Now this is just a single, albeit many-headed model for ambiguity, but one which covers the waterfront comprehensively from metaphor to meaninglessness. And whether the critic’s familiar with Empson’s model or not, I reckon he needs to ask himself two crucial questions before he even sets pen to paper: Þ am I comfortable with all these types of meaning, or just some of them? Þ if the latter, which and why? I’m continually astonished by critics who evidently don’t address this issue before sitting down to write. If any aspect of ambiguity is troubling, why not just come clean and admit it? It betrays no great deficiency; but we’ll know, as readers, that a surreal novelist like Richard Brautigan is going to be given a rough ride by a critic who prefers more direct forms of communicating literary meaning. What’s the point of trying to evaluate a writer’s work who is never going to conform to your way of looking at things? All too often, critics establish criteria of excellence personal to them, and arrange the entire canon of literature on either side of this divide. And to what end? This is what spoils an otherwise thought-provoking and seminal work like FR Leavis’s ‘The Great Tradition’ in which, broadly speaking, he separates the English novel into two groups: those that are “completely serious works of art”, (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, DH Lawrence) and those that have their roots in a messier, undigested kind of reality (primarily Dickens and Henry Fielding - although he does think Dickens’s ‘Hard Times’ might just squeak in under the first heading). Leavis was a New-ish critic who liked his meaning under the writer’s control. That doesn’t necessarily imply that he couldn’t get on with writers who courted ambiguity, only those who indulged in ambiguity for its own sake, for whom ambiguity had an entirely personal significance, or those who allowed it to remain unresolved. Likewise, he wasn’t enamoured of writers who reported reality in the raw without attempting to interpret it, without ushering it inside their artistic vision. Leavis favoured craftsmanship, and rough edges of meaning sticking out of an otherwise smooth work of art weren’t to his taste. So, using these criteria, those great vital slabs of life that are ‘David Copperfield’ or the deeply idiosyncratic visions contained in ‘Les Fleurs Du Mal’ just don’t fit the bill. And hence are less good than those works that do. To which, I would first say “Crap”, and then “So what? Who cares?” Why deliberately curb your own appreciation (and potentially that of your students, Mr Leavis) by drawing artificial lines in the sand? Ambiguity and redundancy can, of course, suggest muddled aims and therefore, potentially, bad art; but when it’s put to interesting, creative use, it really doesn’t matter whether its meaning is resolved or not (I’m finally nailing my colours to the mast here, aren’t I?). I don’t choose my friends on the basis of how tidy their kitchen is, but then again there’s thems that do. Personally speaking, I prefer neatness (as Chris will tell you), but that doesn’t mean I demand everybody’s as neurotic as me, and detest those that aren’t. They get on my tits occasionally when they’ve put the tea bags back in the wrong place and I can’t find them, but that alone doesn’t constitute grounds for separation. And that example’s not as irrelevant as it might look. If meaning is about order (as I’ve been claiming throughout this book), one’s personal attitude to order can play a major part in identifying a book’s meaning, and subsequently assessing it. So now we’ll rejoin Zadie Smith’s argument where we left off a few pages back, just to demonstrate that there’s others who hold this point of view. In her meditation on contemporary criticism, Smith contrasts what she’s identified as the “Aristotelian educated heart” (the disinterested kind that TS Eliot idolized) and what EM Forster (who was also no slouch as a critic) referred to in his letters and diaries as “the undeveloped heart”. To possess one of these latter organs, you have to have an over-fondness for certainty, for making things fit together, and an unquestioning allegiance to pre-existing points of view or codes of behaviour. And, for Forster, this usually translates into a tendency to short-circuit debate, a habit of papering over cracks and inconsistencies, and a wilful desire to see order where it doesn’t necessarily exist. In his novel ‘A Room With A View’, the characters of whom Forster seems fondest are those, like Lucy Honeychurch, who progress from this state of mind to one in which they can put up with muddle, which is essentially the stuff from which we build our lives. But they are also characters who learn to trust their own perceptions, and wean themselves off the easy option of relying on received opinions or second-hand bodies of knowledge. It’s a self-confidence that is earned, not bought. Lucy manages through her discovery of a love that exists for its own sake, and not one bound by social conformity. And this is the theme of many Forsterian novels, particularly those featuring whole gangs of emotionally retarded, buttoned-up English tourists in Southern Europe or India. Italy represents ambiguity, passion, mess and spontaneity; England repression, order, duty and propriety. In Forster’s view, being able to accommodate untidiness is a rite of passgae leading from self-doubt to self-assurance, from fear to courage. But not everyone can learn like Lucy, because not everyone has a George Emerson who is prepared to invest time, energy and love “unlacing” them. Those who don’t, Forster calls “flat characters”. And you can sense that he feels sorry for the Charlotte Bartletts, Cecil Vyses and Miss Lavishes of this world. Not a condescending form of sorrow, but