SOURCE: “Ambiguity in the Poetry of Gary Soto,” in Revista Chicano-Riqueña, Vol. XI, No. 2, Summer, 1983, pp. 34-9.

Although Aristotle was “inclined to consider all ambiguity as a perversion or failing of language instead of its natural and valuable quality,”¹ by the Seventeenth Century, the Spanish theorist and critic Baltasar Gracián firmly established, in his famous treatise “Agudeza y Arte del Ingenio,”² the fundamental importance of ambiguity as a poetic device. More recently, the English critic William Empson further clarified the status of this device by stating that “an ambiguity … is not satisfying in itself, nor is it, considered as a device on its own, a thing to be attempted; it must in each case arise from, and be justified by, the peculiar requirements of the situation.”³ In spite of Aristotelean disapproval, however, ambiguity not only became accepted as “a natural, subtle, and effective instrument for poetry and dramatic purposes”⁴ in Greek literature, but is still considered a valuable rhetorical technique by modern writers.

If we understand Empson correctly, ambiguity should be something more than rhetorical ornamentation and a convenient vehicle for creative exuberance. Besides these superficial qualities, which also have their place in the creative process, ambiguity should be intrinsically functional in the sense of contributing to the internal tension of a poem; i.e., it should form part of the organic structure of the work and create, through a series of ironies, subtle contradictions and dislocations, multiple ramifications and levels of meaning, which give technical brilliance and, above all, intellectual and emotional significance to the poem.

Ambiguity acquires validity, Empson seems to suggest, in direct proportion to its function of sustaining the subtlety, delicacy and compression of poetic thought and adding suggestive, profound and complex nuances to the narrative structure of the poem. In effect, the value of ambiguity as a poetic device may be measured in terms of its organic function, manifest in unexpected or ironic repercussions, resonances or ramifications of language which, by their very dissonance, add surprising perspectives to the poetic design.

On the other hand, if such dissonant perspectives introduced through an ambiguity should distort too violently or frivolously the organic unity of the poem, such a device would lose its valid function and become an obstacle to rather than a vehicle for poetic expression. By posing a serious threat to the unity of the poem, a non-organic ambiguity not only clouds the meaning but also reveals a lack of artistic maturity.

It would seem, therefore, that the effective use of ambiguity as a poetic device requires a highly developed sensitivity to linguistic subtleties; and it is not surprising that in Chicano literature, in its newly acquired status as a legitimate branch of American Letters, no great number of poets have yet emerged as masters of the art of poetic ambiguity. Among those who have achieved this distinction, however, the Californian poet Gary Soto deserves special consideration for his exceptionally high level of linguistic sophistication.

One of the principal charactistics of Soto's poetry is the apocalyptic vision it reflects of the universe. Recurring images of loss, desintegration, decadence, demolition, solitude, terror and death create a desolate landscape in which the voice of the narrator is that of a passive, impotent observer, helplessly caught up in the inexorable destruction of human ties. Within this seemingly hopeless, profoundly grey world of Soto's poems, however, occasional affirmative images introduce muted, contrapuntual notes of something akin to hope.

In his first collection, The Elements of San Joaquín,⁵ for example, the presence of dust, both from the fields and from the mortal remains of the men who work them, and the action of the wind that sweeps everything before it and reduces all things to dust, are two of the most persistent images. Both dust and wind are elements of an environment that is both hostile and indifferent to human solitude and suffering. Soto often juxtaposes these two images in the same poem to suggest apocalyptic forces:

The wind strokes
The skulls and spines of cattle
To white dust, to nothing.

(“Wind,” 16)

At first glance, this image appears to be totally negative since it depicts the slow, irreversible desintegration of the cattle skulls, and by extension those of mankind as well, into dust and then into nothingness. Faced with the terrifying indifference of the wind, which destroys everything—mountains, cattle, or the footprints of beetles, each individual existence becomes inconsequential, ephemeral, all traces of its presence obliterated as if it had never been. Upon closer examination, however, we discover an image that functions on multiple levels in this passage, one which is simultaneously harmonious and discordant. On one hand, the image “strokes” accentuates the terror and aggression implicit in the action of the wind because it denotes hitting or striking a blow which wounds or destroys, an attack; the image conjures up visions of axes, swords, fists and whips, all instruments of aggression or death. On the other hand, “strokes” also carries a denotation which is at odds with the implacable violence of the wind since it represents the diametrically opposite action of caressing, flattering, soothing. On another level, “strokes” also means the sound of a bell or clock ringing the hour, an image which inevitably recalls the passing of time, an action which brings with it the natural desintegration and wearing away of things, a universal law to which man has yet to discover an alternative.

