Literary language is ambiguous and contextualised.
Literary language is ambiguous as much as words themselves are ambiguous. Words are symbols in our language and we may conflate ambivalent meanings together, often unconsciously.
As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) delivered in their work, conceptual metaphors are one way in which this mixing of meanings occur, even on an individual level. To crudely bring out their main point, why do we describe smiles as being “warm”, when they clearly do not dissipate heat? Lakoff and Johnson posit that we blend our understanding of warm hugs and smiling faces as young toddlers. Conceptual metaphors are just one way in which words gain denotative meanings, another being borrowing terms from different languages.
Sentences are similarly denotative and ambiguous. The Yellow Wallpaper is a fictitious short story of a woman confined to rest cure at home. In the story, Gilman describes her narrator as a madwoman in the attic. Is she highlighting her loneliness (as in the use of the word “attic”), or harping at the problem of female misrepresentation (as in the use of the word “madwoman”)? (or both).
When I say something is “warm”, am I then referring to the release of heat or the endorphins triggered by the object? We often pick out this understanding based on where the word is situated in – What kind of text is the word in? What is the object that is warm? How was the warmth felt? Given that we interpret words in the context of a sentence, we can extend this relationship to a larger scale with respect to interpreting literary language.
As we have learnt, Hochman situated her analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper” in an audience set from the late 19th century while Fetterley positioned her interpretation based on the “addictive” reader who reads emotionally. In a similar vein, literary language is interpreted in a climate which includes factors like the prevailing social concerns (“world”), common understanding of symbolic words (“text”), intention behind the writing (“author”), and individual experiences (“reader”).
A descriptivist would highlight the individual variation in this climate of interpretation, and consequently the disparity in how the text is interpreted. Then, the ambiguity of literary language is contingent on and arises from the variation in contexts.
The possible existence of a multiplicity of meaning does not imply that we should have a host of interpretations and accept them all as valid ones. As we established earlier, the ambiguity in literary language arises from and only from contextual variations. We can make different interpretations based on different contextual backgrounds, but our interpretations must be based on some contextual background.
For one, we cannot simply take a leaf out of the book and make the interpretation that Fish intended his readers to be eating fish while readings his works. This illogical claim would fall under what Nhu would describe as a false premise – the deductive building blocks of this statement are weak or even nonexistent. In fact, Austin’s notion of “infelicity” can be applied here. One can only make a valid/ felicitous interpretation given the right contextual invocation.
In all, the ambivalence and validity of literary language and its interpretations are grounded in a context, as much as how this blog post may be read as a class assignment because the readers approached it with this context in mind.