem that, in Graves’s terms, is imagined as attempting to copy the poet’s past life, to reproduce a previous action, to re-present a mental picture. In Riding’s terms, “False poems … are those written to respond to tests of reality imposed by the contemporary mind and are therefore able to satisfy them better than any true one. The creative history of the false poem is the age, the author sensible of the age and the set of outer circumstances involved in his delicate adjustment to the age at a particular moment, in a particular place. Nothing remains beyond this, no life, no element, as in the true poem, untranslatable except in the terms provided by the poem itself. In the true poem these terms form a measurement that did not exist, and the test of the poem’s reality is: to what degree is it a new dimension of reality?”¹⁷ Riding’s “true poem” is essentially Graves’s poem that “cannot be known until it has taken form.”

In terms of the history of New Criticism, Riding’s great contribution to the development of Graves’s idea is to assert that this new reality, non-identical with any other aspect of reality, is effectively a person: “The only difference between a poem and a person is that in a poem being is the final state, in a person the preliminary state. These two kinds of realities, that of the person, that of the poem, stand at one end and the other of the poet’s mind, which is but progressive experience made into a recurrent sequence circulating between one kind of reality and the other without destroying one reality in the other.”¹⁸ And so “the poem itself is supreme, above persons; judging rather than judged … it is even able to make a reader of its author. It comes to be because an individual mind is clear enough to perceive it and then to become its instrument.”¹⁹ Riding recognizes that discrepancy between the meaning of the poem and the meaning intended by the author not only makes the author a reader of the poem, but also makes the poem a being with a mind of its own.

If one consults (and perhaps prefers) the obscurer terms of Anarchism Is Not Enough, one finds that the poem is “nothing,” but a “nothing” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential sense, according to which the singular distinction of the human being is to be no such thing as a tool or a constructed object whose essence precedes its existence in the mind of its creator, for the human being’s existence is prior to its essence.²⁰ According to Riding, “A poem is nothing … Why is it nothing? Because it cannot be looked at, heard, touched or read … It is not an effect … of experience; it is the result of an ability to create a vacuum in experience – it is a vacuum and therefore nothing … Since it is a vacuum it is nothing for which the poet can flatter himself or receive flattery. Since it is a vacuum it cannot be reproduced in an audience. A vacuum is unalterably and untransferably a vacuum – the only thing that can happen to it is destruction.”²¹ Riding’s vacuum takes the place of Graves’s non-consciousness. She recognizes the implications of Graves’s representation of the poem as non-identical with any element of the world from which it emerges – whether poet’s intention, poet’s experience, or world’s event. Riding’s admirer Auden, who often echoes her poetry, echoes this aspect of her literary theorizing when he declares that “Poetry makes nothing happen,” such that a line from “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” that might seem defeatist or quietist is from Riding’s existential point of view positively triumphant.²²

Like Riding, Empson is suspicious of Graves’s psychological explanation of poetry. He complains at the beginning of Chapter Three about the unhelpfulness in literary matters of certain oppositions between the terms “conscious” and “unconscious”: “one must continually feel doubtful about antitheses involving the idea of [the] ‘unconscious,’ which, like the infinities of mathematics, may be a convenient fiction or a product of definition.”²³ In Graves’s new theory “on the much debated and very complicated subject of ‘Consciousness,’” “non-consciousness” certainly emerges as what Empson would call a “product of definition” – just as an idea of non-good might emerge from a definition of good.²⁴ It is also what Empson would call a most “convenient fiction,” since, although its existence cannot be demonstrated otherwise than by definition, it fortunately maintains at least narratively the logical concatenation of cause and effect. It is “the only way of accounting for … discrepancies,” says Graves; it “must be postulated.”²⁵

Empson, as we have seen, ultimately agrees – he characterizes his own parallel concept of an “outside the focus of consciousness” as a conveniently reassuring fiction – yet in Chapter Three, looking down on the unconscious by characterizing a certain “variety of the ‘conflict’ theory of poetry” as a “rather limited formula,” he makes clear just whose antitheses about conscious and unconscious ideas make him doubtful.²⁶ Empson implies, that is, that the antitheses involving the idea of the unconscious about which he personally feels doubtful are to be found in the work of Graves rather than the work of Freud. He clearly has nothing against psychoanalysis as Freud presents it: he refers to Freud approvingly every time he mentions him in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Furthermore, he rather boldly supplements his then anti-Freudian supervisor’s 1926 essay on Hopkins’s contradictory impulses in “The Windhover” ( “I am indebted to Dr. Richards for this case; he has already written excellently about it”) with a pointedly Freudian perspective on the psychological state implied by such contradiction: “in the first three lines of the sestet we seem to have a case of the Freudian use of opposites, where two things thought of as incompatible, but desired intensely by different systems of judgments, are spoken of simultaneously by words applying to both.”²⁷

