Not the same as obscurity …

… Clearing Up Ambiguity by Tim Parks | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

So what is it about ambiguity that it has to be praised to high heaven by all and sundry? Above all, how did it come to take on, at least for some, a cloak of liberal righteousness, to shift from being an aesthetic to a moral virtue, as if the text that wasn’t clear, that didn’t state its preferences clearly, were ethically superior to the text that does.