Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Strier is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (1983) and the coeditor, with Heather Dubrow, of The Historical Renaissance: New Essays in Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (1988).

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Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts

University of California Press

In the collective memory or mythology of literary studies in America, the clash between Rosemond Tuve and William Empson in the early 1950s is an episode in the conflict between "history" and "formalism." My strong impression is that most scholars of English Renaissance literature still think of Tuve as having "won" the debate with Empson. It is my further impression that Rosemond Tuve is still regarded as an excellent model of true (or at least, solid) scholarship anddepending on one's attitudes toward the current sceneof either "old" or "real" historicism. Empson, of course. . . . Well, everyone knows about Empson.

I mean to argue that this episode is improperly described as a conflict between "formalism" and "history." I will try to show that what was really at issue was a particular conception of historical knowledge and its role in literary studies. My main concern is not to praise Empson in this essaythough I will do sobut to criticize in some detail the position in the controversy taken by Tuve. I will praise Empson not just as the better "reader," but as the better historicistas if these virtues could truly be separated. I will argue that Tuve is a bad model for historicism, that her appeal to historical data, and especially her appeal to and understanding of "tradition," are actually quite pernicious. Kenneth Burke, with typical wit and typical generosity, has a brilliant joke about the controversy, a joke that capaciously embraces both Empson and Tuve. "Criticism," concludes Burke, "should be for both Dis-a and

Data."1 Brilliant as it is, I am afraid that I think Burke's joke grants too much to Tuve. I will show that Empson's joke about the controversy, which I will recount and discuss later, is as profound (and as funny) as Burke's and points to a serious problem with Tuve's conception of Data. Tuve, of course, does not make jokes. She is much too busy, as we shall see, holding the fort against modernity.

Before turning to the details of the controversy, let me say a few words about Empson. It may seem outrageously paradoxical to suggest him as a model for historical criticism. Tuve attacked the final analysis in Seven Types of Ambiguity , and "everyone knows" about Empson and ambiguity.2 Everyone feels secure in the knowledge of what kind of critic Empson was, and what sort of book Seven Types is. Empson was a New Critic, and Seven Types is a book of "readings." To call Empson a New Critic is to ally him with Cleanth Brooks and Seven Types with The Well Wrought Urn .3 Empson's practice is formalist, internalist, anti-intentionalist, and antihistoricist. This view of Empson, though I think still widely held, is entirely, even spectacularly wrong.4 The best readers of Empson, whether they approve of him or not, have long recognized that to view him as a doctrinaire or normative New Critic is wrong. To take two important cases, Ren Wellek, who disapproved of Empson, and Paul de Man, who highly approved of him, both recognized this.5 The difference between Empson and the other "formalists," especially I. A. Richards and Roland Barthes, is the central argument of de Man's famous essay on "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism." In the Hegelian language of his early thinking, de Man credits Empson with philosophical correctnesswith understanding "the deep division of

See Kenneth Burke, "On Covery, Re- and Dis-," Accent 13 (1959): 225. For those to whom the Brooklyn pronunciation of "this" and "that" as "dis" and "dat" is not immediately familiar, the joke is thereby explained. "Dis-a" stands for the particular; "Data," presumably, needs no explanation.

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity: A Study of Its Effects in English Verse (1930; 2d ed., rev., 1947; 3d ed., New York: Meridien Books, 1955). I have used the third edition.

Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947).

This is also observed in Paul H. Fry, William Empson: Prophet against Sacrifice (London: Routledge, 1991), 7.

Ren Wellek, "Literary Theory, Criticism, and History," in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 89; Paul de Man, "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism" (1954), in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism , 2d. ed., rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 22945.

