Getting Ambiguities

And he said to them, 

“You don't get this parable?”

“Then how are you going to get all the parables?”
--Jesus to the disciples
(translated into Greek
by Mark
translated into English
by me) 

In English, the word “ambiguities” gets a bad (w)rap.  The “good” grammar teacher or “good” grammar book told us long ago:  “Using ambiguities is bad.”  And we believe this.  We want one and only one meaning for every one word.  We want to wrap up our phrases into a singular package.  We desire no slippery slope.  And this is why I also say too that, “in English, the word 'ambiguities' gets a bum rap.”  We forget that we humans are the ones who assign meaningS to our wordS, whether we're the ones saying them or writing them or listening to them or are reading them.  We may really want to avoid ambiguities, but even if we were successful in such avoidances, then would we really be getting success in communication?

Here's a true story.  You might think of it also as a parable of ambiguities:

Once upon a time, I wrote a blogpost.  In the blogpost, I quoted Aristotle teaching his male only, Greek only, disciples to use “only good Greek.”  One of his commandments, which all of these boys believed, was “avoid ambiguities.”  Then a professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley commented at my post to correct me to say this:  

“Linguists have long distinguished between between vagueness and ambiguity. Vagueness is when you give too little information....  Ambiguity is when there are two distinct interpretations....  [T]here's a small middle ground between vagueness and ambiguity, but the distinction is clear most of the time, and is quite useful.  Aristotle [in this quotation of him that you give] rails against vagueness, not ambiguity.”

So we looked together at the actual Greek word that Aristotle used for “ambiguities” or “vaguenesses,” and we had to agree.  Aristotle's word was both vague and ambiguous.  To be very sure and absolutely sure, Aristotle's Greek word, then, was ambiguous.  Oh, and it was also a tad vague.  Therefore, if you've followed the syllogism here, or the enthymeme presumed here, to it's necessary and logical and singular conclusion, then you get this:  Aristotle had inadvertently, hypocritically, failed to avoid using vagueness and ambiguity.  “Do what I say, fellas, not as I do,” he surely whispered to himself.  (Here's that post where you can almost hear Aristotle whispering and can almost see his face, pink from private professorial embarrassment.)

Now, let's go back to Jesus.  Or are we going forward to him?  When he was talking to his fellows, he'd say and do what Aristotle said to avoid in good language.  That is, Jesus spoke in many parables that few could understand.  His words, his phrases, his sentences, and even his stories were ambiguous, and vague.  Sometimes they were vaguely ambiguous.  Other times they were ambiguously vague.  So his disciples got to question him.  He was all about the Socratic dialectic.  So his rhetoric and his hyperbole and his hyperphysia and his poetry and his feminisms and his parables just weren't all that dangerous, because he let people ask questions and form, and re-form, and trans-form.

(This is a parenthetical paragraph.  It's an aside.  It may make one of the main points of the blogpost.  You be the judge, won't you?  Do get this:  Aristotle belittled Socrates's dialectic, calling it an anti-strophe of rhetoric, which he warned was exaggeration.  Aristotle was about Nature, which he called physics, or if you had to then meta-physics, out of which he invented his log-ike to shut down ambiguous logos and all manner of pluralistic dissoi logoi.  Sappho was a poet, he acknowledged, but the Mytilenean men, he conceded, honored her “although she was a woman.”  Then Aristotle said such men were like the fable-telling parabowling Aesop and those bar-bar-barian fellows of Libya before Muammar Gaddafi came in like he was Alexander the Great.  Aristotle would warn his disciples of such:  “Get this, fellas.  There are dark, woman-like, pluralistic, ambiguous slippery-slope stories [λόγοι logoi] thrown violently alongside your own:  the fables of Aesop and the parables of the Libyans.”)

At first, the disciples of Jesus were sort of like the disciples of Aristotle.  And they were all exactly like we want to be, sometimes.  They wanted to avoid ambiguities.  Fables of the sort Jesus told in public, and so many of them too, were all too vague far too often.  “Please say what you mean, teacher.  Please give us the one and only meaning of what you mean, Rabbi.”  And then Mark comes along, and he translates the words of Jesus into Greek.  All of the metaphors go flying in all these different semantic directions, even when Jesus gives his clear explanation.  All of the metaphors go flying in all these different semantic directions, especially when Jesus gives his clear explanation, in Mark's Greek.  Which makes us think also that translation too can be ambiguous.  It's now a parable of translation.  But that's another story all together.

