Stylistics of decoding (the main points of the lecture) - Методическое обеспечение (hand-outs) - УМКД: специальность 10. 02. 16 - переводоведение - Каталог файлов

	01.12.2009, 22:02
ARNOLD Text Interpretation in Terms of the Reader's Response The interests of a writer and the interests of a reader are never the same and if, on occasion, they coincide, this is a lucky accident. (W. H. Auden) A nation's cultural wealth depends not only on its writers, poets, composers and artists but also on its readers, listeners and viewers. Art rendering reality in a specific form, and being a specific form of cognition, "a way to better enjoy life or better endure it" (S. Johnson), "a transmission of feeling" (L. Tolstoy), insensitiveness to art becomes a great handicap to the development of personality and even culture at large. Responsiveness as a proof of inner maturity is necessary for all art. People who know how to listen to music, how to read poetry become better capable of attending to what other people say and feel. Responsiveness thus is an indispensable part of a fully developed personality. The purpose of the present paper is to help the reader towards better understanding and enjoying English poetry by systematizing some linguistic methods of text analysis, and some achievements of stylistic theory. The problem involves several branches of knowledge. From the point of view of psychology one may regard a poetic text as a specific stimulus, the response to which consists in reading, understanding, enjoying and storing in one's memory this particular poem, and, in case the impression produced is strong enough, in remodelling accordingly one's attitudes and even behaviour. The term "response", one remembers, includes activity and behaviour resulting from stimulation. Another discipline concerned with text interpretation is the history of literature. It dominated philology for such a long time that the general opinion came to take it for granted, and consider the historical approach to a work of art the only serious and scholarly way of text interpretation. With all due respect to our colleagues specializing in literary history, one must remember that the historical background is not all. Linguists, on the other hand, also hope to contribute to text explanation, because neither poetry nor prose can exist without language, even though poetry creates effects not produced in everyday speech. Concepts and methods of modern linguistics have been used in the study of literature over the past twenty years. R. Fowler named this rather vaguely "new stylistics". 1 The usefulness of linguistic methods in describing relations between form and meaning and showing their unity is becoming more and more universally recognized. Literature being a form of communication, it is but natural that many linguists nowadays discuss literary processes in terms of the Information Theory and Shannon's scheme2. Every act, of communication is known to consist of at least five parts: the encoding of the message, its transmission, its realization as a signal, its reception and its decoding. We repeat this sufficiently known scheme so as to stress the fact that literary stylistics in interpreting the text concentrates on the transmission end, on what and who influenced the writer in his creative activity, what sources of information the poet had. We, in decoding stylistics, focus on the receiving end, on decoding and the addressee's response. It goes without saying that both literary scholarship and stylistics take a complex view of the matter, studying causes as well as results, but the focusing is different. Reading a poem is a very special type of communication: the poet is not present and the reader is left to face the text alone, he has to reconstruct all the extra-textual elements of non-verbal context, and recognize the peculiarities of the code used from comparing the data of the text with those of his own thesaurus (i.e. the contents of his memory). This interpretation by the reader, especially by the reader of a later epoch, is rarely identical with what the poet meant. It is, however, not necessarily poorer. Enriched by a larger historical experience, the reader need not aim only at reproducing what the poet himself saw in his work, or what his contemporaries might have felt when reading the poem. Every reader, if he does not study the text as a historical document or as a source of material for linguistic analysis, correlates what he reads with his own problems or with those of the reality he has to face. The intention of the author, traditionally sought in stylistic analysis, his peculiarities as compared to other poets are not readily accessible. Even the poet himself may not always be conscious of his purport and still less of his method. A well-known semasiologist and critic, I. A. Richards, was quite justified in saying: "Poets vary immensely in their awareness both of their inner technique and of the precise results they are endeavoring to achieve."3 One may also quote T. S. Eliot whose opinion is similar: "A poem may appear to mean very different things to different readers, and all of these meanings may be different from what the poet thought he meant." Note the phrase "thought he meant". Further Eliot writes: "The reader's interpretation may differ from the author's and be equally valid — it may even be better. There may be much more in the poem than the author was aware of."4 The reader's response to a poem is subjective: words and images evoke various personal associations, stirring different trains of "thought and feeling. In observing this we must bear in mind that there is a very great difference and a sharp contrast between a variant interpretation and a misinterpretation, the latter being a serious pitfall. The foregoing exposition is by no means intended to advocate freedom of interpretation: there is always a serious danger of overestimating the possibilities of variations. The danger is counteracted if the reader is in the habit of checking every guess on various levels of the poem, accounting for every element present in the text. The above point of view is not always recognized as yet, and it often happens that it is not the text that is commented upon but the author's hypothetical purport. Many people are so accustomed to this way of thinking that they do not notice how illogical it is to judge a work of art not by what it is but by what it was meant to be. Actually the poet's original intentions are interfered with by many things. Even if the poet has decided in advance about the state of events he wants to write about, upon the feelings and attitudes he wants to express and the technique most suitable for his purpose, even then he will have to make a lot of adaptations, such as from meaning to meter or from meaning to image. When all the adaptations of genre, imagery, euphonic effect, etc. have been made, the result is something the author himself could not have foreseen. And it is this result and not the author's original intentions that the reader has before his eyes, and it is to this that he responds.6 Experience proves that the gift of responsiveness can be developed. Ample reading develops it, what used to be called "explication du texte" develops it. Yet the effectiveness of comprehension could be heightened if the new pragmatic approach of decoding stylistics could be used. The problem is then solved by stylistic technique based not on guesses about the author's creative process and his hypothetical intentions but on decoding the text as it is. The term "decoding stylistics" was suggested by M. Riffaterre,6 but was not worked out by him further — he called his own book "Structural Stylistics".7 As developed in the Soviet Union decoding stylistics combines the concepts developed in poetics, in literary stylistics, on the one hand, and those coming from different branches of modern linguistics, such as semasiology, theory of communication, text theory, sociolinguistics, pragma- and paralinguistics, etc. Theory of information also proves helpful. The new approach to text interpretation was first evolved as far back as the twenties in two articles by the great Russian linguist Academician L. V. Scherba,8 in which he analyzed one poem by Pushkin and one by Lermontov, respectively. The second was a study in comparative poetics as it involved a comparison with the German prototype („Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam" by Heine). The articles made history. Scherba managed to combine a rigorous linguistic approach with the subjective perception of a sensitive reader. A review of different concepts belonging to the stylistics of perception may be found in Y. Stepanov's book on French Stylistics.9 Since 1962 these ideas were put into practice in textbooks for advanced foreign language training.10 The year 1973 witnessed the coming of age of the theory as embodied in a book by the author of the present article.11 A smaller book on decoding stylistics was published in the year that followed. These books were preceded and followed by a number of articles and dissertations.12 These few hints on the development of the new trend in stylistics called decoding stylistics can give only a very scanty idea of where to look for further information, but it is now time to turn to the basic principles. The study of decoding stylistics aims at a better and deeper comprehension on the part of the reader of emotive literature, a keener insight into the contents of the message, its values, ideas and aesthetic features. Being concerned with the reader's response and the formation of his personality, we must look for such methods of interpretation that may be of use in his further independent reading, enabling him to discriminate between a variant interpretation and misinterpretation and to judge for himself about the merits and demerits of what he reads. The necessity of an effective text interpretation theory is of paramount importance nowadays because the cornerstone of modern education is the development of individual methods of acquiring knowledge. It is naturally impossible to recommend any hard and fast rules by applying which the reader will always be able to penetrate into the most subtle meanings of a poem and not to misunderstand any of them. And yet the establishment of some general procedures is possible and proves helpful preparing the way for a new reading theory and technique. Approaching an English literary text on behalf of a future teacher of English, one has to keep in mind several aims — reading must be effective in forming the student's