After Walter Scott

"I think you should do some more research first, just to make sure," said Maxy slowly. "You have the name Palitsyn. Apply for his file in the KGB archives--I'll file the applications for you--and find out what happened to him, if he had a family, children. That's the easy bit. Then you can go back to Satinov. You've worked in archives?"
"I love archives," she said, hugging herself.
"Why?"
"You can smell the life in the paper. I've sat in the State Archives and held the love letters of Catherine and Potemkin, the most passionate notes, fragrant with her scent and soaked in his tears as he lay dying on the steppes."
Maxy nodded. "Well, these are different archives. Where there is such suffering, there's a kind of holiness. The Nazis knew they were doing wrong, so they hid everything; the Bolsheviks were convince they were doing right, so they kept everything. Like it or not, you're a Russian historian, a searcher for lost souls, and in Russia the truth is always written not in ink, like in other places, but in innocent blood. These archives are as sacred as Golgotha. In the dry rustle of the files you can hear the crying of children, the shunting of trains, the echo of footsteps down to the cellars, the single shot of the Nagant pistol delivering the seven grams. The very paper smells of blood."
-Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sashenka

Despite the fulsome praise it has received in some circles, Sashenka is a deeply flawed book. One would expect Montefiore--a historian of Soviet and Imperial Russia by day--to try his damnedest to undermine the stereotyped commonplaces of the historical novel, but he does not make the slightest attempt at doing so. His characters, revolutionaries and victims of Stalinist terror alike, are so familiar that it is difficult even to perceive them as the author's original creations. His Georgians, for instance, are all macho good ol' boys who break out spontaneously into "Suliko" (a characterization device approximately on a par with having Southerners sing "Dixieland" and muse about their mothers' grits and cornbread). More generally, Montefiore's reliance on stereotypes allows anyone even moderately familiar with the conventions of historical writing about the period to predict even the subtlest twists of the plot.

It is not simply that being a historian doesn't help Montefiore as a novelist; it actually seems to hurt him. Only his historical experience could have led him to include such a cumbersome and unrelenting accumulation of irrelevant "local color." In a misguided attempt to render the novel's world rich and vivid, the author sticks brand names all over the place and dwells tediously on his characters' eating habits. This gambit could perhaps have paid off in the hands of a more skillful writer, but in Montefiore's it inevitably smacks of excessive pride in the results of his research and of unwillingness to let good writing interfere with Important History. (It doesn't help that mistakes creep in regardless.)

The final, modern-day, third of the novel suffers from a much subtler but no less problematic tendency. It concerns a young historian digging up the events of the novel's first two sections while working in the Soviet archives. Naturally, this plotline allows Montefiore plenty of opportunities for overwrought paeans to le gout de l'archive (such as the one above). In the process, he cannot help revealing a fundamentally and uncritically naive attitude to the writing of history. His young historian Katinka, in reading her various files, reconstructs things as they happened, rebuilding from bits of paper those scenes that Montefiore had written directly in the beginning. From scribbles in margins and timestamps on pages she moves easily to lush novelistic detail about who was in whose office when and what was running through his mind at that moment.

I can forgive Montefiore for writing in a female Mary Sue, since her story really is an engaging one. What I can't accept is his refusal to confront the intractable problems involved in recovering the past as it was actually lived. The gaps and silences that every historian encounters--the stories that paper cannot tell--are simply ignored here; behind every one of the lies and euphemisms of Katinka's KGB sources there is a discoverable, meaningful, and convenient truth, a useful piece of the puzzle. How false this idea is, Montefiore himself should be well aware, and given his own experience with archives it seems bizarre that he would allow his book to end with such a manifestly utopian "case closed."

Sashenka would have been an infinitely more compelling book if what faced its characters at the end was not a finished crossword puzzle but a stubborn and unyielding silence. As a genre, the historical novel holds forth a unique promise--the ability to straddle, without denying, the gap between the lived experience of the past and that of the present. It lets us, or pretends to let us, glimpse something mere history cannot see. But in Montefiore's telling, history eventually conquers all. It is a laughably provincial and, of course, self-undermining gesture.rg

