Plato is now a distant memory. Secure in his polytheistic intellectual set-up, the irrational was something to be mocked or feared. Two thousand years later, it’s the absence of a World Spirit that’s troubling Coleridge. He’s actually searching for it. But the very thing that would, in his view, validate his art, is a quality that cannot be summoned, explained or proved. So meaning has come on a long journey too.
The very ‘meaning’ of meaning isn’t something that can be dissected by philosophy, or history or sociology, as Plato believed; in the Romantic scheme of things, it’s irreducible. It’s a leap of faith. And you either have that faith or you don’t. No amount of reasoning’s going to help you; you either get it or you don’t. There’s no wonderfully elegant compromises to be had from Pope. And the intellectual poise and rhetorical skills of a Sidney won’t help you either. It’s the triumph of the Irrational.
This Romantic faith can take several forms; God is the obvious one (Wordsworth); faith in the perfectibility of man through art and politics is another (Shelley -‘Ode to the West Wind” is a good example of this); for Keats it was the cultivation of the individual “Soul” beyond both God and Intelligence (1); with Oscar Wilde it was simply Love (2). And Coleridge didn’t honestly know, but he reckoned Soul had to be in there somewhere (3).
So these are all schemes for making sense of things, for uniting perception with meaning in a realm beyond sweat, rationality or empirical philosophy.
But subsequent aesthetic theory was to blow any kind of unity apart as writers began to realize that the world was getting more complicated, or they simply wanted to go out into the playground and muck about with meaning . . .
Big Theme #6: One/ Many - The Writer’s Toolbox
Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.”
John Berger, novelist
Sometimes the world seems easy to grasp, sometimes it’s perceived as being complex. So sometimes, writers want to communicate their meaning simply and unequivocally. And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, they need to address the reader directly, sometimes they want to suggest a range of possibilities. Sometimes they need to indicate depth, or just to skim the surface of reality. Once again, it’s horses for courses. So what they need is forms of meaning, or, rather, ways of organizing meaning that can deliver both outcomes.
How they achieve these different kinds of organization isn’t our primary concern here (that’ll come in Part 3); rather it’s to acknowledge why they need to do so.
Let’s break ourselves in gently by dealing with single meaning first, simply because it’s the easier of the two.
Certain genres of writing, at certain periods in history, and among certain cultures have demanded that meaning be delivered as efficiently as possible, usually because something important’s at stake. So what you want is exactitude rather than embroidery, authority as opposed to liberalism. The urgency and the perceived importance of the message usually excuses the utilitarian nature of the style in which it’s written, like a box of ‘No Frills’ cornflakes in the supermarket that lacks enticing colour shots of serving suggestions but is quite a bit cheaper.
So, in medieval times, when eternal torment in Hell was the non-negotiable punishment for sinful behaviour, the Church chose not to mince its words. The Devil was abroad and souls were in peril. With this stricture in mind, an anonymous cleric came up with one of the most spectacularly dull books ever written, entitled ‘Ancrene Wisse’ (‘Ancient Knowledge’) - a tome which was a set text on the compulsory Middle English paper at my college, and which may currently be inducing narcolepsy in a whole new generation of students for all I know.
Briefly, it’s a series of lectures given by a priest to a group of female neophytes who are about to be bricked up (yes, you read that correctly) in a nunnery to keep them out of temptation’s way. I suspect the individual who insisted on retaining this literary Mogadon on the syllabus had a lot in common with the work’s narrator, who placed an unnatural emphasis on mortification of the flesh and patient suffering. ‘Ancrene Wisse’ isn’t unique among medieval texts in promoting these values - it just does it with the barest sugaring of the learning pill. In fact, beyond the conceit of the neophytes and their instructor, there’s no added sweeteners whatever, even in JRR Tolkien’s version, and he can usually be relied on to liven things up a bit.
There isn’t the slightest scintilla of irony, humour or doubt, no possible interpretation outside the rigid tenets of the faith which are hammered into the young women (and, of course, the reader) again and again - eternal damnation awaits those who choose to ignore the message of this pompous, omniscient and devout old bore, who, medievalists inform us, is thought to have lived in the Birmingham area.
If we get out our meaning line (returning it to its horizontal orientation) and use it very much in anger, ‘Ancrene Wisse’ would sit at the far left, where there’s a direct equivalence between signifier and signified. A = A - no ifs no buts or maybes, no intercession through metaphor, just unalloyed statement. A spade’s a spade. It’s the reason creative fiction exists, because the imagination would shrivel up and die if all texts were written like this. But then again, when your soul’s in imminent danger of being consigned to Hell and you’re looking for guidance, who you gonna call? A moral relativist?
