on Pynchon's "ambiguity"

[Mark Kohut]

Reading Seven Types of Ambiguity, by Wm Empson,that classic work on
close reading I learn this (again?): 

Ambiguity for him, in poetry, poetic prose, means words, phrases,
lines, metaphors full of compacted associative meanings...

As, simple exanple "buckle" in Hopkins' poem The Windhover meaning
as on a belt and like on a bicycycle wheel....both meanings 'working".

In its broadest description, it is a way of believing two contradictory things
at once; that people are and are not guilty..[Michael Wood glossing] 
"This sort of contradiction is at once understood in literature"--Empson
"they" [certain characters] or I might add with TRP in mind this whole post,
ideas "are only to be understood by bearing both possibilities in mind."