personality, it must provide material for improving his linguistic skills, his knowledge of English culture and literature, and last but not least, it must give aesthetic pleasure. Ways must be found to help the reader to verify his intuition in interpreting the text by some features within the text, and to safeguard him from misinterpretation. His comprehension of the poem often needs support from extratextual data, sometimes it is found in his thesaurus, sometimes he must turn to reference books. One must bear in mind that there are markers in the text, such as place names or historical allusions, for instance, that signal the necessity of additional information. Useful habits of text understanding are teachable, and with time become automatized. The ground upon which stylistics and linguistics can meet and cooperate is wider than the sentence and can extend to large spans of discourse or to the whole text. The core of reader-oriented decoding stylistics is formed by various types of contextual organization known as foregrounding. Foregrounding differs from stylistic figures in that it comprises larger spans of the text and may involve both syntagmatically and paradigmatically several devices, i.e. its taxonomy is wider. It is difficult to say who was the first to introduce the concept of foregrounding. The term became known as P. Garvin's translation of the Czech term "actualisace"13. As defined in the Prague School by Mukarovsky "actualisace" or deautomatization means an aesthetically relevant intentional distortion of the linguistic components in relation to the normal standard on the one hand, and to the traditional aesthetic norm, on the other. Following the Czech scholars whom he translated, Garvin contrasted foregrounding and automatization that is the stimulus normally expected in a given social situation, whereas foregrounding refers to a stimulus not predictable and therefore capable of provoking special attention.14 Many authors stress that poetic foregrounding presupposes some motivation on the part of the author and some interpreting, or, as we say, decoding, on the part of the reader. Yuri Tynyanov, a Russian writer and philologist (1894—1943), pointed out the dynamic aspect of foregrounding; he wrote that not all verbal factors are equally important, some elements are foregrounded with respect to the others, their interaction makes the form dynamic. The foregrounded elements may influence the others deforming them and setting up the hierarchy.15 The generalizing function of foregrounding consists in bringing to the foreground the most important themes, images, ideas and attitudes, revealing the general atmosphere and making the text into a coherent whole. Bringing forth something that must attract the reader's special attention foregrounding is motivated by the importance of what is emphasized, the emphasis in that case is stronger than that created by separate stylistic devices. Under the general heading of foregrounding the following phenomena may be grouped: coupling, convergence, strong position, salient feature, defeated expectancy and a few others. We shall recognize the essence of these in a few examples. Let us first consider coupling. This may be defined as the appearance of equivalent elements in equivalent positions. This type includes every possible type of rhyme and alliteration, some types of syntactic figures, such as parallel constructions, framing, anaphoric repetition and some other means. As a rule they come not separately but in various combinations. The phenomenon was described for poetry by S. Levin.16 Levin is not exactly a pioneer in this respect because he follows the lead of Roman Jakobson who analysed these structures calling them "parallelism". Jakobson, however, failed to show the almost universal character of this phenomenon, whereas Levin managed to give a more or less complete description of coupling in poetry as functioning on several levels simultaneously. Levin illustrates his point discussing Shakespeare's Sonnet XXX ("When to the sessions of sweet silent thought"). An even more striking example is found in Sonnet LXXIII ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold"). Here equivalent images of autumn, evening and expiring fire, all symbolizing mortality and the approaching end, occupy each an equivalent part of the sonnet — a quatrain, and are introduced by synonymous phrases: "thou mayst in me behold", "in me thou seest", and in the final couplet which explains the whole — "This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong / To love that well which thou must leave ere long." In the above example coupling embraced the whole of the poem. In T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" one of the central parts is both segregated and integrated by the reiteration of resounding anaphors in the beginning of three consecutive stanzas: "I have known them all already, known them all". This anaphoric beginning is echoed by the humble hesitation in the epiphora: ". . . and how shall I presume?" These verbal signals of contextual organization reveal a character sensitive and tortured. There is nothing in life or people that he does not know already, all seems futile and insignificant. His life is so petty that it seems measured by coffee spoons. His feeling