on Pynchon's "ambiguity"

[Johnny Marr]

I take it you've read this recently?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/apr/01/windhover-gerard-manley-hopkins

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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."
>
>
>
>
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