It is clear, therefore, that the implicit ambiguities of the word “strokes” add psychological and emotional dimensions to an image that would be notably diminished had the poet chosen a word with less resonances and dissonances like “reduces” or “pulverizes.” But the question still remains as to whether the inclusion of this ambiguity, which undoubtedly adds complex nuances to the narrative structure of the poem, is justified by what Empson calls “the peculiar requirements of the situation.” Can we affirm, for example, that this device transcends its metaphorical function within the passage to contribute more profoundly to the organic structure by acquiring a more pervasive significance in relation to the rest of the poem? If we listen carefully, we hear the resonances of this stroking caress which the poet subtly introduces in the process of physical desintegration, and which is none other than the process of death itself, echoing in the following stanzas where they modify the image of the wind as it exercises its annihilative action on the narrator:

Evenings, when I am in the yard weeding,
The wind picks up the breath of my armpits
Like dust …

Here, in a less obvious manner, the wind already initiates its action of reducing man to the white dust of his own bones, of reintegrating him into the elements, in a cycle which returns the human body to its beginnings in the dust, an image clearly infused with biblical echoes.

Within this apocaliptic framework, however, the same affirmative note from the previous stanza is clearly heard. In this case, what the wind carries off is the “breath” of the narrator's armpits, that is to say the sweat of a man who works his yard. On a negative level, this exhalation of sweat certainly suggests the physical desintegration of the body, a loss of vital essences which the narrator can never recuperate, a prefiguration of death, in other words. Simultaneously, on a second, affirmative level, the same action is an irrefutable sign of life, since by sweating the narrator reaffirms his existence. On the metaphorical level, this ambiguity creates a tension between life and death since the exhalation of sweat experienced by the narrator is a prefiguration of the exhalation of the spirit in the moment of death which can lead either to the defeat of total annihilation, or to the triumphant beginning of a new life. Another alternative, as the poem suggests, is an harmonic resolution between these two seemingly contradictory states.

This fundamental ambiguity of the poem, which begins as a poetic device in the style of Gracián's “agudeza simple” or simple conceit, introduced by the poet to create uncertainty regarding the precise function of the destructive wind, acquires increasingly significant dimensions and resonances as it is gradually revealed as a unifying force within the poem. By reducing all the creation to dust: the mountains, reduced grain by grain to loose earth; the cattle, whose bones become white dust; the insects, birds and plants, whose tracks are obliterated by its action, and finally man, whose exhalations are dissipated in the air, the wind acquires the personification of an anti-generative, anti-mythic force. Parallel to this negative vision, however, a regenerative force coexists within the poem which mitigates the negative indifference of the wind. Without being diverted from its destructive course, the wind pushes beyond physical desintegration, beyond chaos, beyond nothingness, to initiate a new creative cycle of existence, within which, ironically, the same demolishing wind becomes a generative force:

The wind picks up the breath of my armpits
Like dust, swirls it
Miles away
And drops it
On the ear of a rabid dog,
And I take on another life.

(“Wind,” 16)

At this point it becomes evident that the ambiguity between the contradictory functions of the wind is far more profound than a simple rhetorical conceit and that, on the contrary, it constitutes the axis upon which the poem itself hinges since it establishes a dramatic tension between the disintegrative and regenerative forces operant within the poem.

The importance of this device of ambiguity in Soto's poetry becomes apparent in the consistency with which it is used to create precisely this impression of dramatic tension within the apocalyptic framework so characteristic of his artistic expression. Repeatedly one encounters similar images of desintegration and death mitigated by an ironically positive twist:

The pores of my throat and elbows
Have taken in a seed of dirt of their own.

(“Field,” ESJ, 15)

… Angela beaten and naked in the vineyard
Her white legs glowing.

(“Telephoning God,” ESJ, 10)

And a sewer line tied off
Like an umbilical cord

(“Braly Street,” ESJ, 56)

Roots cradling the skull's smile

(“Blanco,” TS, 14)

A harmonica grinning with rust

(“Song for the Pockets,” TS, 10)

Although these rhetorical ambiguities reflect the ironic vision so characteristic of this poet, Soto achieves his highest artistic brilliance and aesthetic subtlety in those poems, of which “Wind” is an excellent example, in which ambiguity becomes an expansive force not only by multiplying metaphorical and linguistic levels of meaning, but also by dilating the philosophical and dramatic dimensions of the fundamental theme of human existence. Such existence is revealed in Soto's poetry as a long and painful via crucis, a spiritual pilgrimage into a past peopled by spectres of privation, loneliness and death. Nevertheless, subtly but unequivocally, Soto manages to counterbalance this inhospitable existence by incorporating ambiguities that not only reduce the power of death to subjugate man definitively, but also substantially reduce the terror and finality of annihilation by implying a capacity in man to survive and overcome the limitations of his destiny.