Veblen and Bourdieu

These indices and others which resemble them in point of the boldness with which they point out to all observers the habitual uselessness of those persons who employ them, have been replaced by other, more dedicate methods of expressing the same fact; methods which are no less evident to the trained eyes of that smaller, select circle whose good opinion is chiefly sought. The earlier and cruder method of advertisement held its ground so long as the public to which the exhibitor had to appeal comprised large portions of the community who were not trained to detect delicate variations in the evidences of wealth and leisure. The method of advertisement undergoes a refinement when a sufficiently large wealthy class has developed, who have the leisure for acquiring skill in interpreting the subtler signs of expenditure. "Loud" dress becomes offensive to people of taste, as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained sensibilities of the vulgar. To the individual of high breeding, it is only the more honorific esteem accorded by the cultivated sense of the members of his own high class that is of material consequence. Since the wealthy leisure class has grown so large, or the contact of the leisure-class individual with members of his own class has grown so wide, as to constitute a human environment sufficient for the honorific purpose, there arises a tendency to exclude the baser elements of the population from the scheme even as spectators whose applause or mortification should be sought. The result of all this is a refinement of methods, a resort to subtler contrivances, and a spiritualization of the scheme of symbolism in dress. And as this upper leisure class sets the pace in all matters of decency, the result for the rest of society also is a gradual amelioration of the scheme of dress. As the community advances in wealth and culture, the ability to pay is put in evidence by means which require a progressively nicer discrimination in the beholder. This nicer discrimination between advertising media is in fact a very large element of the higher pecuniary culture.
- Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

Thorstein Veblen not only had the most killer mustache of any influential contemporary social theorist; he also worked out a surprisingly robust, if polemical, framework for the study of culture. Today he is referenced (more often than he is read) chiefly in the service of arguments about the corruption of America's bloated upper classes. But the fashion for Gilded Age retro is only of limited use if the object is to understand society rather than simply to polemicize about it--and, moreover, it does little justice to Veblen's considerable prowess as an analyst. Theory of the Leisure Class, in fact, offers us an explanation for all forms of consumption--including cultural consumption--based firmly on the competing priorities of different social classes. The leisure class consumes those goods which are most overtly disconnected from material ends and seeks to justify that consumption with all sorts of spiritual and aesthetic value-judgments.

Since Veblen as a theorist has been largely forgotten, the credit for this line of thinking has fallen to a much later scholar--Pierre Bourdieu. The correspondences between their work are striking. Bourdieu also thinks that aesthetic value-judgments are ultimately the products of class self-differentiation, a process driven and catalyzed by the ceaseless pressure of cultural leveling. For Veblen, like Bourdieu, the notions of "vulgarity" and "beauty" are grounded in an aesthetics of class:

The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty. Our higher appreciation of the superior article is an appreciation of its superior honorific character, much more frequently than it is an unsophisticated appreciation of its beauty. The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is not commonly present, consciously, in our canons of taste, but it is none the less present as a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful, and guiding our discrimination with respect to what may legitimately be approved as beautiful and what may not.

Neither Veblen nor Bourdieu, however, can simply align "cultural capital" with economic capital; the two axes are at least partially independent from one another. (Veblen rather ostentatiously identifies the intellectual habits of the leisure class with those of unproductive, lumpenproletarian "delinquents.") It thus becomes possible for both thinkers to isolate the converging or diverging paths of two different sets of class-based aesthetic values.

What makes these two thinkers so alike, despite the massive historical and geographical gulf that separates them? The most significant contributing factor seems to be the fact that they both were outsiders in their academic milieus. Veblen was a Norwegian Wisconsinite who spent his whole life trying to fit in with elitist coastal university culture and ended his days in a shack in the California woods; Bourdieu, as one of those autodidacts he himself criticized so harshly in Distinction, remained marginal in French academia until he married his professor's daughter. The former makes his contempt for the prevailing ideology of "higher learning" obvious in his thundering conclusion, while the latter inserts well-aimed barbs against intellectuals at every opportune moment in his text.

Outsider status meant for both of them an inability to resolve the gap between the restricted social basis of intellectual culture and its universalizing pretensions. Of course, they, like all of us, came with a specific habitus that made true "objectivity" impossible. But the constant confrontation between their culture of origin and that of their academic setting, which would never have appeared as antagonistic to someone reared among the native intellectual classes, could not but have undermined any possibility of treating "pure" universal judgments as unproblematic. Uneasiness proved to be destiny.

