There are many things to admire here: the exactness of Empson's explications and paraphrases, the boldness of his jump to the "Fall of Man," the inevitable precision with which he sums his results: "By reflection, then, proper bane becomes ambiguous, since it is now water as well as poison." But more than anything else, for me, there is his wonderful confidence, not merely in his own judgments, nor even in the momentum of the narrative that composes them, but in his readiness to plug his authors, Shakespeare and Ford, into that narrative, and thus to attribute it to them as its source. So the great lines here seem the plainest ones: "Shakespeare continually does it"; "Ford is fond of the same device, possibly from imitation."

But if we are investigating the question of the unity of the literary texts, Empson's arguments may seem problematic. What "forces" can be said to hold "proper bane" together, as an ambiguity, when its implications are so opposed that it seems to deconstruct itself? His answer, evidently, is "Shakespeare." This something that Shakespeare "does," and continually. But how can one be said to do something when he is "discovering his ideas in the act of writing," that is, when he may not know what he is doing? Or, at least, how can such doing be considered to set the course and limits for reading him?

We might, perhaps, be more liberal here because this is, after all, Shakespeare, and we are used to thinking him capable of anything. Or we might feel that this conception of a writer's doing his work is quite agreeable in modern terms, since we now think it theoretically sensible to say that an author's "idea" comes into its existence just when it is expressed, that externally constituted verbal forms are what count, and that invention is therefore always a matter of discovery.

But what do such justifications amount to when Empson gets to Ford, when he not only characterizes this Shakespeare-Empson complex as a device but also claims that Ford could have recognized it and imitated — and then, presumably, go on to write the wretched lines that are quoted here? And this difficulty will be exacerbated if we find, as seems probable, that we cannot follow Empson at all when he says, "so that gall has been rent (now with opposite consequences) from its boundaries in the orderly mind, by being rolled in, or round about by, gall." This may seem stranger than deconstruction. If reading Ford-Empson becomes, as is likely, the kind of chore that is all the more onerous for our suspicion that we are missing something, then "fanciful" will be too kind a word for Empson's procedures here. The psychological dubiousness, furthermore, of his assertion that it is "these associations which explain how that particular word came into [Ford's] mind" unsettles the foundation just when we need one. Any associations seem to be possible here, and the context in which Empson is at that moment reading Ford does seem "boundless"; or it seems the context of Shakespeare, which may be the same thing.

Yet not only does Empson's serene confidence continue — "I do not claim that one should admire this turgid piece of writing merely because it is explicable" — but so does my confidence in him as a reader. And at this extreme it is evidently not confidence in the rules by which his associations might be justified, nor in the "unity" of Ford's — or even Shakespeare's — writing. It issues, once again, from Empson's readiness to attribute everything he can imagine to the author in question, as much to Ford as to Shakespeare. He devotes his intelligence to what he reads, to the possible sense of it. Its unity is thus always, at least in part, a matter of his own will toward unity, his desire to recognize it in his authors.

On the one hand, then, the literary designs that Empson discovers are a matter of his own expectations of design, and justified, at least for those who sympathize with his allegiances, by the fact that his heart is in the right place. So that the unity of text and stability of context may indeed be, at times, more than anything else a matter of one's motives. And even if this were all there was to say here, what more — one might ask — do we usually require of a reader, at moments when reading becomes as difficult as it may? For do we not usually suppose that some probability of significance will eventually be discernible, and that sustaining the expectation of unity, the will to sense, will ultimately achieve it?

On the other hand, and more important, Empson's personal disposition to discover and establish the sense his authors make seems logical and accurate in relation to the way we nowadays conceive the dynamics of linguistic forms. We are, as I have already suggested, becoming used to the idea that the unity of such forms is most often something to be discovered, that it involves an expectation projected out ahead of oneself, a readiness to recognize and respond without advance notice of what one is going to find. That, we might say, is just the way the game is played, that is how we most characteristically apprehend the unity of verbal patterns. So that what I have called Empson's commitment to his authors, his belief in their unity and his determination to discover their sense, is something more than mere critical good faith; it is justifiable as the appropriate posture toward the forms of expression at large.

