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?

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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.)

Hitler's Shoah Novel; Aristotle's Woman Poem

No, Hitler didn't write a novel, much less one on the Holocaust of the Jews.  Nor did Aristotle either write poetry or praise females.

My sarcastic title is to emphasize the fact that Adolf Hitler avoided writing fiction and that Aristotle never composed poetry.

Rather, Hitler wrote only in prose:  Mein Kampf   [aka My Very Own Sorrowful Struggles].

And so did Aristotle, scientific things like:   ΠΕΡΙ ΠΟΙΗΤΙΚΗΣ and ΠΕΡΙ ΡΗΤΟΡΙΚΗΣ    [aka  AROUND CREATIVITISTICS  and AROUND SPEAKERISTICS  or, what's been called Poetics and The Rhetoric]. 

These men believed that it took the pure prose of non-creative, non-fiction to call for the destruction of those of another race and to observe the denigration of the other sex.

In another post, soon when I have a bit more time, I want to talk about the values of ambiguity, of poetry, of fiction, and of creative nonfiction.

Academic Writing

My spouse is an award-winning writer, a professional one. She read some of my dissertation, and laughed. That wasn't the effect I'd intended my writing to have on her. And it was my writing (not necessarily what I was writing about) that caused the involuntary smirk on her face. Mind you, she's not that sort of person who would think lesser of somebody else's effort. It's just she saw how much effort I put into the thing, with that effect.

Academic prose is hilarious that way. It pretends to be serious about serious things. It follows certain commandments. Thou shalt not meander. Thou shalt not have more than one main thesis. Thou shalt not forget the interesting introduction and the clear conclusion. Etc.

When you read Aristotle, you get a good model for straightforward academic prose. Only you do it then in English.

When you read somebody like Nancy Mairs, then you have to rethink everything. She's an academic (in rhetoric and composition) who teaches writing like one of those Greek sophists -- only she calls what she does "voice lessons," and she does it in English. Playfully serious wordplay, I guess. Here are a couple of my favorite quotations from Mairs's book, Voice Lessons:

Publication of any sort is an intrinsically social act, "I" having no reason to speak aloud unless I posit "you" there listening; but your presence is especially vital if I am seeking not to disclose the economic benefits of fish farming in Zäire, or to recount the imaginary tribulations of an adulterous doctor's wife in nineteenth-century France, but to reconnect myself—now so utterly transformed by events unlike any I've experienced before as to seem a stranger even to myself—to the human community....lending materiality to my readerly ideal, transform monologue into intercourse.

In a single sentence [the reviewer] reimposed the very dichotomies I had constructed the book in order to call into question, putting electrified fences around the categories “academy” “criticism,” and “writing” to keep the various critters from intermingling, maybe interbreeding to create some nameless monster very like the one I aspire to be.

And in case you're wondering, my wife doesn't write like either Aristotle or Mairs. She doesn't have to. She doesn't work or live in the AkaDemy in the West.

Today is the USA National Writing Day

Write something.  Or read about it.

Aristotle Teaches Einstein

Hal got me to go with her to the public library again last night. With a Joan Didion novel and another by Joyce Carol Oates in her hands, she passed me trying to balance Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams in my own hands while leafing through Annie Dillard's For the Time Being. "Dad, I'm going to get some non-fiction too," she told me and ended up also with two books on mental illness, one on dianectics, one on the "science" of dreams, and a college-level introduction to psychology by "Dr. Joseph G. Johnson." Whew!

Now she'd inspired me to check out from the physics section Lightman's book Ancient Light: Our Changing View of the Universe.

I've heard and read from Lightman about how (he thinks) science writing is different from artistic writing. Doesn't that sound a little like Aristotle, who must keep such categories separate? And I've read Lightman's incredible fiction before and have discussed with him its translation into over thirty different languages. "Do you want the translators of your novels to write in the target language like scientists, Dr. Lightman, or like artists," I asked him. He then incredibly, bravely, shows that he has gone beyond Aristotle and his aristotelian logic: "The translators must be both artists and scientists."

So back to our books. I skim this morning through my daughter's intro to psychology textbook, in which Dr. Johnson begins with a history of the science. Aristotle appears early and directly influences the thinking of Thomas Aquinas and then of Rene Descartes on the mind and soul. I look now at Lightman's science book on the history of cosmology ("In memory of Rabbi James Wax of Memphis who always thought about the big picture"). Aristotle figures early, of course, and directly influences Nicholas Copernicus and then Thomas Digges and then Isaac Newton; as you shall see below and infer by the title of this post, Aristotle also influences Einstein profoundly.

The chapter ends breathlessly (as I think about Lightman's persistent Aristotelian distinction between "science writer / artist writer") with these two sentences:

Whether Newton himself was more persuaded by this logical argument or by his religious beliefs, he ended up supporting the Aristotelian tradition of a cosmos without change. That tradition, unchallenged by Einstein, was not questioned until the late 1920s.
-(page 13, my emphasis)

in a Compromised Light

My Sense of Having
Been Required to
Present Myself in a
Compromised Light

That sense is back. I don’t like having to get what I’m writing in my dissertation, of having to conform myself, into dissertation form. Not two years ago, after the three days of all-day writing for my qualifying exams, the committee met with me for the orals. And each professor told me it was my best writing. By my standards it was my worst. What they meant was I had been clear, less playful with the words as when I had written for them in their courses, now more conscious of them for the exams’ sake. One bright spot, for me, was that Dr. Hogg had given a question in which she asked me to critique Nancy Mairs’ assertion that males tend to write and to live in a binary dimorphic way, while the world in which women speak and live and write is in many respects rather polymorphic. So I told a story for that last, final exam, hoping not to undo what my professors later told me I had done in those first five exams. I wrote a biography that was an ethnography that was a Ph.D. exam. And Nancy Mairs, in my memory of one of her best lines by my standards, the one below which ends a story with a beginning, appeared in the epigraph. She writes as most academics don’t or won’t and therefore can’t,

___ I remember walking out of my oral prelims to find my husband waiting, a bottle of Drambuie hidden in a paper bag for a toast.

___ “How did it go?” he asked.

___ “I passed!” I told him, and burst into tears. As a younger woman, I’d believed that opening oneself up to experience—all experience—offered the greatest opportunity for intellectual and spiritual growth. Now, suddenly, I saw that there are some experiences one simply ought never to have, and prelims constituted such an experience for me. Over time, my humiliation—my sense of having been required to present myself in a compromised light I would never have chosen, any more than I’d have chosen to strip my misshapen body to its skin, even less—faded, of course. But a sliver of grief remains lodged near my heart.

___ I was surprised, then, rereading years later the essays written for the exam, that their tone hardly sounds bleak or distressed. On the contrary, the voice is breathless with excitement, with exertion, with laughter, but not with anxiety. This woman sounds like she’s having as good a time as I always do when the world drops away and I am left alone with language. Listening to her, I am carried back to a little room with one high window where I hunch intently at a grey metal desk under fluorescent flicker, sucking at cigarettes and red cans of Coke, pushing my fountain pen across sheet after sheet of yellow legal-size paper . . . and sure enough, I’m having a wonderful time.

___ “Self. Life. Writing. Self-life-writing. Selflifewriting,” the first essay of my prelims began.