Ambiguity is our constant companion

Urssula LeGuin wrote this about her novel, The Dispossessed.

I read everything as novels, including history, memoir, and the newspaper—I think J. L. Borges is quite correct, all prose is fiction. So when I came to write a utopia, of course I wrote a novel.

I wasn’t surprised when it was treated as a treatise, but I wondered if the people who read it as a treatise ever wondered why I had written it as a novel. Were they as indifferent as they seemed to be to what made it a novel—the inherent contradictions of novelistic narrative that prevent simplistic, single-theme interpretation, the novelistic “thickness of description” (Geertz’s term) that resists reduction to abstracts and binaries, the embodiment of ethical dilemma in a drama of character that evades allegorical interpretation, the presence of symbolic elements that are not fully accessible to rational thought? 

Mandy Brown, in a lovely essay about The Dispossessed and ambiguity, writes:

[A]mbiguity are not precise opposites: something can be clear and ambiguous (as in a clear day when a dark storm hovers in the distance) or opaque but unambiguous (as in a ship run aground in a fog).

Ambiguity is often used to mean uncertainty or confusion, but I think of those more as accoutrements to ambiguity, which likes to adorn itself with lots of other untidy challenges. Ambiguity itself is the state of being open to multiple interpretations. Its Latin root, ambi-, means “both ways.” It arises often when a choice has been prevented or deferred, and two paths open up before you, each of them legitimate, each of them branching off in dozens of other ways. In this manner, ambiguity can create uncertainty, but the uncertainty is a response, a reaction. A reply. 

Here's the opening paragraph of The Dispossessed:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of a boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing more important than that wall.

Like all walls, it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

Brown writes:

Notice the layers of ambiguity she threads in even this short passage: the wall doesn’t look important, but there’s nothing more important than the wall. The wall exists, even in places where there is no wall to see.

The ambiguity that novelists (and fiction) engage in is productive for us.  It helps us deal with ambiguity.

I want to consider that we borrow some lessons from Le Guin and Shevek and look at ambiguity not merely as something to manage or navigate through, but as something to hold. Something to make space for. I think the usual advice for leading through ambiguity is well and fine, but often it feels insufficient. It’s grand to solve the problem of ambiguity by stating plainly which perspective on hand is the one we’re going with, to provide clear direction even when we don’t all see the territory the same way. But sometimes, I think, that quick decision—that easy dismissal—cuts us off from learning things about each other, and the work, that would benefit both.

What would it mean to spend time describing the various perspectives that give rise to ambiguity, and not with the goal of choosing one or eliminating another, but simply to learn? What would it mean to resist the urge to close ambiguity off, to see it not as an inefficiency or a problem to be solved, but as something generative, a door that could be opened, a wall that could be crossed? What would it look like to react to ambiguity not with fear or frustration but enthusiasm or eagerness?

Brown concludes her essay with: 

I’m coming around to thinking that ambiguity, like change, is a constant companion. And maybe instead of manipulating or avoiding it, we need to listen to what it has to say.