Sibylline Leaves
“The mind is complex and ill-connected like an audience.”
William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral
I
Empson’s practical answer to the question with which I ended my last chapter was that if poetry becomes just talk, we should talk about it—in prose. He had been working on The Structure of Complex Words since 1936—some of the thinking for the book went back as far as 1932—and, as we have seen, he was keen to get back to it after the war. In 1939, before returning to England, he had written to a friend, “I wish to God I could get on with my mad little literary book, the Sibylline leaves are gradually being thrown away by the servant” [Haffenden I 528–529]. The word “mad” is just a self-deprecating joke here, and doesn’t take us anywhere near the hospital, but it is interesting that it crops up. It would be too schematic to say that Empson continued to write mad books in prose to keep himself from the more extreme madness of poetry, yet something had changed.
Empson’s later criticism still straddles convictions and uncertainties with tremendous energy and wit, but he is on the whole, as he was not before, doing what he can to resolve matters rather than complicate them. He says, for example, that metaphor is a “very baffling topic” and “perhaps too fundamental to be cleared up,” but also thinks it would make a “valuable” object of study “if one knew how to set about it” [CW 184, 175]. We might think his confession that he finds it “hard to choose between theories at all in this field except by coming across examples in which one theory works better than another” registers a sound scientific position. Empson regards (or pretends to regard) his difficulty as a sign of “a lack of intellectual grasp” [CW 368].
He makes a distinction among the readers he imagines for The Structure of Complex Words. “The reader interested in literary criticism,” he says, “will find his meat only in a central area,” namely the chapters on the uses of particular words in Pope, Milton, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Austen and Wordsworth. This reader “need not bother” with the seven theoretical chapters, and Empson “will not be depressed” if the same reader ignores the three appendices, “which are merely rather amateur attempts to push some problems from Philosophy out of the way.” He will however feel that he has failed if the literary reader does not return from the critical chapters to the first two, “Feelings in Words” and “Statements in Words,” because “the conclusions drawn from them are worth looking into” [CW 1].
Needless to say, most of us who read this book read it straight through, and if it feels a little unprofessional even for literary study, let alone philosophy and linguistics, we may remember R. P. Blackmur’s definition of criticism as “the formal discourse of an amateur.” Cleanth Brooks’s identification of the author of The Structure of Complex Words as “the incorrigible amateur, the man with a knack” perhaps goes a little too far in this direction. Empson himself says he is trying to keep away from what he calls “intellectual buzz-saws,” but then offers two remarkable qualifications of his attempt. First, he says he can’t avoid these questions unless he knows where they are. And second, he says this answer is false anyway, “because I think that even a moderate step forward in our understanding of language would do a great deal to improve literary criticism, and in any case to improve our general reading capacity” [CW 1].
A recurring powerful thought is that dictionaries, perhaps necessarily, list different meanings of words as … different meanings. Not only do they often fail to distinguish between principal and subsidiary meanings, they must by their vocation neglect to say that the different meanings of a word are likely to haunt any of its particular uses. I would like to say that this haunting always takes place, but Empson doesn’t usually go that far. He does say that a word may have a “ ‘connotation’ or feeling which is faintly present in all its uses” [CW 406], and he is certainly interested in “the interactions of the senses of a word” [CW 391], because this is what his book is about.
Throughout the work Empson fails creatively to make an important distinction: between meanings that are in some way in the words, implicit or explicit in their ordinary use, and meanings created by particular applications of the words: “being ‘in’ the word is of course a matter of degree” [CW 25]. I say “fails creatively” because although we can and sometimes must make these distinctions, their theoretical interest lies in the chance of keeping possibilities open—and all the more so because the possibilities are real and practical, just not always in play at the same time.
