One of the things it takes to be a writer is courage.  Another is a whip and a shrug; the whip for getting the lions of ambiguity – seven of them, according to William Empson’s famous taxonomy – up on their stools; the shrug for when it doesn’t go according to plan.

To raise another creature’s name for a minute, one far more feared and entirely loathsome, it was Jacques Derrida who saw the need for the shrug.  Fitting for a Frenchman.

Derrida believed no matter how assiduously the writer cracked her whip to control the lions of ambiguity, there would always be one looking in the wrong direction or snarling when it should be sleeping.  The writer may do everything possible to control the text and screw down meaning, but something will always escape.  Some remnant, some “supplement” as he called it, would get away from the writer, and Derrida spent his career sniffing out these signs in the margins of a text, an occupation which became known as deconstruction, or more kindly, close reading.

Take a tiny example from this blog.

Check out the post about the little girl, Benazir, who died in the Pakistan floods.  The photograph accompanying the post shows a man in the raging waters, his arm raised to call for help.  Then look at the very next post about an entirely unrelated subject – courage in writing – and you can see I unconsciously chose a photograph from Rossellini’s film, Rome, Open City which again features a person raising their arm to call for help.  It’s only now looking back I can see that one post leaked into the next.  This leakage is exactly what Derrida had in mind, and demonstrates how it is that a writer is never wholly in charge of her material.

The 7 types of ambiguity

William Empson (1906-1984), a literary critic and poet, defined ambiguity as occurring when “alternative views might be taken without sheer misreading”.

He identified seven types of ambiguity:

1. The first type of ambiguity is the metaphor, that is, when two things are said to be alike which have different properties. This concept is similar to that of metaphysical conceit.
2. Two or more meanings are resolved into one. Empson characterizes this as using two different metaphors at once.
3. Two ideas that are connected through context can be given in one word simultaneously.
4. Two or more meanings that do not agree but combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author.
5. When the author discovers his idea in the act of writing. Empson describes a simile that lies halfway between two statements made by the author.
6. When a statement says nothing and the readers are forced to invent a statement of their own, most likely in conflict with that of the author.
7. Two words that within context are opposites that expose a fundamental division in the author’s mind. (1)

Empson’s taxonomy was designed originally for poetry, and looking at it now you may see some holes or disagree with some groupings.  But the interesting thing about it is how he makes explicit the writer’s imperfect control, particularly in types 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Number 5 is also interesting.  It’s the one at play in the situation I’ve referred to, with the help of W G Sebald, as “getting hold of the wrong thread.”  If the writer writes to discover what she thinks about a situation, then it’s her task to try to stay ahead of the curve, not following along in its wake.  Or be truly masterful and severe in the re-writing.

Numbers 2, 3 and 4 all pose a constant question to the writer.  As the writer writes, at each step of the way, there is a decision — do I make each meaning explicit (at least, each meaning I identify), or do I leave them conjoined?  Do I hunt down and (try to) kill every ambiguity, or do I leave it to the reader to assimilate it?  Each step, each word, calls on the writer to make a decision about ambiguity, about the amount of “work” the reader is called on to do.

The boring and the baroque

Perhaps you think there’s no question.  Perhaps you think “death to ambiguity” and all who ride in her.  Yet consider just two of the possible end points of such a view.  One is boredom, as noted by Voltaire:

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

Another is the baroque, the style of writing which “deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities”, as defined by Borges.  Borges may have been happy to make a point of the baroque, but it’s an acquired taste, and becoming more so with each passing day.

What it takes to be a writer is to be at home in ambiguity:  to identify it when you can, to let it be when it’s called for, to minimise it when that’s called for.  And to understand above all that some meaning will always escape, and that a shrug, the more Gallic the better, comes in handy.

*****

Notes

1. Empson’s 7 types from Wikipedia

Images: Jacques Derrida smouldering beautifully, courtesy of Just Rhetoric (top); William Empson, courtesy of The University of Sheffield (bottom)