Ambiguity and Narrative Levels: Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru

Abstract

Visual exercises such as Wittgenstein's famous rabbit-duck figure (1969: 194)1 or Escher's birds/black interlacing (1972)2 have often been evoked in studies not distinugishing between ambiguity and other types of plurisignificance (e.g., Wright 1976: 506-508). Attempting to develop a more sharply focused definition, I have identified the same puzzle pictures with ambiguity alone, differentiating it from cognate phenomena on the basis of the logical operation involved (1977: xi-xi, 3-26). Ambiguity, according to my narrow definition, is the of exclusive disjuncts, whereas double and multiple meaning are based on the conjunction of compatible readings, irony on disjunction, allegory on equivalence, and indeterminacy on the absence of any necessary logical operator.3 In narrative, the exclusive disjuncts are what I call the (i.e., the hypotheses the reader has attained at the end of the reading process), and their conjunction is the most abstract equivalent of the coexistence of two mutually exclusive fabulas in one sjuzhet. Closer to the surface of the text this conjunctive disjunction takes the form of the coexistence of mutually exclusive systems of gap-filling clues (Perry and Sternberg's term, 1968: 263-293; see also Rimmon, 1977: 27-58). Thus, as demonstrated in my study, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw yields two mutually exclusive finalized hypotheses-there are real ghosts at Bly vs. there are no real ghosts at Blyboth of which can be equally supported by highly complex clue systems in the text, so that the gap remains open and no choice between the conflicting hypotheses is possible (Rimmon 1977: 116-166). Ghosts vs. no ghosts, black birds flying in one direction vs. white birds flying in the other, rabbit vs. duck all become ambiguous because of the