MY SEARCH FOR AMBIGUITY
The starting point of a project for Henry James was any subtle impression which struck him so forcefully that it demanded a work of fiction around it. He called it a donnee – French for a “datum.” In more poetic terms it was a serendipitous “gift.” In my case James himself is a donnee.
Life is about the journey to find clarity, and from clarity we get knowledge and wisdom. But the “gift” I am slowly absorbing is the irony of poetic transpositions. Man needs to examine exactly what “clarity” is in his limited world because wisdom is really about the embrace of final endings which have no clarity – as we know it. It’s about making peace with radically different outcomes and conundrums having nothing to do with sensible patterns and rules. Ergo, the logical response is that of illogical – or non-logical, non-intellectual pathways to what it is we’ve been striving to find.
It’s not that we need to actively seek out ambiguities. They’re abundant enough and always show up before the busy crowds of intellection arrive to dispatch them. And let it first be known that there are many levels, many camps, of reasoning which all claim their respective preeminence – sensory, kinesthetic, aesthetic, mental. They all base themselves on (are dependent upon) a methodology, a formula, designed to achieve cognitive (syllogistic, deductive) “clarity” of one kind or another, even if it borders casuistry and sophistic shadow-boxing.
But the rational journey has been more like chasing shadows – like trying to catch sunlight in a room or air in the palm of one’s hand. The greater the effort and more impressive the method, the more distant we are from any truth or clarity about anything. Alan Watts referred to it as the “backwards law.”
Ambiguity therefore presents itself as a silent reservoir largely unexplored – a teacher and catalyst inviting us in. Its first and most important pronouncement is already found in Zen Buddhism: what we seek we already know. It becomes a question of understanding the angles and language and an openness as opposed to circuitous and wasteful diversions of trial and error (“error” implies rigidity, force, and the need for correction). In other words, ambiguity in its simplest, unfettered, un-obsessed state transmutes into its own kind of clarity. The only rule is to not continually “grasp” it; one “lets go” of it and of all conceptual models. Zen’s first task (its koan) is always to short-circuit the mind so it so it can’t ask any more questions – so it stops getting in the way.
Enter Mr. James for his helping too clear a place in the occidental world for ambiguity. His fiction demonstrates a fundamental principle, what could be called his aesthetic method: the elimination of “proofs” (intellectual, philosophical, rational, scientific) in order challenge the reader’s imagination – to stimulate attention, exert effort, and deepen personal involvement. The reader recognizes ambiguity as the “very sharpest of realities” arousing sensitivity, curiosity, and imagination. In a word, (s)he must “struggle.” Too much information is inimical to “necessary” illusions which predispose him/her to error and confusion – and without error and confusion he loses touch with the protagonist.
“The whole of anything is never told.” In the voids and cracks the folly of human experience is probed by the reader and protagonist together. But “folly” is not simply the product of carelessness or caprice. It is not an obstacle as usually assumed. It’s more a gateway to new (neural) pathways. An important theory or idea precedes folly here, and each reader stumbles into new confusions and paradoxes both privately and jointly.
Hence, art imitates life in that it constantly avoids the obvious. Andre Aciman once wrote an essay entitled My Monet Moment and said this about a particular painting:
I like not knowing anything about the house or the painting. I like speculating about the setting and imagining that it could easily be France, Italy, possibly elsewhere. I like thinking that I’m right about the wide expanse of seawater behind the house. I stare at the picture and fantasize about the torpor hanging over old beach towns on early July days, when the squares and roads are empty and everyone stays out of the sun.
The caption, when I finally cheat and find it at the bottom of the calendar, reads “Villas in Bordighera.” I’ve never heard of Bordighere before. Where is it? Lake Como? In Morocco? On Corfu? Somewhere in Asia Minor? I like not knowing. Knowing anything about the painting would most likely undo its spell. But I can’t help myself, and soon I look up more things.
And the more he knew the more he demystified, erased, defined. Most importantly, his curiosity, his need to know, ignored the ambiguities intended by the painter himself:
Monet might be interested in neither the house nor the road. All he cares about is the lull that settles on the Mediterranean around noontide and that he is not even sure he’s not making it up. Which is also why he needs to paint it. If it’s there, he’s captured it; if it isn’t, well, it’s there now. What he is looking to capture may be a shape, an arrangement of colors, a pattern, a rhythm, a perspective, an instantaneity, as he called it, or just the transit of light, which Monet frequently complains changes no sooner he attempts to paint it. It spells the difference between impressions of morning and noon.
