ABSTRACT
It is tempting to begin a book about what Empson wrote by describing an essay he might have written but did not. We can take our cue from Empson himself, in Faustus and the Censor, inventing the lost, unaltered text of Doctor Faustus. The essay Empson did not write would have been called “Aristotle, Eng. Lit., and Tragedy.” It would have argued that the way in which the notion of katharsis has always been interpreted by Eng. Lit. (one of Empson’s milder terms for the academic literary profession since the Second World War) is influenced by the founding of the Christian religion on human sacrifice. After all, much as he came to hate Christianity, Empson still belonged to the generation of T.S.Eliot, and it still seemed natural in the 1930s, after Frazer, to say that “the tragic hero was a king on sacrificial as well as Aristotelian grounds; his death was somehow Christlike” — and then to quote Herrick:
Not like a Thief, shall Thou ascend the mount, But like a Person of some high Account; The Crosse shall be Thy Stage; and Thou shalt there The spacious field have for Thy Theater.