Being itself"and with opening the way to genuine historicism, to "the sorrowful time of patience, i.e., history."6

Empson's historicism will be treated at some length in this essay, but it might be well to say a word here about his supposed obsession with the "purely verbal," and about his supposed anti-intentionalism.7 Elder Olson's 1952 essay, "William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction," is the classic attack.8 Olson severely rebukes the myopia of Empson's focus on "diction." This attack, however, founders on the recognition that Empson was interested in "ambiguity" only because he saw this feature of language as a probable indicator of something elsenamely, of "interesting and valuable situations" being addressed or embodied in a text.9 It was these "situations" in which he was really interested. Olson mocks this talk about situations, but then goes on himself to speak of the importance of seeing speeches in plays as by "a certain character in a certain situation."10 In response to Olson, Empson remarks, somewhat bemusedly (and correctly), that what Olson means by "literary effect" is included in what he, Empson, means by "meaning."11 As for anti-intentionalism, Empson notes in his generally positive review of The Well Wrought Urn that he finds Brooks overly concerned with purely formal qualities to the exclusion of political and biographical realism.12 And in a review of William K. Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon in

"The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," 237, 245. In his later essay on "Wordsworth and the Victorians" (1979), de Man praises Empson as an ethical model for deconstructionists, as someone whose work shows "the tact with which such a potentially mischievous task should be carried out." See The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 88.

On Empson as an anti-intentionalist, see E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 22425. Hirsch bases his sense of Empson and "the critical school Empson founded" on a phrase ("piece of language") in the first paragraph of Seven Types of Ambiguity (!), and on the understanding of Empson produced by the Chicago Aristotelians (see n. 8 below).

Elder Olson, "William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction," in R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 4582. Olson's critique of Empson depends on viewing Empson as a typical "new critic," essentially identical with Cleanth Brooks. In the context of Critics and Criticism, Olson's essay stands between and links Crane's critiques of Richards and of Brooks.

Olson, "William Empson," 50; Empson, Seven Types , 266.

Olson, "William Empson," 56.

"The Verbal Analysis," Kenyon Review 12 (1950); reprinted in William Empson, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture , ed. John Haffenden (London: Hogarth, 1988), 107.

"Thy Darling in an Urn," Sewanee Review 55 (1947); reprinted in Argufying , 28288.

1955, Empson strongly reprehended Wimsatt's anti-intentionalism, making the point that since "estimating other people's intentions" is an ordinary feature of social life, and is crucial in many legal contexts, it seems bizarre that "only in the criticism of imaginative literature, a thing delicately concerned with human intimacy, we are told that we must give up all idea of knowing [a person's] intention."13 This passage is pure Empson. What "we all know" about him needs to be revised.14

But let me return to my story. In the battle between Tuve and Empson, it is not exactly clear who fired the first shot. One might think that Empson did, since his review of Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery ("Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition") appeared in the volume of the Kenyon Review preceding the volume in which Tuve's attack on him appeared, but the editors of the Review are at pains to assert in a prefatory note to Tuve's essay that her piece was received before the publication of Empson's review.15 If this is true (and I see no reason to doubt it), we have a situation in which Empson was troubled by Tuve's recent readings of English Renaissance poetry, especially that of Donne, at the exact same time that Tuve was troubled by Empson's rather old readings of English Renaissance poetry, especially that of Herbert. Each of these critics, in other words, took up the cudgels spontaneously and

"Still the Strange Necessity," Sewanee Review 63 (1955); Argufying , 124. Empson's view of the ordinariness of "estimating other people's intentions" is uncannily close to Donald Davidson's view of the "commonplace" quality of "radical interpretation" among persons (see Essay 3, n. 36 below).

Paul Fry's book (cited in n. 4 above) should help, but the most tireless contemporary defender and expositor of Empson is undoubtedly Christopher Norris. Norris's work on Empson is indispensable for anyone interested in the history and state of literary theory and criticism in our century. Among Norris's writings on Empson are William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Athlone Press, 1978); "Introduction: Empson as Literary Theorist," in Christopher Norris and Nigel Mapp, eds., William Empson: The Critical Achievement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1120; and "For Truth in Criticism: William Empson and the Claims of Theory," in The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 10081. This is by no means an exhaustive list of Norris's writings on Empson.

Empson's review of Tuve's Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947) appeared as "Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition," Kenyon Review 11 (1949): 57187; Tuve's "On Herbert's 'Sacrifice'" appeared in Kenyon Review 12 (1950): 5275. The note by the editors appears at the bottom of the first page of Tuve's essay. Tuve greatly expanded this essay into "'The Sacrifice' and Modern Criticism," part one of A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 1999 (hereafter cited as A Reading ). "Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition" is now available in William Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature , vol. 1, Donne and the New Philosophy , ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6377.

unprovoked. They each felt moved to attack the other on principle which makes the controversy particularly interesting.