This creative ability to dislocate, divert, counteract or even invert the significance of one poetic level with that of another, less obvious, though perhaps more representative of the philosophical vision implicit in the poem, is especially apparent in poems which examine different facets of death, such as “The Starlings” (TS, 34), “The Wound” (TS, 16), “The Morning They Shot Tony Lopez” (ESJ, 11), and “Avocado Lake” (ESJ, 30). This latter poem is a notable example of the artistic control Soto exercises over the different levels of a poem through judicious use of ambiguity.

It is interesting to note that although the Christian backdrop is not conspicuously negated in Soto's poetry, it does not occupy a prominent place in his philosophical vision. Therefore, when the poet speaks of death, he usually does so in worldly, physical terms related to individual existences that have been truncated or worn down by indifferent forces. His narrative control and lack of sentimentality in treating this subject confer on this narrator a rather cold, omniscient perspective. The emotional involvement of the poet himself, which gives Soto's poems their human depth and warmth, finds expression only indirectly on the metaphorical level in the ambiguities the poet introduces to offset the cold objectivity of the narrator.

In “Avocado Lake,” for example, this counterbalance between the narrative or literal and the metaphorical levels creates a significant dramatic tension between the action of death, that irreversible fact of a man drowned in the lake, and the reaction of the narrator, who recreates the life of the dead friend and conceptualizes his death from another perspective. On the narrative level, death undoubtedly has the upper hand, since the body floats under the water before being removed and subjected to the useless attempts at artificial revival.

On the metaphorical level, however, the scene is subtly slanted towards another reality where the power of death is subverted. Here the rigidity of the dead friend is softened, his “body moves under the dark lake,” his hands “Are those of a child reaching for his mother.” The very power of death is diminished by images of revival and reawakening: “The grey film peeled like tape from the eyes,” and “The curled finger rubbed and kissed.” The following day, at dawn, life is unequivocally reaffirmed in the presence of a young girl who plays by the same shore, skimming “pebbles across the lake, / Over what remains of him—”

The significance of this passage is that death has not been able to take everything; something of the man has remained to reintegrate itself into the elements, to initiate another cycle of existence in the physical world: “His phlegm drifts beneath the surface, / As his life did.” This is another version of the dust swirled away by the wind and dropped “On the ear of a rabid dog … to take on another life” (ESJ, 16). In this latter example, however, the combination of dry wind and human heat translates into the choleric humour of the mad dog. In the case of the drowned man, his introduction into the cold humidity of the lake is no less than an extension of his own phlegmatic, sluggish, existence. Rudderless and drifting with the currents during his lifetime, the drowned man finds within the lake an existence entirely compatible with his vital essences. By suggesting this conclusion, the narrator achieves, through an astute handling of dialectic ambiguity, a reconciliation with the reality of death without sacrificing the philosophical ideal of a continued or regenerated existence.

Undoubtedly, such linguistic and metaphorical subtleties do not occur fortuitously but only as the deliberate result of a series of creative efforts and impulses. Without going into the genesis of the creative process, we can nevertheless conclude that when a poet like Gary Soto exhibits such clear control over the organic nuances of a central ambiguity in his work, he demonstrates an advanced degree of creative development and a deliberate, intelligent attempt to refine the quality of his art.

Notes

1. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History. (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), p. 637, note 9.

2. Baltasar Gracián, Obras Completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1967), p. 231.

3. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), p. 235.

4. W. B. Stanford, Ambiguity in Greek Literature (Oxford, 1939), p. 1.

5. Gary Soto, The Elements of San Joaquín (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1977). Other collections are The Tale of Sunlight(University of Pittsburgh, 1978), Father is a Pillow Tied to a Broom (Slow Loris Press, 1980), Como arbustos de niebla (Mexico: Editorial Latitudes, 1980), and Where Sparrows Work Hard (University of Pittsburgh, 1981). These collections are abbreviated in the text as ESJ y TS.

This paper was read, in a slightly different version, at the Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures in Baton Rouge, February 18-20, 1982.