I have been faulted for ambiguity. Is John, the knight in The knight’s tale, a force of good or a menace? He is individually enforcing rules of civilization which are no longer accepted laws, and his authority is compromised by the degradation of the very society he is trying to protect. All of my novels have similar conundrums and uncertainties—more or less. Even the mysteries were written with the actual murder only secondarily in mind.
Merriam-Webster tells us it is “a word or expression that can be understood in two or more possible ways.” Good enough, even if a little vague. This definition applies to most words, even some nouns. But ambiguity is the bread of our language, the honey of our poetry, and the jam of our misunderstandings. It is, to be precise, built-in to all that we know, or think we know, or want to know, or wish to forget.
My own understanding of the word has changed over the years. When I first began to write with intentions, it was a sin. Something to avoid at all cost. Something to correct. But I saw it at once as a mountain to climb, as much as a swamp. How could I make myself understood without pretending I knew things which I did not—especially about people, those most mysterious of beings? Why was the best of what I read always so lucid, so clear? I was twelve and such thoughts kept me up at night. By the time I was sixteen I had suffered the inevitable agony of defeat, resigned myself to the murky depths of purgatory, and wrote something to express my feelings of the moment which, oddly, won a small writing prize at my high school and left me in a real quandary.
Before long, I became a fan of the ambiguities in film noir. I still love it but the addiction of watching several films every week only lasted a few years. I did not stumble on William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity until late in college and this was a little late in the game for me, having already slurped my way through metaphor like an endless bowl of ice cream, and I was immediately suspicious of his use of a word to define itself as was inherent in the second case given of using two different metaphors at once. There is another word for that. Sloppy. I had to write something about the book for a class, and I remember that my criticism was rejected as an attitude problem. Mine. And it was.
Empson, and most modern literary criticism, is just a lot of pigeonholes. Categorizing. Classifying. Concrete this and Post Structural that. Something good perhaps for a flock of professors of literature who have failed as writers and must cover themselves for their cowardice in the face of their own ignorance with a shield of redefinition and a sword of authority. Something like that.
My own ambition, early on, was simply to write honestly. Now, there is some real ambiguity for you. Hemingway had used the word ‘true’ for this. Duke Schirmer, my first writing teacher at Mamaroneck High School, had favored that one. But I found the ambiguity of ‘true’ more difficult to handle than ‘honesty.’ It seemed to me that I could not be true to myself, or anything else, when ‘myself’ was still so incomplete. Honestly.
I was a teenager, after all. I had just found a great liking for the writing of Ayn Rand in those years, and her sharply defined character motivations were comforting, but her rejection of ambiguity was unambiguous. Now, this was a pickle. I yearned for such certainty in my own world, but I could find no one who fit that standard, and worse, the most interesting people I knew were riddled with contradiction. ‘Why was that?’ I asked myself when no one else would listen. Thankfully I could not get over my love of Victor Hugo or Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad, so the ambiguity was in me to stay.
Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities may be cited as a failed attempt to deal with the uncertainty of life in a dramatic form. It may or may not be a failure—it was clearly rejected by the public—but it is also audacious and worthy of the man who wrote what is the greatest, and most ambiguous, of all novels in Moby Dick. The idea of dealing with so many uncertainties in the less dramatic context of a 19th-century home life, something readers thought they knew far better than the mysterious rigors of survival aboard a whaling ship, might have been the mistake. But all of our lives, when looked at with any perspective, are often a similar hash.
‘Film noir’ is one of the only original artistic products of the twentieth century, along with jazz and tie-dying. Naturally, it is an academic label attached to an artistic movement on film that is akin to the term ‘modern art’ for its lack of accuracy. Them professors do still hate to be ambiguous. But, unlike ‘modern art,’ it does exist, in the same way as ‘Baroque’ and ‘Gothic’ do and can be understood unambiguously for its use.
