Ambiguity

Way back when I went to school we read novels. Big lumps of processed tree sandwiched around black dye and filled with moral goodness. We opened them and we read them and we didn’t stop until they were all gone: chewed, digested and circulating through our veins.

This was the wholesome diet that helped us face the world and our examiners. We trusted that the right ratios of Shakespeare and Dickens would give us the strength to face down the ambiguities of the world.

It didn’t work, of course. Or it didn’t work for long. Maybe at school we were prepared to kid ourselves that Shakespeare and Dickens provided some kind of certainty that might shelter us from the rain. At University it quickly became evident that there are no certainties to be found in any writer who is worth reading. Ambiguity is the essence of great writing and the masters revel in it.

Ambiguity isn’t easy to examine, however, and the mass education projects of the mid 20^th century struggled to know how to deal with Shakespeare. At school I remember being asked to memorise Polonius’s speech from Hamlet in which he advises Laertes on how to live a virtuous life. It strikes me now as a little sad that we sat in class holding tight to this one small, shaky reed of certainty while all around us raged a river of existential angst. While we read, “neither a borrower nor a lender be”, Hamlet grappled with the enormities of life and being right beside us and we never really noticed.

It’s the hardest of things to confront ambiguity in a classroom. You can’t really mark it; you can’t easily define it; it’s very difficult to push it into shape for a lesson plan.  “Language” as the poet Gwen Harwood reminds us “is not a perfect game/ and if it was, how could we play?” At the heart of what makes us human is an enigma and I’d like to think this enigma finds its way into my classroom from time to time as well.