of failure and frustration is rendered in the image of himself pinned by other people's eyes to the wall like a helpless, wriggling insect in some collection. The coupling helps the reader to feel how keenly Prufrock suffers from his inability to cope with the animosity of the world around him. Foregrounding comprises both the extra-regularities and extra-deviations. Coupling belongs to the types based on extra-regularities. We have shown these extra-regularities on the level of composition and imagery, we have it in the same extract in versification and sound patterns. An easily recognized element of coupling here is the rhyme. The equivalence of elements in rhyme concerns the phonemic make-up, and the equivalence of position is determined by a systematic recurrence of similar sounds in similar positions within a stanza or line. In most cases rhymes occur at the end of the line, but other regular positions are also possible, e.g. in the middle: "We were the first that ever burst / into this silent sea" (Coleridge). The function of the rhyme is not only to provide musical quality; it also defines the structure of the stanza, fulfilling such basic functions of all foregrounding as integration and segmentation of the text and its parts. Thanks to different forms of coupling smaller parts are combined into larger textual units, and these, in turn, build themselves into integrated messages. The type of foregrounding called "convergence" that was introduced by M. Riffa-terre, consists of an accumulation of several different stylistic devices serving one image or performing one common stylistic function. Convergence often takes very little space, although its irradiation may be very wide. Thus, the whole essence of the tragedy of Macbeth and its main theme of the struggle between evil and good is compressed in his first words: "So foul and fair a day I have not seen." The effect is based on inversion and on a rich epithet containing alliteration, developing an oxymoron into a paronomasia ("foul and fair"); the negative construction and the word "so" enhance the expressiveness. There is, moreover, an echoing effect because this phrase reiterates the spell of the three witches in the previous scene: "Fair is foul and foul is fair / Hover through the fog and filthy air." It is worth remarking that not only several various stylistic means are as a rule grouped within one instance of foregrounding, but that several different types of foregrounding are also often combined. Thus, convergence often occurs in what is called the "strong position". The term is self-explanatory if we take into consideration that the position of an element in the text is of importance in bringing the logic or the beauty of what is said to the reader's attention. The elements may be made prominent by the fact that they stand out most effectively in the title, in the first line, or in the closure of the text. The great informational value of these parts is determined by psychological factors. It is quite natural, therefore, to find in these points some key image reinforced by convergence. This does not mean, of course, that there always is a convergence in these points. The title plays an important part in providing a clue to the meaning of the whole, being the starting point of a chain of expectations that tune the reader's mind to what he perceives. The title may name the main characters, state their social roles, their relationships, the scene and the time of the action. The subject and the main idea may also be hinted at, either directly (The Man of Property) or by means of allusion (Of Mice and Men). The familiar quotation from the poem "To a Mouse" by Robert Burns runs as follows: The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! Steinbeck's title may be understood on two levels. On the one hand, one of the two main characters — a hobo, a half-witted giant of a man — suffers from a gruesome obsession: he catches mice and kills them. On the other hand, he himself is as helpless as a mouse and doomed to be crashed by his own insanity. The phrase "of mice and men" has a paronomastic quality: men are brought down to the same state of vulnerability to fate as mice. All this is echoed in Steinbeck's story, evoking in the reader a keen sense of pity and sympathy. After the process of probability prognostication is started in the reader's mind by the title, he goes on through the text mapping separate quants of information. His interpretation is modified by a kind of feedback process. His forecasts are either supported or discarded as untenable. Points we called "strong positions" are of paramount importance in this process. They include, in addition to the title, the first and the last lines or passages of the whole text or of its important structural parts (such as a stanza or a chapter), and also the epigraph, prologue and epilogue, if any. The end of the text is the final test where everything becomes clear in retrospection: the correct guesses are confirmed and the wrong ones rejected. Sometimes "poets rely on the reader to select the aesthetically most acceptable solution"17 when several are possible. An interesting signal received by the reader subconsciously, it seems, is what has been described by Dell Hymes as summative words, and before him by De Saussure