There are moments in William Empson’s classic Some Versions of Pastoral [i] when we glimpse what might have been a fruitful relationship between anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism, concerning the relationship of literature to ritual and social integration. This is a central thread of Empson’s study, but there are so many central threads, tangled together, that it can be difficult to take hold of it.

He starts with proletarian literature, distinguishing it from pastoral, and in the process bringing in the political significance (and function) of literature: “It is for reasons like these that the most valuable works of art so often have a political implication which can be pounced on and called bourgeois. They carry an implication about the society they were written for; the question is whether the same must not be true of any human society, even if it is much better than others”[ii] (Empson, 20). He considers, in his off-handed manner, social structure, political stability, and symbols of sovereign power throughout the book. But he also touches repeatedly on something else —how the political in even its modern instantiations is inseparable from pre-modern beliefs and practices that bring about social stability. On John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera he writes: 

It is both-heroic and mock-pastoral., but these take Heroic and Pastoral for granted; they must be used as conventions and so as ways of feeling if they are even to be denied. It would be reasonable to say that human nature is exalted as that it is debased by this process; it makes Macheath seem like the heroes and swains no less than the heroes and swains like Macheath... But pastoral usually works like that; it describes the lives of ‘simple’ low people to an audience of refined wealthy people, so as to make them think first ‘this is true about everyone’ and then ‘this is especially true about us’… there is a natural connection between heroic and pastoral before they are parodied, and this gives extra force to the comic mixture. Both when in their full form assume or preach what the parody need not laugh at, a proper or beautiful relation between rich and poor…It is felt that you cannot have a proper hero without a proper people, even if the book only gives him an implied or magical relation to it (Empson, 196).

The word “magical” and the way that magic is a category of power relations to which societies appeal to balance and mend themselves, and to balance and mend their relation to the natural world, underlies Empson’s analysis of the political in the book. His is an anthropological conception of politics and literature both.

Some of his most far-reaching insights (and speculation) in the study concern the literary imagination as performing an act of social integration, both as a whole and within a natural world that threatens it:

The connection between pantheism and deification is perhaps best approached by a speculative route. F.M. Cornford developed a theory in From Religion to Philosophy that the primitive Greeks invented Nature by throwing out onto the universe the idea of a common life-blood; the living force that made natural events follow reasonable laws, and in particular made the crops grow, was identified with the blood which made the members of the tribe into a unity and which they shared with their totem. So the physicist is well connected by derivation to the physician, the ‘leech’ who lets blood. However this may have been in primitive Greece it was a natural fancy for a Christian; the Logos had been formulated as the underlying Reasons of the universe and was also the Christ who had saved men by shedding his blood and sharing it in the Communion. It seems to me that there is a trace of the idea in the speech of Faustus:

                  The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike;

                  The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

                  O, I’ll leap up to my God, Who pulls me down?

                  See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.

The blood might be the red sunset of the fatal night. It is too far off to help, perhaps, because the firmament had grown further off; what pulls him down is the force that holds him to one world. Clearly the sign is for some reason a portent not a hope; perhaps because the sacrifice of Christ had made his sin more unforgivable. I think there is a feeling that the blood of Christ is what sustains all Nature, that it is what makes time run on. And the idea that Christ is somehow diffused through all Nature (into which Faustus himself wishes to be dissolved) makes it the more impossible to escape punishment (Empson, 77-78).

This is exemplary Empson, though it does not exemplify that version of Empson  which critics these days are most likely to celebrate: it is not an intense scrutiny of ambiguities in grammar or jostling meanings in words but is instead Empson the anthropologist, author of the recently recovered Faces of the Buddha. There is also something that feels necessarily dated in the intellectual orientation. Durkheim, whose writings on ritual and totems underlie the thought of the passage, had died less than twenty years before Empson wrote; the full excitement of his ideas persisted, as Foucault’s did long after his death. Marcel Mauss, Levi-Bruhl, Malinowski, and Evans Pritchard were in the full throes of success or nearly ripe in their thinking. In literature, of course, Eliot’s drawing attention to his sources in rituals and myths in The Waste Land had awakened what Larkin would call “the myth kitty,” for generations of poets to stroke. These ideas are not forgotten or lost, and the inheritance of Durkheim and the legacy of these early anthropologists is preserved in Mary Douglas (who is still read), Maurice Godelier (eminent and still living), and Phillipe Descola, to name a few (F.M. Cornford’s book is still in print, incidentally). But it is unusual to find in literary criticism such explicit appeals to the material and ethnographic focuses of these anthropologists, and to their theories of social development. For one thing, they write about pre-modern societies; for another, the post-structuralist inheritance has dominated the field. (Some have engaged with Geertz, but that is probably because Geertz drew on the study of literature and hermeneutic theory). Empson’s reach here is genuinely interdisciplinary. It is also a wildly inventive way of reading literature politically. 