Since the chronology leaves us free to proceed in any order, I will begin with Tuve on Empson, since her attack is avowedly theoretical and since, in this case, we have a response as well. Tuve is defending the idea that "there is such a thing as misreading," and especially the idea that "meanings have histories," that meanings of elements in poems are "clarified by knowledge of meanings those elements have carried before the poem was written, and, as we say, 'outside' it."16 Most generally, Tuve sees herself as defending "the value of knowledge to criticism."17 She means by this the value of knowing the sorts of things than an author can reasonably be taken to have known and to have assumed that his or her audience knew, though this is already a more cautious formulation than Tuve's. "Tradition" is Tuve's favorite word. Above all, Tuve sees her role as making sure that traditional elements in texts will be seen as such, and that inappropriate notions of novelty will not be applied to highly "traditional" poetry. Herbert's poetry, in other words, must be praised for the right things in the right way. "Illegal" critical practices (her word) and "illegitimate" readings must be detected and rebuked (OHS, 71). Tuve sees herself as policing the borders of the past, so that no anachronistically modern element can falsely enter and so that the massive outlines of "the tradition" can be clearly discerned by the (not so humble) seeker after truth.

There are many problems with all this. The first of them is that Empson does not deny that there are "such things as misreadings"though he persists (like Richards) in being interested in them.18 Even more damaging to Tuve's polemic is the fact that Empson, as we have already seen, does not hold an "internalist" point of view. He constantly brings in historical and biographical material, and he is a passionate devotee of the OED . Other critics of Seven Types, in fact, accused Empson of bringing in too much "outside" material, of assuming that the reader could carry too much "baggage" with him. He was attacked for con-

"On Herbert's 'Sacrifice,'" 54. Hereafter references to this essay will appear in the text as "OHS" followed by a page number.

A Reading, 910. Subsequent page references in text.

The most spectacular (and spectacularly good-humored) instance of this is Empson's discussion of a misreading he had cherished of a line from Rupert Brooke. See Seven Types, 232 (subsequent page references in text). I. A. Richards's interest in "mis-" and other bad readings is fully manifested in the analyses of the protocols in Practical Criticism (1929; pap. rpt., New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966).

necting "bare ruined choirs" to the Reformation on the one hand and to Shakespeare's sexual predilections on the other.19 Like Burke, Empson was radically uninhibited in what he would bring to or say about a text. Like Burke, he was a pragmatic, "kitchen-sink" sort of critic, bringing in anything that seemed to him relevant to the meaning of the text in question. But the meaning to whom, Tuve wouldand didask. She sees Empson as interested only in the meanings that an older text might have to a modern reader who is interested only in modern ideas. This is the heart of Tuve's attack on Empson's reading of "The Sacrifice." Tuve is certain that "modern" ideas are necessarily irrelevant to "traditional" ones.

The section on Herbert's "The Sacrifice" is the longest reading in Seven Types and, as the final reading in the final substantive chapter, it is meant to cap the argument of the book. Empson sees the "ambiguities" that he explores as ordered (loosely) on a scale of increasing psychological complexity. He gives "The Sacrifice" the crowning place because he sees this poem as powerfully and beautifully presenting (in the final words of the chapter) "the most complicated and deeply rooted notion of the human mind."20 This notion is "the idea of sacrifice," and Empson praises the poem for imagining this idea so fully "that all its [the idea's] impulses are involved." That the impulses involved are contradictory is what makes this idea an especially interesting "type of ambiguity" for Empson. The central contradiction in "the sacrificial idea" is between submission and aggression. Empson values the Herbert poem so highly for the intricate mixture of vindictiveness and tenderness it projects into the voice of the crucified Christ. Empson is particularly insistent that the vindictiveness in the voice be heard.21

Interestingly, Empson was quite concerned about the historical and intentionalist plausibility of this reading. "You may say," he notes, "that

See the "Note for the Third Edition" of Seven Types, xviii. This refers to a discussion with F. W. Bateson; see "Bare Ruined Choirs," Essays in Criticism 3 (1953): 35763.

Seven Types, 263. The analysis of "The Sacrifice" occupies pp. 25663. I will not give specific page citations for quotations from this analysis.