These days, the only real reasons we need unambiguous communication is in the framing of laws, the writing of contracts and in the instruction manuals for electrical products and flat-pack furniture.
Seems we’ve lost our touch.
So in ‘Ancrene Wisse’, there’s plenty of room for theological discussion, but very little occasion for interpretation. We know what the narrator means, because he makes damn sure we do. But, as I may have barely hinted above, this doesn’t necessarily make for good art. Lectures rarely do, and this is something with which Aristotle would have agreed.
The essence of good writing, he says, is “to be clear without being commonplace.” But, of course, the moment you start deviating from ruthlessly literal parameters of expression, you’re opening the door to ambiguity or even multiple interpretations. Any diversion into the realm of analogy is going to muddy the meaning pool, and this, we might say, is the price you pay for trying to be interesting, to entertain as well as inform and educate.
This particular ambition, which we can trace back to Horace’s ‘Ars Poetica’ and possibly beyond that (4), was given a new lease of life in the 1920’s, when Lord Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, laid down the definitive blueprint for public service broadcasting. Interestingly, if you look for these terms using the internet, my search engine registers over 186,000 examples where these words are paired, and it’s not just media organizations that have monopolized their use - those who wish to inform, educate and entertain range from schools and colleges to garden centres and manufacturers of kitchen appliances. Not a very scientific sampling method I know, but nevertheless it does reveal that us humans in many walks of life (some of them improbable) are well aware that education and entertainment travel hand in hand, and actively benefit from each other’s company. You could even argue, and I’m sure philosophers and anthropologists must have done, that elements of entertainment or performance are hard-wired into our attempts to communicate with one another. After all, you’re not going to give a bore your attention for very long, and, by the same token, if Robin Williams didn’t have the odd serious thing to say in his interviews, you’d get heartily sick of his incessant clowning. Each impulse exists to moderate and support the other when they’re working well together. And this is partly what Aristotle’s on about in his ‘Ars Poetica’.
The desire to elevate art from the prosaic involves a whole palette of strategies collectively known as ‘style’, or what Aristotle terms ‘unfamiliar usages’ that are used to ‘improve on reality’.
He homes in on two such strategies, “importations” and “metaphors”; the former, I think, refers to what we might call ‘poetic diction’ where synonyms are substituted for words familiar from everyday speech, the latter where one quality or thing is substituted for another. Mixing them in with ordinary language may cause some confusion, but the successful artist will retain sufficient clarity for his intended meaning to be preserved, and not cast the reader entirely adrift. He then gives an example of where even Homer has nodded by failing to carry the reader along with him. In the ‘Iliad’, he uses the word ‘ourenas’, which could mean either ‘lookouts’ or ‘mules’, something you wouldn’t want to get mixed up in the thick of a military campaign.
Most of the time, however, these ambiguities can be resolved by a brief examination of their context; nonetheless, any kind of crux, however small, will provide an opening for the critic, who, according to Aristotle, will tend to make ‘unreasonable pre-suppositions’ about the writer’s meaning from the word go. So caveat scriptor - again.
Yet all Aristotle’s observations are formulated from the point of view that the writer doesn’t deliberately want to create and maintain ambiguity, to effectively abdicate from any discussion of meaning and leave it to the reader to figure out. Such an approach would be the hallmark of a poor craftsman. I’m sure Shakespeare would be both amused and puzzled to find that there’s a whole industry trying to figure out what his works mean, casting their light into the dimmer recesses of his plays to extract more information, to establish fresh connections and build new structures in what he probably felt was pretty transparent writing. After all, during a theatrical performance, the audience only gets one shot at deciphering the meaning before the action or dialogue moves on, and it wouldn’t have been in Shakespeare’s interest to leave his playgoers scratching their heads and thinking “Well what the hell was that all about?” as they strolled out of the Globe. Not good for business.
So we ought to define what we mean by ambiguity before we go any further, to ensure we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet, since it would be rather ironic at this stage in the argument if we weren’t.
And there’s no better writer from whom to steal that definition than William Empson, whose seminal work ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ is one of the few ‘must have’ works of lit crit. “Ambiguity,” he writes, “is any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”
Footnotes:
1. Keats wrote the following to his sister Georgiana in 1819, two years before his death: “Call the world if you Please "The vale of Soul-making" .... I say "Soul making'' Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. This appears to me faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity.”
2. see his poem ‘Panthea’.
