1.6 Ambiguity and paradox

Types of ambiguity

Ambiguity refers to the quality of having multiple possible meanings or interpretations in language, whether the author intended it or not. Within the New Critical framework, ambiguity isn't a flaw to be eliminated; it's a source of richness that rewards close reading. William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) was foundational here, arguing that the best poetry gains power precisely from its multiple simultaneous meanings.

Different types of ambiguity can occur at every level of language, from individual words up to entire narratives.

Lexical ambiguity

• Occurs when a single word has multiple possible meanings (homonyms, homophones, polysemes)
• Can create humorous double meanings through puns or lead to genuine interpretive uncertainty
• Example: "I saw a bat" could refer to the animal or a piece of sports equipment

Syntactic ambiguity

• Arises when the structure of a sentence allows for different interpretations
• Often caused by unclear pronoun references, misplaced modifiers, or missing punctuation
• Example: "Flying planes can be dangerous" could mean planes that are flying or the act of flying planes

Semantic ambiguity

• Happens when a sentence has multiple possible meanings despite having clear syntax
• Caused by words with multiple connotations or figurative language open to interpretation
• Example: "The old man the boat" initially reads as a description, but man here functions as a verb meaning to operate

Pragmatic ambiguity

• Occurs when meaning depends on context, tone, or implied meanings beyond the literal words
• Often involves irony, sarcasm, or figures of speech that shift depending on situation
• Example: Saying "nice job" after someone makes a mistake could be sincere or sarcastic depending on tone and context

Ambiguity in literature

Authors frequently use ambiguity as a deliberate literary device to create multiple layers of meaning, draw readers into active interpretation, or reflect the genuine complexity of human experience. For New Critics especially, ambiguity was not something to resolve away but something to hold in tension.

Intentional vs. unintentional ambiguity

Intentional ambiguity is a deliberate authorial choice to include words, phrases, or structural elements with multiple possible meanings. Authors use it to create suspense, irony, or to prompt readers to question what they're reading.

Unintentional ambiguity is an inevitable result of how language works. Even so, New Critics argued that the author's intention doesn't determine meaning. Unintentional ambiguities can still be analyzed for their interpretive effects, since the text stands on its own.

Ambiguity as literary device

• Creates open-ended, multi-layered works that support various interpretations
• Prompts readers to actively construct meaning, question assumptions, and weigh different perspectives
• Reflects the uncertainties and competing truths of real life
• Example: Henry James' The Turn of the Screw leaves it genuinely unclear whether the ghosts are real or projections of the governess's disturbed mind. The text supports both readings simultaneously.

Ambiguity in poetry vs. prose

Poetry tends to concentrate ambiguity through figurative language, unconventional syntax, and imagery that carries multiple connotations. This density is part of why New Critics favored poetry as their primary object of study. Emily Dickinson's poems, for instance, frequently use ambiguous pronouns and metaphors that resist a single paraphrase.

Prose creates ambiguity through different means: unreliable narrators, unclear character motivations, or open-ended plots. Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" keeps readers uncertain about what is real and what is imagined until its final lines, and even then the ambiguity lingers.

Ambiguity in characterization

• Characters' identities, motivations, relationships, or reliability as narrators may be left deliberately unclear
• This pushes readers to interpret clues and consider multiple possibilities rather than settling on a single reading
• Reflects how, in life, we never fully know another person's inner world
• Example: The governess in The Turn of the Screw can be read as heroic protector or psychologically unstable narrator

Ambiguity in plot and narrative

• Unclear or unresolved events, fractured timelines, or blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy
• Engages readers in active interpretation and gap-filling
• Highlights how stories and meaning are always partly constructed by the reader
• Example: The ending of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day leaves the emotional resolution between Stevens and Miss Kenton unspoken and unresolved

Paradox in literature

A paradox is a seemingly self-contradictory statement that may nonetheless express a deeper truth. For New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, paradox was not just an occasional device but the very language of poetry. In his influential essay "The Language of Paradox," Brooks argued that poetry communicates truths too complex for straightforward propositional language, and paradox is how it does so.

Types of paradox

• Logical paradox: A statement that seems self-contradictory or absurd but may be true (e.g., "This statement is false")
• Rhetorical paradox: An observation that appears contradictory but reveals a deeper truth (e.g., "Less is more")
• Situational paradox: A contradiction between expectations and reality, or between appearance and actuality (e.g., safety measures that create new dangers)

Paradox as rhetorical device

Paradox grabs attention because the mind naturally tries to resolve contradictions. That effort is what makes paradox so effective: it forces the reader to think past surface meaning.

• Concisely expresses complex ideas or overturns assumptions
• Adds memorable, insightful, or witty elements to arguments and poetic expression
• Example: "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" in Orwell's Animal Farm captures the hypocrisy of the pigs' regime in a single sentence

Paradox in poetry vs. prose

Poetry often employs compressed paradoxical statements as wordplay or to express emotional complexity. John Donne's "Death, thou shalt die" in Holy Sonnet 10 packs an entire theological argument into four words: death is conquered by the very thing it represents.

Prose tends to develop paradoxes over longer stretches, through situations or characters that embody contradictions. The central paradox of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a perfect example: a soldier must be insane to be excused from combat missions, but requesting to be excused proves sanity, so no one can ever be excused.