a genuinely heartfelt understanding and even empathy with damaged goods. And we too see them in our day-to-day existence, people who, for whatever reason, don’t engage fully with life whether out of fear or arrogance, who consciously or unconsciously abstain from taking leaps, however small, into the unknown. It’s the couple who complain that they can’t get a decent cup of tea in France; the guy who uses jargon rather than his own language to describe things, and, yes, of people who won’t read fiction on the grounds that it isn’t “real”. And critics who come at meaning with their minds clouded by unchallenged preconceptions. To further translate this argument into the field of literary meaning, we could do worse than look at the novelist Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal tome ‘The Ethics of Ambiguity’, in which she identifies a similar breed of strait-laced professionals who possess the “esprit des serieux” (literally “the spirit of the serious”) who lack the vision or self-confidence to make their own choices both in life and thought, or the courage to occasionally venture out on an intellectual limb. A propos of escaping this habit of mind, she quotes her longtime friend and fellow philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: Man, Sartre tells us, is "a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being”. That means, first of all, that his passion is not inflicted on him from without. He chooses it. . . By uprooting himself from the world, man makes himself present to the world and makes the world present to him. I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat. This means that man, in his vain attempt to be God, makes himself exist as man, and if he is satisfied with this existence, he coincides exactly with himself. It is not granted him to exist without tending toward this being which he will never be. But it is possible for him to want this tension even with the failure which it involves. His being is lack of being, but this lack has a way of being which is precisely existence. A bit circuitous, granted, but the basis of the whole positive side of existential theory which you don’t often hear about, so it’s worth persevering with for that alone. What de Beauvoir is saying is that although our perceptions don’t allow us to completely enter into the outside world, we can at least be alert to its shifting meanings as possible if we demonstrate a little flexibility, sensitivity and humility in our dealings with it, counterbalanced by a rigorous intellectual independence. So, bearing that in mind, what should the critic’s relationship with reality and meaning ideally be like? In a word, ambiguous, and to achieve that, he first has to “uproot” himself from everything he thinks he already knows. That way, meaning becomes a two-way street: he defines himself as he defines meaning, and he doesn’t hide behind the cosy bulwarks of habit, technique and reason. Basically, he has to start from scratch, destroying his conceptions of meaning in order to rebuild them. Without straying too far into de Beauvoir’s existential labyrynth, she’s implying that meaning is forged from a creative “tension” (that word again) or ambiguity between what we are and what we are not, which, if harnessed appropriately, makes for great art if you don’t either abase yourself before reality or seek to be its lord and master. And it’s the same with the critic and the text; you’ll never completely dominate it, so don’t bother trying; but at the same time don’t routinely let it mean whatever it likes. So in your dealings with meaning, don’t be too arrogant or servile. By all means have the courage of your convictions, but first make sure they’re your convictions, and never let them harden into arrogance. I don’t know why she couldn’t just come out and say that . . . In terms of meaning, this approach was identified by Matthew Arnold nearly a century earlier as the tension between ‘connotation’ (what something means but remains unsaid, or the mystery of something) and ‘denotation’ (what something means that’s overtly stated). The writer doesn’t necessarily want to dominate his meaning, to have complete control over it, even assuming he can; he has to allow a dimension of “otherness” for his meaning in order to engage others successfully - a theme we’ve encountered time and again in our meanderings so far, in examples as far removed from one another as the Washington War Memorials at the close of Part 2, or Joan Didion’s bevatron at the start of Part 3. And really, as a critic, it’s all you have to remember. There’s no final word on anything, because meaning will always wriggle out of your grip. And you’ve just got to live with that. If you can’t (or won’t) admit it, don’t use literature to help grind your particular axe, or you’ll end up joining the “esprit des serieux” club. But at the same time, don’t worry that issues such as standards and quality have been thrown out with the bathwater, because you’ll be using your “cleansed” perceptions to root it out wherever it exists. And, to be fair, that’s pretty much where the more enlightened examples of Lit Crit are positioned in the early years of the 21st century, which to me at any rate is a cause for optimism. Since the dawn of criticism, we’ve progressed from one extreme of dogma to the other, from unitary interpretations to meaninglessness, and are now seeking to achieve a more satisfactory balance between the two somewhere between Meaning and Significance, which can accommodate both value and pluralism. It’ll probably take time for these ambitions to filter through to the mainstream, but certainly in the last fifteen years, philosophers like Martha Nussbaum have been able to mention value in the same breath as criticism and have lived to tell the tale.