These pages in Seven Types can be seen as the beginning of Empson's lifelong agon with the central doctrine of western Christianity, the Atonement. Milton's God (1961; rev. ed., London: Chatto and Windus, 1965) is the culmination of this agon. Even Milton's God , though certainly a polemic, is not entirely ahistorical. As Empson well knew, many of the Gnostics saw God the Father in much the same way Empson (and Shelley) did. It is true, however, that what is central to Milton's God is its moral passion, its sense of justice and hatred of cruelty, rather than either its historical or its literary dimension. Its deepest kinship is perhaps with Voltaire.

the pious Herbert could not have intended such a contradiction, because he would have thought it blasphemous, and because he took a 'sunny' view of his religion." In a typically brilliant, offhanded, and telling joke, Empson suggests that a fog of piety has obscured "the pious Herbert," and that actually looking at his work (or almost anything else) produces surprising results: "It is true George Herbert is a cricket in the sunshine, but one is accustomed to be shocked on discovering the habits of such creatures; they are more savage than they seem." Empson suggests, moreover, not only that "the pious Herbert" is more savage than he seems, but that the whole orthodox tradition is. His main strategy is to appeal first to orthodoxy ("it is merely orthodox to make Christ insist on the damnation of the wicked") and then, above all, to the Bible: "a memory of the revengeful power of Jehovah gives resonance to the voice of the merciful Jesus." The achievement of "The Sacrifice," for Empson, is its ability to sustain this doubleness. "Only the speed, isolation, and compactness" of Herbert's method in this poem, Empson says, could handle in so sustained a way "impulses of such reach and complexity." He sees this poem as unusually impersonal for Herbert. He sees it as a poem in which "the theological system is accepted so completely that the poet is only its mouthpiece," and he speculates that this kind of impersonality and systematicity might be psychologically necessary "if so high a degree of ambiguity is to seem normal."

One can see why Tuve would have wanted to attack this reading and why she found herself so frustrated in the course of doing so. On the one hand, Empson clearly relies on a Freudian-Frazerian framework; on the other hand, he fully recognizes the "traditional" basis of the poem. But not the right traditionand besides, Freud must go. Tuve particularly singles out two of Empson's readings of lines as "impossible." This kind of claim particularly worries me, and I think that it should always be a red flag. Tuve is insistent that when Herbert's Christ says "Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree," Empson is completely misguided in thinking that "this makes Christ smaller, more childlike than Eve, who could reach the apple without climbing," and Tuve is sure that there cannot possibly be any implication in the phrase that Christ himself is "doing the stealing." Tuve insists that the phrase "could not have implied this for Herbert" becausebecause what?22 Because such a meaning could not have existed in "the tradition." Yet in the course of making this suggestion, Empson cited the gospel privileging of little children,

OHS, 56, emphasis mine; Seven Types, 262.

surely a relevant part of "the tradition." He could also (as Burke would) have cited the famous pear-stealing episode in Augustine's Confessions as relevant.23 As we shall see, "the tradition" turns out to mean something very specific for Tuve.

The suggestion that Christ is stealing the apple like a mischievous boy leads Empson to see a hint of incest here; "the son stealing from his father's orchard is a symbol of incest," he says. This seems hopelessly arbitrary, though not, when one considers the imagery and plot of Pericles, where Antiochus's abused daughter is strikingly referred to as fruit on a tree, hopelessly anachronistic.24 But immediately Empson pulls back to his major point, that "in the person of Christ the supreme act of sin is combined with the supreme act of virtue." Tuve warns that supposed "primeval" meanings should not be substituted for "layers upon layers of consciously apprehended significance" (OHS, 73). But this is precisely what Empson does not do. He fully integrates the "primeval" into the theological. His "digression" into Freud and Frazer only seems to deepen the "traditional" meaning for him. Oddly and significantly enough, it is Tuve who seeks refuge in a notion of the literary, wanting to separate out "literary" from psychological or anthropological facts (OHS, 7273). It she who is defending "the poem itself." This is no accident, I think. Her view is much more restricted and restrictive than Empson's.

