Forms of Dishevelment

'This surely is the advantage of superstition', Michael Wood writes in the sixth chapter of On Empson: 'It does not claim knowledge it doesn't have, and it does not deny its bafflement. On the contrary, it dramatizes its disarray' (p. 160). Like one of Empson's own statements on pastoral or ambiguity, this remark has a double plot: Wood is puzzling out a particular essay by Empson on King Lear, and its knowingness about self-delusion; he is also offering, with casual philosophical force, a defence for Empson's distinctive qualities of mind and prose. Empson is a 'superstitious' writer in Wood's sense: he can 'allow us to think about chance, character, and whatever order the world is supposed to have without recourse to religion or fatalism' (p. 158). Wood's 'superstition' doesn't match any of the seven types of superstition defined under the Oxford English Dictionary's entry for the word. Taken together, the senses from 'the great work', as Empson liked to call it, summon a more familiar, if complex, figure of the superstitious person: one engaged in excessive religious observance, heterodoxy, magical thinking, mistaken notions, fearful confusions. This dictionary superstitionist is not Empson, a dogged rationalist, whose writings, for all their extravagance, couldn't be less credulous, less reverent. So what does Wood mean by his reinvention of the term? In Wood's hands, superstition, a conceptual mode at once deliberately modest and overreaching, allows us to make some sense of Empson's strange poetic and critical temperament. It offers ways of understanding how his apparent shift from early pluralisms to ever wilder dogmatisms might be told other than as a story of pure waste. It also recovers space and force for his more unexpected kinds of meditation – tenacious thinking about middle spirits, for example, or speculations about hydroptic earth – as forms of literary-critical intelligence.

If Empson is a writer who comes, improbably enough, under a version of superstitious reading, then so too does Wood in this book. On the whole, this book 'does not claim knowledge it doesn't have' but instead, albeit with great surface serenity, 'dramatizes its disarray'. This is a calm book about forms of dishevelment. On Empson does make a pose of organised critical form. Wood fails to resist the superstitious trick of seven chapters, for which he apologised in Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, his Empson lectures of 2003, one of which was titled 'Seven Types of Obliquity', and justified itself as 'an attempt, by sympathetic magic, to get Empson's backing for what I'm trying to do'.¹ Here Wood just lets the trick stand, and it does no real harm. What reads more strangely are the epigraphs: Giorgio Agamben, Gillian Rose, and Hannah Arendt appear at the head of chapters as voices from other systems of critical knowledge, sublimely jarring. Thus the first words of the book, below the tongue-in-cheek boldness of the chapter title, 'Empson's Intentions', come from Agamben's The End of the Poem: 'What is a hesitation, if one removes it altogether from the psychological dimension?' Not only does the conceptual fit between Agamben's 'hesitation' and Empson's 'intentions' seem weak, but the critical form also strains here. Epigraphs don't belong easily with Empson: he is unlike Eliot, who feeds off the kinds of preliminary irony and staggered voicing that epigraphs initiate; his ambiguities or indecisions are rarely of the variety of the hesitant or 'false' start. The best sympathetic magic for Wood's book might have been to borrow Empson's usual chapter form and just begin.

When Wood does begin 'in earnest' it is, appropriately enough, not in earnest. The book opens with a protracted piece of joke-work. Wood stages the moment at which Empson 'decides to linger in Macbeth's mind', as Macbeth urges himself to believe (in Wood's paraphrase) 'that murder might be not so bad a crime (for the criminal) if he could just get it over with' (p...