Edmund Wilson's Cloudy Apocalypse

What then? The second half of The People seems as ridiculous to us today as the first half seems acute. Michelet, like many nineteenth-century writers, is at his worst when he is preaching a gospel. We know them well in English, these nineteenth-century gospels: Ruskin's Beauty, Meredith's Nature, Matthew Arnold's Culture--large and abstract capitalized words, appearing in cloudy apocalypses, as remedies for practical evils. Once Michelet leaves history proper, once he gets outside his complex of events, he shows the liberal nineteenth century at its worst. Great displays of colored fire are set off, which daze the eye with crude lurid colors and hide everything they are supposed to illuminate. The bourgeois has lost touch with the people, Michelet tells us; he has betrayed his revolutionary tradition. All the classes hate one another. What is to be done about it, then? We must have love. We must become as little children; for truth, we must go to the simpleton, even to the patient animal. And Education!--the rich and the poor must go to school together: the poor must forget their envy; the rich must forget their pride. And there they must be taught Faith in the Fatherland. "Here," Michelet is forced to confess, "a serious objection arises: 'How shall I be able to give people faith when I have so little myself?'" "Look into yourself," he answers, "consider your children--there you will find France!"
- Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station

I'll give Wilson credit for one thing: he makes socialism seem like an interesting and exciting new way of thinking, which is not an impression I've had for a long time. There's also, of course, the fact that he's a fantastic writer and a superb storyteller, and the fact that one of his appendices contains my favorite bit of Marx-Engels correspondence. To the Finland Station's characters are engaging and very human; its relative independence from the ideological canons of the Soviet writing of the time allows it to go in unexpectedly fruitful directions, such as the rich history of utopian socialism in America.

Yet to call the book a particularly distinguished bit of intellectual history (as I saw one review do online) seems somewhat misguided. This is a certainly a story about people who have ideas--big ones and little ones, effective ones and stupid ones--but it is not really a story about the ideas themselves. The only really consistent and graspable idea in the book is "The Dialectic," with its eventual graduation into a full-fledged Marxist myth. As the editor's introduction notes, however, "The Dialectic"-according-to-Wilson is nonsense. It's not an adequate expression of Hegel's ideas, much less Marx's; the "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" formulation is so rudimentary that one wonders why silly old Hegel wrote all those books in the first place. Indeed, it's as clear a demonstration as could be of the inability of Wilson's journalistic way of thinking to cope with purified intellectual abstractions.

More often, ideas for Wilson are like electrons circling a nucleus. Each of his colorful people walks around and accumulates life experience, with these comparatively tiny particles circling him the whole time: "property is theft" for Proudhon, phalanasteries for Fourier, industrial communities for Owen. But, while each individual contributes his idea to the fund of socialist history, they're not immovably attached. Human life is complicated; the nucleus is heavy. So ideas drop off, they're exchanged, they create or reduce possibilities for intellectual reaction with other people. So what if Marx's theory of surplus value has a fatal flaw? It's his pragmatic deployment of it that really matters.

The other side of this focus on the individual is a contempt--unsurprising given Wilson's own limitations--for anything that even remotely smacks of using an idea, especially an abstract, capitalized idea, as anything like an end in itself. Wilson's harshest words are reserved for fetishists of the Dialectic and their nineteenth-century bourgeois counterparts; Lenin's waffling on ideological issues in the run-up to the Revolution, in contrast, is lauded as a praiseworthy commitment to action. He is compared to a train engineer, with all the practical-minded tweaking and gauge-reading ability the analogy naturally implies.

In other words, Wilson is unable to escape, either ideologically or methodologically, from the familiar pairing of "theory" and "practice" and its perennial preference for the latter. This leads him into a contradiction. That word "action," triumphantly italicized in a Lenin quote near the end of the book, needs only a capital letter to become a nineteenth-century abstraction. It implies a shaping of history in a liberatory direction, something which was accomplished by Lenin only after a string of failures by his socialist predecessors. A claim like this can only destroy the beautiful particularity of Wilson's human subjects--for where are they if their whole life's work can be incorporated and sublated into the schemes of some balding Russian with a speech impediment? Bakunin, as Wilson describes him, has no ideas; if his historian were consistent, he'd have no Action either.

