96
PARTISAN REVIEW
sake of the communication: "we imagine a mental state relevant to the
poem"; we imagine (as his best pupil William Empson put it) a mental
state according to which what is said "would appear true." Such a
formulation challenges two opposite kinds of critical confidence that
had some currency before Richards, intuitionism and positivism. He
understood both that we could never know directly what an author
meant to say and that we could never discover a single, fixed meaning
in the language itself. Acknowledging the dilemma of relativism,
Richards made concessions
to
it: readers "must be free to choose their
own interpretations deep down after much surface conformity." This is
not quite an endorsement of indeterminacy; in fact, as his
Practical
Criticism
(1929) makes clear, he cared enough about the ideal of a
reliable reading to be appalled by the corruptibility of the communica–
tion process, and later he even turned away from criticism and tried to
simplify the verbal medium. What is important here is that, without
becoming an outright relativist, Richards recognized the sources of
uncertainty, and allowed his principles to be modified accordingly.
Prescriptive compromise, however, is inherently unstabl e, and it is
not surprising that Richards's influence soon forked into opposite
directions, most readily associated with the names of William Empson
and F. R. Leavis. Especially in
Seven Types of Ambiguity,
Empson
(followed by Burke) weakened our confidence in the determinacy of
textual meaning by making the boundary of relevance in interpretation
more difficult to define. Leavis, along with a number of American
critics who valued both close reading and moral firmness (Winters,
Tate, Ransom, Blackmur, Wimsatt, and Brooks), strengthened it again
though at the risk of confusing intrinsic and extrinsic judgments.
Empson returns repeatedly
to
the question of the author's inten–
tion and the erosion of that standard under the press ure of his search
for multiple implications. His fascination with ambiguity and "com–
plex words" dizzies the reader-Richards himself, with friendly wit,
compared the experience of reading Empson to that of sickening for
the flu-but the boldness is calculated. Indeed, it is one of the attrac–
tive features of his work that it raises theoretical problems without
fretting about neat solutions, as if not to spoil the fun. He coils back
and forth across the line between relevance and irrelevance, nimbly
evading a commitment in particular cases as to whether an author
meant what he said, as to "how much of his activity he is conscious
of, and how much of his activity he could be conscious of if he tri ed."
He likes to see how far he can go, conceding that "relevance and
unity are threatened by complex situations," yet he holds back from
the abyss of total indeterminacy.
