Empson’s idea of Shakespeare’s ‘method’ makes the film Shakespeare in Love look like a documentary, and the touch about walking home is marvellous. But is he serious? Yes and no, but I find it impossible to measure the respective doses. He is serious about considering the ‘moment of discovery’, and about the reading of the play involved in the fiction he creates. Hamlet does talk as if he knew he was caught up in a terrible old play. The rest, the committee meeting, the ventriloquised author’s soliloquy, is bravura filling-in of comic detail: critical theatre. I don’t know – our subject is guessed-at intention after all – how comic Empson meant the detail to be.

In other moods, Empson was willing to admit that Wimsatt and Beardsley’s argument had ‘a kind of flat good sense about it, because it is hard to know how we do learn each other’s intentions’. But then he was adamant that this difficulty was no excuse for not trying to get into an author’s head. On the contrary, it means we have to try harder. ‘There is no metaphysical reason … for treating the intentions of an author as inherently unknowable.’

The most important thing in these arguments is an element that is present everywhere in Empson but only occasionally stressed. Understanding literature is not different from understanding anything else: ‘We do it all the time.’ Norris puts this very well when he says that ‘Empson’s books all seek, in different ways, to make terms between poetry and the normal conditions of language and commonsense discourse,’ and that ambiguity, for example, ‘belongs to a normal, not a uniquely poetic order of thought and language’. Making terms usually means making sense, and one of Empson’s rather tangled claims engages the Wimsatt Law in a truly intriguing way.

Any speaker, when a baby, wanted to understand what people meant, why mum was cross for example, and had enough partial success to go on trying; the effort is usually carried on into adult life, though not always into old age. Success, it may be argued, is never complete. But it is nearer completeness in a successful piece of literature than in any other use of language.

‘Partial’ and ‘usually’ make clear the practice is common but not universal, and the remark about old age is a mildly mischievous joke. But the conclusion is startling. In the very region where we might think, from our own experience, from the long, conflictive history of literary criticism, and indeed from Empson’s own work, that it has always been hardest to ‘understand what people meant’, success is less partial than anywhere else. The author’s intention is closer than anyone else’s to being fully available.

The reason for literature’s success in this respect is everywhere in Empson’s writing, often lost in the noise he is making about what he doesn’t like in current literary study, but finally not at all far from Wimsatt and Beardsley’s claim, or that of most good criticism, new or old. The completed work is the test of intention, or as Empson says, ‘you must rely on each particular poem to show you the way in which it is trying to be good.’ If we combine this statement with his remark that ‘the judgment of the author may be wrong,’ it is hard to see what the quarrel is about. Hard, but not impossible. For the same reason that he would rather have a faked biography than no biography, Empson would rather guess at the contents of an author’s mind than leave the author out of the story. This is what he says in his quieter moments: ‘I would not mind agreeing, as a verbal formula, that the intention of an author can always only be guessed at, so long as it is also agreed that the guess … should always be made.’ And rather more loudly: ‘If critics are not to put up some pretence of understanding the feelings of the author in hand they must condemn themselves to contempt.’

If we borrow the figure of the death of the author, we could imagine Barthes and Empson staring at each other as if in a mirror, without either of them knowing who the mirrored figure is. Barthes thought the author had to be seen as dead so that writing could be rescued from the tyranny of gossip and academic pedantry, and be properly read for its own sake – Calvino wanted to see writing as a machine for much the same reasons. But then Barthes later came to see he couldn’t do without the author, that he ‘desired’ this figure, as he said, that he had to construct or imagine an author in order to trace out certain meanings – ironies, for example. This was a way of discreetly letting intention back into criticism – as an invited guest rather than a police presence.

Furthermore, as every student of literary theory knows very well — you learn it the minute you first read “The Intentional Fallacy” — this position was hardly unique to Barthes, or, for that matter, to Barthes and the others (Foucault, Derrida) who held some version of it. Beginning in the mid-1940s, the idea that the meaning of a literary work was not determined by its author’s intentions was foundational for American literary criticism, providing the material (although this was by no means what it was designed to do) for a potential theoretical solution to an aesthetic problem. The aesthetic problem was how to create anti-theatrical works of art at the moment when the very effort to do so (indeed, any effort at all) had begun to register as theatrical. The theoretical solution was to deny not that those efforts took place but that they were in any way constitutive of the meaning of the work of art. It was the syntactic and semantic rules of the language, not the author’s consciousness that determined the meaning of the work. Thus Fry’s strenuous but not very compelling attempt to imagine a kind of psychology for the painter’s desire not to produce an effect on the beholder (“half-conscious,” “almost unconscious,” “perfect sincerity,” “complete indifference”) is rendered supererogatory. The new theoretical anti-intentionalism rescues the critic from a psychological anti-intentionalism that, still committed to some account of the artist’s agency, can only register the artist’s actions as unconscious (and hence not fully actions) or as completely disconnected from all possible consequences (and hence, again, not fully actions). Now, the ontological irrelevance of the artist’s intentions, whatever they are, makes it unnecessary to deny that he actually had any.9