We can see that Empson’s recollection in the 1970s that he was very keen on Freud in the 1920s is accurate insofar as he stands up for Freud in the face of his supervisor’s hostility, but insofar as he echoes his supervisor’s complaint that Graves’s conflict theory is inadequate, he seems a long way from acknowledging what he would later tell Riding: that he regarded Graves’s conflict theory as “the necessary background for a theory of poetical ambiguity.”²⁸ These passages reveal Empson’s anxiety about not only whether his commitment to Graves’s method of reading involves him in a psychological paradigm that his thesis director regards with condescension and disdain, but also whether it aligns him with a critic Richards regards as representing “the gravest” psychoanalytical danger.²⁹ Empson undoubtedly has Richards in mind when he says that “one must continually feel doubtful” of “antitheses involving the idea of ‘unconscious.’”³⁰ His description of the unconscious as, at times, a “convenient fiction” clearly echoes Richards’s claim that “an unconscious mind is a fairly evident fiction.”³¹ To have Richards in mind on this point is also to have Richards’s criticism of Graves in mind: “Mr Graves has attempted to analyse Kubla Khan … The reader acquainted with current methods of analysis can imagine the results of a thoroughgoing Freudian onslaught”; “the attempt to display the inner working of the artist’s mind by the evidence of his work alone must be subject to the gravest dangers.”³²

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From the beginning of his discussion of ambiguity of the third type, Empson foregrounds the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious. We learn that “an ambiguity of the third type, considered as a verbal matter, occurs when two ideas, which are connected only by being both relevant in the context, can be given in one word simultaneously.”³³ That the ideas are connected only by being both relevant in context is crucial – “they are two pieces of information, two parts of the narrative” – for the point of this type of ambiguity “is the sharpness of distinction between two meanings, of which the reader is forced to be aware.”³⁴ By definition, ambiguity of the third type requires the reader to be conscious of it as ambiguity. Awareness is all: “I am not using the word ‘ambiguity’ in a logical, but in a psychological sense; the notion of relevance is necessary to pick out cases of it, and it is conceived as always conscious in one mode or another.”³⁵

For the reader not to be conscious of the two meanings is to miss part of the poem’s story or information. Similarly, for the poet not to have become conscious of the one word that does the work of two is to have made a poem longer, less elegant, and less efficient than it need be. Furthermore, for the reader to be conscious of “an additional effect” beyond the connections between the meanings of a pun, and for the poet to express more than narrative information in the two meanings of the pun (for example, to make it also an intimate “expression of sensibility”), is to create a different type of ambiguity.³⁶ In ambiguity of the third type there can be no meaning for reader or writer that is surplus to this narrow informational focus of consciousness.

Clearly Empson would like to confine ambiguity of the third type to one’s being “mainly conscious of the pun, not of its consequences”; to one’s being conscious of its providing two meanings of strictly narrative consequence, that is, rather than one’s being conscious of the further possible meanings that the pun might present concerning the mood or state of mind of the poet (or mood or state of mind of the character) who speaks the pun. His interest is in the poet’s controlling the device of ambiguity and the reader’s appreciating it; that is, in its function as a practical device for providing narrative information only: “I want to insist that the question is not here of ‘consciousness’ of a device as a whole, but of consciousness of a particular part of it … [C] lear or wide distinction between the two meanings concerned is likely to place the ambiguity at the focus of consciousness … [to] make it more obvious to the reader, more dependent on being overtly observed, and less intimately an expression of sensibility.”³⁷

Of course Empson’s language of degree here – this part of the device is more conscious, that part less – is ambiguous in precisely the ways he defines ambiguity throughout his study and so implicitly engages the question that Graves raises: whether a nonconscious activity surplus to the activity of consciousness can ever be escaped or eliminated.

As we have seen, wrestling in his early work with this question of the role of consciousness in poetic creation, especially as seen in his revision of his distinction between “a deliberate poetic allegory in the established tradition and an unwitting uprush of inspired poetry when in a state of actual dream,” Graves no longer believes that such a distinction can be maintained: “Between the ‘deliberate’ and the ‘unwitting’ there is, so far as I can see, only this distinction, that the ‘deliberate’ is in the present tense, the ‘unwitting’ in the past.”³⁸ Funded by and founded upon the non-conscious, the conscious and the unconscious are always already interpenetrated, a fact that needs only a change of perspective to show itself. The impact upon Empson of Graves’s explicit claim in Poetic Unreason, and of his implicit claim throughout his early work, that there is always, necessarily, a meaning that is surplus to consciousness in every true poem is evident in Empson’s failure to convince himself that he has ever identified a pure example of type-three ambiguity. As he writes Chapter Three, Empson finds himself always quite adept at the change of perspective that reveals the unconscious within his examples of ambiguity of the third type.

