A Small Treatise Considering the Principles of Ambiguity (Without Allusion to Gertrude Stein)

Let's say the inexperienced writer doesn't consider her writing to have any ambiguity.

Let's say the bad writer considers her writing to have only ambiguity.

Let's say the good writer considers her writing to be as ambiguous as necessary.

(Let's say the first sentence is unambiguous.)

(Let's say the second sentence is too ambiguous.)

(Let's say the third sentence is ambiguous enough.)

Wallace Stevens Responds to Vic Ruggiero

                  Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

In Answer To Vick

The hidden qualm I find in Vicks question about ambiguity is this: writers can nuance themselves to the point where a reader or audience falls asleep. Modernism rebelled against overt meaning, and, as Vic said, left a lot out so that the reader could connect the dots. But ambiguity is not lack of clarity, or lack of meaning, or even lack of directness. Ambiguity occurrs and thrives even when a poet or song writer is being about as subtle as a sledge hammer. Take an expression like "sex, drugs, and rock and roll." It's pretty blunt. Somehow, to certain minds, it says everything without saying anything more than "sex, drugs, and rock and roll." It implies an absolute aesthetic. It implies a reduction of life to a sort of primal simplicity. It's level of ambiguity resides in the magic of trinity: One aesthetic, or concept of the beautiful and the good under three "divine" persons. The implication is that these things go together, that they are linked in such a way that you can't mention one without mentioning the other. The hearer provides the connection. The speaker utters. But suppose I say: "Potato salad, surgical equipment salesmen, and your fine assed mother giving me head in the back of a Volkswagen van." The very randomness of these things might throw a reader off, or make the reader or listener search for meanings and connections that are not controlled or preconceived by the speaker. Suppose I made a list of trinities:

The father, son, and Holy Spirit
Death, lemon ice, and my grandmother's false teeth
sex, drugs, and rock and roll
labor day, christmas, and the unforgettable tits of my Bulgarian wet nurse
a horse, a camel, and a man picking his nose at day break

The pattern of threes becomes the ruling principle, and now almost anything can be yoked to the system of threes and the reader will feel some sense of unity that can't be well defined, but is there. We are pattern seeking animals. We seek pattern more than we do cognitive meaning. If we didn't, then no new meanings would be possible. What modernism and post-modernism plays with is the energy of the disconnect, the loss of an unquestioned order of priority. This is definitely at the heart of surrealism, language poetry, and much of the new York School. By freeing language, by liberating utterance from orders of priority, many things are possible:

1. The reader will project a priority, thus creating a new order or possibility.
2. The reader will lose all sense of priority and, by losing it, gain a more acute sense of process as a value in its own right.

3. Incongruity will create its own perspective so that not knowing exactly what is being said or meant will become an aesthetic preference. Die hard modernists often despise the over determined meaning for the simple fact that the overt and the obvious bores them.
4. Strangeness will create a revolt on the part of the reader and or listener thus leading to the shock, controversy, and outrage much modernist art is hoping to achieve.

   Empson discussed seven types of ambiguity. I don't have time to delve into them, but let's just consider the ambiguity of the word "and." Conjunctions are links. They connect disparate words or concepts, but they also imply a radical disconnection as much as they link. "And" is a bridge, and a bridge is proof that there is a gap. That gap may be infinite. Many biblical narratives begin with the word "and:" 'And it came to pass..." in this case "and" implies the narrative proceeds from someone or some thing else and is connected to that thing. "And" adds, accumulates. It also serves the two extremes of the binary-- connect and disconnect. "And" is intrinsically ambigous.

    One can be direct and ambiguos. Ambiguity is not a dirth of meaning,or a confusion but a hypertrophic splintering of it into many possibilities, some of which contradict each other (the essense of irony): "I'd just love to go to bed with you and have you pre-mature ejaculate." This is an ironic or sarcastic statement. This is the sort of ambiguity that exists for thousands of years. But suppose the irony is leeched from it. Suppose the implication is that the person speaking truly does want nothing more than to go to bed with the other and have him pre-mature ejaculate. Now you are heading towards the truest ambiguity of post-modernism, the sort of power Andy Warhol wielded because his whimsical and seemingly guileless statements could be considered both ironic (tongue in cheek, wise assed) and without guile-- a sort of uber sincerity an almost autistic literalism taken to a point surpassing the skill of irony and entering the realm of the absurd: "I just adore men who can't last a minute in bed.' A New York dillitante can utter such a statement and impress her friends with her cleverness or unconventionality. Daisy Buchanan can weep over Gatsby's shirts and escape the awful fear of substance. Lack of substance, content, meaning can be a signifier of power and priviledge. The gods never have to be substantial. True power is always accessible to the arbitrary. It does and says whatever it wants without being troubled by significance. It does not serve. It pronounces, and in merely laying out the words and phrases it claims and depends on no order of priority save its own whim. This is the sort of ambiguity that can, in the hands of unskilled writers and poets, prove precious and pretentious, and infuriating. Nuance and the avoidance of meaning can become doctrinaire. I may be wrong, but I think that may be part of what troubles Vick.