(In his Greek translation, his own version of this story, Mark makes the parable of Jesus that would unlock all of the parables sound like Gorgias Praising a Woman, the woman of all women, Helen.  I mean, really.  Did you ever read what Gorgias wrote next to what Mark translated, and how?  Notice how they both depend on the reader to get the meaning.  Not just one meaning either.  At least four.  But then there's their twists at the end.  In both accounts.  Oh, this is another parenthetical, fairly unimportant paragraph, depending on how you read it.)

I've been silly here.  But now I want also to be more serious.  I want to talk a little now about how we people want to contain the meaning of our words.  I want to talk some about trying to contain, to dis-ambiguate.  We might look at Chinese (as Victor Mair does here, showing how letters for sound can restrict meanings of 便 ).  But we might as well just look at our English.

Here are some words and phrases:

fellow

feminist

gender neutral

Here now are some posts that get to the ambiguities of those words.  Or they're posts that sometimes would dis-ambiguate these words of ours as we might use them.

Doesn't fellow avoid ambiguities?  Isn't it male only, and not female at all?

Suzanne has written on fellow as also feminine in “Broadly Evangelical?” and in “The death of the masculine generic.”  Look, ladies and gentlemen, she did not make this stuff up.  It's in Shakespeare and in the English Bible and in all sorts of places before men who wanted the word all to themselves said different.

Doesn't feminist avoid ambiguities?  Isn't it only bad female and not good male at all?

Notice how one of the commenters (“roguephysicist”) at the second post linked above says this:  “The blowback from 'gender-neutral' translations sponsored by feminists and homosexuals has hardly started.”

It sounds a little like “feminists” are real bad women here.  They can't be good, can they?  And they wouldn't be men either, would feminists?  

And then there's the statement by the COMMITTEE ON BIBLE TRANSLATION:

“Second, we object to the 'guilt-by-association' labeling of some of our translations. The review [by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood] notes some renderings in the updated NIV that are adopted also by 'feminist' interpreters. Yet they fail to note that many of these same renderings are also adopted by complementarian interpreters. (For instance, 'assume authority' in 1 Tim. 2:12 is Calvin's rendering.) The fact that egalitarians and complementarians alike adopt many of these translations suggests that, in fact, there is broad scholarly support in favor of these conclusions. It is the scholarship that has influenced the decisions of CBT in these texts – not a modern agenda of any kind.”

Notice how the COMMITTEE does not dispute or correct the Council, at least not on the would-be un-ambiguous view that “feminist” is a position not desirable.  Again, real bad women (and not real good men) are those who would hold that “feminist” position.

Jesus would not be one of those, nor would he listen to them either.  This is the thinking that would be “not a modern agenda of any kind.”

Well then.  Would Jesus listen to Mollie?  She's a feminist, a young modern one, perhaps with a bad reputation as one, she says.  And she also asks:

“Where are the religious people that are accepting, loving, and kind? They are probably the ones who are humble, quiet, and non judgmental. It’s a shame that a few extreme feminists can make a bad name for all. Is it the same deal religious people, with some groups and religions representing everyone? Certainly, they are not interchangeable, but I cannot help but wonder.”

But weren't some of the first feminists ever Christians?  Weren't some religious, good people with good names too?  Come to think of it, I think so.  Here are some of those fellows, men and women.  So who has the “a modern agenda”? 

Doesn't gender neutral avoid ambiguities?  

Doesn't that phrase mean that  

“The male-oriented meaning has been neutralized” 

and that 

“The emphasis on Jesus as a male has been neutralized” 

and that 

“'Man,' 'father,' 'brother,' 'son,' and 'he/him/his' are ... are removed or neutralized”?