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The worry for Empson is that if it is not possible for the poet or the reader to limit consciousness to the particular part of a pun that is its narrative information, and if the pun always already has a meaning in addition to the conscious one and so is justified in other literary terms, then his reader “may say that, in so far as an ambiguity is justified, it is moved upwards or downwards on my scale out of the third type,” or may say that “if the pun is producing no additional effect it has no function and is of no interest.”³⁹ Empson concedes that “if this were true, the type would gain in theoretical importance but contain no examples of interest to the reader of poetry.”⁴⁰ In other words, it would be no more than a product of definition. It would posit a circumscription of language by consciousness never realizable to the degree of pureness or completeness required by the definition of this type of ambiguity.

Empson initially resists the hypothesis that ambiguity of the third type has no poetic function and is of no poetic interest: “I think it is not true, because the matter is complicated by questions of consciousness, of the direction of the reader’s attention, of the interaction between separated parts of his mind, and of the means by which a pun can be justified to him.”⁴¹ That is, he implies that a reader can, in practice, identify and respond to type-three ambiguity. As Empson explains, “I mean by the conscious part of the effect the most interesting part, the part to which it is most natural to direct your attention.”⁴² Of course, the reader’s consciousness can change, so it can change the nature of the ambiguity in the poem. In “The Temple,” for instance, Herbert “has put to extraordinary uses these dry and detached symbols,” has made them “apply to three different situations, and from this point of view the poem belongs to my third type.”⁴³ The reader initially finds this aspect of the poem most interesting and naturally directs attention towards it, but he eventually experiences the poem differently: “One may say … that in ordinary careful reading this poem is of the third type, but when you know it sufficiently well, and have accepted it, it becomes ambiguity of the first or (since it is verbally ingenious) of the second type.”⁴⁴

At least for a little while, it seems, the reader experiences ambiguity of the third type, yet Empson himself remains unconvinced that he has ever isolated a pure example of this: “I consider that I have shown by examples how an ambiguity can approach the third-type definition, which is perhaps rather like a limit.”⁴⁵ The language is mathematical: in mathematics, a “limit” is a quantity which a function or sum of a series can be made to approach as closely as desired. The problem is that the limit at infinity of the function of type-three ambiguity, from the point of view of literary criticism, is zero: at its limit, this type of ambiguity “has no function and is of no interest.”⁴⁶

And so Empson ambiguously suggests that ambiguity of the third type, as the “connection between the two halves of an ornamental comparison, the two meanings of a pun,” approaches zero (the state of “no connection”), seems to give only “trivial” pleasure.⁴⁷ He chooses this word advisedly, for in mathematics the word trivial describes something that gives rise to no difficulty and so, in Empson’s words, “is of no interest.”⁴⁸ It denotes objects that have a very simple structure (such as an empty set, a set containing no numbers) and proofs or solutions (to an equation) that are very simple but for the sake of completeness cannot be ignored. This is precisely what Empson wishes to acknowledge about ambiguity of the third type: at its limit, this type of ambiguity is indeed “trivial” ( “it has no function and is of no interest”), yet it retains “theoretical importance.” There is also some value in the “formal satisfaction” of “a connection between two ideas” even as they approach the limit of “no connection” and the set of type-three ambiguity thereby becomes empty of literary import: “there is at least the pleasure … in seeing the shell even when it is empty.”⁴⁹

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The mathematical analogies by which Empson proceeds throughout Chapter Three constitute another hint that it is suffused with anxiety about the influence on him of Graves’s theories about the unconscious. Early in the chapter, Empson links hypotheses about the unconscious to hypotheses about infinity: “one must continually feel doubtful about antitheses involving the idea of [the] ‘unconscious,’ which, like the infinities of mathematics, may be a convenient fiction or a product of definition.”⁵⁰ It is possible that this analogy is suggested to Empson by Graves’s having introduced mathematical language into his own account of the conscious and the unconscious.