Empson’s emphasis is constantly on the “rich obscure practical knowledge” [CW 438] that any language holds in trust for us, and this emphasis allows him to pursue individual cases, and to refuse definitions that would keep him away from the active life of the language he wants to explore. “The connection between theory and practice, where both are living and growing, need not be very tidy” [CW 434]. Empson is especially interested in what he calls the emotive or slangy use of certain words, suggesting that a person is likely to make up his or her mind “in a practical question of human relations, much more in terms of these vague rich intimate words than in the clear words of [his or her] official language” [CW 158]. The recurrence of the word “rich” is important, and we have seen it at work in an earlier chapter. It names something like generosity in words, and the chance of generosity in the user of them. Richness in Some Versions of Pastoral is glossed as “readiness for argument not pursued” [SV 145].
“Such words give us an insight into the thought of a given period,” Empson says, and may also “form a kind of shrubbery of smaller ideas,” which helps us to defend ourselves against our own big ideas.
There is a main puzzle for the linguist about how much is “in” a word and how much in the general purpose of those who use it, but it is this shrubbery, a social and not very conscious matter, sometimes in conflict with organized opinion, that one would expect to find only able to survive because somehow inherent in their words. This may be an important matter for a society, because its accepted official beliefs may be things that would be fatal unless in some degree kept at bay. [CW 158]
Empson is thinking of the “official beliefs” of Christianity and Buddhism, but we can call up plenty of other “official” assumptions that will work only if we accept them less than wholeheartedly, and his picture of society is both complex and appealing. Greeks and Elizabethans held Greek and Elizabethan worldviews. They also, because they were human beings with lives to live, dissented from these views on all kinds of occasions. Empson says something similar of Dr. Johnson: “probably the parts of his thought which are by this time most seriously and rightly admired were not carried on his official verbal machinery but on colloquial phrases.” I add only that it is not just the words in the shrubbery that do the counter-official work. The official words will do it too, if they are given the right ironic or speculative inflection.
“A poet is not building an intellectual system,” Empson writes, “he is recording a time when his mind was trying out an application of the thoughts, not proving a doctrine about them” [CW 6–7]. Recording a time is a fine, precise thought. Empson wants us to see that the criterion of truth has its place even in imaginary conditions, whether to do with poetry or with our responses to other people: “The point is not that their truth or falsity is irrelevant, but that you are asked to imagine a state of mind in which they would appear to be true” [CW 12]. This is his solution to a very old problem concerning “beliefs” in literature: “not that we separate them from their consequences but that we imagine some other person who holds them, an author or a character, and thus get a kind of experience of what their consequences (for a given sort of person) really are” [CW 9]. “I do not see,” he says, in a grand refusal to acknowledge what is so difficult for everyone else, “that the subtlety of the process detaches it from any connection with fact” [CW 14].
Truth, consequences, fact: all imaginary perhaps but all imaginable, discussable. Empson is saying that even poetry full of feeling is structured by thought, does not consist of mere mood or imagery, and he is inclined to believe that feeling without thought, if not a literal impossibility, will not find its way into language. The unofficial doctrines have at least as large a place in our lives as the official ones. There is such a thing, Empson says, as “the logic of … unnoticed propositions” [CW 39].
This sense of the life of words—“it seems to me very likely that there is an inner grammar of complex words like the overt grammar of sentences” [CW 253]—is both intensely practical and largely mythical. Practical because we experience it every day, and because Empson has such brilliant things to say about particular examples. And mythical because it all takes place in a location we can neither ignore nor inspect. In The Structure of Complex Words Empson calls it “the background of the mind” [CW2, 69], “the subconsciousness” [CW 10], and “the back of the mind” [CW 57, 120, 200, 203, 426], a phrase he likes to use elsewhere too [SV 27, 103, 176]. Sometimes the notion of being in the back is enough: “at the back of the metaphor,” “at the back of an ironical joke” [SV 33, 55]. It is a spot where words and meanings “hang about” [CW 274], where ideas are “not so often believed as feared to be possible” [CW 168], where different, even opposed meanings congregate without quarrelling. It is where Pope’s distinct uses of the word “wit” in The Essay on Criticism stay together, where his jokes and his seriousness are never out of touch with each other.
It is also where most readers or viewers will find, if they find it at all, their reaction to Fortinbras’s terrible gag about Hamlet.
Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally.