I never fully made sense of it, or appreciated its full argumentative reach, until I started working my way through the first volume of Habermas’ Also a History of Philosophy, Volume I.[iii]  It is a massive work, and the impetus behind it is Habermas’ recognition that his earlier theoretical accounts of social formation and integration did not sufficiently account for the persistence of religious experience in the modern world (Habermas, 128).[iv]  In the first volume of the work, he considers the origin of sacred spaces, ritual, and mythology in the evolution of humans and the symbolic systems of humanity (and in so doing argues that the contours of Durkheim’s account of ritual and social cohesion remain unsurpassed):

I have pointed out the cognitive and motivational challenges to which the species as exposed in crossing the evolutionary threshold of linguistic communication, when, with the socialization of its cognition, it emerged from the ‘egocentrically biased’ view of primates and, with the communicative coordination of action, it simultaneously became entangled in a highly ambivalent mode of socialization through individuation (Habermas, 178).

Elsewhere, Habermas explains the “highly ambivalent mode of socialization through individuation” as the struggle of “maintaining the balance between excessive dependence on and excessive distance from a collective identity that is as unrelentingly formative as it is supportive” (Habermas, 173; italics Habermas’).  He develops the idea in several directions: “The trans-subjective social bond woven from the threads of communicative actions coerces and saves at the same time, because with it, to put it in terms of social ontology, a new layer of reality of symbolic orders emerges—namely, the public reality of the normative” (Habermas, 176; italics Habermas’). Most powerfully—dare one say poetic, somewhat oddly for Habermas: 

In every ontogenesis is rooted the memory traces of an early, highly ambivalent dependence, of being radically at the mercy of the simultaneously sustaining structure of a helpful social environment. From the perspective of the individual, the power of the social collective is both overwhelming and life-enabling. In phylogeny, too, the original crisis experience of being suspended over the abyss of an existence at the mercy of the collective, but an existence that nevertheless has to be ‘accomplished’ individually, must have trigged an earthquake that accompanies the reproduction of social life to the present day. It found a distant echo, for example, in Rousseau’s description of the social contrast as an act of self-alienation and simultaneous self-assignment of the individual to society. This figure of thought is also instructive in other respects. The social contract gives rise precisely to the gap between facticity and validity characteristic of a new layer of the normative that in a sense emerges from nature. The authority of traditions (which later become differentiated into custom, morality and law) is nourished by this diffuse complex. The fact of ‘ethical life’ brought to bear by Rousseau—the ‘ethos’ of the community of citizens assumed as something given—goes back to the sustaining normative background understanding of a form of life that depends on the solidarity of its members, because it is always latently threatened in its innermost regions by social disintegration through the socialization mechanismof language that empowers individual to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ (Habermas,176; italics Habermas’).

Confronted with this precarious balance, “Ritual communication can be understood as an answer to these challenges. The tensions that broke out between the individual and society in everyday communication were evidently thematized and absorbed in this out-of-the-ordinary communication. The processing of the self-referential theme of the instability inherent in the socialization process itself would explain not only why ritual lacks a reference to the world, but also what qualifies it to generate the countervailing normative binding and bonding energies” (Habermas, 178; italics Habermas’). Literature and its language do not lack reference to the world; they participate in “world-disclosing” and in the essential linguistic move of representing “as if.” Nonetheless, literary criticism has long been attuned to literature’s self-awareness; literature’s expressing judgments about the world that are self-referential in so far as they also justify its form. And in so far as literature makes good on the imagination with language that cannot make good on its normal powers (a poet cannot lie or promise; this was not J.L. Austin’s discovery, but he made it a matter of significance for philosophers), it is similarly “out of the ordinary.”  

