Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

Ambiguity and the Poets
bologies,/ And, for a sooth, they tellen twenty lyes [lies]” (Troilus and
Criseyde IV.1405-07). In academic life today, ambiguity 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 the sentence: “You will be fortunate indeed if you
can get Professor X to work for you.” Intentional ambiguity or not?
For a literary scholar and critic, the general dimensions of ambiguity
can appear singularly difficult to map. It seems to be not so much an
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 William Empson’s well-known book, Seven Types of
Ambiguity, which he published in 1930, in his twenties. Most of his
examples are drawn from poetry. It is not a taxonomy, as one might
expect from the title. As his editor, John Haffenden, puts it: “Seven
Types of Ambiguity […] offers less a methodology than Empson’s own
methodised brilliance” (4). 1 Pertinent criticism at the time objected
among other things that Empson “had […] been too prodigal in his
associative […] interpretations,” and that “he too often worried the
parts without reference to the whole” (4). But the term spread, thanks
largely to the so-called New Critics, though by 1947, one of them,
Cleanth Brooks, wrote that he held no brief for the term “ambiguity”
(or for “paradox” or “irony”): “Perhaps they are inadequate. Perhaps
they are misleading. It is to be hoped in that case that we can eventually
improve upon them” (195). By 1957, William K. Wimsatt and
Brooks acknowledged that “the term ‘ambiguity’ was perhaps not
altogether happy, for this term reflects the point of view of expository
prose, where one meaning, and only one meaning, is wanted” (637).
That is, the norm for poetry has always included what they call “multiple
implication” (638)—a useful enough phrase, if clumsy. In 1958,
Roman Jakobson accepted the term “ambiguity,” defining it as “an
intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focussed message, briefly, a
corollary feature of poetry” (85). He went on to quote Empson. 2 (Jakobson’s
essay, by the way, was first published in English.) Mean-
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