Ambiguity

Back in September, friend of the blog Marcus Geduld posted a long, thoughtful essay in response to an essay I wrote about Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go.  That essay was my response to a literary writer turning to a science fiction trope, and necessarily involved theorizing about the differences between literary fiction and genre.

Among the many intelligent comments Marcus made had to do with ambiguity, which literary works tolerate more than does genre.  I’ve been thinking about this ever since, though not from the point of view of a critic or theoretician, but from the point of view of a writer.

Human beings live in a pea-soup fog of ambiguity.  The present is complex, the past forms the present but you can’t change it, and the future is hard to discern.  And humans are emotional animals whose desires and needs can blind them to aspects of reality that may be perfectly obvious to anyone else.

“Does she love me as much as I love her?”

“Is Iran deceiving the US in the current negotiations over nuclear weapons?”

“Was it Professor Plum in the library with the pipe wrench?”

“What will the weather be like in two weeks?”

People may well confront these sorts of questions, then find the answers ambiguous or inadequate.  This doesn’t mean the answers aren’t there, it just means they’re unknown to the person who’s asking the question.  The issue isn’t the ambiguous nature of reality, the issue is one of information, and who has it.

In reality, things are one thing or another.  Either your partner’s love is as intense as yours, or it isn’t.  Either Iran is deceptive or it isn’t.  Either Plum killed the victim or he didn’t.  You may not know the answer, but the answer actually exists.  Ambiguity in this case isn’t about human nature, it’s about access to information.

(There may not actually be an answer to what the weather will be like in two weeks, due to the chaotic nature of weather phenomena.  All a meteorologist can give you is a degree of probability.  So if your fictional character is confused over what the weather will be on his wedding day in two weeks, it’s a perfectly reasonable sort of confusion.)

If you’re a writer creating a fictional milieu, you can toss your protagonist into an ambiguous situation— and in fact it’s good for the drama if you do— but as creator you are in effect the God of this world, and you know the answers, or at least you should.  Your character can go through fifty-seven kinds of Heinz hell trying to find the answers to her problem, but you should know the answers yourself.  You should know what Iran and Professor Plum and the anvil clouds are all up to as far as your fictional universe goes.  If not— if your own confusion is a mirror of your character’s— then you risk having your book be about nothing.

Because writing is about point of view.  If you don’t have one, if you don’t have the answers at least to your own little secondary world, your fictional endeavor takes on the quality of futility.  “I don’t know the answers, so I’m going to write a book about it.”  Yeah thanks, I could have not found the answers without you.

Your protagonist can battle against his ambiguous situation, or not.  He can find the answers, or not find any answers at all, or find the wrong answers, or find the answers and misinterpret them.  All of these approaches will produce a different kind of story, and they’re all valid.

Sometimes the answers to questions seem not to actually exist.  “Is there a God?” “What is the meaning of life?”  “Do I possess free will?”  In this case, your characters can find an answer that’s good for them.  Or for you.  Or, well, not.

And then there’s the situation when your character gets all the answers, and then decides not to act on them, and that’s a whole other kind of story.  (And PS: Your character is Hamlet.)

There is also the situation in which your character is in an ambiguous situation— because we all are, pretty much— but doesn’t perceive any ambiguity at all.  Your character seems to see everything clearly, sees everything black or white, on or off, good or evil— then then acts on these judgments.  Generally this doesn’t end well in real life, but in fiction this often produces a happy ending.  Go figure.

Lastly, there’s the situation in which the character has all the necessary information, but simply refuses to believe it because of those pesky human wants and needs.  The character actually produces ambiguity where there isn’t any.  “No,” a rational person might well say, “he doesn’t love me, and he’s proved that over and over.”

But, your character might well respond, I absolutely need him to love me, and I will act on that assumption until I am proved right, and waste days and months and maybe even years of life and hope and yearning because I NEED NEED NEED NEED and I can’t help it and I can’t stop!

Again, this doesn’t produce happy results in real life, for all that it seems to work well enough for Disney princesses.

Ambiguity is a feature of the human condition.  Ambiguity is a condition that a fictional character should have to deal with.  But in the author’s mind, the answers should be there, at least for the work in question.  Because otherwise, there are just too many people wandering around in the dark without any idea of how they got there, and I can do all that on my own.