Let us examine another moment when Tuve simply rules out one of Empson's readings. The lines in question are these:

Why, Caesar is their only King, not I:
He clave the stonie rock, when they were drie;
But surely not their hearts, as I well trie.25

Empson sees this stanza as contrasting both "the earthly power of the conqueror" and "the legal rationalism of the Pharisees" to "the pro-

See "Adolescent Perversity," section 8 of "Verbal Action in St. Augustine's Confessions ," in The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961 ), 93101.

See William Shakespeare, Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger (London: Methuen, 1969), 1.1.22 and 29. With regard to Christ as a "mischievous boy" who is executed on a tree, Paul Fry has suggested (in a superb commentary on an earlier draft of this essay) that Ralegh's poem on "the wood, the weed, the wagg" might provide some relevant contemporary context; see The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Agnes Latham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 49.

"The Sacrifice," lines 12123, in The Works of George Herbert , ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1945).

founder mercy of the Christ and the profounder searching of the heart that causes" (Seven Types, 260). Tuve again points out an "impossibility": Herbert could not have identified Moses with Caesar. And why? Because of "the tradition," because of the "traditional" way of reading the bible. Herbert could not have identified Moses with Caesar becauseand here comes the big guntypologically Moses is identified with Christ. Tuve considers this a knock-down argument (OHS, 5456). She is jubilant. Empson does not know typology!

In his printed reply to Tuve, Empson acknowledged that perhaps he should have noted the contrast between Caesar and Moses in the second line of this stanza. He insists, however, that there is a shift in the stanza, so that where the second line differentiates Moses (and Jesus) from Caesar, the third line differentiates Jesus from both Caesar and Moses. For Tuve, the third line simply cannot be saying something different from the second. "The tradition" will not allow it. But Empson holds the not implausible view that Herbert was stressing the special inwardness of Christ's teachings. Empson rather dryly notes that "surely it is also traditional to regard the Old Testament dispensation as different from the New."26 Empson is right about both the stanza and "the tradition." But what is most important to recognize is that there is no such thing as "the tradition," in this and probably any regard. "The tradition," even whenafter a historical evolution that needs to be tracedit assumes a dominant and relatively stable form, is complex, multifaceted, and internally conflicted; it is always the product of contestation and the repressed or suppressed positions are never totally extinguished.27 "The tradition" is a deeply misleading (and coercive) form of speech. Typology, to return to our particular case, was used to establish differences as well as continuities between the Testaments.28 Tuve is using her construction of "the tradition," backed up by massive but very selective erudition, as a bludgeon with which to browbeat a less learned but more adventurous and not necessarily less accurate critic. Perhaps we can derive a first lesson from the controversy: Beware of all

William Empson, "George Herbert and Miss Tuve," Kenyon Review 12 (1950): 736. Argufying , 252.

For a very clear and cogent exposition of this view, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), chaps. 68.

For clear accounts of this see, for instance, Thomas M. Davis, "The Traditions of Puritan Typology," and Richard Reinitz, "The Separatist Background of Roger Williams' Argument for Religious Toleration," in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Typology and Early American Literature (N.p.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972.), 1145, 10737.

talk of "the tradition." This has an immediate relevance to our current pedagogical situation in the United States. It means that, in curricular debates, attacks on and defenses of "the tradition" or "the Western tradition" or "the great tradition" are equally misguided.

It is important to look hard at what any scholar puts forth as "the tradition." Tuve's "tradition," like all such hypostases, is produced by special pleading. This becomes quite clear when we examine another moment in Tuve's discussion of Herbert's Caesar-Moses stanza. Tuve mocks Empson (OHS, 55; A Reading , 28) for paraphrasing "Caesar is their only King, not I" as "I am not a political agitator." Empson's phrasing is deliberately provocative here, but his viewpoint on the line is a profoundly historical one. He is showing his normal feeling for historical and narrative situations (he was especially impatient with critics "too proud to attend to the story").29 Empson's viewpoint is directly relevant to the trial of Jesus, which took place in the context of the Maccabean-Zealot revolts.30 Milton's Satan, we recall, propounds the Maccabean model to Jesus in Paradise Regained .31 The point would seem to be unimpeachably historical. This does not, however, make it properly "traditional" for Tuve. "Traditional," for Tuve, means medieval. Empson, though he does acknowledge a medieval quality in the poem, goes directly from Herbert to the Bible. This, for Tuve, is illicit. In regard to the refrain of "The Sacrifice" ("Was ever grief like mine?") Tuve explicitly rebukes Empson's recourse to the Bible. "We must be chary," she says, of interpretations of these words "based on a lively sense of their being rather said by the sinful city of Jerusalem 'in the original'" (A Reading , 34). As her scare quotes indicate, Tuve heaps scorn on the notion of "in the original." From the height of her erudition, she contemptuously explains that "Herbert's 'original'" was not a verse in Lamentations but "a well-known and effortlessly accepted" liturgical tradition.