For our purposes, however, Barthes’s version of anti-intentionalism is more crucial than Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s, and for two reasons. The first is that Barthes’s is theoretical and aesthetic (in effect, the anti-theatrical aesthetic creates the necessity for the anti-intentional — i.e. theatrical — theory) whereas Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s is theoretical and methodological. Barthes is defending certain aesthetic values; Wimsatt and Beardsley were seeking to establish the “public” and “objective” character of literary meaning. Their concern was with professional literary criticism.10 And the second, which really follows from the first, is that insofar as Wimsatt and Beardsley were interested in establishing the public meaning of the text, they were just as opposed to considering the reader as they were to the writer; the companion to “The Intentional Fallacy” was “The Affective Fallacy.” Whereas Barthes is just the opposite; he explicitly links “The Death of the Author” to “the birth of the reader” and he explicitly celebrates the refusal of what he calls an “ultimate” meaning, the refusal to “fix meaning” that the shift from writer to reader makes inevitable.

Thus we have both an aesthetic solution to the problem of the artist’s agency — How do you avoid seeming to seek to produce an effect on the reader/beholder? Do nothing — and a theoretical answer to the question of the author’s agency — How do the artist’s actions determine the meaning of the work? They don’t. And just as, in Barthes, the theoretical answer immediately and (as I shall show) necessarily produces an appeal to the reader, so too does the aesthetic solution. That is, the theoretical solution to absorption’s aesthetic problem (the invention of an artist who could not be understood as performing for an audience because his intentions to produce certain effects were now understood as in principle irrelevant to the effects his work in fact produced) is simultaneously the transformation of absorption’s aesthetic indifference to the reader or beholder into a total — indeed (as I will also show), programmatic — appeal to the reader or beholder. In Camera Lucida, this is the whole point of the punctum, which is nothing but an accidental and unintended effect of the photograph on the beholder — the “detail” that can “‘prick’ me” only if the photographer has not put it there “intentionally” and that can prick me but may not prick you.11 That’s why Barthes famously doesn’t reproduce the Winter Garden photograph of his mother; it cannot have the effect on us (she’s not our mother) that it does on him — for us, no punctum, for us, “no wound.” The punctum, in other words, functions as an absorptive reproach to the “artifice” of the photographer, resisting and reproaching his inevitably theatrical efforts to produce a particular effect on the beholder while at the same time (and for the same reason) it transforms the photograph into a work dependent entirely on the beholder — a purely theatrical object. The absorptive demand of indifference to the reader/beholder becomes an insistence on the absolute primacy of the reader/beholder.

Is there anything more shaming than doting on the electrified English folk-rock of the late Sixties and early Seventies? It’s taken me, I confess, a dreadfully long time to come to terms with it — to acknowledge that I adore, nay, have always adored, the whole tambourinetapping, raggle-taggle mob of them: Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, John Renbourn, Shirley Collins, Bert Jansch, Martin Carthy, Steeleye Span, Maddy Prior, Richard and Linda Thompson, Lindisfarne. I still venerate Jethro Tull and its leader, the psychedelic flutist Ian Anderson, unforgettable for his dandified overcoat, harelike skittishness, and giant comic aureole of red beard and frizzy hair. It’s like admitting you’d rather go to the local Renaissance Faire than hear Mahler’s Lieder at Wigmore Hall.

One is cruelly dated by one’s doting. The British fad for switched-on folk reached its apogee somewhere between 1968, when the Incredible String Band released its sitar-laced masterwork, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, and 1978, the year that the lissome but likely inebriated Sandy Denny, former lead singer of Fairport Convention, died of blunt head trauma after falling down a flight of stairs. Yes, one capered and twirled through it all. Alas, one is now fairly eldritch oneself — positively rime-covered.