3. see ‘The Aeolian Harp’
4. Horace writes; “Poets aim at giving either profit or delight, or at combining the giving of pleasure with some useful precepts for life . . . The man who has managed to blend profit with delight wins everyone’s approbation, for he gives his reader pleasure at the same time as he instructs him.”
The very ‘meaning’ of meaning isn’t something that can be dissected by philosophy, or history or sociology, as Plato believed; in the Romantic scheme of things, it’s irreducible. It’s a leap of faith. And you either have that faith or you don’t. No amount of reasoning’s going to help you; you either get it or you don’t. There’s no wonderfully elegant compromises to be had from Pope. And the intellectual poise and rhetorical skills of a Sidney won’t help you either. It’s the triumph of the Irrational.
This Romantic faith can take several forms; God is the obvious one (Wordsworth); faith in the perfectibility of man through art and politics is another (Shelley -‘Ode to the West Wind” is a good example of this); for Keats it was the cultivation of the individual “Soul” beyond both God and Intelligence (1); with Oscar Wilde it was simply Love (2). And Coleridge didn’t honestly know, but he reckoned Soul had to be in there somewhere (3).
So these are all schemes for making sense of things, for uniting perception with meaning in a realm beyond sweat, rationality or empirical philosophy.
But subsequent aesthetic theory was to blow any kind of unity apart as writers began to realize that the world was getting more complicated, or they simply wanted to go out into the playground and muck about with meaning . . .
Big Theme #6: One/ Many - The Writer’s Toolbox
Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.”
John Berger, novelist
Sometimes the world seems easy to grasp, sometimes it’s perceived as being complex. So sometimes, writers want to communicate their meaning simply and unequivocally. And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, they need to address the reader directly, sometimes they want to suggest a range of possibilities. Sometimes they need to indicate depth, or just to skim the surface of reality. Once again, it’s horses for courses. So what they need is forms of meaning, or, rather, ways of organizing meaning that can deliver both outcomes.
How they achieve these different kinds of organization isn’t our primary concern here (that’ll come in Part 3); rather it’s to acknowledge why they need to do so.
Let’s break ourselves in gently by dealing with single meaning first, simply because it’s the easier of the two.
Certain genres of writing, at certain periods in history, and among certain cultures have demanded that meaning be delivered as efficiently as possible, usually because something important’s at stake. So what you want is exactitude rather than embroidery, authority as opposed to liberalism. The urgency and the perceived importance of the message usually excuses the utilitarian nature of the style in which it’s written, like a box of ‘No Frills’ cornflakes in the supermarket that lacks enticing colour shots of serving suggestions but is quite a bit cheaper.
So, in medieval times, when eternal torment in Hell was the non-negotiable punishment for sinful behaviour, the Church chose not to mince its words. The Devil was abroad and souls were in peril. With this stricture in mind, an anonymous cleric came up with one of the most spectacularly dull books ever written, entitled ‘Ancrene Wisse’ (‘Ancient Knowledge’) - a tome which was a set text on the compulsory Middle English paper at my college, and which may currently be inducing narcolepsy in a whole new generation of students for all I know.
Briefly, it’s a series of lectures given by a priest to a group of female neophytes who are about to be bricked up (yes, you read that correctly) in a nunnery to keep them out of temptation’s way. I suspect the individual who insisted on retaining this literary Mogadon on the syllabus had a lot in common with the work’s narrator, who placed an unnatural emphasis on mortification of the flesh and patient suffering. ‘Ancrene Wisse’ isn’t unique among medieval texts in promoting these values - it just does it with the barest sugaring of the learning pill. In fact, beyond the conceit of the neophytes and their instructor, there’s no added sweeteners whatever, even in JRR Tolkien’s version, and he can usually be relied on to liven things up a bit.
There isn’t the slightest scintilla of irony, humour or doubt, no possible interpretation outside the rigid tenets of the faith which are hammered into the young women (and, of course, the reader) again and again - eternal damnation awaits those who choose to ignore the message of this pompous, omniscient and devout old bore, who, medievalists inform us, is thought to have lived in the Birmingham area.
If we get out our meaning line (returning it to its horizontal orientation) and use it very much in anger, ‘Ancrene Wisse’ would sit at the far left, where there’s a direct equivalence between signifier and signified. A = A - no ifs no buts or maybes, no intercession through metaphor, just unalloyed statement. A spade’s a spade. It’s the reason creative fiction exists, because the imagination would shrivel up and die if all texts were written like this. But then again, when your soul’s in imminent danger of being consigned to Hell and you’re looking for guidance, who you gonna call? A moral relativist?
These days, the only real reasons we need unambiguous communication is in the framing of laws, the writing of contracts and in the instruction manuals for electrical products and flat-pack furniture.