But is the picture of Herbert harking back to the biblical context of a phrase widely used in Latin liturgies absurd and unhistorical? Didn't the Reformation send everyone, especially every Protestant, back to their

See "Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry," British Journal of Aesthetics 17 (1962); Argufying , 162.

See, inter alia, Paul Winter, On the Trial of Jesus , 2d ed. (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1974); and especially S. G. F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Early Christianity (New York: Scribner's, 1968).

See Paradise Regained , 3.16580, in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose , ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957).

bibles? And wasn't the great triumph in the North of the humanist call for a textual and moral return ad fontes the encouragement of the study of the bible "in the original"in the original languages and not in the Latin translation?32 Again, Tuve's "tradition" reveals itself as special pleading. In a private letter to Tuve (dated February 25, 1953), Empson made the crucial point about Tuve's notion of "the [Christian] tradition": it is an abstract hypostasis that does not allow for actual history, for a rupture like the Reformation or a ferment like the Renaissance. With an exasperation that was clearly not directed only at Tuve, Empson exclaimed: "I can never understand why critics who claim to be historical think they show expertise by getting their date wrong and claiming that Renaissance writers were really medieval ones."33

It was in fact the limits and peculiarities of her notion of tradition for which Empson criticized Tuve in "Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition" (Burke, it should be noted, very gently criticized her for the same thing).34 Empson did not criticize Tuve for believing in "the value of knowledge to criticism" or for going "outside" the text. Empson criticizes the way in which Tuve relates knowledge to interpretation and the peculiar qualities of what she counts as knowledge. In Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery , the tradition in question is "the rhetorical" rather than "the Christian" tradition, but here too there is an enormous amount of special pleading. Empson points out the limits of what the English rhetoricians actually say about tropes, and the distance between the "system" that Tuve expounds and anything that is actually in the rhetoricians.35 Even more significant, however, is Tuve's outright rejection of historical evidence when it does not coincide with her general presuppositions.

One of Tuve's deepest working presumptions is that nothing in past literature ever struck a learned contemporary of that literature as strange

See, for instance, E. Harris Harbison, The Christian Scholar in the Age of the Reformation (New York, 1956), esp. chap. 3; and Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1983).

I am grateful to Paul Fry for a copy of this letter and the whole Empson-Tuve correspondence. Empson's most sustained meditation on conservative, pseudo-historical presentations of "the Christian tradition" is "Literary Criticism and the Christian Revival" (1966), in Argufying , 63137.

See "On Covery, Re- and Dis-," 223, for what Burke calls the "latitudinarian" (that is, liberating and liberalizing) effect of reading "The Sacrifice" in the context of Herbert's corpus rather than in the context Tuve provides.

"Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition," in Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature , 1:65. Hereafter cited as DRT.

or odd. To see a literary work as strange means, for Tuve, that one has not properly understood it. A work couldn't actually be strange or odd. The aim of criticism is to eliminate strangeness. This is where Empson strongly demurs. He points to the elitism as well as the insensibility of this view when he asserts that "if you make yourself really servile about accepting a 'convention,' if you insist on taking it as a matter of course for us few who are in the know, you are at bottom refusing to let it give you the shock which it was intended to produce, even in its prime."36 A "convention" may have been intended to shock"even in its prime." Empson takes the central conceit of Donne's Anniversaries , the deceased teenage girl as the world, as an example of this. He points out what a serious embarrassment for Tuve it is that Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Donne's as learned and as well-disposed to Donne as possible, thought that Donne's Anniversaries were very odd indeed.37 Jonson thought that the poems were, in fact, so shocking as to be blasphemous.38 If the educated reader was supposed to see exactly what familiar thing Donne was doing, it is odd that a learned and well-disposed contemporary did not take the poems in this way. Again, Empson emerges as the better historicist. He spends a number of pages giving a fully and convincingly historical account of why Jonson would legitimately have thought that Donne's hyperboles were, as the later Johnson said, enormous and disgusting.39 Empson takes as central to Donne's historical context not "the tradition" but the great division between the churches that dominated the consciousness of European intellectuals in the post-Reformation period. Empson sees Donne as using an essentially Catholic and Spanish rhetorical trope, the identification of an individual with the Logos, in the consciously Protestant English context, so that "the Protestant treatment gave an extra gaiety to his defiantly Catholic

