Hannah asked me for an example of “clearly communicated ambiguity one’s character feels”. Since in a way all literary characters are “ambiguous” in a way that they cannot be summed up by a few adjectives, I wondered how this question can be effectively clarified and answered.
This response aims to 1) clarify the language by attempting at some categorization and listing a small glossary 2) advance the author’s two cents on the answer to the question. Disagreements are welcome on both objectives, since the purpose of the essay is more to clarify the author’s own thinking than to convince.
Let’s skip over unintentional ambiguity, i.e. bad writing, and focus on the intentional ones. For the sake of this discussion, let us proceed with the assumption that art can only be intentional1.
Ambiguity does not exist for essays as a method of writing, since unclear essay is just a bad essay. An essay arguing for ambiguity still needs to be unambiguously written. An essay about ambiguity is just like this one, which the author has no more to say than what she’s about to write. Let’s skip the discussion of essays and focus on fiction and poetry.
Two ways to be ambiguous
There then seem to be two ways to unpack the concept of intentional “ambiguity” in a literary context.
1. Content
The first way “ambiguity” may exist is in content. Intentional ambiguity in content, like any other intentional element of the writing, demands a purpose for the element to exist. Let’s belabor intentionality a little more with rudimentary examples. If a good writer says “he is happy and he is sad”, it’s because the writer accentuates the subject’s contradictory feelings, not because the writer had forgotten the first half of the sentence. Not all intentionality will achieve the same status, since this happy-sad feeling still needs to justify its own existence as an element in the writing. If a good writer says “it is round and it is square”, it is not that the author is being illogical, but rather that the author is intentionally making the subject subvert logic. The intentional subversion of logic needs to justify itself with a purpose. We’ve all seen ambiguities which serves a purpose. Sometimes it builds depth, sometimes it’s a puzzle, while other times it pushes the plot forward. For example, see the latest Murakami story “Kaho” in the New Yorker which advances its plot almost purely with the complexity and ambivalence of the characters.
Omit needless words. — The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White
2. Voice and style
The second way is in voice and style. Sorry to lump these two words together, but I really mean the category of things that are to writers material and color to painters.
To see how ambiguity can exist to different extents in voice and style, I will first give the examples that need less illustration. Consider how poetry which is unconstrained by anything including even grammar has evolved over time. We went from Sonnet 18 to Love Song of Prufrock and the Wasteland.
Once again I belabor intentionality. There’s not a single line that a poet does not debate and think through. See Ezra Pound’s edits of the Wasteland here. Readers of poetry assume intentionality, because it cannot be absent in an act that is so rule bound and strictly so. Even the most “ambiguous” form unambiguously adheres to a framework of discussion, debate and hence improvement. Only with intention can one break the rules, and only with “genius”2 can one break the rules aesthetically. When intentionality seems to be lacking upon first glance, as it always will be, when we first stand in front of a white painting or a poem, we ought to find the grid of rules the work adheres to or break, to find the riddle the artist has posed for us, rather than assuming the lack of them, a misunderstanding which gradually and increasingly widens the gulf between the artist and their audience and endangers taste in this age of artistic proliferation. The process of art seeing is to see such rules and riddles. Literature uses enigma built with words in a way that an abstract expressionists thought about placing a patch a color or shape for days before placing it (and replacing it, and replacing it, and replacing it). Every puzzle is constructed by definition of puzzle. The best and most artfully puzzles constructed with words become a poem.
But what is the perceived increased ambiguity from classic to contemporary poetry? If we equate this ambiguity difficulty of understanding, then we ought to further unpack this relationship by examining this difficulty. Reginald Shepherd tells us that
The poet refers to something we’ve not heard of, assumes a piece of knowledge we don’t have. If one doesn’t know that Herman Melville wrote obsessively about the sea, then one won’t understand that the ocean itself is treated as his final resting place, though the man himself died on dry land. If one does not have “But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” and the rest of “To His Coy Mistress” in one’s ear, the relationship of poem and title of Archibald MacLeish’s “You, Andrew Marvell” will appear rather opaque, and some of the poem’s sense of doom may be lost. Sometimes the allusion is only implicit: one will miss some of the force (and some of the humor) of Frost3’s “For Once, Then, Something” if one misses the presence of Narcissus in its description of a man who sees “Me myself in the summer heaven” reflected in the water of a well. Poems considered difficult often allude to material outside the common literary or intellectual frame of reference. Modernist poetry is particularly difficult in its wide range and idiosyncratic, often inexplicit, deployment of allusion.
before reminding us of the important distinction between sense (i.e. meaning) and reference (i.e. external object). Poetry can only be considered to be operating in the realm of sense. It stretches meaning, accentuates it, and subverts it playfully. When we ask “what does it mean”, we ask what the poem is referring to, because we are much more comfortable in the realm of reference, since in our daily usage of language, we use it to refer to something4. Modern poetry has gotten more “difficult” in its increasingly severed tie with the external world of reference, where poetry finally and fully realized its proper position in language, and live and breathe independently in the world of meaning. Its elusiveness hence does not come from “inaccuracy” or ambiguity of reference, since such reference never existed at the first place and was in fact an achievement to be rid of.