The obvious, decorous meaning is that Hamlet would have done well in war and governance, if he had had the chance, but the pileup of “like,” the stage, and “put on” suggests the new leader has wandered into a swamp of dramatic or Freudian irony. Now the implication is that Hamlet has always been an actor, never offstage even in his most intimate moments, and that even death is not going to change him. Empson thinks this is a mistake on the writer’s part—although of course Shakespeare doesn’t have the “appalling persistence” of Joyce when it comes to puns [CW 66].
But Empson is mainly describing, not judging, and he thinks the Freudian slip can even serve common sense: “when a man is dutifully deceiving himself he will often admit the truth in his metaphors” [CW 338]. The back of the mind here looks like the depths of the mind. Still, this perspective is also part of Empson’s plan. Complex words really are complex, either in themselves or in the uses to which they are put, and all we can do, if we wish to understand their working, is track the examples we meet to whatever parts of the mind they light up for us, and whatever regions of the “socially complicated” world [CW 28].
The chapter on King Lear in The Structure of Complex Words is one of the masterpieces of literary criticism of any time, and leaves us thrilled and exhausted in ways that resemble the effects of the play itself. Empson would think this comparison far too grandiose, and I am not suggesting that his writing imitates or competes with Shakespeare’s, only that it fully rises to the challenge of an extraordinary reading, and that here as elsewhere in his work, the style of the criticism performs as well as declares an interpretation.
In King Lear we have a “group of ideas” that cluster round words like fool, madman, jester, clown, simpleton; and somewhere among them is the figure of the “ordinary simple man, who is held to be somehow right about life though more pretentious figures fail to see it” [CW 105]. The most famous exposition of this trope is Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly, and Empson devotes a preliminary chapter to exploring the set of meanings collected and set in motion there. Erasmus (and the Middle Ages before him) was a little too religious for Empson, who says he “cannot see … that Shakespeare makes any serious use of the idea that God will forgive us because we are all fools, which was the crown of the structure of medieval fool-theory” [CW 107]. Erasmus certainly believed in this idea, but his text suggests rather that we are not fools enough, that true folly is beyond us, and a secular version of this thought is precisely what animates some of the most magnificent moments of Shakespeare’s play.
In Erasmus Folly herself sings the praise of folly, and of course does it foolishly. She is not joking when she says the most foolish thing anyone has ever done is die to save others, especially if like Jesus Christ you are dying to save a whole hopeless species. Erasmus’s irony is circular and complete, it invites all kinds of thoughts, some easy and some difficult, but we can’t tip it into any kind of sermonizing. Whatever steps we take in that direction will look ridiculous.
Shakespeare’s version of folly is secular, and reads now as if he were entirely up to date with our twenty-first-century assumptions about rational choice, self-making and self-seeking. A good instance, as we saw in the last chapter, occurs in the conversation between the formal fool, the king’s jester, and the accidental one that the Earl of Kent has become. Neither man is going to abandon the king to the literal and metaphorical storm that is approaching. The fool will stay, and the other fool will stay too: loyalty in this context can only appear as a failure to be wise.
The storm’s other name is madness, and Kent and the Fool are going to meet up with the Earl of Gloucester’s son Edgar, who is pretending to be a lunatic, that is, neither a jester nor an unprofessional simpleton but still part of the folly family. At this point four fools are materially represented by particular characters—a clown, a man who goes mad, a man who pretends to be mad, and a man who is stupidly, even insanely loyal—and several other meanings of the word float about in the language of the play. The other chief sense of “mad” is within reach here too. When Lear feels himself to be in danger of weeping rather than raging, he says “I shall go mad.” He will go mad because he can’t get mad, can’t find a sane form for his anger.
I’m sure Empson is right to place Shakespeare at some distance from Erasmus, in spite of the close echo. Erasmus has the folly of Christ as his model, and the further Socratic folly of over-intelligent humans who imagine they are wise. Shakespeare has the wisdom of the wise as his target. This is not false worldly wisdom, as in the religious view, it is the real, depressing, all too frequent thing, as we have seen in Empson’s reading of Sonnet 94. Shakespeare is reflecting, through his characters, on the sheer good sense of leaving others to the storm if you can get out of it. We can’t, alas, say such behavior is wrong because we are quite likely to do the same ourselves. But we can celebrate those who are crazy enough or noble enough to do otherwise.