Graves frequently mentions mathematics; in fact, he concludes the chapter “A Theory of Consciousness” by pointing to mathematics as a mode of thought that shows it is a mistake to use “the words ‘primitive’ and ‘fantastic’ and ‘childish’ and ‘imaginary’ as qualifying the emotional mode of thought as opposed to the intellectual mode.”⁵¹ But the most interesting mathematical aspect of his writing consists of his use of a vocabulary that is often meaningfully ambiguous in mathematical ways: “Consciousness is a term capable of vertical and horizontal subdividing, vertically into deliberate and unwitting, horizontally into action, knowledge (or ‘pure consciousness’) and thought … In any series of action–knowledge–thought; action–knowledge–thought; action–knowledge–thought, there is continuous discrepancy between the units.”⁵² The words “term,” “series,” and “sequence” all have a special mathematical meaning in addition to their more general meanings. In mathematics, the word “term” means each quantity in a series; the word “sequence” indicates an ordered set of terms; the word “series” indicates a set of terms constituting a progression or having values determined by a common relation, or it can mean the sum of a sequence of terms.

Graves uses these words in a way that is faithful not just to their ordinary general sense, but also to their particular, specialized mathematical sense: the terms “action,” “knowledge,” and “thought” are ordered in the sequence “action–knowledge–thought,” and a “series of action–knowledge–thought; action–knowledge–thought; action– knowledge–thought” is the progression of a consciousness that “is not an even flow.”⁵³ He presents the partial sums of the series “action– knowledge–thought; action–knowledge–thought” as pointing to a whole of non-consciousness, for “these phases of consciousness are each derived from moments of non-conscious activity.”⁵⁴ Concerning this whole, however, Graves declares that “we can never have any knowledge of its character,” that it is an activity “of which knowledge can never … appear.”⁵⁵ In the mathematical context that his terms evoke, this “continuously interrupting and continuously interrupted sequence of non-conscious activity” resembles less the sort of infinite series that converges to a certain value called its limit (as 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + … converge to the value 1) than the sort of series that diverges – having no value that its partial sums approach (as 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + … approach no knowable, nameable value, for even though the terms become infinitely smaller, enough of them added together will always give a value greater than any number that can be named).

And so Graves not only uses mathematical words to account for the manifold meaningfulness of poetry, but he also does so ambiguously – a double incentive for someone recently reading mathematics at Magdalene College, under the supervision of the famous mathematician A.S. Ramsay, to read this material closely. Extraordinarily alert to ambiguity of all sorts, the mathematician Empson cannot have failed to notice that Graves uses what he would call ambiguity of the first type (in which “a word, a syntax, or a grammatical structure, while making only one statement, is effective in several ways at once”) in explaining his theory of consciousness.⁵⁶

Graves’s purpose in availing himself of an implicitly mathematical vocabulary is ironic: he observes that consciousness cannot be known in the way a mathematical sequence can be known. In mathematics, a sequence can be said to be known if a formula can be given for any particular term by reference to the preceding terms or by reference to the particular term’s position in the sequence. In the case of consciousness, the sequence of the terms “action,” “knowledge,” and “thought” simply does not obey a formula. No term can be known from any of the others by the application of a formula: “Action does not proceed from thought, nor knowledge from action, nor thought from knowledge.”⁵⁷ Neither poetry nor life is amenable to formulaic representation. Just as “a poem will never be a copy of the poet’s past life,” so “no thought or mental picture can recur identically,” and so “no action is merely a reproduction of a previous action.”⁵⁸ Graves and Zeno agree that there is a great gulf between the finite sequences of life and the infinite sequences of mathematics: “if only two actions of a given sequence were identical in cause and effect, this sequence would achieve perpetual motion, which, in this finite universe, is not to be hoped.”⁵⁹ Graves’s point is that the prediction of the next item in a sequence that mathematics enables in the context of a principle of order is precisely what life disables because it subscribes to no principle of order.

Empson’s mathematical training provides him with terms and analogies to explain the intricate theoretical relationships amongst elements that he identifies in ambiguous poetic language. He uses words like the ones that Graves uses, and he uses them in the same way Graves does – that is, ambiguously. He translates words and concepts from the mathematical contexts in which he has learned them to the new literary critical contexts that he is trying to develop, all the while encouraging the reader to keep in mind both their general and their more particular mathematical meanings.