Therefore one's confidence in Empson's way of working resembles the regard one may have for any inquiry that seems genuinely exploratory, and even what seems farfetched or mistaken may be born with, since it may yet turn out well, and the end of the expedition may be something like this:

Spenser concentrates the reader's attention on to the movement of his stanza: by the use of archaic words and constructions, so that one is at a safe distance from the exercise of an immediate judgment, by the steady untroubled flow of similar lines, by making no rapid change of sense or feeling, by sustained alliteration, parallel adjectives, and full statement of the accessories of a thought, and by the dreamy repetition of the great stanza perpetually pausing at its close. . . .

The size, the possible variety, and the fixity of this unit give something of the blankness that comes from fixing your eyes on a bright spot; you have to yield yourself to it very completely to take in the variety of its movement, and, at the same time, there is no need to concentrate the elements of the situation into a judgment as if for action. As a result of this, when there are ambiguities of idea, it is whole civilizations rather than details of the moment which are their elements: he can pour into the even dreamwork of his fairyland Christian, classical, and chivalrous materials with an air, not of ignoring their differences, but of holding all their systems of values floating as if at a distance, so as not to interfere with one another, in the prolonged and diffused energies of his mind. (33-34)

One may feel, as I do, that this is as fine a description of the verbal action of Spenser's stanza, and of the imaginative disposition that it demands and satisfies, as we have or ever shall have. And one may also see that the intelligence of its specification, and even its moments of truly fine writing — "the great stanza perpetually pausing at its close"; "in the prolonged and diffused energies of his mind" — are products of Empson's openness and responsiveness, both to Spenser in particular and to the forms of language in general, the consequences of a closeness that generates the best reading.

Even if we say, however, that Empson is as good at this as anyone could be, do we want to say that everyone concerned with reading should try to emulate him? And do we want to say that what he does with his reading has to do with the way everyone reads? What we have seen so far is that a way of treating the reading of literature that originated in the academy and continues to support its procedures may be done brilliantly. We need now to ask not what range of association should be articulated in relation to a text, but whether any such articulation should necessarily occur at all. Does literary critical close reading connect with reading, either as a prescription for what ought to happen there — and hence as a way to improve one's reading — or as a description of something that always, to some degree, happens when we read? With his usual fairness, Empson raises such questions often, and his answers to them may sometimes seem pessimistic:

Now I was frequently puzzled in considering my examples, though not quite in this way. I felt sure that the example was beautiful and that I had, broadly speaking, reacted to it correctly. But I did not at all know what had happened in this "reaction"; I did not know why the example was beautiful. And it seemed to me that I was able in some cases partly to explain my feelings to myself by teasing out the meanings of the text. Yet these meanings when teased out (in a major example) were too complicated to be remembered together as if in one glance of the eye; they had to be followed each in turn, as possible alternative reactions to the passage; and indeed there is no doubt that some readers sometimes do only get part of the full intention. In this way such a passage has to be treated as if it were ambiguous, even though it may be said that for a good reader it is only ambiguous (in the ordinary sense of the term) while he is going through an unnecessary critical exercise. (x)

This conception of "teasing out the meanings of the text" is obviously a powerful one: Culler praises Barbara Johnson's "happy phrase" in her defining deconstruction as "the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text," when he should be admiring only her taste in what to borrow. But Empson's criticism of something which he does better, probably, than anyone else arises more than once in Seven Types of Ambiguity, and what may follow a painstaking account of what certain words "suggest" is a question: "'To whom do they suggest such things?' the reader may ask; and there is no obvious reply" (63). At other moments, the justification for "verbal analysis" is even less obvious:

There is a distinction here of the implied meanings of a sentence into what is to be assimilated at the moment and what must already be part of your habits; in arriving at the second of these the educator (that mysterious figure) rather than the analyst would be helpful. In a sense it cannot be explained in language, because to a person who does not understand it any statement of it is as difficult as the original one, while to a person who does understand it a statement of it has no meaning because no purpose. (3)

Whatever it is that is "to be assimilated at the moment" of reading, the other category, "what must already be part of your habits," might be seen both to cover a good deal of our reading behavior and to be uninfluenced by the analytical critic. This way of thinking sometimes leads to moments when Empson grants the isolation and idiosyncrasy of his own procedures: "unexplained beauty arouses an irritation in me, a sense that this would be a good place to scratch" (9).