The Fool’s position is quite particular. It’s his job to be funny, and Empson is right to remind us of “the malice which is part of his role.” We don’t have to think of him as “high-minded and self-sacrificing” [CW 133]. But he does stay rather than run, and surely Empson is wrong to say “the Fool understands about madness because he is mad himself” [CW 133]. He imitates folly in all kinds of ways, but no one in the play seems further from insanity. When he says he would rather be anything than a fool—Lear has just threatened to have him whipped—he corrects himself instantly with a thought we may find sorrowful or sympathetic or merely realistic. “I had rather be any kind o’ thing than a fool: and yet I would not be thee, nuncle.”
“The very subtle thought of Lear was inherent in the language,” Empson claims, and specifically in the play of meanings hovering around the idea of the fool [CW 115]. This inherence means that even the mild verb “reflecting” as I used it above is probably too strong and too intentional—not for Empson, but for me. Shakespeare had only to strike certain notes, and a crowd of implications and associations would start the rich but perhaps ultimately unmanageable interpretative work in the audience’s mind. His mastery was in the timing and temper of the notes.
“The subject of Lear is renunciation,” Empson quotes George Orwell as saying. “The idea of renunciation is examined in the light of the complex idea of folly,” and this is the thread he follows throughout his chapter [CW 125]. What’s initially wrong with Lear’s renunciation of power and authority, the division of his kingdom among his three daughters, or as it happens between two of them, is the elaborate pretense he has set up for his abdication. Empson remarks on “the speed and violence” that Shakespeare lends to this “scene like a fairy-story” [CW 126].
Lear asks his daughters, “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” He is not asking how much they love him, but what they will say, wondering how he will judge the competition in rhetoric. Two of his daughters, the ugly sisters of this linguistic fairy tale, read the invitation correctly, amply producing ghastly versions of the verbal show required. The other refuses to take part in the charade, and again Shakespeare point us towards a question of utterance rather than feeling, as if he has been working on speech act theory. “What can you say,” Lear asks Cordelia, “to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.” She says nothing. No, she says “Nothing,” but of course the spoken word is not nothing, in this situation it is a disastrous assertion. Her father tells her that “nothing will come of nothing.”
This is not the place for a long exploration of the theme, but it seems to be the case with all the many uses of the word “nothing” in the play—referring to a speech, a letter, a piece of nonsense, a lack of identity—that the operative meaning constantly lies with the opposite term: saying something; reading something; meaning something; being something.
Later in the play Lear repeats his apparently pragmatic formula with a slightly different wording: “nothing can be made of nothing.” It’s worth pausing over the awful trick that language and his own vanity are playing on the king. It is mathematically true that if you add nothing to nothing you have nothing, but the maxim is ruined if your nothing hides an unmistakable something.
We have quickly come a long way from the initial game. The false saying of love by two daughters has become the true saying of dismissal and degradation. The true if slightly prickly saying of love by the other daughter has become an absence. The question now is not what anybody says, but what a king is when he is not a king, and more generally, what anyone is when they step out or fall out of a social role that has a recognized name and status.
Empson goes much further than this question of lost or baffled identity, though. If he writes so forcefully in his later work about how wrong religion, and especially Christianity, can be, here he offers what may be the best defense of superstition ever invented. Commenting on critical responses to Cordelia’s death and various attempts to rescue the dignity of the gods who seem to act only as a disguise for chance, he suggests that grand ironies in Hardy’s style are just as bad as pious attempts at uplift. “To believe in a spirit who only jeers at you is superstitious without having any of the advantages of superstition. … If this is the atheist view of tragedy it is as disagreeable as the Christian view” [CW 154].