James recognized yet another critical element apropos of ambiguity: invoking a sense of “the past” against which to present a backdrop of certain truths – also to bring to bear new imaginative meanings in the reader’s mind. Meaning never morphs in isolation; it coalesces only relative to a nexus of past meanings.
That said, James made a critical observation about America in the 1880s. He already found it wanting in terms of depth and dimension. Comparing it to Europe he said, “we have so much less of it … and I think they represent an enormous quantity of it.” America was too local, concerned with the common, the immediate, familiar, colloquial, and paltry. There was no “tone” to American life. Varieties and intensities were there but “it will reveal its secrets only to a really grasping imagination.” Granted, the nation was still young, but artists (particularly writers) found little texture and context when wanting to write about the American experience. There was ample material for fiction, but in wanting to deal with the subtleties of motivation, with delicate moral impulses, he felt unable to express those impulses. Unlike in Europe where he could easily resort to established norms, traditions, and manners, he was severely handicapped in America.
There was no art for art’s sake with James. Art was a central part of the “act of life.” It wasn’t there to simply entertain or distract. It was there because the creative process yields a rare order of experience which can only thrive in an exquisite mix of ambiguity and imagination, experience and risk. But again, it requires a past against which to lend contrast, direction, and depth. Without it all that’s left is surface, distraction and emptiness. Lewis Lapham said, “[W]e have lots less reason to fear what might happen tomorrow than to beware what happened yesterday. Individuals deprived of memory lose track of where they’ve been or where they might be going; a nation denied knowledge of its past cannot make sense of it present or imagine its future. Construed as means instead of end, history teaches the art of democratic self-government, sustains the hope of individual liberty.”
Since the 1880s virtually nothing has changed in America in terms of its attitude toward the past – or history. It dons a seasoned contempt simply because history proves not to contribute to the national creed, which is capitalism – material profits gained or lost “here & now.” History (seen as a mere relic, a pastime, an idle curiosity) wastes valuable time that should be spent on the sciences – not art, literature, history, the languages, and philosophy. The prioritization of the sciences, engineering, and math in our schools and the defunding of the arts is proof enough. In fact, the effort to categorize art into a bureaucratic department, called “the arts,” was Reagan’s first official step in lumping it all into one generic thing – a revelation to artists of how little Washington knew (or cared) about art in the first place.
The consequence is that of an existential crisis as America gropes for direction without a moral compass, with only that which registers as vital to Wall Street. We’ve become a nation of incurious illiterates still awaiting its tragic evocation of regret. We’ve pushed out into dark waters with discarded moorings and a heading to nowhere. Gore Vidal called it the “United States of Amnesia”: “We don’t learn anything because we don’t remember anything.”
The mysteries of ambiguity (as a bearing to meaning) is such a remote concept in the American psyche – clamoring instead for “data,” unwilling to plumb its inexhaustible depths – that the very idea appears futile. It is light-years away from understanding or embracing any notion of the subtleties of uncertainty. Like “the arts,” ambiguity is reduced to a category of synonyms (moderation, temperance, ambivalence, frugality, self-restraint, forbearance, and mediocrity) – which are in turn coupled with adjectives like “disordered, confused, lost, vulnerable, undisciplined, maladjusted, wasteful, and entangled” – conditions otherwise needing “correction, supervision, and guidance.” Americans are a people who do everything with gusto, all or nothing, zero-sum, aggressively, in extenso/in extremis – as “rugged individualism” and supreme self-confidence (ego) are God’s divine approbations made manifest.
I have to add a second reason for James becoming a donnee (a gift, not a datum): He couldn’t cope with the American scene. The mere mention of Paris, Rome, and London practically did the artist’s work for him in persuading his readers to accept illusion (and ambiguity) for reality. So he went to live in Europe permanently where he thrived as a writer. There he met Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, and others. He studied techniques on producing sensuous effects, finding the exact word, the perfect phrase, the precise image and detail. A gathering of writers, usually at Flaubert’s house, studied writers like Balzac, the French Realists and Romanticism. In that illustrious company James’ understanding of the relation of art to experience, of the aesthetic expression of experience, simply blossomed.
Perhaps the most dramatic schism between the Jamesian way and America crescendoed with H.G. Wells. Wells simply couldn’t stomach the Jamesian thesis and had no patience for it. He attacked James at every opportunity – and to no surprise. Wells symbolized ambition, progress, he loved the machine and believed in nothing but the “here and now” and the future. Thus, in James “you will find no people with defined political opinions, no people with religious opinions, none with clear partisanships or with lusts or whims, none definitely up to any specific impersonal thing.” – Exactly.
