Author: Ophelia Benson

I like William Empson. Don’t try to talk me out of it.

As a poet who had written anti-Fascist propaganda for the BBC during the war and had taught ‘English literature’ in China both before and afterwards, he didn’t want writers or readers to trade in emotive, ineffable or overly abstract (i.e. religiose) language. Literature was there to alert us, to make us think rather than assent; close reading was the preferred antidote to indoctrination. The consequences of listening or reading inattentively, and of not seeing how language can be used to sustain inattention and sponsor cruelty, were Empson’s abiding preoccupations.

Well, you probably won’t bother trying to talk me out of it, because you can see right there why I would like him, and how futile such an attempt would be. Anyone who isn’t keen on ineffable or religiose language is going to be someone I am going to like. (Emotive language is a little different. I like emotive language [used sparingly] as long as it’s clear that everyone knows that’s what it is. It’s emotive language that’s smuggled in that I can’t stand; emotive language that pretends to be neutral. I don’t know what Empson would have thought of that.)

There were two related things that Empson as a literary critic could not abide. One was submission to authority, and the other was torment, both the wish to inflict it and the wish to suffer it. Empson was criticised and indeed ridiculed for this hatred, which was directed mostly against Christianity and ‘neo-Christian’ literary critics, but these are things one is unlikely to be casual about if they matter to one at all.

Well, yes. If you mind them at all you tend to mind them a lot. Thus the Rapture-fans, who revel in the thought of being snatched up into the clouds to watch the left behind be tortured, repel me and shock me quite intensely, just as the students at Patrick Henry who sign up (literally sign up, in writing) to the doctrine that the unsaved will be tormented in hell for eternity, and then go cheerily about their business, repel me and shock me. It’s bad stuff. I don’t see any way to get around that.

Empson, who believed in the ‘straddling’ of contraries rather than their resolution, who found ambiguity in literature more truthful than conviction, could not avoid unequivocally taking sides when it came to the Fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, and what he took to be the virtual fascism of the Judeo-Christian God. His letters, like all his critical writings, show that he was as unambiguous as he could be in his hatred of the haters of variety. He wanted a variety of sorts of feeling and an unendable clash of different philosophies. So by his own lights he couldn’t and didn’t create his own orthodoxy…‘What else does one write criticism for except to win agreement?’ he asks in a letter to Christopher Ricks, and yet the winning of agreement – or perhaps the winning of too much agreement, the way literature coerced assent instead of opening argument – was the very thing that troubled Empson.

Which is very like a running argument (or discussion) that’s been going on around here about consensus. Very like it indeed. Suggestive stuff.

Indeed, the thing Empson seems to have been most at odds with himself about was conflict…Empson believed that disagreement was often the more adequate response; to say where you think someone is wrong is to be on the side of variety…The possibility of disagreement was, I think, mostly evidence for Empson that one was not at anyone’s mercy. The writer could be at the mercy of his conflicts, just as the critic could be at the mercy of the text, or the institution that employed him. So the Empson who believed that the most morally disreputable thing a writer could do was suppress the conflicts that animated him, the Empson who preferred a clash to a consensus…

Was a very interesting fella.

And speaking of Wonkers, Ian B sent me a lovely little piece from the Wall Street Journal the other day, that’s more of the same kind of bowl of warm spit. Written by one Charlotte Hays – which sounds like a woman’s name to me. Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend. Does Charlotte Hays think she’d be writing for the WSJ without feminism? Hmm?

Perhaps the nicest thing about attending the National Organization for Women’s 40th birthday event last weekend was that I didn’t have to pack a lot of fancy party clothes – the dress code was strictly old feminist. The mindset was of the same vintage. Though there was a “summit” for young feminists on Friday before the conference got under way in earnest (and I do mean earnest), most of the 700 women in attendance were no spring chickens. They were joined at the Crowne Plaza by a handful of hen-pecked, middle-age men, always touchingly eager to demonstrate their ardent sympathy.

There’s lots more of the same kind of thing. Old, boring, old, boring, old, not hip, old, not as hip as I am, old, we’ve heard that before, yes that Equal Rights Amendment, yawn, 1982, yawn, old, I chose to get a bite to eat at Quizno’s instead. Stupid stuff. And the Wonkette shall inherit the earth.

I wonder if Katherine Rake has been reading Wonkette.

Roll up, roll up, for a spot of that old favourite, feminist-bashing. Anyone can have a go, it’s easy. Trot out that readymade mythological figure of the dungaree-clad, scary, hairy and humourless feminist.

Don’t forget ‘fixated’ and ‘so angry’ – they go with the humourless bit. And as for rolling up – the comments are depressing. Actually they’re more like disgusting. And that’s at the Guardian! So men in the rest of the world are even more misogynist and contempt-filled – how encouraging.

And we now also have to contend with the hypersexualisation of our culture, a phenomenon that has developed and snowballed with hardly a murmur of dissent. Against a backdrop of ubiquitous images of women’s bodies as sex objects, rates of self-harm among young women are spiralling, eating disorders are on the rise, and plastic surgery is booming.

Well there’ve been quite a few murmurs of dissent from me, but I do my murmuring in such a quiet, genteel, whispery, mousy way that no one hears me, what with all that panting and grunting going on. I suppose it’s my karma.

I think there’s some tension there though, and I think it’s a tension you find in a lot of feminists. A bit of eating cake and having.

The stereotype of the mythological feminist, while ridiculous, is dangerous in that it gives the impression that feminism is first and foremost about how women should dress or whether they should wear make-up…Against a backdrop of ubiquitous images of women’s bodies as sex objects…

Well, which is it? It’s no good disavowing concern with how women should dress in one breath and then expressing concern with ubiquitous images of their bodies as sex objects with the other. The two are, unfortunately, linked. I myself have a Talibanish tendency to flinch when I see women ambling around the supermarket with their stomachs or buttocks or tits poking out, for precisely that kind of reason, a tendency which always causes me to ask despairingly why women can’t just wear clothes instead of either tents or bathing suits. I ask that question for feminist reasons, because I think it makes a difference to how everyone thinks of women – so I don’t think it’s much good pretending feminism isn’t concerned with that subject, even to suck up to the Wonkette crowd.

Any Buddhists out there? I have a question. Or not so much a question as something I don’t get. (I know of at least one Buddhist out there. Maybe I’ll email her, or maybe she’ll say something here before I get around to it.) This morning I was reading a book about feminism and world religions – called Feminism and World Religions – and in the essay on Buddhism Rita Gross tells us that many Buddhists explain male dominance as a result of karma: everyone’s ‘current position’ is a result of karma from the past, so women’s inferiority results from ‘negative karma’ so they have to bear it gracefully, which will probably lead to the good karma of rebirth as a man. (She then says what’s wrong with that view – you don’t get to say ‘it’s your karma to be oppressed by me’ because that’s bad or ‘negative’ karma for you.) But on the next page she talks about egolessness and the non-existence of the ego, the self, the identity. That’s fine, I have no problem with that, it just sounds like dear Hume to me; but what I don’t get is how those two things can possibly make sense in combination. If the self doesn’t exist in this life, what sense can it possibly make to say that what we did in a past life belongs to us in this one? Accepting the (absurd, but never mind) idea of rebirth just for the moment for the sake of argument – what is it that is reborn if there is no self? I want to know. What is it that is reborn, and what is its relationship to its ‘karma’? It’s presumably not anything material; it’s not meant to be the same atoms or anything; but it’s also not the same person, because personhood is an illusion. So what is it?

This is a blindingly obvious problem, so surely it must have been discussed to within an inch of its life, but I seem to have slept through that class. Answers on a postcard please.