What are the advantages of superstition? Very briefly, if it is put to imaginative and ambitious use, it will allow us to think about chance, character, and whatever order the world is supposed to have without recourse to religion or fatalism. It will allow us to see tragedy where other perspectives will show us only bad luck or bad habits, and we can evoke it, if we inhabit the pre-Christian world of King Lear, by Greek names or anonymous terms like “the heavens,” and of course by the recurring word Nature.
Empson begins to unpack this set of evocations by suggesting that Lear’s early address to the “dear goddess” Nature offers “room for a superstitious idea that his curses really affect Nature and bring bad luck all round” [CW 130]. We know this idea is superstitious because we know Nature doesn’t care what we say, yet we also know that magic and metaphor have truths to tell us about the world. At the end of his magnificent speech about need, Lear appeals to the heavens, begging them that they will “fool me not so much / To take it tamely,” a speech that Empson says “touches off the storm.” Really? Is that how it works? Empson’s answer is exemplary:
At least there seems no doubt that it would be so taken by the audience, who were accustomed to melodramas in which thunder comes as an immediate reply. The storm in Nature is no doubt partly the image of Lear’s mind, but it is also an attack upon him, whether from the stern justice of God or the active malice of the beings he has prayed to. The use of the term fool acts as a strong support for the theory of malice. … Every time Lear prays to the gods, or anyone else prays on his behalf, there are bad effects immediately. [CW 134]
The hesitation about the source of the attack—God or the gods—represents different views in the imagined audience, but the imagery will work whatever our theology is, as long as we are not using it to shut out our fears. The ideas of justice and even malice, on this scale, take us well beyond being jeered at. This sort of response to prayer suggests a much larger story about human helplessness. Empson goes on to propose that another famous speech of Lear’s (“Take physic, pomp”) invites us to think that “Nature does you good, but only when in its more appalling forms” [CW 137].
Whether Nature does us good or not, it is what there is, and in this play there is no other agency to which we can put our questions. “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” Lear asks, in what Empson calls “his clearest expression of the feeling of mystery in the evil of the world.” There is no shortage of opinions about nature and providence in the play—almost every character offers at least one—but “it does not appear,” Empson says, “that any of the views are made to seem adequate to the mystery of the world as it is presented” [CW 144].
This surely is the ultimate advantage of superstition. It does not claim knowledge it doesn’t have, and it does not deny its bafflement. On the contrary, it dramatizes its disarray. You ask the gods not to do something, and they do it at once. Religion in its consolatory, schematizing sense is always akin to paranoia, and paranoia is often close to being right—about the extent of our need for a lurid story if nothing else. Which do we prefer? That the world’s horrors occur by chance or by maleficent design? Which view will make us feel better if “the world is a place in which good intentions get painfully and farcically twisted by one’s own character and by unexpected events” [CW 154–155]?
When Gloucester says the gods “kill us for their sport,” he is not articulating “a solid doctrine,” as Empson puts it, but he is connecting his thought to “the fundamental imagery of the play” [CW 141]. Edgar’s response—
How should this be?
Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow,
Angering itself and others.
—refers to his own role in deceiving and protecting his father, but also, Empson adds, “helps us to define the gods”:
The clash of these two great sentences makes us see them as creatures cruel and senseless through their own suffering, the contempt of whose irony unites them to what they mock. [CW 142]
I’m not sure Edgar’s line quite makes this contribution, but this is just the effect of the play at large. This vision of the gods as cruel creatures implies a whole tortured universe. Empson associates the image with “the root idea of tragedy that the sacrifice of the hero re-unites his tribe with Nature or with supernatural forces” [CW 142], and it is in this sense that Lear can become “the scapegoat who has collected all this wisdom for us … viewed at the end with a sort of hushed envy, not I think really because he has become wise but because the general human desire for experience has been so glutted in him; he has been through everything” [CW 157].
The Greek gods in the play (and Nature and the heavens) are not just decorative, or stand-ins for whatever deities pagan Britain had, they are precise equivalents for what they were in Aeschylus or Sophocles: sources of any order or clemency there is in the world, but also of all its chaos and cruelty. We would blame them if we could; as it is, we worship them and fear them and hope for the best.
