368
PARTISAN R.EVIEW
THE COMPLEXITY OF WORDS
THE STRUCTURE OF COMF'LEX WORDS.
By
Willillm Empson. New
Directions. $5.00
Nearly twice as long as
Seven Types of Ambiguity,
Empson's
new book is more closely argued, more difficult and-in its wider
range of implication--even more exciting. It may be slower in making
its effect than
Se.ven Types
or
Some Versions ()f Pastoral
because
Complex Words
is more profoundly unified, and because it is neces–
sary to follow attentively some fairly complicated trains of reasoning
and puzzle out some fine distinctions to appreciate just how much
Empson has accomplished here.
Most readers of
Seven Types
probably didn't remember very long
how the seven types were distinguished, or even what they were. The
idea of ambiguity was enough. They were content to be fascinated
by all the relevant associations that could be brought to bear in the
reading of "bare ruined choirs" or "brightness falls from the air."
There are parallel pleasures of an immediately available sort in the
Shakespearian chapters of
Complex Words.
But in this book Empson
has worked out a set of precisely elaborated logical principles which
he applies not only to problems of Shakespearian interpretation, but
also to problems of the nature of Metaphor, of pre-logical thought
among primitive people, of pseudo-statements in poetry, and of the
reality of moral values. Only by mastering his formulae and distinctions,
can one see how much confusion they clear up in all these troubled
areas.
By
complex
words Empson means those like "wit," "sense,"
"honest," "dog," and "fool," for which long lists of quite different
senses are given in the Oxford Dictionary, or those like "quite" and
"just," which are employed with a subtlety of intimation by native
speakers almost impossible to explain to foreigners. Discovering the
exact meaning of such a word in a given context is not a matter of
fixing on one dictionary sense and throwing out the others. Some of
these other senses will inevitably be present to the mind as possibilities,
especially if, as with "wit" in the
Essay on Criticism
or "fool" in
King Lear,
the poet has himself been using the word in these other
senses frequently in the work itself. The present chief sense, coming in–
to ·one of several possible logical relations with other dictionary senses,
implies an assertion or predication which can
be
examined logically
like any other. Saying, for instance, "his nature is disorderly," as
opposed to "his character is disorderly," implies relations between