This should not be surprising: Habermas moves from ritual to myth, and the movement from myth to literature is non-controversial. It is the move that Empson repeatedly, and rapidly makes, frequently restoring to Christianity its pre-modern aura. Literature in modern society does not function as mythical narratives which, in Habermas’ account, were suited for “stabilizing collective identities” because, tied to the self-referential meaning of rituals, narratives were fortified against “cognitive dissonances” arising from “pragmatically acquired knowledge about the world” (italics Habermas’); myths are “shielded from dissonant knowledge of the world in a completely different way from narrative representations that can be true or false” (Habermas, 180). But we can nonetheless suppose that normative standards by which a work of literature determines whether it is, in its own form, balanced and “right” (whether it makes good what it imagines of the world, and whether it correctly imagines how the world imagines goodness), are themselves (and here I quote Habermas) “borrowed from a normative background, which in turn is symbolically structured and therefore pre-supposes the use of symbols, but whose existence nevertheless cannot be explained, like language, from the profane contexts and functional requirements of social cooperation.”  (Habermas, 177) And Empson suggests how it is that, without being myth, if a work of literature is to establish its own unity—something that depends on its embodying and expressing the normative standards by which its relations of part to whole are said to be “correct” or “right” in some sense—it must carry out an integration of meanings and judgments that are inherently social. Even if the point of the work is, as in Modernist literature, to deny us unity, it can only do so against a background notion of what such unity might be; the success of a given work of literature as a literary work is not just akin to, but exemplary of, the work of social integration upon which the collective identity of a social group depends.  

Empson of course goes further still; he thinks of a genre—pastoral—as a representation of one basic form of social stabilization, the reconciliation of rich and poor, sophisticated and naïve, complex and simple, categories that, though they do not all overtly designate groups within a society are nonetheless categories by which social groups are related to one another on a hierarchy (we might think of a populist resistance to expertise; college-educated to non-college-educated). In this he offers a suggestion that genre can be analyzed in terms of social relations—a consideration that ought to encourage us to read not just drama or narrative but also lyric in terms of genre (as we are apt to do when we think of satire, though not of lyric as tragedy, usually). He points us towards the overt effort of reading works of literature as performing the work of social integration that Habermas describes in ritual and myth; he encourages us to read literature as containing within it the resources of those rituals and myths. Habermas clarifies, as perhaps nobody else can, how we can undertake such a reading of literature in the 21st century, with a hundred years of social theory and research, not least Habermas’ own, separating us from Empson. 

One of the greatest lessons Habermas has for readers is the recovery of past thinkers for present purposes can entail rigorously creative interpretations. For all that is made of Habermas’ debate with Gadamer, no thinker I know demonstrates more potently than Habermas what a hermeneutic encounter, the horizon of the present meeting and shaped by the horizon of the past, can be. (The Theory of Communicative Actionrecovers Weber for the latter half of the 20th century). This spirit of reading the past, demonstrated time and again in Habermas’ work, depends on his belief that there are minds, lost now, known only indirectly, and remotely, in written work and records, that hold the possibility of renewing discoveries. At the end of the chapter I’ve drawn on most, “The Meaning of the Sacred,” he writes: 

At the end of the genealogy of postmetaphysical, it will remain open whether, in the pluralistic and highly individualized societies of the West that are organized as constitutional states, democratic decision-making and liberal political culture will suffice, once the understanding of self and the world has been completely desacralized, as the secular equivalent for the mode of dealing with the crises of social integration that was once rooted in ritual. Perhaps recalling Rousseau’s enigmatic conception of the psychodynamically transformative power of the democratic founding act could put is on the right track. But I will not pursue this speculative line of enquiry.(Habermas, 180-181)

Now here is Rousseau, the progenitor of so much of Kant’s account of public and private reason, and so at the root of much in Habermas, appearing with the promise of something essential that may have been left out, that may help us better understand what we see before us today. Here, as elsewhere, we find Habermas’ analysis to be avowedly “rich in argument unpursued,” to borrow a phrase from Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral, a book that is likewise rich in such untapped veins. 

In the thought that literature makes good the promise of the imagination (and the literary imagination the potential of literature), we are thrown back on the question of what it means to make good, and from there to the critical task of what exactly is made good, and how good, and by what means and measure—to an inquiry into the normative. But in the most rewarding experiences of reading literature, we are thrown in another direction: from a feeling of satisfaction, balance, and fulfillment—the particular aesthetic pleasure that extends to scenes of natural beauty in which we feel we ourselves fit—to the question of what judgments are compounded in such a feeling, and how those judgments (and feelings) are warranted by the work. 