The best moral justification that one can give for such scratching, it would seem, is that it results in a sort of rationalistic armoring of one's imaginative susceptibilities, and protects one's freedom of mind from enslaving designs. I have used such arguments myself, in the classroom, to justify perpetual efforts to talk about "what happens when we read," but the truth is that neither I nor my students are very much afraid anymore — as we once might have been — of "subliminal" advertisements or other such plots upon our imaginations, to which we might be more vulnerable because unaware of them. Besides, if talking reasonably about poetry were indeed like scratching an itch, and put one less "at its mercy," wouldn't it be better not to talk about it? Empson usually maintains that only bad, insubstantial poems may be spoiled by one's describing how they work, but he also sometimes allows that our responsiveness even to a "good" text may be damped by analysis, and, he feels, if it is then let the chips fall where they may.

That is because in his own way of going about his reading, evidently, he has no choice; his verbalizations of his feelings about that reading seem its necessary consequences. While discussing the action of poetic meter, he supplies us with a good reason why this might be so for everyone:

The demands of metre allow the poet to say something which is not normal colloquial English, so that the reader thinks of the various colloquial forms which are near to it, and puts them together; weighting their probabilities in proportion to their nearness. It is for such reasons as this that poetry can be more compact, while seeming less precise, than prose. (28)

This is as nice a formulation as one has come to expect from Empson, but even though so specifically illuminating about the way that we apprehend metrical form, it also has a wider range. For it describes the dynamics not merely of reading poetry but perhaps of all reading. Very often when reading — though perhaps not always — we are inclined to "colloquialize," in the sense that we bring to bear upon the special language we encounter on the page alternative verbal forms that seem "near to it." To some degree or other, that is, we paraphrase what we read. That degree may of course depend upon several conditions: how wordy we are, or have been trained to be, for one, or how difficult or rich is the text we confront, for another. But however much or little we incline to talk to ourselves as we read, what is important here is that when we do so we are not necessarily engaging in some sort of schoolroom behavior: paraphrase — and even its more insistent extensions into explication and the like — may be natural to one's reading, a part simply of what reading is.

The question, now, is what part? How do our colloquializations relate to a line of poetry, or possible paraphrases to a passage of prose? What is the difference between that reading which must be "assimilated at the moment" — presumably by active and perhaps even conscious paraphrase — and that reading whose sense is "already . . . part of your habits" — and thus automatically and even speechlessly absorbed? One answer is suggested by that "already." For the distinction that Empson seems to entertain here is not a qualitative opposition between absolutely speechful and speechless reading, but a temporal or historical difference between that responsive articulation which is new and that which has become, through practice, habitual. In other words, we always talk back to or about our reading as we do it, but some of that talks is automatic and some–of which we shall be much more aware — is not. So the question is not if we talk about our reading to ourselves as we do it, but how actively and consciously we talk.

This understanding of the situation, of course, is very much in Empson's favor; at least it locates all readers upon Empson's turf, which is a little like requiring everybody to play in the major leagues. But the notion that we always, somehow, talk about our reading as we do it may also be repulsive to us for motives other than this prospect of unfair competition. My own feeling, once upon a time, that there was much more to my reading than I could or would say in an English composition is a case in point. For it was a belief that there was much more to my mind than words, that my deepest and most significant mental life, while perhaps not exactly speechless, was beyond orderly articulation, and was "unverbal" in that way.

But Empson himself may also seem to grant us a mental life beyond words at those moments when he acknowledges the role of what he calls the preconscious in reading:

I have continually employed a method of analysis which jumps the gap between two ways of thinking; which produces a possible set of alternative meanings with some ingenuity, and then says it is grasped in the preconsciousness of the reader by a native effort of the mind. (239)

At such moments we need to understand, however, that really he considers nothing — nothing relevant to reading, that is — as really "native" about the mind, for ultimately, both in his arguments about it and in its own functioning, the preconscious is full of words: "Normal sensibility is a tissue of what has been conscious theory made habitual and returned to the pre-conscious" (254). What is native to the mind is the same, in his view, as what is habitual to it, and thus the preconscious is imagined as the historical product of previously articulated and assimilated verbal forms. And what may seem "unverbal" to us may just be something that we have already, sometime in the past, said. So that the difference between preconscious and conscious apprehensions in reading is not between nonlinguistic and linguistic processes, but between old talk and new talk. This is not to say, of course, that the status of the talk is in both places the same: but it is to say that Empson's preconscious is something that is produced by learning language.

