Seven Types of Ambiguity

I’ve just finished reading Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman. It was really beautifully written, having a surreal verisimilitude. The characters in the story each has a distinct personality and Elliot Perlman takes you through each of these character in 1^st person view, through the same events. I can’t believe I actually teared twice on different occasions as I read the story. No other book has ever had that effect on me. Trust me on this- it is not because I am lachrymose. It has to do with empathy and Elliot Perlman did a fantastic job in defining empathy and being alone which subsequently leads to loneliness.

To empathize is to connect with the individual both intellectually and emotionally. He further suggests that to not be alone, somebody has to really connect with you and you have to connect with them and come with you as you ride the relentless waves of fear and hope, of pain and pleasure, doubt and certainty that inhabit the sea of human experience. Besides receiving, you have to reciprocate the compliment and project yourself into someone else’s pain and, by absorbing, lessen it.

Given such a detailed account of what empathy is, and the pain the characters experienced in the story, the prostitute Angela, the love-sick Simon and his esoteric obsession for Anna, and once you’ve actually begin to empathize with the characters in the story, how can it not be possible for anyone to feel the way I that felt? On reflection, the way Simon carried his obsession and love for Anna, for all those 10 years after his relationship with Anna ended abruptly, and the action of kidnapping Anna’s son to assuage his loneliness, personally, I felt that no wrong had been committed. Even if rationally, a wrong had been committed, it is paradoxically contradicted emotionally by feelings of injustice. In fact, this relentless persistence in the pursuit for the ideal love, shouldn’t it be instead encouraged? However, society views such actions with contempt, as an aberration, a mental illness. For these minorities, as Seligman describes, a state of learned helplessness is experienced. I suspect that this is the cause of many cases of depression- To be absolutely helpless in a given situation, and under the scrutiny of society. Finally, after mustering the courage to take action against this helplessness, as it was for Simon’s case, Simon was placed on trial for a flatulent crime preceded an ambiguous question mark.

I simply love the way Simon was eventually exonerated from all his charges, and not because he did not commit the crime. Simon was acquitted and found not guilty because of 2 beguiling women, who perjured in court for his sake. In a sense, it has a kind of a classic “love conquers all” theme, filled with a melodramatic and an intense quixotic struggle in the pursuit for the idealized love within the conundrums of our quotidian life.

Since I’m dwelling on the topic of love and empathy right now, let me finish with a poem by Shakespeare to ponder on:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI)

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.