The best criticism I suspect begins in this place of pleasure. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes that the end (telos) of literature is pleasure, whereas that of science is truth, I would like for him to have meant by pleasure something near to this fulfillment I am describing, the sense of stability and unity that is brought about by a work, but that encompasses readers of the work also.[v] After all, for Coleridge a poet is a master of the faculty of “imagination,” which brings about “the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” in the poem itself; those qualities are not only verbal and aesthetic, but may extend to the social. For Coleridge, the imagination cannot be appreciated apart from its integrative functioning. Reading critically means reading for fulfillment and asking that such the source of fulfillment reveal something about the normative grounds of pleasure itself, as myth and ritual—experienced as an authentic participant—could not. Habermas quotes Maurice Bloch: “You cannot argue with a song,” and explains “the members of a choir cannot comment on the score of a song while singing” (Habermas, 135). But in criticism, we attempt to do just that—and find oftentimes—that arguing with a text alters how we sing it, for the better; it improves our sense of what it means for a work of literature to make good on the promise of the imagination. Habermas suggests that, whatever it might mean to make good on the promise, that promise of the imagination is itself a promise that overcomes rupture, that repairs and transforms, individually and socially. He speaks of a pre-modern consciousness, but the psychosocial dynamic that he describes is not absent from modernity, only coordinated through different social structures:

The fear of the identity-threatening consequences of exclusion as well as of hyper-inclusion—of the social bond being ruptured as opposed to the individual being suffocated through forced integration—is the theme of evolutionary experiences extending far into the past that are encapsulated in ritual forms of expression…If this interlocking is projected from social space onto historical time, the loss and recovery of one’s identity provides the pattern for the process of becoming a self in the passage through crises of social integration…The vacillation between an interpretation of the First as an unfathomable origin from which one either frees oneself or to which one returns is replaced by a different kind of original experience—the vertiginousness of a transgressive act that is at once frightening and, as a possible source of salvation, fascinating. To cross the boundary is to give precarious consent to a destructive process with an uncertain outcome—the destruction of an old identity that has become diffuse in favor of a new identity, but one that is in turn at risk of being consumed and overwhelmed. (Habermas, 173-4; italics Habermas’).

Without mentioning the imagination, it is difficult to see how a more granular account than this would avoid the term, for the imagination both presupposes and sustains the symbolic background that makes crises of social integration and the recovery of stability possible. 

Some might prefer the term ideology to “imagination,” but the advantage of the latter is both in its generality—following Maurice Godelier, the imaginary sustains and is sustained by the symbolic and the real alike (a triadic dependency)[vi]—and in its relevance to Habermas who does not invoke ideology in his discussion. For even if he were to do so, the dynamic of social integration of which he speaks takes place at a level that is both collective and individual, that requires individuals to imagine themselves at the same time as a social group imagines itself in ritual acts. Favoring an account that relies on the evolution of learning processes and social cognition, Habermas leaves space for imagination and ideology alike.

Here too Habermas and Empson speak to one another. For Empson, individual independence of mind is among the chief virtues; that he can speak of this alongside the forces of society does not diminish his sense of either. Instead, it is an independent mind—not a genius, but capable of judgment distinct from the prevailing currents—that can wrestle conflicting social forces into the calm power of literature, that can offer a heroic possibility of living. This is, I think it is fair to say, the guiding ideal of Empson’s criticism—but not so far off from a guiding ideal in Habermas’ work, as he proceeds in dialogue down his (long and varied) gallery of heroes. It is an ideal, though, that they each represent explicitly. For Habermas, this is the individual who has managed to preserve himself both within and apart from society—the critical philosopher par excellence. For Empson, it is the original poet-critic David, singer of psalms: “it is an important version of the idea of the man powerful because he has included everything in himself, is still strong, one would think, among the mountain climbers and often the scientists” (Empson,120). This answers to both Habermas and Empson; it suggests that the individual imagination needs to be capacious enough to invite others into it, to preserve them in their liberty, but to balance them in its whole, at the same time as the imagination presses outwards against those who would close upon it too tightly, without withdrawing from the hearing of those to whom it speaks. This is the ideal of Empson and Habermas’ own intellectual outputs; it describes their stance to the past and present; but it also, in the case of each, suggests what is required if a person is to recover from the crises of social imbalance and also what a decent political and social order must afford those that live within it.

