Ambiguity. Saying One Thing, Meaning A Lot More.

Ambiguity is just something not being made very clear, right? Well there is actually some confusion and controversy among literary critics about what ambiguity is. Usually, if we describe something as ‘ambiguous’, we probably mean one of two things: either that it is obscure in meaning or that it seems to have two or more meanings. However, when thinking about poetry, ambiguity is a poetic device; M. H. Abrams defines the poetic device as something which uses ‘a single word or expression to signify two or more distinct references, or to express two or more diverse attitudes or feelings’. Therefore, as something to be used in poetry, ambiguity has nothing to do with obscurity but with ‘two or more distinct references’ – for the references to be ‘distinct’ they cannot be obscure, can they?

There are several things we should talk about in order to differentiate between them and ambiguity. First of all, ambivalence. Ambiguity is a feature of language but ambivalence is a quality of feeling. Ambivalence is the coexistence in one person of opposite feelings towards an object, person or situation. An ambivalent feeling might result in, or be revealed by, an ambiguous statement, but not necessarily and, by the same token, we cannot assume that an ambiguous phrase or text indicates ambivalent feelings in the speaker or writer.

Another thing commonly confused with ambiguity is multiple meaning. There is a wide ranger of ways in which a piece of text can have multiple meanings without being ambiguous; irony, for example, can be thought of as a king of multiple meaning, since the reader has to distinguish between an apparent meaning and an implied one, but this does not make it ambiguous. While ambiguity is of course a type of multiple meaning, there are other types of multiple meaning that are not necessarily ambiguous. Furniss and Bath offer the definition that ‘ambiguity consists of two or more distinctly different meanings sustained by the same piece of text which cannot be resolved into a single meaning’.

This idea that the two meanings ‘cannot be resolved into a single meaning’ is very important in differentiating between ambiguity and things like metaphor and allegory. The multiple meanings of ambiguity need to be distinctly different from one another, and they need to resist being resolved into a single meaning but in reading a metaphor, we should not lose sight of the fact that the metaphor is a way of talking about something literal rather than a means of saying two different things at once. In allegory, the two different meanings of the story are not alternative interpretations, but simply different ways of reading the same story; any potential ambiguities are resolved into allegory.

However, a lot of the time, the effects of ambiguity or clarity are bound up with questions of context. Poems often depend on readers having specific knowledge if they are to have the desired effect and so they are context dependent. However, ambiguity is a specific poetic device, used by the poet for a specific reason. And so while a poem might be confusing or obscure to a reader who does not ‘get it’, that is the reader’s confusion, not the poems’ ambiguity.

So how is ambiguity used? There are two basic reason why ambiguity is possible in language: first because syntax and grammatical structure can be open to different readings, and secondly because individual words can have more than one meaning.

Syntactical ambiguity happens when the the grammatical structure can be interpreted in two different ways due to the arrangement of the verb and the subject. The example given in ‘Reading Poetry: An Introduction’ is from Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VI Part Two’, which is about the power struggle between Henry VI and the Duke or York. “The Duke yet lives that Henry shall depose, / But him outlive, and die a violent death.” In this, the first line can either be read as ‘There is a Duke (object) that Henry (subject or agent) shall depose (verb) or as ‘There is a Duke (subject or agent) that Henry (object) shall depose (verb)’ and so it is uncertain which of the characters will kill the other. Note that this ambiguity is a deliberate device used by Shakespeare – it is a prophetic spirit who is speaking at this point in the play and the use of ambiguity placates both parties in the story.

Lexical ambiguity is possible because the English language is replete with words which have more than one meaning (polysemous words) and with different words which have the same sound (homophones). It is easy to confuse these types of words but it should be notes that homophones are usually completely unrelated to each other in regards to meaning while the meanings of polysemous words are usually related, otherwise they would be completely different words.

As we have said, ambiguity is a specific poetic device used to achieve certain effects. New Critics argue that there can be two kinds or ambiguity. The ambiguity of ‘outright confusion’ is problematic and arises out of a poet’s failure to resolve all the contradictions opened up by the poem, however, ambiguity that is ‘rich and meaningful’, can produce ‘poetry’s finest effects’. So while ambiguity can enrich a poem’s central theme, idea or meaning, ambiguities which cannot be incorporated in this way produce confusion or incoherence and, it can be argued, a degree of poetic failure. Ambiguity can be resolved through careful attention and interpretation, but rather than interpreting the poem, we should seek it analyze the way it generates possibilities.