Paradox in characterization

• Characters who embody contradictory traits or roles that nonetheless feel true to life
• Challenges simple archetypes and forces readers to hold complexity in mind
• Example: The Nurse in Romeo and Juliet is simultaneously comic and tragic, both a helper and an obstacle to the lovers

Paradox in themes and motifs

• Central thematic contradictions often drive the tensions and meanings of a work
• Recurring paradoxical situations or images develop a work's philosophical questions
• Example: Macbeth opens with "Fair is foul, and foul is fair," establishing the paradoxical collapse of moral categories that runs through the entire play

Ambiguity and paradox in literary criticism

Different schools of literary theory approach ambiguity and paradox in distinct ways. Understanding these differences helps you see how the same textual feature can serve very different analytical purposes depending on your critical framework.

New Criticism and close reading

New Critics valued ambiguity and paradox as central elements of literary language. For critics like Cleanth Brooks and William Empson, these weren't problems to solve but qualities that made literature literary rather than merely informational.

• Close reading was the method: unpacking the multiple meanings, tensions, and ironies within the text itself
• The goal was to show how a poem's ambiguities and paradoxes resolved into a unified, coherent whole (what Brooks called the poem's "structure of meaning")
• The text was treated as self-contained; biographical or historical context was considered secondary

Deconstructionism and indeterminacy

Deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida took a fundamentally different view. Where New Critics saw ambiguity resolving into unity, deconstructionists saw it as evidence that meaning can never be fully stabilized.

• Language always contains contradictions and slippages that undermine any single interpretation
• Deconstructive readings seek out aporias, or irresolvable logical impasses, within a text
• Binary oppositions (good/evil, presence/absence, speech/writing) are shown to depend on and undermine each other

Reader-response theory and interpretation

Reader-response theorists like Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish shifted focus to the reader's active role in constructing meaning from a text's ambiguities.

• Different readers resolve ambiguities differently based on their experiences, expectations, and reading communities
• Ambiguity becomes evidence that meaning doesn't reside solely in the text but is co-created in the act of reading
• This framework highlights the inherent subjectivity and multiplicity of literary interpretation

Psychoanalytic criticism and unconscious meaning

Psychoanalytic critics saw ambiguity and paradox as windows into unconscious drives within the text, the author, or both.

• Freudian concepts were used to interpret ambiguities as symbolic expressions of repressed desires, fears, or conflicts
• A text's contradictions and paradoxes could reveal the complex workings of the psyche
• Ambiguity in this framework isn't just a literary technique; it's a symptom of deeper psychological tensions

Notable examples of ambiguity and paradox

Shakespeare's plays and sonnets

Shakespeare's works are dense with paradoxes, puns, and layered meanings that operate on multiple levels simultaneously. The comedies often turn on wordplay, mistaken identities, and paradoxical reversals (the gender-bending disguises in Twelfth Night create paradoxes of desire and identity). The sonnets include paradoxical expressions of love, beauty, and time, such as "My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming" (Sonnet 102).

Modernist poetry and experimentation

Modernist poets like T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens used ambiguity and paradox to capture the fragmentation of modern experience. They experimented with free verse, dense imagery, and allusion to create texts that resist single readings.

The Waste Land is a key example: its ambiguous speakers, fragmented scenes, and paradoxical juxtapositions of the sacred and profane make it one of the most analyzed poems in the New Critical tradition.

Postmodern fiction and metafiction

Postmodern authors pushed ambiguity further by questioning the boundaries between fiction and reality, author and reader. Metafictional techniques like self-reference, unreliable narration, and non-linear structures foreground the constructed, ambiguous nature of all narrative.

Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler addresses "you" as both a character and the actual reader, creating a paradox about who is reading what and where fiction ends.

Magical realism and ambiguous reality

Magical realist authors like Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie blend realistic settings with fantastical elements that are presented without explanation or surprise. The result is a world where the magical and mundane coexist, and the reader must decide how (or whether) to distinguish between them.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, supernatural events are narrated with the same matter-of-fact tone as ordinary ones, making the boundary between real and unreal genuinely ambiguous.

Analyzing ambiguity and paradox

Identifying instances in texts

1. Watch for words, phrases, or passages that seem to carry multiple possible meanings
2. Look for contradictions, juxtapositions, or tensions between different elements of the text
3. Note when characters, events, or descriptions are left unclear, unresolved, or open-ended
4. Pay special attention to moments where the text seems to say two things at once

Interpreting multiple meanings

1. Consider the different possible connotations and implications of the ambiguous element
2. Explore how different meanings interact: do they complement each other, or create tension?
3. Ask how the ambiguity contributes to the text's tone, effects, or philosophical questions
4. Resist the urge to "solve" the ambiguity too quickly; the richness often lies in holding multiple readings together

Examining effects on reader experience

• Analyze how the ambiguity makes you an active participant in meaning-making rather than a passive receiver
• Consider how it prompts you to question assumptions or see things from multiple perspectives
• Reflect on whether the experience of uncertainty connects to the work's broader themes about knowledge, reality, or interpretation

Connecting to themes and author's purpose

• Examine how ambiguity and paradox relate to the central ideas, conflicts, and questions of the work
• Consider how the author uses them to comment on the nature of language, meaning, or truth
• In a New Critical framework, focus on how these devices function within the text itself rather than speculating about the author's biography or intentions