There exists a third reason why James resonates so, one which brought about ambiguity only accidentally, as the gift of improbability and circumstance. This cuts rather deeply for me personally and it lends the rhetorical question: By the time one has reached his sixth decade in life, who has not experienced that gauntlet of humiliation for the crime of voicing an unwelcome opinion in front of strangers – at which point they attack with juicy ad hominem passados? My own moment arrived in a country store in a country town in a highly “redneck” region of Colorado. Making a sarcastic remark to a friend about a particularly unqualified politician, one shopper countered, then another, and another, with the kind of synchronized timing a choreographer would envy. I was suddenly stunned by the unity of indoctrination permeating the air. I was speechless, and to this day I am mystified for my silence. My “inaction” in the following days grew to anger, then to rage at myself. It impacted my self-esteem for years to come. I was with a lady companion at the time, and I was conscious of not wanting to provoke an embarrassing scene. I was also outnumbered. But these were no excuses to just stand there and allow myself to be a target of the most outrageously witless and bovine arguments imaginable in the political conversation – which only rendered exactly what I wanted to avoid most of all – humiliation. A lesson learned.
James’ moment came on January 5th, 1895. The premier of his new play, Guy Domville, opened in London. He had just returned from looking in on Oscar Wilde’s own play, An Ideal Husband. When it was over he returned just in time for the closing lines. At that moment “All the forces of civilization” descended “with the hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs, whose roars (like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal zoo) were only exacerbated by the conflict.” James stumbled off stage and walked home alone – “the most horrible hours of my life.” It crushed him and for years he was angry at himself though he projected it outwardly: “Forget not that you write for the stupid – that is, that your maximum of refinement must meet the minimum of intelligence….”
A certain grace however grew from this experience. He gave up the play and stayed with writing novels. But he wrote them in a way which read like plays. What the stage wouldn’t let him do, the novel allowed “fifty excursions, alternatives, excrescences, and the novel … is the perfect paradise of the loose end.” He probed more deeply than ever into interior chaos, “glimmers of buried truths, the undisclosed drama of hint and inference” – into places that could not be named and where there was no explanation for the world. The ultimate place for conundrums, he called them “the sacred terror.” It’s the feeling of dread before the Medusa while also being given a knowledge which is beyond knowledge.
In this sense he was the accidental “modernist” – uncovering outer skins and exposing labyrinthine depths of the human psyche – almost becoming his brother (William the psychologist). The results were narratives which no longer sought rational deduction. They took on the quality of the surreal keeping the reader inscrutably off-center. Soon the ambiguities of self-consciousness and doubt superseded and overwhelmed both reader and protagonist. This finally gave way to the Jamesian novel. In the end the sacro terrore became, transmuted into, the poetry of ambiguities.
Maybe a final reason for this Jamesian fascination is because he hailed from an intellectual family, as I did. Alas, his family was not my family (but one I always wish was). His father explored philosophic and religious matters and invited prominent people into the home. His older brother, William, was a famous psychologist and philosopher. And when prominent literary figures visited the US the James residence was a port of call. Henry grew up in a house rich with ideas about the questions of the day and with the leaders of contemporary thought. – But the point is that both he and his brother (unlike my family) avoided established positions, fixed beliefs, norms, and the pressures of conformity. They relished the free exchange of ideas and intellectual tolerance. In other words, they embraced ambiguities in all their myriad forms and avoided any dangerous finalities aesthetically, intellectually, and philosophically. They “got it” that we were meant to leave the world as we entered it – filled with wonder, awe, and the “wisdom of futility” – knowing when to stop trying to understand it. And then we understand it.
America demands specifics, clarity, simplicity, and concrete data – with an allegiance to an eternal “here & now” (a cliché stolen from the spiritual by the politically ambitious as an easy subterfuge). In psychology there’s a syndrome called “agitated depression.” It’s an unwillingness to slow down for fear that old issues and memories may catch up with us, forcing the unresolved upon us. America is all about speed, economy, and efficiency, and (since World War II) has been forcing the so-called “capitalist free world” into the same spinning “neurosis.” For my own small part, all I can do is nurture my own Jamesian dream of expatriation – to another nation, another (socialist) culture, another aesthetic sensibility, another slower/saner experience.
© 2016 Richard Hiatt
The Subversive Imagination: Dispatches from the American Frontier 