Ambiguity and the Poets

A stranger meeting for first time might well be taken aback by her mixed reputation. She is disliked and avoided in some realms, whereas in others she is welcome. A philosopher like J. L. Austin will patrol streets of language in order to identify in his book, How To Do Things with Words. Ambiguity is bane of translators, who must decide whether it is intentional or merely casual, and ii casual, whether author is careless or lazy or ignorant. We do not want in legislation. Nor do we want it in our wills or in our financial affairs. (Lawyers, of course, like linguists, [consider] as productive because it triggers processes of disambiguation [Bauer par. 6]) Nor do we want in our traffic signs. A recent visitor from Australia, driving on express highway around Toronto, noticed signs for collector lanes. assumed - logically enough - that these were toll highways, collecting money, and so avoided them, overshot city, and was late for dinner. In fact, collector lanes simply siphon off - that is, collect - traffic that is preparing to exit.On other hand, is a useful and even welcome guest in some places. It is excellent device for concealing views. The oracles are said to have used regularly, though these turn out to be literary oracles more than historical ones, as far as we can tell. Macbeth's witches offer a well-known later example. The gods are prone to or amphibology, according to Chaucer's Criseyde: He hath not wel goddes understonde/ For goddes speken in amphibologies,/ And, for a sooth, they teUen twenty lyes [lies] (Troilus and Criseyde IV. 1405-07). In academic Ufe today, also has its uses. Suppose a selection committee for a senior position at your university receives a letter of recommendation on behalf of Professor X. How does it read sentence: You wUl be fortunate indeed if you can get Professor X to work for you. Intentional or not?For a literary scholar and critic, general dimensions of can appear singularly difficult to map. It seems to be not so much unknown land mass as a mythological creature, a Proteus, who changes shape whenever you wish to capture him - Proteus ambiguus, as Ovid calls him (Metamorphoses II.9). This many-sidedness is sometimes blamed on WUUam Empson's weU-known book, Types of Ambiguity, which pubUshed in 1930, in his twenties. Most of his examples are drawn from poetry. It is not a taxonomy, as one might expect from title. As his editor, John Haffenden, puts it: Seven Types of Ambiguity [...] offers less a methodology than Empson's own methodised briUiance (4).1 Pertinent criticism at time objected among other things that Empson [...] been too prodigal in his associative [...] interpretations, and that he too often worried parts without reference to whole (4). But term spread, thanks largely to so-caUed New Critics, though by 1947, one of them, Cleanth Brooks, wrote that held no brief for term ambiguity (or for paradox or irony): they are inadequate. Perhaps they are misleading. It is to be hoped in that case that we can eventuaUy improve upon them (195). By 1957, WUUam K. Wimsatt and Brooks acknowledged that the term 'ambiguity' was perhaps not altogether happy, for this term reflects point of view of expository prose, where one meaning, and only one meaning, is wanted (637). That is, norm for has always included what they call multiple impUcation (638) - a useful enough phrase, if clumsy. In 1958, Roman Jakobson accepted term ambiguity, defining it as an intrinsic, inaUenable character of any self-focussed message, briefly, a corollary feature of poetry (85). went on to quote Empson.2 (Jakobson' s essay, by way, was first pubUshed in English.) Meanwhile, Empson revised his book somewhat for later editions, then about 1973 mischievously wrote to a friend:Reviewers were teUing me, as soon as Ambiguity came out, that not aU was ambiguous, and I could see that method worked best where authors had had some impulse or need for process; but, as it had become my line, I went on slogging at it for two more books. …

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