Only after we clarify the framework can we start evaluating how “unambiguous” modern poetry in fact is. It is unambiguous because our previous notion of ambiguity (i.e. the inability to precisely pinpoint a reference) no longer makes sense. One can then expand meaning and “sense” with a clairvoyant understanding of the precedence one rebels against. Modernists alludes expansively, subversively, idiosyncratically and unambiguously. A Romantic poem such as I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud means exactly what it refers to and no more, whereas In a Station of the Metro5 means what it senses and is boundless.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Fiction6 does not have ambiguity on the language level (a rule which the modernists entirely subverted, but a bit more on that later), since formal language abides by rules. Semantics abides by rules. Normal sentences are assumed to not be puns. When they’re puns, the writer will let you know they are puns. When the writer doesn’t let you know, the reader will tell them that their intended audience will miss the parts, and then the writer will either have anticipated the reaction, or go back and improve on the work.
Fiction’s stylistic ambiguity manifests elsewhere. Dostoyevsky is a straightforward, raw and explicit writer who never needs me to do any guessing7. His ambiguity is always deducible from what words appear on the page. Let us can take any random paragraph as an example. Consider this paragraph (randomly grabbed as promised lol),
I don’t want to understand anything now. I want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind long ago not to understand. If I try to understand anything, I shall be false to the fact, and I have determined to stick to the fact.
In this passage, Ivan Karamazov expresses his outrage against the suffering of innocent children. He rejects any theodicy that justifies this suffering and struggles with the problem of evil. The author tells you that Ivan “does not understand”, and you need not doubt it. We can take these passages at face value. The character’s chaos and ambiguity is entirely contained in the content and revealed by it: Ivan undebatably feels conflicted even when he says otherwise. His ambiguity is unambiguously captured in what he is saying, whether the direct meaning of the sentence affirms or disaffirms this ambivalence.
Herman Hesse is another example of extreme precision, explicitness and simplicity. (fun tangential read from Hermann Hesse on language. It is beautiful, concise, and ought to give hope to whoever with the slightest affinity with lovers of words). Steppenwolf starts with a literal rendition of the debilitating ambiguity of Harry Heller, being half-wolf half-man in a world where unity is the only possibility. The ambiguity exists both in Harry Heller’s extreme fluctuation between the duality, and in the tension between this duality with unity.
Here’s a full short story of DFW using unequivocal language with minimum need of interpretation, while illustrating a very disorienting and ambiguous inner world—Good Old Neon—for a quick post dinner read.
It would perhaps also be helpful to lump the fiction writers into time periods in order to isolate the effect of changes in literary philosophy, from, individual variation in styles. Let us backtrack a little on the timeline and say a few words for the modernist fiction writers. As mentioned above, modernism which poetry so proudly went through also applied to fiction (fun read from Virginia Woolf "Modern Fiction”). In oversimplified terms, modern fiction writers started depicting life as it truly is. Modern writers no longer have a structure or a message. So even the idea of what it means to “capture ambiguity” accurately, changed. Modernism achieves a unification of form and content by simply writes (about) the thing in itself. Simply put, in the past, someone would have highlighted disagreements or conflict in order to demonstrate a psychological ambiguity, but now all they need to do is to accurately and plainly report on life—the most ambiguous and conflicting of all!
As we progress into the modernism timeline, the pendulum swings to the other end, and no one is more “unclear” than the stream of consciousness writers. I think stream of consciousness as a name for the method is deceiving, because we easily mistake seeing through the subject’s perspective and hearing the subject’s thoughts with knowing the subject8. You may see what the subject sees, but you don’t know how the subject feels. The reasons seem to me two-fold.
For one, stream of consciousness can venture into poetry prose which is once again no longer constrained by formal language. See the last episode “Penelope” of Ulysses.
For two, this methodological update of permitting and respecting the fragments in thoughts comes with a societal update post WWI, which is a decreased sense of rules for society and absolute morals. These two updates fostered each other. The shared emotion between the subject and the reader collapses alongside the moral scaffold. The audience is freed by the artists from the shackles of conventions and released into chaos. In a grand tide, literature and all other art stands on its two feet and becomes independent from any anchored assumptions, and we cannot even assume that someone feels sad after they’re cheated on by their wife.
(For two-point-five, although objective narration and stream of consciousness are considered two distinct literary device with distinct focus, if you think about it, they’re quite inseparable in the context of tearing down the ought-and-should and presenting human experience for what it really is, full of fragments and distance within oneself9: is our experience of the world, our inner stream-of-consciousness not a movie that play that we watch, that we can only describe as if watching from the outside, even though we ourselves are who we watch?
The implication of the above is that 1. American writers innovatively started widely employing first-person objective narration, but this trend was to be expected 2. the readers, while enjoying the orgasmically well-sketched feast of infinite human experience, an unprecedented feeling of being understood and almost-complete annihilation of such alienation10, are also left in further despair if they expect to know the subject just because the sentences start with “I”…)
How, then, are they going to show us the ambiguity of the inner world of Leopold Bloom?
