A Culture of Ambiguity by Thomas Bauer

Author:Thomas Bauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

AMBIGUITY AS STIGMA

The psychologists S. Budner and A. P. MacDonald advance the hypothesis that people with a high degree of tolerance of ambiguity not only do not avoid ambiguity, but also search for it and enjoy it; when they are confronted with problems involving ambiguity, they solve such problems with particular skill.42 If we apply this hypothesis to our topic of cultural ambiguity, we might expect that in cultures in which ambiguity was tolerated to a relatively strong degree, ambiguity was also produced with zeal and joy. For instance, many texts would have been created that were consciously ambiguous and confronted their readers with the opportunity to solve ambiguity and have fun with it.

It is hardly conceivable to find a better confirmation of the Budner–MacDonald hypothesis than in the literatures of the precolonial Near East. In fact, the tolerance of ambiguity that we find in a number of different fields corresponds with an incredible abundance of texts that consciously employ ambiguity, play with polysemy, and baffle, fascinate, and entertain their listeners and readers by their range of possible interpretations. It is probably not too risky a statement to say that among the literatures of mankind, the literatures of the Near East between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries offer the greatest wealth of ambiguity.

Perhaps one could write the history of the literatures in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages in the precolonial period as one of progressively complex ambiguity. However, Western literary historians and many of their indigenous postcolonial colleagues interpret this history differently. In their eyes, the history of the Near Eastern literatures was a history of decay. The “prevalence” of “linguistic wordplay” was seen as the most characteristic sign of this decay. In 1851, for instance, when Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, a professor of Arabic in Leipzig, presented a work by the Lebanese Christian poet and scholar Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī (1214–1287/1800–1871) to a German audience, he did not fail to issue a warning against “sterile artistic play.”43 Shaykh Nāṣīf was one of the most important representatives of Arabic literature in his time. A Greek-Catholic Christian, he was very receptive to Western culture. But in his writing and scholarship he unwaveringly continued to follow his own classical tradition—much to the chagrin of Western authors like Fleischer, who basically valued al-Yāzijī but deemed his persistence in the tradition a grave mistake. For Fleischer, the most problematic point was precisely al-Yāzijī’s delight in ambiguity—in Fleischer’s own words, the “sterile artistic play”—that marks all of the author’s works. For Fleischer, these “sterile artistic games” not only are a flaw of al-Yāzijī’s works but also constitute a real danger to the entire Near East:

The vain delight in this technique, and the incommensurate appreciation devoted to it, present all Oriental peoples affected by a stagnant education system with a heavy obstacle to the creation of a taste for fresh scientific realism and an elevation to serious intellectual labor. May the humane and reasonable men of the West who nourish and guide that new life of our Oriental friends

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