Polarities

I asked him if he had ever met Mustafa Sa'eed.
'No, I never did. He left Oxford a good while before me, but I heard bits and pieces about him from here and there. It seems he was a great one for the women. He built quite a legend of a sort round himself--the handsome black man courted in Bohemian circles. It seems he was a show-piece exhibited by members of the aristocracy who in the twenties and early thirties were affecting liberalism. It is said he was a friend of Lord-this and Lord-that. He was also one of the darlings of the English left. That was bad luck for him, because it is said he was intelligent. There's nothing in the whole world worse than leftist economists. Even his academic post--I don't know exactly what it was--I had the impression he got for reasons of this kind. It was as though they wanted to say: Look how tolerant and liberal we are! This African is just like one of us! He has married a daughter of ours and works with us on an equal footing. If you only knew, this sort of European is no less evil than the madmen who believe in the supremacy of the white man in South Africa and in the southern states of America. The same exaggerated emotional energy bears either to the extreme right or to the extreme left. If only he had stuck to academic studies he'd have found real friends of all nationalities, and you'd have heard of him here. He would certainly have returned and benefited with his knowledge this country in which superstitions hold sway. And here you are now believing in superstitions of a new sort: the superstition of industrialization, the superstition of nationalization, the superstition of Arab unity, the superstition of African unity. Like children you believe that in the bowels of the earth lies a treasure you'll attain by some miracle, and that you'll solve all your difficulties and set up a Garden of Paradise. Fantasies. Waking dreams. Through facts, figures, and statistics you can accept your reality, live together with it, and attempt to bring about changes within the limits of your potentialities. It was within the capacity of a man like Mustafa Sa'eed to play a not inconsiderable role in furthering this if he had not been transformed into a buffoon at the hands of a small group of idiotic Englishmen.'
- Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

I have been complaining a lot recently about the propensity of contemporary historians to rely on the trope of "problematizing dichotomies" in lieu of anything more original. I'm sure that, in the heady neon/pastel days of Joan Scott and Derrida, finding dichotomies to pick apart was a fun, profitable, and historically rigorous endeavor--and I wouldn't deny that it has done much good for my own generation of aspiring scholars. But, in many ways, this methodology (if you can call it that) has also been a victim of its own success. Driven by the overproduction of scholarship into increasingly desperate attempts to distinguish themselves from their peers, historians have turned to the "problematization paradigm" as a universal panacea for historiographical stagnation. After all, disciplinary practices within the Western intellectual tradition are so thoroughly shot through with binary thinking that it's never hard to find some opposition to criticize. In some comparatively moribund fields--like the history of Russia before the Great Reforms--the recipe has proven to be so successful that "X: Between Y and Z" is now becoming one of the standard title templates. (For Y and Z, substitute, for instance, "East" and "West.")

If we are to find an approach that avoids this species of mechanical pseudo-Hegelianism, it would help to identify sites where problematization itself becomes, well, problematic. I don't mean that we should uncritically embrace the old dichotomies; in fact, that would be far worse. What is needed is a treatment of dichotomies that doesn't assume that they are by nature either "real" or "imaginary." Historians who assume they are "real" tend to uncritically enthrone them as fundamental categories; those whose see them as "imaginary" ineveitably adopt a demystifying posture with respect to them, which may be useful in a polemical context but almost always leads to presentist distortions in a historiographical one. Unfortunately, the latter has been the most important drive underpinning the problematization paradigm.

It's difficult to figure out what an alternative to these two positions might look like, but Season of Migration to the North demonstrates what we have to deal with in practice. Since, like the better-known Things Fall Apart, Salih's novel is a classic piece of postcolonial literature, it is easy to make assumptions about the nature of the dichotomies that underlie it. Surely there is a questioning of the colonizer-colonized relationship; surely there is a reevaluation of the colonialist inheritance in matters of agency and politics; surely the result is a tension between both poles that cannot resolve itself decisively in either direction. All of these things, indeed, are there. It's even possible to read the closing paragraphs as potential fodder for a book called Tayeb Salih: Between North and South.

Such a reading would, I think, miss one of the most crucial elements of the novel--namely, its persistent attempt to retain and reinforce those supposedly problematic dichotomies. North and South, in Salih's novel, not only do not break down into a "frontier" or a zone of exchange, but also strive constantly to annihilate each other. Sure, both the narrator and Mustafa Sa'eed occupy a space between the two. But this is hardly a Richard Whitean "Middle Ground." It's a site of crisis that demands a gesture, not of reconciliation, but of decision. Even with his English PhD, the protagonist finds himself entirely unable to serve as an ambassador for Europe--its very touch seems to corrupt and destroy.

