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eBook details

• Title: Ambiguity Now (Essay)
• Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 79 KB

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"Few of us are prepared to accept the statement that the language of poetry is the language of paradox" (Brooks 3). The surprise value of this statement--the opening sentence of Cleanth Brooks's 1947 critical study The Well Wrought Urn--had by that date already been diminished by a growing orthodoxy about displacement, irony, ambivalence, and ambiguity as central values in modernist poetic practice. For instance, William Empson's work (which he quotes) had been around for a decade and a half. Brooks is perhaps pretending something much more outrageous than in fact some of his readers, or at least those sympathetic to modern poetry, would have believed it to be. Yet among its many agendas, Brooks's book ably demonstrated to those readers not only how paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity are central to the work of his contemporaries, but that they are central too to understanding the way ancient poems are composed, poems from the canon like Gray's "Elegy," Donne's "The Canonisation," or Herrick's "Corinna's Going a-Maying." They are central, that is, to the experiences we have when we read, central to a capacity to recreate a play of meanings and feelings across the text when it is felt as a totality. For Brooks, irony, paradox, and ambiguity are also part and parcel of those means which characterize the poet as a creative artificer and not just as a communicator or edifier--characteristics such as the preference for symbol over abstraction, the preference for suggestion rather than explicit statement, the preference for metaphor over judgement. Where the modernist critic is concerned, paradoxes: "spring from the very nature of the poet's language: it is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations" (Brooks 8). And later he reinforces the importance of this claim about the connotative range of poetic language--and the play of contradiction and ambiguity at work in it--by stating: "the poet has no one term. Even if he had a polysyllabic technical term, the term would not provide the solution to his problem. [The poet] must work by contradiction and qualification" (Brooks 9). Ambiguity is the order of the day. As inheritors of modernist critical approaches, we have become familiar with the close symbiosis between the stress given to ambiguity and a comparable stress given to textual autonomy in modernist reading. The concept of "textual autonomy"--the idea that poems are somehow unique, untranslatable acts of meaning and experience--is another way, indeed, of establishing an important logistical emphasis on behalf of the importance of ambiguity and contradiction in a poem's imagery and in its narrative complexity. The contrariety of a poem is what ultimately prevents it being reduced to prose. The play of ambiguous pressures across the poem's language is what ultimately obliges the reader to see a poem as different from a simple statement or a simple idea. In short, caught in the force field of ambiguity and paradox, what poems say is ultimately irreducible to fully communicable truths, largely because they cannot be successfully paraphrased. For Brooks, paraphrase is a destructive distortion not just of the content of the poem but also of its bearing towards the reader--that is, of the ways in which the reader has to handle and respond to its language. A poem communicates richly, with nuance, with delicacy in the structuring of its meanings, and with qualifications--so much so that "the thing communicated is mauled and distorted if we attempt to convey it by any vehicle less subtle than that of the poem itself" (Brooks 73). Taken quite literally, this would mean that the only way to elucidate a poem is to keep repeating it--or to keep re-reading it--and not to seek to re-tell it or paraphrase it or look up its words in a dictionary. In practice, however, what Brooks means is that, given that the structure of poetry is a structuring of contradictions and ambivalences, it seems that a poem's interna

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