I became a fan in the early Seventies, partly out of some romantic “Englishness” (British parents) and partly out of a Tolkien-influenced countercultural interest in ballads, alchemy, ancient magic, Celtic standing stones, and the literature of the Middle Ages. I was a bookish grad student, living alone in the Upper Midwest, yet oddly obsessed with Sir Gawain and dowsing wands. Long Lankin, Matty Groves, and Black Jack Davy — not to mention any number of ladies on milk-white steeds — somehow became my imaginary posse. Hearing Steeleye Span’s rollicky up-tempo rendering of “Little Sir Hugh” — Child Ballad No. 155 — on a radio show one morning was, I recall, a watershed moment:

Mother, mother, make my bed
Make for me a winding-sheet
Wrap me up in a cloak of gold
See if I can sleep

That Little Sir Hugh (speaking here) has just had all the blood drained from his body by a lamia is part of the charm.

Nothing quite the same, I found, existed in North American rock of the time — not in the heraldic, folk-guitar-spangled sound of the Byrds, or in pleasantly cheesy one-offs like Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair.” While still revered, perhaps, by New Age witches now residing in Wiccan assisted-living covens in Oregon and Big Sur, terminally wyrd favorites of mine such as Buffy Sainte-Marie’s doomy “Reynardine — A Vampire Legend” or Pentangle’s “Lyke Wake Dirge” were hardly emblematic of American popular taste. The United States, alas, was signally lacking in shires and sprites and elf-knights, not to mention mummery and morris dancers.

The heyday of true British folk-rock was brief. Along with Sandy Denny, other leading musical lights had disappeared from view by the late Seventies. Shirley Collins, the innovative balladeer behind the hugely influential album Anthems in Eden (1969), damaged her voice and stopped singing. Richard and Linda Thompson, one of the most unusual and mesmerizing vocal partnerships of the late twentieth century, became devout Sufis and later divorced. The Incredible String Band broke up in apparent acrimony in 1974. Robin moved to California, where he became active in the Church of Scientology. Licorice went with him, though she subsequently vanished into the Arizona desert. (Internet ghost trails suggest that after renouncing Scientology — as Robin seems to have done also — Licorice wished to evade L. Ron Hubbard’s vengeful myrmidons and assumed a new identity.)

Musical tastes had changed dramatically by then. Electronic pop and rock went in two antagonistic — yet both firmly anti-folkie — directions in the late 1970s: toward disco, rap, and urban dance music on the one hand (sexy, sleek, fun), and toward punk on the other (mock savagery, crashing chords, and taking the piss). My own, somewhat wistful, defection came around 1980, after I was mercilessly satirized by my neopunkoid quasi boyfriend Dick for hoping he might grok Richard Thompson’s dark and skirling live version of “Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman.” Yet as soon as I’d (reverently) laid down the needle, I had to snatch it up again — prompted by my companion’s hideously mimed display of convulsive writhing and retching. (I should have anticipated my folly: Dick had recently traded his pretty, bowl-shaped Botticelli haircut for one of clipped, David Byrne–style severity.) We had to wash out our ears at once with some bacteria-rich Iggy Pop and Sex Pistols. I later regained a mote of Dick’s respect because, unlike any other girl he knew, I actually owned several Ornette Coleman records and had started tiptoeing toward Alfred Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, and other thoroughly haute-arcane exponents of the jazz avant-garde. Such mandarin interests were enough to recall me, probationally, to the ranks of the maybe-elect.

But so too began my decades-long slide into musical pretentiousness: Cage and Webern, Harry Partch, rediscovered Baroque opera played on period instruments, obscure blues vamps, Renaissance polyphony, historic recordings from the decaying urns of forgotten French record companies, Ligeti études, Pauline Oliveros, Captain Beefheart, and Moroccan gnawa music — these became preferred listening. Manfred Eicher’s much-lauded German boutique label, ECM — notorious for its cerebral emphasis on the more severe strains of avant-garde chamber music (musique concrète, György Kurtág, Pierre Boulez) and stark, echt-minimalist jazz (mostly northern European) — became a go-to source for hardcore experimental stuff.

Yet life has its freaky surprises, and even kitsch of a long-gone era can suddenly — bizarrely — start pinging on one’s snob-radar. Take Robin Williamson. Yes, mon vieux, the golden-throated, once-and-future Ariel behind the Incredible String Band still makes records! The curly blond hair is an elfin silver now, but the voice remains intact — as Panlike and mellifluous as ever.