Lear has made a fool of himself on the most cosmic and appalling scale possible: he has got on the wrong side of the next world as well as on the wrong side of this one. I do not think one need extract any more theology from the gods. [CW 155]
Empson’s “not I think really because he has become wise” is not a denial of Lear’s wisdom, only of its relevance. This seems to me a remarkably subtle point. Lear has learned a real lesson, “not merely through suffering, but through having been a clown.” But then “this mood of greatness arises in him as a sort of wild flower, almost unconnected with anything else. The play does not allow him to keep it” [CW 146–147]. Perhaps one can’t keep it and live. The paradox of being right about the mystery of this world and the next by getting on the wrong side of both is almost too deep to contemplate. “Being right” here seems to mean arriving at a story less deluded than most, but only available in some sort of delusion.
“Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be”—we have read the line in “This Last Pain” [CP 53]. The repeated letter “g” creates a kind of stutter, as if the poem were ambiguous about ambiguity. And indeed, what could be ambiguous about the terrible gifts showered on the unfortunate humans in King Lear? Cruelty, deceit, poverty, madness, death and bereavement are just the chief among the unkind donations. But then what if they are the price of even a useless wisdom, the discovery of your daughter’s love, and an entirely new sympathy for the wretched of the earth? The idea of a price troubles the notion of the gift, of course, yet since both price and gift are metaphors for a relation we can’t name otherwise, we may feel that even among unequivocal horrors we have not quite done with ambiguity. We can certainly decide the price of wisdom is too high, and if Lear and Cordelia were historical persons most of us would emphatically do so, and want other lives for them. But since they are characters in perhaps the fiercest and most imaginative portrayal we have of the intractable world that is ours, we can hardly wish for them anything other than just the lives and deaths they have.
III
I want to glance at one more of Empson’s complex words, because he thinks it functions very differently from “fool” and its relatives, and because it will show something of the range of his inquiries. It also displays a certain recurrence and consistency, since his main example is still Shakespeare, and the questions raised in King Lear have not gone away, only found another, rather shabbier home. The word is “honest” and the Shakespeare play in question is Othello.
The word has the familiar meanings of “truthful” or “to be trusted,” and a lot of now obsolete or rare connections with the word “honor.” Used of a woman it means “chaste” or even “virginal”; used of a servant or anyone perceived to be of lower station than oneself, it has a note of cheerful condescension. A phrase like “to be honest” can mean anything from “I’m going to tell you the truth, although it may not be a good idea” to “I’m so glad to have something nasty to say to you.” The Oxford English Dictionary, not notable for its jokes, must at least be smiling when it glosses the phrase “honest John” as “a truthful, trustworthy, or sincere man; a type of surface-to-surface ballistic missile designed to carry a nuclear warhead.” It does say the second meaning is “now historical.”
Empson’s great aim, his implausible task, is to discover how the infinitely deceitful Iago, so often called honest and himself so skillful a manipulator of the term, could actually in some sense be honest—deceiving others, for example, because he is himself so undeceived. Empson likes to repeat the idiom “blow the gaff” in this context. The words “honest” and “honesty” are used 52 times in Othello, Empson tells us. King Lear uses the word “fool” “nearly as often”—47 times, Empson notes elsewhere—“but does not treat it as a puzzle, only as a source of profound metaphors.” “There is no other play in which Shakespeare worries a word like that” [CW 218]. The slightly archaic use of “worry” as a transitive verb is very effective. The only ordinary context I can think of for this idiom is when a dog worries a piece of cloth or a toy or a newspaper. What’s more, Shakespeare “hated” the word “honest,” Empson says. Or more precisely, there was something he hated “in the word”: “a peculiar use, at once hearty and individualist, which was then common among raffish low people but did not become upper-class till the Restoration” [CW 218]. “The word was in the middle of a rather complicated process of change.” It
came to have in it a covert assertion that the man who accepts the natural desires, who does not live by principle, will be fit for such warm uses of honest as imply “generous” and “faithful to friends,” and to believe this is to disbelieve the Fall of Man. [CW 218]
Empson is moving very fast here, and I don’t think he means Shakespeare hates these implications, only the fact that it seems to be impossible for his characters to use the word in this sense without a patronizing effect. The Concordance shows, Empson says, that Shakespeare “never once allows the word a simply hearty use between equals” [CW 218]. So we might think that “the way everybody calls Iago honest amounts to a criticism of the word itself” [CW 219]. And no doubt, a criticism of those who habitually use it in this way, normalizing double-talk. There are plenty of “honest” people, that is, who are crooked in all kinds of other ways. But Empson thinks this good sense, honest itself in a fashion, doesn’t get us anywhere near the complications of Iago’s character. A sort of honesty in Iago is dramatically more interesting than a pride in his own villainy, which is more usually attributed to him.
