Abstract
This article considers the notion of ambiguity and its treatment by critics and theorists from a perspective informed by the work of Slavoj Žižek, according to which ambiguity should not be conceived as an exceptional ‘grimace’ of language’s deeper, more genuine ‘Unambiguity’; rather, the pervasive fantasy of Unambiguity should be thought of as the grimace of ambiguity – a convenient invention whose function is to mask the Void of a generalised indeterminacy feared by literary critics. It examines not only ambiguity’s ideological functions in literature, but ideology’s role in the critical conceptualisation of ambiguity. Eleanor Cook’s article, ‘Ambiguity and the Poets’, is taken to exemplify the much-maligned concept’s strangely persistent usefulness for an enriched understanding of poetry, but also the contradictoriness of the positions adopted by liberal interpreters. Revisiting poems by Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens discussed by Cook, and adding a reading of Tess Gallagher’s ‘Instructions to the Double’, the article demonstrates 1) the social character of ambiguity in those texts, and 2) how the moral hesitation about linguistic instability evident in the language of Cook’s article – ambiguity’s ‘mixed reputation’ – highlights anxieties around sexual and economic power within critical discourse. Critics’ implicit and ever-frustrated desire for ‘Unambiguity’ (an ideal of stable semantics and a correspondingly well-ordered society) is symptomatic of the contradictions of their historical moment and the bourgeois assumptions of ‘traditional’ literary criticism. It is therefore proposed, in conclusion, that unblinking attention to the unfinished, ambiguous nature of social and linguistic reality is a more effective path to political change, and indeed to the effective appreciation of poetry, than unspoken appeals to this fantasy of unachievable Unambiguity.
Highlights
One only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them
Empson, who played a large role in propelling it to the forefront of critical discussion in his Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), recognised its inherent difficulty, and yet irresistibility
His book is so important, not just because it is so good at spotting ambiguities, but because it shows how the problem of ambiguity goes to the heart of the critical activity itself, as when he says at the outset that ‘Sometimes ... the word may be stretched absurdly far, but it is descriptive because it suggests the analytical mode of approach, and with that I am concerned.’ (Empson 1)
Summary
Other approaches are less reticent about this collective element to the emotional complexity registered in poetry. The liberal discourse on ambiguity is irritated by this dilemma: whilst Ambiguity subverts the lucid semantics needed for good business, she is integral to Literature; Literature (or its idea) in turn plays an important role in ideologically legitimising the existing social order by aestheticising it, naturalising it, or by claiming to ‘transcend’ it, at least when it is taught in certain ways This gesture by which Ambiguity is simultaneously ushered into poetry and excluded from ‘life’, recurs frequently in the critical literature on plurality of meaning. According to Soon Peng Su, Positive value is given to ambiguity in literature because the process of producing a literary piece, involving numerous rewritings and revisions, reduces the likelihood of accidental ambiguities This leads to the assumption on the part of literary critics that ambiguity in literature, and poetry especially, is deliberate and contributes to the larger design of the work. It is as if the author’s proprietorial control over the literary text creates a privatised space in which they can be as ambiguous as they like behind closed doors without causing offence to the surrounding community
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