I single this out only because it is an artistic stamp that identifies some aspects of the word ‘ambiguous.’ To say film noir is ‘characterized by low-key lighting, a bleak urban setting, and corrupt, cynical characters,’ is half-truth, and thus, not true at all. The lighting may be characteristic of many of the films because so many of the directors were escapees from Hitler’s Germany where the academically defined ‘German expressionism’ was the thing. But it was also a by-product of the low-cost methods used in silent film-making which were purposely carried forward to ‘talkies’ out of an appreciation of the older medium and the power of those black and white graphical images, if not simply a lack of funds to furnish an entire set.
But the part of the ‘film noir’ definition I have the most argument with is the ‘corrupt, cynical characters,’ bit. That exact sort can be found in William Godwin’s novel, Caleb Williams, which was published in 1794. It can be found in much else, but I like this example for the disparity of the dates. When Fritz Lang or Sam Fuller or Alfred Hitchcock, or John Houston made a film, the ambiguity was only possible because the right thing—the true thing—was clear. The audience was just as hip to what the right and the wrong were as the director, a point highlighted when Hitchcock kills the boy Stevie in Sabotage, which was outside an acceptable frame of good storytelling, and the audience rejected it. The issue in Houston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre is not right and wrong caused by cynicism but by blatant immorality. And when the same director has Sam Spade give up Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, it is not love that was sacrificed but a truer meaning of his friendship with his murdered partner Miles Archer that was preserved. As jaded as author Raymond Chandler could be, The Big Sleep is just one great big wet kiss of a morality tale.
In Out of the Past, the characters are not so much cynical as wrong-headed. The ambiguity is the story itself. Jeff is a fool for love, but which woman does he love more—Ann, the good one, or Kathie, the bad? His choice gets him killed. A cynical character would have let Kathie face the music. Ann is the real loser. But the true point of it is, this is a tragedy, as Greek as it can be. The ‘art form’ of the best film noir is timeless. That some filmmakers in Hollywood, or Paris, or London used the ‘look’ without the substance is about as meaningful as a thousand ‘Romance’ or ‘Horror’ novels clogging the paperback racks in the drugstore.
Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ is still a question to be answered by each of us. It was Werner Heisenberg who managed the theoretical physics of all this by making up a principle for it. Basically, his uncertainty principle explains why love is such an ambiguous mess. “It states that there is a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known. In other words, the more accurately one property is measured, the less accurately the other property can be known.” Pure ambiguity!
Love is at the core of human existence. It is the most obvious and subtle example of our humanity. To set aside the ambiguities of our feelings and surrender to an emotional state which is at best an adventure and at worst a crap shoot is simply amazing! And human. But this is our life, we are talking about, not a new brand of beer. And it is done anew countless millions of times every year.
Most religions (all that I am aware of) are attempts to deal with the uncertainties of life. Why did my loved one die? Why did the flood come? Why did this happen to me? Only God knows. Accepting a particular faith in God might allow you to cope. But the core of religion is the elimination of ambiguity. I suspect the artificial intelligence of AI will fail on just this point. Given our ignorance, certainty is not possible, but we must strive for answers or drown in our questions. Neither the usual manifestation of God created by us as ‘Fawlty’ human beings, nor an AI flawed by insufficient data, can deal with the truth.
Seeing this truth is not revelation. There is no fix for the sophists who demand answers to all things, just as there is no answer to the ambiguities. They are us. All that we do can be seen as a means of coping with the uncertainties of life by constructing the physical means to make use of what little we know in order to overcome our ignorance. The flourish that we add to the cathedral by pounding the stone into shapes we can appreciate aesthetically, or the color of the paint on our house in the suburbs is some aspect of this. It’s our style. Our civilization.
Our glory or our degradation as human beings, is in how we deal with the ambiguities. That we seek answers to what we do not know or do not understand is what molds us. Certainty in civilizations or individuals who have stopped seeking answers, is deadly. That there will always be unanswered questions and accepting that fact as part of the fabric of our lives, is actually a key to our health and happiness as a species. The awareness of our own ambiguities as we struggle with knowledge amidst social acceptance is what keeps us open to the myriad of possibilities in other people. We are social animals, even as we crave privacy. It is also the key to good storytelling.