Let us not start with Joyce. Let us start with Murakami who uses such simple language that 12 year olds can read him, to disentangle the effect of language from the effect of voice. Take an example of this scene where we follow the main character down into a well after his wife disappeared mysteriously,
I closed my eyes, stretched out on the ground, and let myself sink deep down into the darkness. I allowed the darkness to envelop me, to penetrate me to my very core. I felt as if I were floating in deep space, in the gravity-free silence of the vacuum.
How did the subject feel? The answer is no longer deducible from the text, even though the text is extremely psychological. In that way, this is much more ambiguous than Ivan Karamazov’s announcement.
We can have our guesses as to what the well is. Maybe it’s a subliminal space, or maybe it’s some other abstraction, maybe it’s sense and not reference. But the “answer” is irrelevant. What matters is how these brushstrokes of “ambiguity” serves as part of the structure of the story. How so? I think for one, the tension between the content and the language constitutes one important aspect of style. It disorients us: going into a well is fantastical, yet the action is described with a matter-of-fact tone. It gives us a curiosity and nervousness that we aren’t aware of. With the heavy breathing created by this disorientation, our heart sinks, our stomach tightens. We hallucinate an intimacy with the subject who we truly, fundamentally, incorrigibly and helplessly know nothing about. The mystery and ambiguity surrounding the subject’s psychology is entirely preserved. The desire to solve this mystery and dispel this ambiguity propels us deeper into the novel.
Metafiction
Now, if what you really want to say is “I, as an author, do not know how the main character feels”, then you’re writing meta-fiction (fun on-topic interview with DFW), because you really do know how the character feels. Knowing that the character feels ambiguous is still knowing precisely how the character feels. If one truly doesn’t know how one’s character feels, that’s a lack of clarity in oneself, not in one’s character.
If one is writing meta fiction, one is bound by the same rules: there needs to be a reason and intention for the readers to hear the narrator’s voice. Kurt Vonnegut writes meta fiction artfully. Every single time the narrator’s voice enters, it serves a purpose and carries a punch. It’s unforgettable. Some examples from his most famous work Slaughterhouse Five:
An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, “There they go, there they go.” He meant his brains.
That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.
or
One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But old Derby was a character now.
He doesn’t need to tell you why the narrator’s voice appeared. You know by just reading it. Not even the whole thing, just the sentence right before. It is not only intentional, but also so obviously, impeccably clearly intentional.
That is craftsmanship.
A word from Adorno
I recently posted a quote from Adorno about the enigmatic nature of art, which I think summarizes and extends the above.
Artworks share with enigmas the duality of being determinate and indeterminate. They are question marks, not univocal even through synthesis. Nevertheless their figure is so precise that it determines the point where the work breaks off. As in enigmas, the answer is both hidden and demanded by the structure. This is the function of the world’s immanent logic, of the lawfulness that transpires in it, and that is the theodicy of the concept of purpose in art. The aim of artworks is the determination of the indeterminate. Works are purposeful in themselves, without having any positive purpose beyond their own arrangement; their purposefulness, however, is legitimated as the figure of the answer to the enigma. Through organization artworks become more than they are.
apparently there’s debate even on that, which we will safely dismiss for the sake of this essay and the sanity of humanity itself.
Kant’s explanation is merely one of many, of course. But the author is trying her best to keep the discussion contained, unsuccessfully.
“Those who read Frost’s poetry deeply enough to see through the caricature of the simple farmer-poet espousing country wisdom see his dualities and contradictions metastasize. They begin to see him as both authentic Yankee sage and contrived farmer-poser, as Romantic and Modernist, as believer and skeptic, as portraitist and landscape artist, as threatener and rescuer, as avant-garde innovator and arrière-garde nostalgist, as liberal and conservative, as dour stoic and mischievous humorist, as affable companion and self-proclaimed “bad bad man,” as demystifier and remystifier of an unruly universe, whose design—if there is one—seems dark, muddled, and mysterious.” Bravo Malone.
Not necessarily, as debates are still going in the oridinary lanaguge philosophy. People haven’t really agreed on the nature of meaning and communication in language. See Truth-Conditional Semantics, Speech Act Theory, Pragmatic Contextualism as some examples of what those damn philosophers have conjured up.
We really don’t need big guns such as Ezra to illustrate this simple point. The author may have selected this poem in order to save space.
Short story and novels are very different as well, but I’ll lump them together for now
I did not know this prior to writing this essay but apparently some people argue that Dostoyevsky has “bad” and primitive style and his genius is solely contained in his engrossing stories and rich characters, while others argue that he’s a master in all, including stylistic innovation such as in polyphony. See Vol 8 in https://monoskop.org/images/1/1d/Bakhtin_Mikhail_Problems_of_Dostoevskys_Poetics_1984.pdf.
A mistake we often make in analyzing ourselves as well.
no wonder they were all psychoanalysts.
Is it cheeky to say that if a writer could capture alienation with full precision and perfection, then alienation has been eliminated, since all who feel alienated have now been heard, remembered and understood? Perhaps, perhaps… but that’s why perfection is worth striving for, even if it also means it is beyond reach.