Seems we’ve lost our touch.
So in ‘Ancrene Wisse’, there’s plenty of room for theological discussion, but very little occasion for interpretation. We know what the narrator means, because he makes damn sure we do. But, as I may have barely hinted above, this doesn’t necessarily make for good art. Lectures rarely do, and this is something with which Aristotle would have agreed.
The essence of good writing, he says, is “to be clear without being commonplace.” But, of course, the moment you start deviating from ruthlessly literal parameters of expression, you’re opening the door to ambiguity or even multiple interpretations. Any diversion into the realm of analogy is going to muddy the meaning pool, and this, we might say, is the price you pay for trying to be interesting, to entertain as well as inform and educate.
This particular ambition, which we can trace back to Horace’s ‘Ars Poetica’ and possibly beyond that (4), was given a new lease of life in the 1920’s, when Lord Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, laid down the definitive blueprint for public service broadcasting. Interestingly, if you look for these terms using the internet, my search engine registers over 186,000 examples where these words are paired, and it’s not just media organizations that have monopolized their use - those who wish to inform, educate and entertain range from schools and colleges to garden centres and manufacturers of kitchen appliances. Not a very scientific sampling method I know, but nevertheless it does reveal that us humans in many walks of life (some of them improbable) are well aware that education and entertainment travel hand in hand, and actively benefit from each other’s company. You could even argue, and I’m sure philosophers and anthropologists must have done, that elements of entertainment or performance are hard-wired into our attempts to communicate with one another. After all, you’re not going to give a bore your attention for very long, and, by the same token, if Robin Williams didn’t have the odd serious thing to say in his interviews, you’d get heartily sick of his incessant clowning. Each impulse exists to moderate and support the other when they’re working well together. And this is partly what Aristotle’s on about in his ‘Ars Poetica’.
The desire to elevate art from the prosaic involves a whole palette of strategies collectively known as ‘style’, or what Aristotle terms ‘unfamiliar usages’ that are used to ‘improve on reality’.
He homes in on two such strategies, “importations” and “metaphors”; the former, I think, refers to what we might call ‘poetic diction’ where synonyms are substituted for words familiar from everyday speech, the latter where one quality or thing is substituted for another. Mixing them in with ordinary language may cause some confusion, but the successful artist will retain sufficient clarity for his intended meaning to be preserved, and not cast the reader entirely adrift. He then gives an example of where even Homer has nodded by failing to carry the reader along with him. In the ‘Iliad’, he uses the word ‘ourenas’, which could mean either ‘lookouts’ or ‘mules’, something you wouldn’t want to get mixed up in the thick of a military campaign.
Most of the time, however, these ambiguities can be resolved by a brief examination of their context; nonetheless, any kind of crux, however small, will provide an opening for the critic, who, according to Aristotle, will tend to make ‘unreasonable pre-suppositions’ about the writer’s meaning from the word go. So caveat scriptor - again.
Yet all Aristotle’s observations are formulated from the point of view that the writer doesn’t deliberately want to create and maintain ambiguity, to effectively abdicate from any discussion of meaning and leave it to the reader to figure out. Such an approach would be the hallmark of a poor craftsman. I’m sure Shakespeare would be both amused and puzzled to find that there’s a whole industry trying to figure out what his works mean, casting their light into the dimmer recesses of his plays to extract more information, to establish fresh connections and build new structures in what he probably felt was pretty transparent writing. After all, during a theatrical performance, the audience only gets one shot at deciphering the meaning before the action or dialogue moves on, and it wouldn’t have been in Shakespeare’s interest to leave his playgoers scratching their heads and thinking “Well what the hell was that all about?” as they strolled out of the Globe. Not good for business.
So we ought to define what we mean by ambiguity before we go any further, to ensure we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet, since it would be rather ironic at this stage in the argument if we weren’t.
And there’s no better writer from whom to steal that definition than William Empson, whose seminal work ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ is one of the few ‘must have’ works of lit crit. “Ambiguity,” he writes, “is any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”
Footnotes:
1. Keats wrote the following to his sister Georgiana in 1819, two years before his death: “Call the world if you Please "The vale of Soul-making" .... I say "Soul making'' Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. This appears to me faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity.”
2. see his poem ‘Panthea’.
3. see ‘The Aeolian Harp’
4. Horace writes; “Poets aim at giving either profit or delight, or at combining the giving of pleasure with some useful precepts for life . . . The man who has managed to blend profit with delight wins everyone’s approbation, for he gives his reader pleasure at the same time as he instructs him.”