It turns out that after the Incredible String Band broke up, Williamson — who is now seventy-one and seemingly indefatigable (he still lives in California and continues to tour, with his wife and fellow musician, Bina) — carried on singing and recording for four long decades, most of them unremarked by the musical mainstream. But he has recently returned to view by way of four burnished and resplendent CDs, all of them on hallowed ECM. The most recent of these, Trusting in the Rising Light, was released in November. Like its forerunners, The Seed-at-Zero (2001), Skirting the River Road (2003), and The Iron Stone (2007), the new disc features Williamson, warm Scottish burr and all, declaiming over a growling, haunting jazz-folk accompaniment. In earlier recordings he riffed on the poems of William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Henry Vaughan, John Clare, and Walt Whitman. Here he sings and recites his own verses, vocalizes wordlessly, and improvises on Celtic harp and guitar to uncanny and arresting effect.

He is joined by several top-flight players from the experimental-jazz world — the most improbable being Mat Maneri, the quiet, mad genius behind what one can only call a seriously downtown, seriously daunting, post-post-post one-man string section. A brilliantly untethered improviser, Maneri can expostulate, seemingly effortlessly, on the five-string viola, electric six-string violin, and the baritone viola. I first came across him via the beautiful but hermetic recordings of his father, avant-garde saxophonist Joe Maneri (1927–2009), a renowned teacher of microtonal music at the New England Conservatory of Music. (Both Maneris, unsurprisingly, are represented in the ECM catalogue.) Joe’s microtonalism — reflecting a lifelong study of world music and non-Western scales — seems to have rubbed off on Mat: in the words of one critic, both father and son trade in a similar “slippery, space-filled alien blues.” Mat, in turn, has spoken of his artistic debt to Indian ragas, serialism, Baroque chamber music, and the atonal compositions of Elliot Carter.

Okay: I know it all sounds weird — like Queen Latifah singing Bartók. But adventurous listeners will be rewarded. Robin is still Robin — free and unabashed by the oddity of his material or his own throwback status, and in flagrantly glorious form. Maneri, meanwhile — one can almost hear him listening, E.T.-like, to Williamson’s ancient cadences — supports him in what gradually becomes an astringent and exquisite conversation. Though sometimes inclined in the past to the gushy and shambolic, Williamson here is bracing and austere. And Maneri, tracking the folkways, shows himself a man, warm-blooded and wise — not a space alien at all.

Literary types — especially lovers of English Romanticism — will take particular delight in Williamson’s late resurgence. The term “bardic” still gets thrown around a lot in college English classes, typically to refer to a preliterate, visionary, or divinely inspired strain in epic poetry. Homer — whoever he (or she) was — is usually cited as the first Western bard: a poet-musician who knew his archaic material by heart and performed (to lyre accompaniment) with incantatory gravity. For fans of Wordsworth or Coleridge or Blake, it is hard to see anyone coming closer than Williamson has to the “bardic mode” as reimagined by the great English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century. He seems to channel the Muse directly. To hear him deliver, say, “The Four Points are thus beheld,” from Blake’s mystical poem “Jerusalem,” is to feel summoned to a peculiar and solemn attention.

But there’s a happy kind of respite here too — a gentle turn away from apocalypse. If living every bright and horrible twenty-first-century day is making you feel appallingly old all of a sudden — a sort of scarified, baby-boomer Methuselah — Williamson’s remarkable creative rebirth in what he calls the October of his life can be encouraging. The endgame, thrillingly, is not quite so endgamey as you feared. A so-called late period is possible, even if you’re a Scottish singing hippie who was once garlanded in wildflowers and the goofy radiance of youth.

And certain things are indubitably better when reexperienced. One of the unsung pleasures of encroaching senility, or so I’m finding, is how many things from the past suddenly reveal themselves as even more awesome than you thought they were the first time. The Four Tops, for example. Madame Bovary. Studebaker station wagons. Little baby rabbits. Schopenhauer. You’re not embarrassed by any of it anymore. The plastic seat covers. The pellets. The World as Will and Representation.

Rediscovering Robin Williamson — or someone like him — may in turn prompt further recalibrations. You drag out your old Incredible String Band albums and find in them countless marvels of Musical Genius Personified: ravishing melodies and colorful, polyphonic structures; an inspired use of non-Western instruments (tabla, oud, sitar); witty, not-half-bad lyrics (surely no worse than early Yeats and far less lugubrious); an overall effect of loose, lightsome, psychedelic joy in life. You begin to relish your new connoisseurship: you feel sagelike. Maybe aging, after all, is simply a new form of getting stoned? The Very Long Nap will come soon enough; for now, let these little floods of pleasure continue. Dear Licorice, that means you. Tarry not long on the Banks of Sweet Italy. We want to hear you again.