“So what is it about ambiguity that it has to be praised to high heaven by all and sundry? Above all, how did it come to take on, at least for some, a cloak of liberal righteousness, to shift from being an aesthetic to a moral virtue, as if the text that wasn’t clear, that didn’t state its preferences clearly, were ethically superior to the text that does.”
“In every other sphere of expression ambiguity is a flaw. Clarity is prized. Politicians are condemned for their ambiguity. There is nothing worse than bureaucratic forms or technical instructions that are not clear. It is famously said that the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War was the result of an ambiguously worded order. Hundreds died. But in literature ambiguity is positive. “Authors and readers alike have a stake in textual ambiguity,” writes critic Janet Solberg, because “literature both illustrates and depends on the ability of language to create and to obscure ‘meaning.’””
“At the same time, of course, in order to evoke experience for the reader, literature has to be precise. The more we recognize what is being described the more likely we are to engage with the narrative.”
“To set my mind straight on this, I recently went back to the fountainhead, the first man to acclaim ambiguity as somehow essential to literature, William Empson.”
“And what struck me as I opened the pages of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) was the precision with which different manifestations of ambiguity are described. In examples ranging from Greek tragedy to the present day, but concentrating above all on Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Empson always distinguishes between the merely (but perhaps excitingly) vague and the semantically complex, between the suggestive nebulousness of Thomas Nashe’s “Brightness falls from the air” and the complexity of possible meanings in a later line in the same stanza, “Dust hath closed Helen’s eye,” where, as Empson points out, the poet hints at a statue with dust falling on it, rather than an eye turning into dust.”
“In any event, toward the end of his exposition of “the first kind of ambiguity” (when a detail is effective in several ways at once) he remarks:”
“People, often, cannot have done both of two things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in their minds the way they would have preserved their self-respect if they had acted differently; they are only to be understood by bearing both possibilities in mind.”
“Setting aside the question of an exact definition of ambiguity, it’s soon clear that what Empson is really trying to do is pin down all the ways literature can be dense, can create complexity, with always the implication that in doing so it in fact achieves a kind of realism, since experience itself is complex and dense and not easily deciphered. He speaks persuasively of “a general sense of compacted intellectual wealth, of an elaborate balance of variously associated feeling.””
“Both in prose and poetry, it is the impression that implications…have been handled with more judgement than you yourself realise, that with this language as text innumerable further meanings, which you do not know, could be deduced, that forces you to feel respect for a style.”
“That is, contrary to the drift of Janet Solberg’s remarks, language in general actually tends to the simplistic, offering a reductive account of what it seeks to represent—it could hardly be otherwise. Hence we prize someone who has managed to put into language, with its relentless and crude semantic segmentation of experience, some of the density and indeed perplexity we feel as we try to get a grip on what is going on around us.”
“At this point you might say that if our experience of reality is that it is far from clear, any literature with a mimetic vocation will have to be on the one hand precise in the presentation of the physical detail and on the other ambiguous in its vision of the whole, what the details add up to. But there are those who see a value for ambiguity and multiplicity beyond mimesis.”
“Ambiguity, uncertainty, multiplicity are positive in literature in so far as they act as a corrective against a dominant and potentially harmful manipulative hubris. This seems well and good. But in order for art to achieve this quality, Bateson observes, the artist has to be genuinely open to the unconscious, to all that lies outside rational, control-oriented behavior. Lawrence agrees: for the novel to avoid didacticism, the novelist has to be truly open to the world he describes; it is the multiplicity he then inevitably lets into the text that overwhelms the petty habit of knowing better.”
“To have learned how a piece of literature effects and stimulates us—and nobody gets closer to explaining such effects than Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity—is not to have learned how to create a similar piece of literature. For this reason, it would be as well when we talk about ambiguity in this or that novel to be as precise as possible about its nature and implications and above all to avoid the sort of perfunctory, reflexive praise that simply aligns this quality with a special kind of cleverness. As if we could just all decide to be “wonderfully ambiguous.””