Nineteenth-century critics, Empson says, saw Iago as an abstraction, a representation of evil, and plenty of later critics have followed the tradition. In a marvelous reversal of usual priorities, Empson asks us to prefer a single word to a package of important meanings. Writers and critics have often evoked fancies and daydreams of evil, he says, but with a vagueness that almost robs the term of meaning. “Iago may not be a ‘personality,’ but he is better than these; he is the product of a more actual interest in a word” [CW 231]. “The puns on honest take the stage,” Empson says [CW 238].
How does this work, though? When Othello tells Iago’s wife, Emilia, that it is from her husband that he has learned of Desdemona’s (supposed) infidelity, she is taken aback, and repeats the idea in astonishment: “My husband!” “My husband say that she was false?” Othello insists:
I say thy husband: dost understand the word?
My friend, thy husband, honest, honest Iago.
As Empson says, “Othello means no irony against Iago, and it is hard to invent a reason for his repetition of honest” [CW 226]. But if “honest” has among its implications, to summarize rapidly what I am taking from Empson, “alert to, even disgusted by the deceptions of the world, including one’s own murky games,” then we can see Othello as desperately caught between the patronizing and the unmasking sense of the word: Iago is a jolly good fellow and perhaps the only person who sees the dark truth of things. This would be why Empson calls the line “appalling,” as he evokes “the hearty use and the horror of it” [CW 227].
We can also think—we could think forever—about the intricate conversation between Iago and Othello, where the servant accuses the master of making honesty a vice, because that is what happens when one is stupidly honest.
Iago. To be direct and honest is not safe.
I thank you for this profit, and from hence
I’ll love no friend, sith love breeds such offence
Othello. Nay stay; thou should’st be honest.
Iago. I should be wise; for honesty’s a fool,
And loses that it works for.
Othello. By the world,
I think my wife be honest, and think she is not.
What is striking is the way honesty gets entangled with folly here, and with uncertainty, as if we had returned to the moral universe of King Lear. And in a way we have. The twist, though, and one that does suggest Shakespeare is worrying a word rather than playing with it, is that honesty cancels itself out in such excessive maneuvers: it’s just honest to see how foolish honesty is. Wisdom is better than honesty because wisdom knows the score. But then you have to be “really” honest to acknowledge this wisdom. The thought is circular and repellent, yet hard to steer entirely clear of in any fully socialized world. Perhaps Iago’s real vice is his determination not to be a fool.
We should note too that this rampant cynicism, in Othello, is using the language of Puritan morality, and at one point Empson makes the brilliant suggestion that Iago himself “is a satire on the holy thought of Polonius: ‘To thine own self be true … thou canst not then be false to any man’ ” [CW 231]. What if the self I want to be true to is that of a cruel depressive who loves sowing havoc in the world not because he is evil but because it’s fun—or it’s the closest thing to fun to that he can manage?
I don’t think Othello is more disturbing than King Lear, but it is more intimately involved with the ways we talk to ourselves and others, and in this sense Empson’s chapter is about meanings that are very close to a word, and not the vast realms of implication a word may conjure up. Here the realms are the reverse of vast; petty and demeaning rather. But we do see what happens when puns take the stage, and language is recognized as the consummate performance artist that it is.