Reading Note:
O What a Mansion!
17 June 2015
One things leads to another — especially when I can find the books.
I plow on with William Empson’s 7 Types of Ambiguity. It is like riding in a train, staring out the window at a tangled wood. Every now and then, a broad field appears at an opening in the forest, and, beyond it, the dreaming spires of Oxford. Just as one is recognizing the turrets and the towers, the wilderness closes in again. One sits back grumpily, resentfully surmising that Empson has no interest in Oxford. He went to Magdalene, not Magdalen: he’s a Cambridge man.
A Cambridge man who started out in mathematics. When I found that out Empson wrote 7 Types of Ambiguity when he was 24, having abandoned mathematics for literature, I understood a great deal, even if it wasn’t the book itself. 7 Types of Ambiguity is written rather incompetently by a brilliant young man who has not done a great deal of listening in his life and who blithely generalizes from his own rather peculiar experiences. His amateur psychology is intriguing enough to mask its dodginess. At the same time, the book is stuffed with the crack critical insights that come to a math man early in life, never to be recaptured.
Thank heaven for Wikipedia. The entry for the book helpfully lists all seven types of ambiguity. Having nearly reached the end of the first chapter, and heard Empson mention “the first type of ambiguity” several times without any clear expression of what this first type was, I sighed with relief to find that it was “metaphor.”
I also learned that Empson’s first evangelists were I A Richards and Frank Kermode. If Kermode wrote like Empson, I wouldn’t know much about him. And I learned that Empson was instrumental, if that’s the word, in enhancing the prestige of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 among New Critics. Sonnet 94? Which one is that?
For a few mornings in the spring or fall of my sophomore year at Notre Dame, I got up well before breakfast, dressed, and carried my Pelican edition of the Sonnets with me across the quad from Dillon to Lyons and then down to St Mary’s Lake. One I was lost in the shrubberies, I would open the book at random and read aloud. Every now and then, I would cross paths with a smiling priest, but I was safe, at this hour, from my fellow undergraduates, any of whom who might be awake at this hour were surely focused on non-cerebral tissues. Lost by the lake, I could let myself go, and feel what it might be like to declaim, and perhaps even to have memorized, Shakespeare, in bosky collegiate surroundings. I had a vague idea that, at some point in the past, such behavior had been not only encouraged but protected, and perhaps even admired, at least in the faraway vicinity of those dreaming spires. I wanted at least a taste of the life of open ownership of magnificence — something as forbidden in Cold War America as it was in Soviet Russia.
It was a matter of days only. I soon slumped to type. Disgracefully, though, I allowed myself to “remember” that I had, on these excursions, read each of the sonnets at least once.
Sonnet 94: “Those that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none…” This did not ring a bell at all. All it summoned up was the bosh of my exaggerate claims.
Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets was right where it ought to be. In this indispensable volume, each sonnet is discussed in a couple of pages that reproduce the compression of the sonnets themselves. It is very apt to say that Vendler “unpacks” the sonnets, because, when she’s done, the contents of fourteen lines of verse are laid out over seeming acres, and all in the space of two or three pages. Reading about Sonnet 94, I was quickly made aware that it forms an arc with the sonnets to either side. “With the failure of 94’s hopeful diversion into organic metaphor, the accusation suppressed in 93 and 94 can burst out in full cry in 95: O what a mansion have those vices got / Which for their habitation chose out thee!“
I had to stop right there. I had but to turn the page to read Sonnet 95 in full, but that would have to wait.
O what a mansion have those vices got
Which for their habitation chose out thee,
The exclamation point in Vendler’s notes to Sonnet 94 is an interpolation that makes sense if you’re just reading the two lines — if you’re imagining, perhaps, a very great actress on a severe stage, sharply turning in her long gown so that its train stretches out before her, and hurling a dagger of contempt at some blandly fatuous villain. Vendler claims that the gist of the sonnet, “often preached in sermons,” is “hate the sin and love the sinner,” but I don’t feel any love in these two lines. Admiration has rotted to disgust. In the notes to Sonnet 95, she asks us to hear the “man” in “mansion” and the “habit” in “habitation,” and this more than suggests the identity of sin and sinner. Having learned something from Empson, I can add that the mansion is an ambiguous figure, visibly splendid but secretly infested with vermin, and doomed to collapse into hell; alive and dead at the same time.
Every now and then, Shakespeare says something that startles because it shakes free of now-archaic speech patterns and assimilates the syntax of something that might be spoken today. Spoken in the exaltation of great anger, that is. O what a mansion! I could say that. And then there is that “got,” made all the more intensely vernacular by linking mansion with habitation — the one word very grand, the other abstractly pretentious, and both ending in -ion. Where we would diverge is in the final three words; we would say (to preserve the meter), “sought you out.” But “chose out thee” not only is required for the rhyme but emphasizes the sinner: thee! It spits.
One of the peculiarities of the English language is that the old second-person singular, thou — which in all the European languages developed into a second-person familiar, to be used only with intimate peers (and God) — came to feel just the opposite, starchy and formal. It has disappeared from the spoken language and is known only to the educated and to some varieties of the religious. Chose out thee reminds us of our loss.
Anyway, I was staggered. How had I never encountered this magnificent language before? And what were the chances of my ever being able to use it to rebuke an actual person? As I stumbled about, getting ready for bed, I delivered the two lines over and over, trying to get them just right, as loudly and dramatically as I dared. I also tried to think which of Shakespeare’s plays they might be fitted into. I couldn’t think of one. The Sonnets are their own play.