Yes, if you believe Wayne Grudem.  This is how Wayne for the Council (the CBMW) has avoided ambiguities.  With the above sentences, he makes “gender neutral” mean one thing and one thing only:  males are getting hurt!  Notice that “gender neutral” cannot now mean anything nice.  It's hurting males, even Jesus as a male, and it's hurting a whole bunch of male nouns and pronouns in English too.  Wayne writes these sentences in his essay, “The 'Gender-Neutral' NIV: What Is The Controversy About?”  

Wayne has built on what David Kotter, executive director of the Council (CBMW), has said.  David has been concerned about “gender neutral” bathrooms and college dorms.  He says:

“There is a direct path between a departure from biblical truth to confusion over gender and finally to concrete examples such as gender-neutral bathrooms. The work of CBMW affects the every day life of every believer.”

Notice how David's “gender neutral” is unambiguously “confusion over gender.”  The executive director of the work of the CBMW is making sure every believer every day won't be confused when a bathroom can be used by men and by women or when a dorm is like an apartment complex with men and women both rooming there.  Biblical truth won't allow such.  And the Jesus of "biblical manhood" only only used bathrooms clearly marked "MEN" and also condemned all Ruths for sleeping on those floors for Boazes only.  And that same Jesus of "biblical manhood" would never give “gender neutral” money advice to yuppy women and men like that confused probably-feminist probably-not-believing Kimberly Palmer has.

And God said,

“Let us make a human

in our image,

by our likeness....”

And God created the human

in his image,

in the image of God

He created him,

male

and

female

He created them.

--Genesis 1

(translated by Everett Fox

from Hebrew

into English)

This is the record of the begettings

of Adam/ Humankind.

At the time of God's creating

humankind,

in the likeness of God did he then make

it,

male

and

female

he created them

and gave blessing

to them

and called their name:

Humankind!

on the day of

their being

created.

--Genesis 5

(translated by Robert Alter,

from Hebrew

into English)

The Intentional Introduction of Ambiguity

Sometimes we readers just can't tell whether a writer (a poet and translator perhaps) has intentionally introduced ambiguities.

I'm thinking now of Nancy Mair's quotations of Michel de Montaigne, which indicate to her that he's one who, like her, seems to "try to sustain a kind of intellectual double vision: to see the feminine both as that which language represses and renders unrepresentable by any human being, male or female, and as that which in social, political, and economic terms represents experiences peculiar to the female."  Ironically, she says of him:

Montaigne’s begins to sound like a feminist project. Which is not to say that Montaigne was a feminist. (“You are too noble-spirited,” he was able to write to the Comtesse de Gurson when she was expecting her first child, “to begin otherwise than with a male.”) But whether intentionally or not, Montaigne invented, or perhaps renewed, a mode open and flexible enough to enable the feminine inscription of human experience as no other does.

I'm also thinking of Wayne Leman's quotations of Eugene Peterson's translations of the Psalms, and whether the latter was after some intentional rendering of Hebrew or Hebraic Hellene ambiguities.

I'm also thinking of that old / new Irish Hymn, translated, and of another Hebrew / Hebraic Hellene passage of Creativities in the Beginning when God's image was translated rather ambiguously - intentionally?

---

And yet, sometimes writers will declare (as Mairs does) their intentions of introducing ambiguities.  Remember how Nancy Mairs says it?

In my writing, I try to sustain a kind of intellectual double vision: to see the feminine both as that which language represses and renders unrepresentable by any human being, male or female, and as that which in social, political, and economic terms represents experiences peculiar to the female. I want my femininity both ways—indeed, I want it as many ways as I can get it. I am the woman writer. Don’t ask me for impregnable argument. As far as I’m concerned, my text is flawed not when it is ambiguous or even contradictory, but only when it leaves you no room for stories of your own. I keep my tale as wide open as I can. It’s more fun this way. Trust me.

And here's how Jorge Luis Borges says it, translating his español into his English or is it the other way around?

Mi suerte es lo que suele domoninarse poesía intelectual.  La palabra es casi un oximoron; el intelecto (la vigilia) piensa por medio de abstracciones, la poseía (el sueño), por medio de imagenes, del mitos o de fábulas.  La poesia intelectual debe entretejer gratamente esos dos procesos.

