Yet the widespread practice of “close reading” was only settled in the mid-twentieth century and its original genius and greatest practitioner was William Empson. None of this would have seemed implausible or unfamiliar to Johnson, Coleridge, or Hazlitt, the great critics of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century.
Or it may emerge from the cunning deployment of a genre like pastoral, which induces readers to reflect on themselves while looking at something apparently unlike themselves. It commonly turns on a hidden complexity that the reader is prompted to notice in a single word-for example, the word “honest” in Othello, as applied to the character of Iago. An ambiguous moment in a poem may indicate a suspension between two states of mind, in a situation where someone confined to either state could not know the reality of the other.
But diplomacy can allow for “strategic ambiguity,” well understood by all parties, where too much specification would hamper an agreement.Īmbiguity in literature is a more elusive thing-not a matter of tacit meanings suppressed to secure a particular end. An instruction manual on fixing a wheel shouldn’t leave you uncertain whether a wood or a metal spoke is preferred. Ambiguity has been an arresting feature of language ever since people learned to care about words for reasons unconnected with utility.
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