A Slippery Story

“Problematic” may well be the most overused word in contemporary literary discussion. Ever since Freud opened the can of worms of the unconscious, we have been obsessed with a search for hidden motives and meanings, and this has spilled over into our reading of literature. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, we now know, is much more than the historical chronicle of a king of Thebes. But words themselves can also be equivocal, slippery. In 1930 the young critic William Empson published Seven Types of Ambiguity, a study of poetry that demonstrated how the sheer richness of imaginative speech could generate multiple but often contradictory associations. This led, in turn, to the notorious “intentional fallacy,” by which authors were credited with subtleties in their work of which they were unaware—and, more insidiously, critics could claim the privilege of legitimizing their own (often bizarre) interpretations. But “ambiguity” was itself problematic, and a conscious...