For instance, a mathematical and logical conceptual framework helps him to explain how ambiguity of the seventh type fits into the “series” of ambiguities that he defines: “An example of the seventh type of ambiguity, or at any rate the last type of this series … occurs when the two meanings of the word … are the two opposite meanings defined by the context … One might say, clinging to the logical aspect of this series, that the idea of ‘opposite’ … admits of a great variety of interpretation.”⁶⁰ Here Empson adds a footnote: “–a .b is contrary to a for all values of b.”⁶¹ In any such pair of opposites, he suggests, “you are only stating, for instance, a scale, which might be extended between any two points, though no two points themselves are opposites.”⁶²

Recognizing that the idea of opposition in poetry has logical, psychological, mathematical, and grammatical dimensions, Empson finds it easiest to explain the way the ambiguity of opposition ranges between the potential to condense two statements into one, on the one hand, and the potential to make extractable from one statement an indefinite number of meanings, on the other, by figuring this range of potentials in terms of a formula:

When a contradiction is stated with an air of conviction it may be meant to be resolved in either of two ways, corresponding to thought and feeling, corresponding to knowing and not knowing one’s way about the matter in hand. Grammatical machinery may be assumed which would make the contradiction into two statements; thus “p and – p” may mean: “If a=a₁, then p; if a=a₂, then – p.” If a₁ and a₂ are very different from one another, so that the two statements are fitted together with an exhilarating ingenuity, then I should put the statement into my sixth type [of ambiguity]; if a₁ and _a2 are very like one another, so that the contradiction draws attention both to the need for and the difficulty of separating them, then I should regard the statement as an ambiguity of the seventh type … If “p and – p” could only be resolved in one way into: “If a=a₁, then p; if a=a₂, then – p,” it might fairly be called an ambiguity, containing two separate statements under the appearance of one … But it is evident that any degree of complexity of meaning can be extracted by “interpreting” a contradiction; any x^a₁ and x^a₂ may be selected, that can be attached to some x^a arising out of p; and any such pair can then be read the other way round, as “If x^a=x^a₂, then p; if _xa=_xa₁, then – p.” The original contradiction has thus been resolved into an indefinite number of contradictions: “If a=_xa_y, then p and –p,” to each of which the same process may again be applied.⁶³

Empson and Graves agree: the limit of contradiction and the limit of discrepancy is the same – indefinite.

Like Graves, Empson acknowledges a gulf between the formulas of mathematics and logic and the messy facts of life and poetry, and he invokes an “outside-consciousness” similar to Graves’s nonconsciousness by which to preserve a convenient fiction of order. In life and literature, he observes,

contradictions are often used … when the speaker does not know what a₁ and a₂ are; he satisfies two opposite impulses and, as a sort of apology, admits that they contradict, but claims that they are like the soluble contradictions, and can safely be indulged; by admitting the weakness of his thought he seems to have sterilised it, to know better already than anyone who might have pointed the contradiction out; he claims the sympathy of his audience in that “we can none of us say more than this,” and gains dignity in that even from the poor material of human ignorance he can distil grace of style … [H] uman life is so much a matter of juggling with contradictory impulses (Christian-worldly, sociable-independent, and suchlike) that one is accustomed to thinking people are probably sensible if they follow first one, and then the other, of two such courses; any inconsistency that it seems possible to act upon shows that they … have a fair title to humanity.⁶⁴

Graves’s interrupting nonconsciousness serves the same purpose: it explains discrepancy in any explanation of our thoughts and actions as the human condition; we cannot know the non-conscious activity which is at the core of each of us. The Graves who says in his own words that “knowledge can never appear” of the continuously interruptive, non-conscious source of discrepancies in consciousness becomes the figure in Empson’s text who from the poor material of human ignorance can gracefully and sympathetically affirm, “we can none of us say more than this.”

•

Conceding that with “two notions … most sharply and consciously detached from one another” in type-three ambiguity “one finds oneself forced to question its value,” Empson concludes Chapter Three with a tour de force of ambiguous words, until he can no longer suppress the mathematician within, at which point numbers and mathematical notations explicitly supplement words in search of a value that seems to be as much numerical as aesthetic.⁶⁵

Of type-three ambiguity of the special sort (the connection of two ideas by a single word) he suggests that “it must seem trivial to use one word with an effort when there is time enough to say two more simply; even if time is short it seems only twice as useful, in a sort of numerical way.”⁶⁶ Concerning not this special sort of ambiguity, but rather “general ambiguity of the third type” (associations “concerning whole states of minds” implied by “several different topics, several universes of discourse, several modes of judgement or of feeling”), Empson finds that “the value of the general variety of ambiguity of the third type is no more obvious.”⁶⁷ He suspects that the duality at the heart of ambiguity may be the key to its value: “You remember how Proust, at the end of that great novel, having convinced the reader with the full sophistication of his genius that he is going to produce an apocalypse, brings out with pathetic faith, as a fact of absolute value, that sometimes when you are living in one place you are reminded of living in another place, and this, since you are now apparently living in two places, means that you are outside time, in the only state of beatitude that he can imagine. In any one place (atmosphere, mental climate) life is tolerable; in any two it is an ecstasy. Is it the number two, one is forced to speculate, which is of this encouraging character?”⁶⁸ The mathematician cannot resist putting this insight more generally: “Is to live in n + 1 places necessarily more valuable than to live in n?”⁶⁹

