On Portmanteau Words
The Structure of Complex Words. By William Empson. (Chatto and Windus. 21..)
NOTHING written between the wars had a greater effect on the reader's response to poetry than Mr. Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity. It opened the eyes of my generation to the com- plexities of meaning that underlay any single, seemingly simple, lyric. It showed us that a Donne or a Marvell could incorporate two or more contradictory meanings in the same lines, and that the reader was capable, without making any conscious analysis, of accepting a poem's ambiguities and resolving them. Where Mr. Empson's master, I. A. Richards, almost succeeded in persuading us by his questionnaires that really we understood nothing at all and could only distinguish good poetry from bad by the name on the cover, Mr. Empson, in his first book, called our attention to the miracles of understanding of which we were unconscious but which sprang automatically into action as we read. We might be incapable of appreciating the differences between one of Mr. Empson's categories and another. Indeed his distinctions may have been a little unreal. But his findings have certainly modified the climate of critical thought.
His new book has the same amazing virtues and presents the same difficulties as his first. Its first 80 pages make remarkably stiff reading. For he sets out to establish, in terms of the arid science of semantics, his right to make the penetrating analyses which occupy his next 200 pages. His method is to take certain key words, and, by examining the changes of meaning that they have undergone through the centuries and the wealth of subordinate meanings that they have picked up in passing, to show their par- ticular significance in a given play or poem. What, for instance, is implied by the word honest as applied by Shakespeare to Iago ?
Honest and honesty occur 52 times in Othello. In some contexts it means plain-spoken, and Mr. Empson shows how it is for a quality of bluntness in lago, for his readiness to blow the gaff on other people's hypocrisies, that the fantastical- Othello values him. But honest has,. at the same time, quite another level of meaning in this play. It is a term of contempt. For by Shakespeare's time it had assumed a peculiar connotation, at once hearty and indi- vidualist, which was then common only among low people, but which became respectable at the time of the Restoration. An honest man, in this second sense, was an unprincipled man, who followed only his natural desires. The term fitted Iago in both its connotations. Yet for Othello, Cassio and Rodrigo, and for the different social strands among the audience, its implications were subtly different. Othello is, in fact, a play largely concerned with the theme of honesty, as King Lear is with fools and foolishness, and Measure for Measure with sense and with its secondary-meaning of sensuality. Mr. Empson's essays on these and half-a-dozen similar subjects will permanently enrich his reader's understanding of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Wordsworth. His discoveries are real and valuable.
He is, however, for all his sensitiveness to literature, the prisoner of his school and his decade. He still feels it to be possible to reduce meaning to a sort of algebra ; and not only the first but the last chapters of his book are taken up with such propositions as the following: "If B' is the minor sense in A=B; this equation would count as Type III when the immediate context demanded B ' but as Type II when it demanded A '." By such language the simple statement that the sun is shining could be rendered obscure to all who had not learnt to play the old Cambridge parlour-game, known as the Meaning of Meaning. It would be sad if readers with no taste for such intellectual acrobatics allowed themselves to be deflected from the central chapters of this most valuable book.
J. M. COHEN.
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