Forms of Dishevelment

Abstract

‘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.