Any attempt to turn the book into a pluralist text would therefore belong to a realm of what the author would regard as false liberal tolerance, a spirit of compromise that leads, just like colonialism, to the annihilation of one side of the dichotomy. This must also include any typical "problematization" of the North-South binary, which for Salih is just as solid and real as anything else. The persistence of these bad old dichotomies, then, without an invidious Western hand behind them, must stand as a reminder of the arbitrariness of scholarly trends--for in another age they would have been taken up, with equal foolishness, as fundamental ontological categories. The only thing that can be said is that they are neither quite real nor quite false.

Vile Bodies

Zoia Zakharovna Fleisch probably wore a wig (around company, obviously); and--to note, by the way: she probably wore makeup shamelessly, because we had seen her as a luxuriously-coiffed brunette with polished, too-smooth skin; and now before us there was only an old woman with a sweaty nose and a ratlike ponytail; she wore a little sweater, again, a dirty one (probably for nighttime use).

Lippanchenko sat, half-turned away from the tea-table, showing his square, hunched back both to Zoia Zakharovna and to the dirty samovar. In front of Lippanchenko was spread a half-played game of solitaire, making us think that after dinner he had taken up his regular evening pastime, which acted so beneficently on the nerves, but--was interrupted: he was torn from his cards unwillingly; there was a long conversation, during which, of course, were forgotten: the glass of tea, the solitaire, and all the rest.

It was after this conversation that Lippanchenko had turned his back; turned his back to the conversation.

He sat without his starched collar, without a jacket, with an unbuckled belt, which evidently constricted his stomach--as a result of which the tail of an uncomfortable starched undershirt projected treacherously between his vest and his slipping trousers (dark yellow--the same ones as before).

We have caught Lippanchenko in the process of contemplating, deep in thought, the dark stain of a cockroach crawling away from the clock, rustling; they bred at the little summer house: huge, black ones; and were plentiful--so unbearably plentiful that, despite the lamplight, there was rustling in the corner and an antenna occasionally peeked out from a crack in the china cabinet.

Lippanchenko was distracted from his contemplation of the crawling cockroach by the tearful, whining complaints of his life-companion.
- Andrei Belyi, Petersburg

With its driven, existential neurotics, its claustrophobic and treacherous city, Belyi's Petersburg readily brings to mind Dostoevsky. He not only references him directly, in the description of specific scenes and in bits of dialogue; he also borrows from him a certain kind of attitude to language, which is especially vivid in the Russian original. Both writers, either in the narration or speaking through their characters, adopt a tone that is just slightly familiar or colloquial, full of diminutives, so that the reader can tell that the narrator or speaker is not some kind of impartial incarnation of formal purity. Normally, this would have a relaxing, "natural" effect--and indeed it often does, especially in Dostoevsky. Just as often, however, the sense is one of foreboding. The mincing speech of the Devil in The Brothers Karamazov makes him more of a threatening figure, not less; the same goes for Belyi's Morkovin.

Belyi, though, relies much more heavily on an effect prefigured for him by the image of the stinking, decaying corpse of Father Zosima in Brothers. Bodies, for Belyi, are always disgusting. Half the characters bulge obesely out of their waistcoats; their breath stinks, the sweat trickles down their large-pored yellowish faces. No one escapes this treatment. Again and again, Belyi describes with relish the "crawfish-like" neck of the civil servant Appolon Appolonovich; his wife's graying hair, double chin, and belly, which protrudes from the bottom of her corset, is painted in equally loving detail. The novel frequently begins to look like an immense George Grosz canvas.

Although the sheer visceral effect of such descriptions is undoubtedly one of the reasons Belyi uses them so much, they also have a deeper purpose, which is augmented by the aforementioned use of language. Belyi is perhaps the only writer who can make the pathetic and contemptible look powerful and frightening. Morkovin, one of the most terrifying figures in the whole novel (he is modeled on the well-known agent provocateur Azef), is also the most pathetic. His gestures, his mannerisms, his appearance all bespeak the utmost servility; yet he is enormously cunning and capable of the subtlest treason. Even the positive characters (to the extent that there are any) are ultimately pathetic. The whole extended sequence in which Nikolai Appolonovich is dragged through town by Sergei Sergeevich is constructed around the theme of cowardly, pitiful self-abasement--and Nikolai remains nonetheless, if not the hero, then at least the weighty moral focal point of the novel.