My luck lies in what might be called intellectual poetry.  The term is almost an oxymoron; the intellect (wakefulness) thinks by means of abstractions; poetry (dream) by means of images, myths, or fables.  Intellectual poetry should pleasingly interweave the two processes.

And now, after reading what Borges says about dreamy poetry and the wakeful intellect, I'm thinking about Alan Lightman's novel, Einstein's Dreams.  How clever to realize, to intellectually understand by the images of a work of fiction, all that might have led you to your understanding of time as relative, especially in relation to your own waking understandings of light.  This is what Lightman's fantastic first novel does for you, and for me, and of course for Albert Einstein.  The book's been translated now into more than 30 different languages.  I asked Lightman about these, and he confessed he'd never yet read a single 1 of these renderings of translators.  I'd been listening to the novelist, who is also an acclaimed astrophysicist; he'd been saying that novelists and other artists use their guts and their hearts to try to capture the imagination, the belief of their readers and viewers.  But scientists, claimed Lightman, do something altogether different:  Lightman says that scientists use their heads to name things objectively, without regard to their readers' belief or imagination.  So I asked Lightman if he'd rather the translators of his novel be artists or scientists.  And do you know what his brilliant answer was?  He said Both.  Of course, translators must intend ambiguities!  They have to both render a work believable and they also must use those "intellectual abstractions."  Yes, "the intellect (wakefulness) thinks by means of abstractions," admits Borges, who also says, "el intelecto (la vigilia) piensa por medio de abstracciones."  And also there's so much more.

And now I'm thinking about novelist Yann Martel.  He's done something very difficult in writing a Holocaust novel, while he himself is neither a Jew nor a historian.  The novel I'm reading now is his Beatrice and Virgil.  His main protagonist, Henry, comes in starting to pitch a novel about the Holocaust to his editors, to the booksellers, to us Martel's readers.  Without spoiling the whole thing (and I'm not finished reading yet), he also tells how the project fails, that it absolutely flops.  But, at the very least, he imagines that he must intentionally introduce ambiguities.  Henry has chosen to use a flipbook format in which the book is read forward to the middle one way but then must be flipped over so that the back cover becomes the new front cover for the second half of the book or, rather, another book in another literal direction.  (Later, Henry struggles with the fact that flipbook is also, ambiguously in an unintended way, a completely different sort of book format as well).  Martel and Henry have to define what they mean:  "a book with two sets of distinct pages that are attached to a common spine upside down and back-to-back to each other."

Here, hear a bit:

        Henry chose this unusual [flip book] format because he was concerned with how best to present two literary wares that shared the same title, the same concern, but not the same method.  He'd in fact written two books:  one was a novel, while the other was a piece of nonfiction, an essay.  He had taken this double approach because he felt he needed every means at his disposal to tackle his chosen subject.  But fiction and nonfiction are very rarely published in the same book.  That was the hitch.  Tradition holds that the two must be kept apart.  That is how our knowledge and impressions of life are sorted in bookstores and libraries--separate aisles, separate floors--and that is how publishers prepare their books, imagination in one package, reason in another.  It's not how writers write.  A novel is not an entirely unreasonable creation, nor is an essay devoid of imagination.  Nor is it how people live.  People don't rigorously separate the imaginative from the rational in their thinking and in their actions.  There are truths and there are lies--these are the transcendent categories, in books as in life.  The useful division is between fiction and nonfiction that speaks the truth and the fiction and nonfiction that utters lies.

What Martel does from this point is to begin to deconstruct the whole notion of intentional, intended ambiguities introduced anywhere, anyplace, anytime.  But we begin to get a bit of what the novelist intends.  It's intention as clever as Nancy Mairs's, and Jorge Luis Borges's, and Alan Lightman's.  (A good interview with Martel is here.  Although the critics seem to be panning his book, I think they haven't read it yet -- at least not its flip side on the other side of the ambiguity.  The best review I've read so far is here.  In another good interview, the novelist defends his fictional writing on the Holocaust here, at Vox Tablet.  What is very clear, whether you like the book or hate it, the author intends to introduce ambiguities; and I like that.)