Empson’s answer is “yes.” He believes that two is always better than one and, more generally, that a higher number of mental events is always better than any lesser number of mental events. The number two is fundamental to aesthetic value: to make “a connection between two ideas, even when they are merely both relevant and need not have been particularly connected,” is still “to connect things in an illuminating way.”⁷⁰ And so “Proust’s belief, as a matter of novel-writing, is very convincing … the pleasure of style is continually to be explained by just such a releasing and knotted duality, where those who have been wedded in the argument are bedded together in the phrase.”⁷¹ As Graves puts it in Impenetrability, “When particular words very highly charged with meaning in their context occur in English literature, this is counted a great virtue. In logical literatures it is a vice, by the rule of ‘one word, one meaning’ … When such a concentration of forces can be exerted at a single point in literature, then, in Humpty-Dumpty’s words, ‘there’s glory for you!’”⁷² For Humpty-Dumpty Graves, to have meaning + 1 is always better than to have one meaning only. According to Empson, “one must assume that n + 1 is more valuable than n for any but the most evasively mystical theory of value.”⁷³ Ambiguity of the third type, then, which posits the barest possible connection between two ideas, marks the theoretically minimum expression of knotted duality from which any release of literary pleasure can be achieved.

For Empson, the basic insight of Graves’s conflict theory consists of its recognition of the philosophical, psychological, and poetic virtue of two. As Graves explains, “My contention is that where a conflict between any two interests occurs, one cannot finally supplant the other; the ruin of this interest will inevitably spell the ruin of that.”⁷⁴ Whether the binary opposition involves “the fervour of the prayer-meeting” and “the desire for sexual expression,” or “sin and grace,” or the conscious and the unconscious, Graves’s point is constant: they “seem to alternate in equal force.”⁷⁵ Recall that “between the ‘deliberate’ and the ‘unwitting’ there is … only this distinction, that the deliberate is in the present tense, the ‘unwitting’ in the past.”⁷⁶ The deliberate and the unwitting, or the conscious and the unconscious, are always already a part of each other: “when we speak of a deliberate mode of action we mean that the deliberate mode is at the time dominating the unwitting mode which cannot consequently appear.”⁷⁷ According to Graves, duality is fundamental to consciousness. Even he seems to recognize that his state of nonconsciousness is simply a product of definition, a postulate of theoretical importance with no practical relevance for a reader of poetry.

The poet is society’s agent for – and the poem is the occasion for – the reconciling expression and experience of this duality. As Grave presents it, duality is expressed and experienced as one’s being two or more persons at once. One can see that what Empson presents as largely his own insight into the value of duality is evident more obviously and more insistently in Graves than in Proust. Empson represents Proust’s insight in rather awkward geographical terms: living in more than “one place (atmosphere, mental climate) … is an ecstasy.”⁷⁸ The point is psychological, not geographical; art provides the psychological place for the experience of two mental places (the present and the past), two mental atmospheres, two mental climates, and so on. And the point is Graves’s.

•

Not surprisingly, then, given its role in alerting Empson to the poetic virtue of duality, Graves’s modified theory of consciousness plays a part in Empson’s definition of the fourth and seventh types of ambiguity as well – definitions that depend on distinctions concerning how much poets know about their own meaning and to what degree they control it. The difficulty Empson has in finding examples of type-three ambiguities stems from his agreement with Graves that poetry cannot be predicted or constrained by the poet’s conscious intention.