The upshot of reading this first volume of Habermas against Empson is that it clarifies what Empson wants to suggest in terms that accord with contemporary social theory. The first volume of Habermas’ work suggests just how bold Empson’s suggestion might be: that despite the social differentiation and rationalization of the modern lifeworld, despite the detachment and self-reflexivity of modern critical and creative practices, the pre-modern energies capable of restoring social integration by the manipulation of symbols in ritual and myth persist into the modern experience of aesthetic. Those energies depend on the imagination’s potential to reconcile conflicting judgments and contrasting metaphysical categories of experiences experience such that stable identity can be restored to consciousness, individual and collective alike. Works of literature (and art) make good on this potential by realizing it and inviting us to participate in it; they bring about, in their relation of part and whole, the possibility of a valid unity of warring elements that arises out of cognitive dissonance and crises experienced socially as well as individually.  We can, against this, better understand also why Empson repeatedly returns to the notion that a work of modern literature is stronger for including within it more such elements, more judgments, more possibilities: this testifies to its integrative capacity and testifies to the virtues of its design.

Continuous with his criticism, Empson’s poetry “Homage to the British Museum” asks us to consider how the vestiges of the pre-modern in our world are not merely dead museum pieces: 

There is a Supreme God in the ethnological section;

A hollow toad shape, faced with a blank shield. 

He needs is belly to include the Pantheon,

Which is inserted through a hole behind.

At the navel, at the points formally stressed, at the organs of sense,

Lice glue themselves, dolls, local deities,

His smooth wood creeps with all the creeds of the world.

Attending there let us absorb the cultures of nations

And dissolve into our judgment all their codes.

Then, being clogged with a natural hesitation

(People are continually asking one the way out),

Let us stand here and admit that we have no road.

Being everything, let us admit that is to be something,

Or give ourselves the benefit of the doubt;

Let us offer our pinch of dust all to this God,

And grant his reign over the entire building.

Christopher Ricks offers the best comment on the poem:

It is not only that this ‘Supreme God’ is Tangaroa, the sea god, in the act of creating the other gods and man; he is seen as wonderfully able to do all the creating by himself, and so to absorb the powers of womanhood within his manhood. He shows that we can imagine, though we cannot enter, a world in which it is not any longer true that

                                    two is least can with full tensions strain,

                                    Two molecules; one, and the film disbands.

He alone has the right to think that he can create it all alone; he possesses the true pride of which Empson’s Arachne was the travesty (Ricks, 235).[vii]

“We can imagine, though we cannot enter” the world where gods and myths can bring about integration of the entire world into a unity that they contain. This capacity to imagine what we nonetheless cannot enter draws into focus the modern/pre-modern divide, the difference between literature and art and the forces at work in myth and ritual as Habermas describes them. But the poem does invite us to enter something: the imagined physical space of the British Museum and the imagination of a possibility of unity that is no longer ours but that, in being made into a poem, is nonetheless generative of a unity of its own, in which we can participate. Critical detachment is the ground upon which Empson’s imagination conceives of its own potential. This, though not participation in the ritual, is participation in the past from the present, accommodating pre-modern and modern in a union broader than either. 

When Empson writes “Let us offer our pinch of dust all to this God,” we should notice how much “all” does: the “pinch of dust” is made substantive; the dust that is usually scattered is gathered up, as if such gathering were a feat of strength, even if it is a mere pinch; such a pinch of dust is all that remains of the energies of sacrifice, but it is a sacrifice nonetheless, and, being dust and a mere pinch at that, is all the more difficult to gather into one place. “All” follows abruptly from “dust,” so that there is a flicker of a semantic conjunction, “dust all”: the “all” that is given to the God, the dust being “all” that we could possibly give. Then there is the final line, “And grant his reign over the entire building,” where “entire” omits nothing, and where “grant” suggests a concession of power, an admission that the God, and what he represents, has reigned over the Museum all along—a suggestion that in our highly differentiated world, we still live beneath the order of this distant past of rituals and myths, or at least are able, in imagination and understanding, to come to terms with it.

--By Owen Boynton