In this, Belyi is both deeper and subtler than Dostoevsky. One of the great weaknesses of Brothers is that Smerdiakov is denied any measure of sympathy or (despite the author's best efforts) humanity. The brothers, with their big ideas and grandes gestures, are the real heroes--and they are never really pathetic, even if they are sometimes in crisis. Belyi's great virtue is that he constantly puts on display the gross fleshy and social linkage between big ideas and human life. If he is really to be ranked among his fellow Big Modernist Novelists, then in this regard he far surpasses Musil and Proust. (Perhaps not Joyce.) Something about "bodies and languages" is supposed nowadays to be the great ethical stake of critical theory; for Belyi, both seem to be beyond saving.

On Skinner and Empson

For such reasons, then, it is necessary for us to protect our sensibility against critical dogma, but it is just because of this that the reassurance given by some machinery for analysis has become so necessary in its turn. Thus I suppose that all present-day readers of poetry would agree that some modern poets are charlatans, though different people would attach this floating suspicion to different poets; but they have no positive machinery, such as Dr. Johnson thought he had, to a great extent rightly, by which such a fact could be proved. It is not that such machinery is unknown so much as that it is unpopular; people feel that, because it must always be inadequate, it must always be unfair. The result is a certain lack of positive satisfaction in the reading of any poetry; doubt becomes a permanent background of the mind, both as to whether the things is being interpreted rightly and as to whether, if it is, one ought to allow oneself to feel pleased. Evidently, in the lack of any machinery of analysis, such as can be thought moderately reliable, to decide whether one's attitude is right, this leads to a sterility of emotion such as makes it hardly worth while to read the poetry at all. It is not surprising, then, that this age should need, if not really an explanation of any one sort of poetry, still the general assurance which comes of a belief that all sorts of poetry may be conceived as explicable.
- William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

How can Empson's well-known book be compared with Quentin Skinner's equally well-known 1969 article, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas"? They are, of course, very different works, the products of different times, genres, and disciplinary traditions. Empson's flamboyant flitting from one literary set-text to another is miles away from Skinner's ponderous footnotes and scholarly sneer. Yet both of them raise a common central issue: the possibility of textual criticism and interpretation itself, and the tools we have and do not have for realizing that possibility.

That's not much to go on. Hardly any critics manage entirely to avoid this theme, even if they want to do so. But what binds these two particular writers together is a specific kind of approach to criticism. Not only do they deny the ability of any single, well-defined methodology to gain adequate purchase on texts; they also make ambiguity into a fundamental substrate of understanding. Empson, of course, does this explicitly and, perhaps, excessively--but Skinner, too, relies on the possibility that historical utterances may have a inherently undecidable meaning.

The difference between them is the level at which this ambiguity operates. For Empson, it is detectable within the text by any reasonably attentive reader. (Whether it can be appropriately categorized is another question entirely.) As one advances farther and farther down the ladder of ambiguities the meaning of the ambiguous utterance becomes less and less clear to the author himself, or at any rate to the author as reconstructed by the reader; but that does not gainsay the fact that the utterance is deliberately included in, or not omitted from, the text. Empson studies ambiguity as a literary and not a generic textual phenomenon because, well, that's what it is.

For Skinner, on the other hand, the ambiguity takes place at the level of the intersection between text and context, which is why neither pure text nor pure context can provide adequate analytical fodder. The upshot of all the Wittgensteinian meandering is that any given sentence in a written work may turn out to have been written as a joke, or a piece of insincere praise, or any number of other things. Not living in the context, we are unable to appreciate the use-meaning straightforwardly; we must therefore reconstruct the former to gain a sense of the latter.

This leaves us, though, with a curious further possibility--that context may never be reconstructed completely and therefore any sentence could potentially mean anything. The anxiety about this problem is the root of conspiracy theories and radical revisionisms of all sorts, and is of a piece with the perennial historical quandary that the most basic aspects of culture are tacit and thus often inaccessible. And there is also yet another problem, along the lines of Empson's last few ambiguities--that a writer might not know or care, or might know or care very little, about the context of his utterances. (To what extent can we make contextual sense of the cat section from Jubilate Agno?) We must, I think, regard this effect--in which ambiguity explodes beyond even the loose methodological limits set for it by Skinner and Empson--as a sign of a kind of inevitable failure. To define a rigid zone of doubt, or even an unrigid one, is a contradiction in terms. How one can then write history, and in some sense even criticism, becomes a rather complicated question.