On the one hand, Empson finds a “curious ambiguity” in a couple of poems by Dryden – “a full-blown pun, such as Restoration poets would normally have been aware of, and made, if they had used it, into an ambiguity frankly of the third type, and yet the reader seems meant to absorb it without realising it is there.”⁷⁹ Similarly, there are “puzzling” ambiguities elsewhere: “he seems to claim only to be saying one thing, even when one does not know which of two things he is saying.”⁸⁰ (Graves would find here the distinction between the “deliberate” and the “unwitting.”) On the other hand, even in his list of eighteenth-century puns demonstrating “self-consciousness,” Empson cannot bring himself to limit the consciousness of the poet to that of a punster: “to join together so smartly a business and a philosophical notion, a nautical and a gastronomical notion, with an air of having them in watertight compartments in your own mind (each such subject has its rules which save a man from making himself ridiculous, and you have learnt them), so that it seems to you very odd and agile to have jumped from one to the other – all this belongs to the light-weight tattling figure (it is very odd it should have been Dr. Johnson’s) … the man quick to catch the tone of his company, who knows the talk of the town.”⁸¹ The conditions ought to be right for ambiguity of the third type: “The mind has compartments which hold opinions and modes of judgment which conflict when they come together … compartments, therefore, which require attention, and one is particularly conscious of anything that mixes them up. If the two spheres of action of a generalisation, or the two halves of an ornamental comparison, involve two such compartments which must be thought of in two ways, then we have a general ambiguity of the third type.”⁸² Yet in the case of Johnson’s writing, it is difficult to explain whose is the controlling consciousness and just what it controls in the writing by which it manifests itself: that the mind’s compartments are separate is only an “air”; the air is imparted by a “figure”; the discrepancy between “Doctor Johnson’s” poetic figure and his actual person is remarked. Ambiguity of the third type cannot be maintained in the midst of such an array of supplementary ambiguities.

In contrast to Graves’s suggestion that “between the ‘deliberate’ and the ‘unwitting’ there is … only this distinction, that the ‘deliberate’ is in the present tense, the ‘unwitting’ in the past,” Empson increasingly limits to the reader, rather than the poet, the possibility of limiting awareness to “consciousness of a particular part of” the punning device.⁸³ At the beginning of the chapter, the “questions of consciousness” are focused first, and most explicitly, on the “the direction of the reader’s attention” and the “interaction between separated parts of his mind.” The poet’s consciousness is treated much less explicitly ( “its most definite examples are likely to be found, in increasing order of self-consciousness, among the seventeenth-century mystics who stress the conscious will, the eighteenth-century stylists who stress rationality, clarity, and satire, and the harmless nineteenth-century punsters who stress decent above-board fun”).⁸⁴ The poet’s consciousness, it seems, just cannot be presumed to be as simple as the reader’s: unable to claim that the poet is ever free of the “unconscious,” Empson confines himself to the claim that the pun as narrative device “is less intimately an expression of sensibility.”⁸⁵ Expression of sensibility is not entirely a matter predicted or constrained by deliberation. No more than Graves does Empson believe that the poet can create “deliberate poetic allegory,” and deliberate poetic puns, uncomplicated by the “unwitting uprush of inspired poetry.”⁸⁶

Graves demonstrates this point in On English Poetry in his discussion of the same sort of satirical and didactic verse that baffles Empson. According to Graves, “only the theory that a conflict of emotional ideas is a necessary ingredient of verse to make it poetry, will satisfactorily explain why many kinds of verse, loosely called Poetry, such as Satire and Didactic verse are yet popularly felt not to be the ‘highest’ forms of Poetry.”⁸⁷ There is too much deliberation here and not enough unwitting inspiration. Graves therefore relates “mere verse” to poetry “as chimpanzee to man.”⁸⁸ Occasionally, however, in one case out of a hundred, chimpanzee versifiers write a poem (if not Hamlet) “in spite of themselves”: “Where the writer is dominated by only one aim, in satire, the correction of morals; in didactic verse, instruction; there is no conflict and therefore no poetry. But in rare cases where some Juvenal slips through feelings of compunction to a momentary mood of self-satire and even forgets himself so much as to compliment his adversary; or in didactic verse where a sudden doubt arises and the teacher admits himself a blind groper after truth (so Lucretius time and time again) and breaks his main argument in digressions after loveliness and terror, only then does Poetry appear. It flashes out with the surprise and shock of a broken electric circuit.”⁸⁹ Empson notes something similar in his observations about the “puzzling” ambiguities that ought not to appear in the satirical and didactic verse of Dryden, but nonetheless somehow do.⁹⁰

For Graves, “the power of surprise … marks all true poetry.”⁹¹ He defines two limits: on the one hand, “Poetry over which the poet has no direct control”; on the other hand, “Poetry over which he has a certain conscious control.”⁹² At the limit marked by the poet’s “conscious control,” the element of “the unforeseen fusion in his mind of apparently contradictory emotional ideas” disappears, for nothing is unforeseen.⁹³ That is, the possibility of surprise disappears. And so “the weakness of originally unspontaneous poetry seems to be that the poet has only the very small conscious part of his experience to draw upon, and therefore in co-ordinating the central images, his range of selection is narrower and the links are only on the surface.”⁹⁴ Surprise “seems to result from a foreknowledge of certain unwitting processes of the reader’s mind, for which the poet more or less deliberately provides.”⁹⁵ Neither can the processes of the reader’s mind be completely witting, nor can the processes of the poet’s writing be completely deliberate, for such wit and such deliberation mark the limit at which surprise – and with it, poetry – disappears.