Empson, "Last Words on George Herbert," TLS December 31, 1993, 11. This is a posthumously published essay that Empson wrote in the early 1950s in response to Tuve's A Reading of George Herbert (see n. 15 above).

Modern critics occasionally assert or assume that Jonson was not well disposed toward Donne's poetry (and vice versa). This is a mistake. There was admiration on both sides. For a discussion, see Richard Strier, "Lyric Poetry from Donne to Philips," in Carl Woodring, ed., The Columbia History of British Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 23637.

For Jonson's remark that "Dones Anniversarie was profane and full of Blasphemies," see Jonson's "Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden," in Ben Jonson , ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 1:133 (see DRT, 70).

For "enormous and disgusting hyperboles," see Samuel Johnson, "Abraham Cowley," Lives of the English Poets (London: Dent, Everyman's Library, 1925), 1:17.

but startlingly displaced trope" (DRT, 75). Empson speculates that Donne's use of this trope might well have seemed nearly as strange and strained to his English contemporaries as it does to most readers now.40

So another moral may emerge from this confrontation: a work of art in the past can be doing something that would have struck its own educated contemporaries as strange. Lots of different ideas were available in the past, especially in so yeasty a period as the Renaissance, and there has never been a homogeneous and self-consistent "tradition" or dominant discourse. A work might be using heterodox ideas. This was a point that was very dear to Empson.41 And even with regard to works using traditional and familiar ideas we cannot just read off their meanings by identifying their apparently traditional elements. Empson's joke, which I promised to recount, is that Tuve's attitude toward tradition reminds him of "an Emperor of China who returned a poem to its author with a somewhat embarrassed air and said, 'But surely there is no such poem,' meaning that he could not recall the classical poem that it must be presumed to imitate."42

We must strive to see traditional works against the backdrop of their traditions, not as merging indistinguishably into them. All the "elements" of a poem can be familiar, yet the poem can be startlingly original. We must, in Empson's wonderful phrase, taste each text with "as clean a palate" as we canrather than, following Tuve, with as full a mouth as possible.43 To do what Empson recommends does not mean making believe that each text is the first thing ever written, or the first thing ever written on its topic, but it does mean trying to appreciate each text's distinctive qualities, however strange or familiar. It means letting the historical chips fall where they may. Ultimately this is why Empson is a better guide to historical criticism than Tuve, since Empson keeps the particular in focus rather than letting it dissolve into its (supposed) component elements. In his essay on "The Verbal Analysis," written in the same period as his controversy with Tuve, Empson asserts that "a

Barbara K. Lewalski's treatment of the Anniversaries within a Protestant context has the advantage of centrally acknowledging the Reformation, but is liable to the same critique of "normalizing" the poems and dissolving them into a relatively homogenized tradition; see Donne's "Anniversaries" and the Poetry of praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). For Lewalski too, Jonson's remarks are an annoyance (see pp. 3, 14041, and 193).

For a consciously Empsonian reading of a Donne poem ("Satire III")along these lines, see Essay 6 below.

"George Herbert and Miss Tuve," 736; Argufying , 253.

"George Herbert and Miss Tuve," 738; Argufying , 254.

profound enough criticism could extract an entire cultural history from a single lyric."44 Tuve might well have agreed with this, but, as we have seen, the directionality implied here is important. To put the point in Burke's wonderfully funny and cogent terms, Empson is a better model for historical critics because Empson, as Tuve does not, lets the Dis-a lead him to the Data.

"The Verbal Analysis," 599; Argufying , 107.

Excerpted from Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts by Richard Strier Copyright 1997 by Richard Strier. Excerpted by permission.
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