Adaptation of Shannon’s Model

This model permits Decoding Stylistics to give a correct representation, reflecting the active role of literature in history, and the feedback between art and society.

This shows that as given by the theory of information the scheme is general and comprehensive. Information theory does not claim that it can substitute any other particular science or branch of knowledge. Its merit lies in creating a common language that facilitates the contacts between the languages; showing some basic universal laws and relationships, it creates the basis for a general approach and permits each science comparing its results with those of the other science to find the specific and peculiar features in a clearer and more rigorous way.

Thus the general notion of code that presupposes a system of signs of any nature is particularized in many different branches of knowledge according to their object.

Linguists have adopted Shannon’s scheme for their model of verbal communication for a very long time already. The term code is now used by most authors writing on style; R. Jakobson was one of the first. Now we find the word in the books by I. Levy, G. Leech and Chatman, by I.R. Galperin, V. Kukharenko and J. Lotman and many others.

To be operative the verbal message requires:

1) a code fully or at least partially common to the addresser and the addressee, i.e. to the encoder and the decoder of the message;

2) a context that the addressee can recognize, and that is either verbal or capable of being verbalized;

3) a contact, i.e. a physical channel and psychological connection enabling both participants to enter and stay in communication.

It must be emphasized that the definition of a code given above does not mention or presuppose the unchangeability of the system. On the contrary, the system of a code may develop adapting itself to the conditions under which it is used.

With a literary text even if the poet and his reader speak the same language and are contemporaries there is always some difference in the codes they use, moreover a poet always introduces some innovations by which he mobilizes the reader’s attention, his verbal code changes in the interaction with the message.

Different philologists offered different variants of Shannon’s scheme so as to adapt it to what happens in verbal communication.

Compare the scheme by Cl. Shannon, I.A. Richards and R. Jakobson with the following scheme suggested here for the process of literary communication:

Social reality  writer  literature  reader  Social reality

surrounding (encoder) (decoder) surrounding

the writer the reader

This last scheme brings, as we have already pointed out, Decoding Stylistics in correspondence with our view of literature as a social phenomenon. It is also an essentially cybernatical view of literature because it shows that literature controls the reader’s perception of reality and his activity in real life.

Very roughly it might be illustrated by W. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66, as follows. The life in Tudor England on the threshold of the 17^th century made Shakespeare indignant with its social injustice. He chose several general but discrete images, those of faith, maiden virtue, art, truth etc. that are oppressed, and misjudged, creating typical images of injustice, and encoded these in the form of a sonnet. During four centuries the sonnet decoded by many generations of readers influenced in some degree their mentality and even their behavior towards the reality of other different epochs.

Decoding Stylistics concentrates on the decoding and development processes. Literary stylistics on the contrary, is primarily interested in the first stage, i.e. how the source of information influences the encoder. Every message is sent by someone, sometime, somewhere to someone else. It is sent under the influence of a particular situation, external or psychological as a response to it.

Specialists in literary stylistics look for what is peculiar in the codes of each writer as compared with his predecessors and contemporaries. They are more interested in poets than in their works or their readers. A work of art for them is in the first place a result, the causes of which have to be investigated. Decoding Stylistics considers a text as a source of impressions for the reader affecting his mental make-up and personality. Stylistics that is particularly interested in stylistic devices, above everything else concentrates itself on the code.

It is worth remarking that all this does not mean that either of the trends disregards the other stages completely, it only concentrates the bias chosen.