Empson agrees. On the way to demonstrating both the poet’s control of ambiguities of the third type and the reader’s awareness of the deliberateness with which the poet invokes these ambiguities, Empson always finds that he is on the verge of another type of ambiguity – one of which the poet is not conscious or the poet’s consciousness of which cannot clearly be determined. Thus the shift from his declaration at the beginning of the chapter that “it is not true” that ambiguities of the third type “contain no examples of interest to the reader of poetry” and so have only “theoretical importance,” to his concession at the end of the chapter that the third type indeed seems to be a trivial product of definition.⁹⁶ Reviewing his literary analysis throughout Chapter Three, and returning “to the notion … put at the beginning of the chapter, that in so far as an ambiguity is valuable, it cannot be purely of the third type,” Empson concedes that there can be no pure example of ambiguity of the third type: “I consider that I have shown by examples how an ambiguity can approach the third-type definition, which is rather like a limit, and yet remain valuable.”⁹⁷ Ambiguity of the third type turns out to be a convenient fiction postulated as the limit of a series of progressively self-conscious uses of ambiguity.

1 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity: A Study of Its Effects in English Verse, 1st ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 287.

2 Ibid., 298.

3 Ibid., 298.

4 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), 49.

5 Ibid., 49–50.

6 Ibid., 50.

7 Ibid.

8 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 308.

9 Ibid., 309.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 50–1.

13 Ibid., 50.

14 Ibid., 51.

15 Ibid.

16 Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Doran and Company, 1927), 58.

17 Ibid., 61.

18 Ibid., 62–3.

19 Ibid., 60.

20 See Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), translated by P. Mairet, in Existentialism, ed. Robert C. Solomon (New York: Modern Library, 1974), 198.

21 Laura Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 16–17.

22 W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 242. Robert Graves drew attention to Auden’s borrowing from Riding. According to Martin Seymour Smith, in Robert Graves: His Life and Work (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 297, Graves had Alan Hodge write a letter to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement complaining about borrowings from Riding and himself. Graves also ran side-by-side passages from the poems of Riding and Auden in “These Be Your Gods, O Israel,” Essays in Criticism, 5.2 (April 1955): 129–50.

23 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 131.

24 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 49.

25 Ibid., 50.

26 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 142.

27 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 285, 286. See I.A. Richards, “Gerard Hopkins,” The Dial, 81 (1926): 195–203, repr. in Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. John Paul Russo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 139–47.

28 Empson, letter to Riding (25 August 1970), Selected Letters, 429.

29 I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1924; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925), 29.

30 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 131

31 Ibid.; Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 82.

32 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 30, 29.

33 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 130.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid., 153.

36 Ibid., 130, 132.

37 Ibid., 131, 131–2.

38 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 49, 51.

39 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 130–1.

40 Ibid., 130.

41 Ibid., 130–1.

42 Ibid., 131–2.

43 Ibid., 151, 152.

44 Ibid., 153.

45 Ibid., 167.

46 Ibid., 130.

47 Ibid., 166.

48 Ibid., 130.

49 Ibid., 166, 130, 130, 167, 167, 166, 167.

50 Ibid., 131.

51 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 55–6.

52 Ibid., 50.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 3.

57 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 50.

58 Ibid., 51.

59 Ibid.

60 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 244.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., 249–51.

64 Ibid., 250.

65 Ibid., 166.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., 166, 141, 141, 166.

68 Ibid., 166.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., 167.

71 Ibid.

72 Robert Graves, Impenetrability; or the Proper Habit of English (London: The Hogarth Press, 1926), 55–8.

73 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 167.

74 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 92.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid., 51

77 Ibid.

78 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 166.

79 Ibid., 135, 136.

80 Ibid., 136.

81 Ibid., 137, 138.

82 Ibid., 145.

83 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 51; Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 131.

84 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 131, 131, 131, 132.

85 Ibid., 132.

86 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 49.

87 Robert Graves, On English Poetry: Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective (London: William Heinemann, 1922), 99.

88 Ibid., 98, 99.

89 Ibid., 99.

90 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 136.

91 Graves, On English Poetry, 24.

92 Ibid., 13.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid., 16.

95 Ibid., 24–5.

96 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1st ed., 130.

97 Ibid., 166, 167.