Ambiguity as an Art Form

The issue of intelligibility in Chinese is a double-edged sword.  As a tonal language, all of the so-called Chinese dialects depend on unambiguous tones for meaning.  As a spoken language, without tones it is not possible to fully infer the meaning of words in most instances.  In fact, even with the use of tones, to banish all chance of ambiguity reference to the character representation of a word is often necessary.

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In the written language, various forms of calligraphy have developed over the millennia.  Some are prized for their legibility and have pride of place in texts, such as religious texts or official chronicles and histories that want to leave no room for ambiguity.  But there are other calligraphic forms that become expressive art forms in their own right.  It is especially common for poetry to be rendered in calligraphic scripts that favor impressionistic shape and flow over legibility.  I have seen massive hanging scrolls that render classic poems in cursive scripts that resemble cascading waterfalls.  Staring at such works, not able to recognize a single familiar character (let alone actually read anything that has been written) I have always wondered about how the calligrapher intended the work to be experienced, perhaps more as an impression and a visual experience over a purely literary one.  I have read of Ming artist-scholars complaining of the illegibility of such fancy calligraphic demonstrations, virtual performance art from the Tang Dynasty, that left these later art connoisseurs befuddled, confused and even a bit testy in the face of what amounts to art that consciously chooses potential illegibility over certain legibility.  There are even occasions where the text of the represented poem was rendered in a note in a more legible script to satisfy the needs of these later reader/viewers to have a one-to-one correspondence between what they saw and what they understood.

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In the realm of contemporary popular music in Hong Kong, Cantopop, I have noticed an analogous phenomenon.  Cantopop is Western-style popular music that is, however, sung in Cantonese.  English, the original language of globalized Western commercial pop music is most definitely not a tonal language.  By its nature as a non-tonal language with a large number of multi-syllable words that are not ambiguous in meaning, it is perfectly suited to communicate meaning wedded to the musical forms of Western popular music.  Even homophones in English typically can depend on context to determine meaning unambiguously.  This does not seem to be the case for Cantonese and Cantopop.  Without access to tones, Cantonese can become extremely ambiguous and it can be difficult to determine exact meaning not only of individual words, but, cumulatively, of entire utterances.  I have noticed that Cantopop depends to a much greater degree than English-language pop music on the written text in conjunction with the sung text to determine meaning.  In the absence of tone, Cantonese has a startling overabundance of homophones, leading to a potential riot of ambiguity and double, even triple meanings.  The only way to determine what the singer is singing (and what the lyricist established as the primary meaning of the utterance) is to resort to a written rendition of the lyrics.* One has to wonder if the best Cantopop lyricists and singers take full advantage of the ambiguity inherent in such a language system, adding layer upon layer of coded meaning to their songs.  I often feel listening to the work of the most sophisticated lyricists as if I am one of those Ming era literati scholar-artists standing in front of an especially artful calligraphy that I know to be a rendition of a famous poem, only because of the title.  As a non-native speaker who cannot read Chinese, I am reduced to immersing myself in the stream of language for its sound, the abstract interplay of parts, the beauty of melody, arrangement and vocal delivery.  Given the dense intricacies of meaning embedded (or not) in such works of pop music, perhaps I can be forgiven for my lazy complacent acceptance of my illiteracy.  I also have to wonder if I understood more of the “meaning” of what I was hearing, would I enjoy it nearly as much?Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWqKkp8vwMs&feature=related

*If you visit YouTube and watch any of thousands of Cantopop song performances, each one has been posted with the karaoke text prominently displayed to banish any chance of ambiguity and assure the intelligibility of the performance.  For a song sung in a non-tonal language, such subtitles seem not only unnecessary, but undesirable and offensive in that they mar the viewing pleasure of the performance by obscuring the performers and distract from savoring the delivery of the typically quite intelligible sung text.

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