In the more than half-century since he took this view, it has received powerful support: from Wittgenstein's linguistic analysis, from psychoanalytic theorists such as Lacan, and, especially, from the phenomenological inquiries of Merleau-Ponty, whose conceptions, were we to attend to them more fully than we have, would, I am certain, clear away many of the theoretical difficulties we continue to have concerning language and our mental activity in relation to it:

Thought is no "internal" thing, and does not exist independently of the world and of words. What misleads us in this connection, and causes us to believe in a thought which exists for itself prior to expression, is thought already constituted and expressed, which we can silently recall to ourselves, and through which we acquire the illusion of an inner life. (Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London, 1962, p. 144).

What is most striking about this model of the mind is that it places its real life outside it, in its present and immediate interaction with the established perceptual forms among which it finds itself. The "ideas" that it contains are merely digestions of verbal constructions previously spoken or heard, and are of not much importance save for the fact that their felt insufficiency — their very habitualness to their bearer, perhaps — provides the impulse toward new articulations, new efforts to fill what Merleau-Ponty calls elsewhere a "determinate gap": "the excess of what I intend to say over what is being said or has already been said" (Phenomenology, Language, and Society, ed. John O'Neill, London, 1974, p. 86; hereafter PLS). In this conception, in other words, the characteristic disposition of the mind is to articulate, to assimilate the articulation, and to set it aside or behind, and thus continually to attempt to exceed what has "already been said." But this behavior is not aimlessly instinctual. Or, at least, we can make sense of its motives: for thinking, as Merleau-Ponty conceives it, is the continual effort to use language in an effort to get beyond it, an effort in which articulation brings about a confirmation and solidification of thought and thus forms a new base: "Sedimentation occurs, and I shall be able to think farther" (PLS, 89).

If these ideas appeal to us, then we can be in no doubt that our reading is always accompanied by talking about our reading. For it would seem that verbal articulations are always involved in our responses to a text, both as a past and future. In this way, Empson's verbal analysis, and what we know more generally as close reading, is in relation to something we do quite naturally, and relevant to all reading, whether in school or out. But something more needs to be said about the terms of that relevance.

For even if all reading always involves responsive paraphrase, and assumes previously assimilated, "unconscious" formulations while tending toward as yet unachieved future one, the actual present moment of reading — or at least of excited reading — would seem to be that tendency, an inclined but unsettled condition, in which one would be, in Merleau-Ponty's terms, moving away from certain "sedimentations" and thinking "farther." Which is to say that when Empson "teases out" the implications of a text he should not claim, as he often does, that these were established in the mind as the text was read. Something was there, to be sure: a "determinate gap," perhaps, an inclination away from previous articulations toward the ones that Empson will arrive at, but not the actual, new formulations themselves. So that the undergraduate's objection that he was not, in his reading, really at the verbalized places that close-reading assignments pressed him toward now seems sustained, though he was wrong to think that he could not get there, or even to think that he would not, sooner or later, simply through his own continued reading.

The analogy between verbal forms constituted in the mind and "sedimentation" may also define more sharply the status of articulated responses to reading. For as these are intelligibly expressed, they evidently cease to matter as they did before. They become, if not another sort of thing, nonetheless a previous thing, important now only as a background, as the assumed basis for reading the same text again differently, for moving on again from the language we know toward all the language we do not. Thus the fellows who sat on the grass when I was in school and told me that "talking about it kills it" also were right in a way, since we cannot go back to what a poem was before we talked about it, but must go on, "thinking farther" with the poem if it will stand that. But they were wrong in thinking that one really had a choice in the matter. And some poems, like some music, some other forms of life, may, with careful management, make the entire trip.

As for close reading — the formal description of our talk in and about our reading — it is fairly accurate, because it is as close as we can get. It can tell us everything about what is present all around, before and after, reading's best moments.