as anagrams. The essence of this phenomenon is that some sounds repeatedly occurring in the text are summated in one semantically crucial word, which often occurs in the final position. The absence or presence of such a summative word is possible but not obligatory. An example is Wordsworth "Sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge", where the octet ends in the word "air", and the sestet and the whole sonnet in the word "still". Both these words are composed of dominant phonemes, both are summative words forming the basis of the whole scene and expressing the poet's delight as he responds to the beauty of London as part of Nature. The effect is stressed by the exclamation mark after the word "still".18 A rather special type of closure is the last couplet of Shakespeare's sonnets.19 The sense of finality is dependent on the integrity and correlation of the thematic and formal structure of the preceding lines. The effect of closure is to sum up the poem's theme. Sometimes the final touch is unexpected and shows the whole in a new light. Quite often the final strong position is made even stronger by a combined effect of several types of foregrounding, such as convergence or coupling, or defeated expectancy. All three are present, for instance, in the final couplet of Sonnet XIX: Yet do thy worst. Old Time; despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young. This accumulation reflects the general paradox of all communication needing maximum signal in minimum time, and this entails compression, whereas maximum reliability entails, on the contrary, redundancy. The fourth type of foregrounding is named after the psychological effect produced – "defeated expectancy” or "defeated anticipation”. It combines extra-regularities with extra-irregularities. When viewed in terms of probability prognostication, it may be interpreted as follows: extra-regularity creates a certain pattern in the verbal chain; this conditions the reader to expect that this pattern will be continued. His expectation is defeated by the appearance of some element of low predictability. The more clearly the pattern is delineated, the more unexpected the contrast, the more effective the surprise and the stronger the impression. The following may serve as an example: "In moments of crisis (...) I size up the situation in a flash, set my teeth, contract my muscles, take a firm grip on myself, and, without a tremor, do the wrong thing" (B. Shaw). The anticlimax present here is only one of the possible forms of defeated expectancy. A variant of anticlimax is bathos characterized by an especially abrupt and sudden transition from the sublime to the ridiculous or banal. The extra-regularity in this case may be less pronounced, compensated by a very marked difference between two consecutive elements, representing very different referents. The effect is often strengthened by additional stylistic means, such as zeugma: Here Britain's statesmen of the fall foredoom Of foreign Tyrants, and the nymphs at home, Here thou, Great Anna! whom three realms obey Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea. (A. Pope) The expectation raised by the accumulation of high-flown words is broken by the everyday words naming everyday occupations. The linguistic lexical contrast reflects the incompatibility of subject matter, i.e. problems of foreign policy and choice of courtesans. Like all other types of foregrounding, defeated expectancy involves all levels. The mock-serious attitude is present here and in the rest of the poem — in prosody, in the so-called enjambment or run-on lines in which syntactic units do not correlate with the verse lines. The phrase "foredoom the fall of foreign Tyrants" overflows from line to line. The enjambment creates a tension between the actual text and the expected pattern, the norm being the end-stopped lines characterized by correlation between the syntactic structure and the division into lines. A pause is expected at the end of each line, yet the syntactic structure contradicts it. Defeated expectancy may also occur on the level of the plot, as in O. Henry's short stories famous for their unexpected denouement, or in the so-called shaggy dog stories where the unexpectedness of the ending is part of the genre. In many cases, but not always, the effect produced by defeated expectancy is comical. Sometimes it creates lyrical or even tragical contrast. In the poem "Naming of Parts" by Henry Reed the enjambment stresses the counterpoint of a lyrical description of spring and the mechanical routine of army regulations which the young recruit hears from his drill sergeant, and on which he cannot keep his mind: Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But today, Today we have naming of parts. Japonica Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens, And today we have naming of parts. The mood of the whole poem is based on this contrast. To sum up: matters we discuss here under the general heading of foregrounding have been separately noted and described by various scholars as independent phenomena. We summarize them here because they have much in common: taken together, they form the missing link between the whole text and its minor parts, and help to sharpen the response of the reader to ideas, images and emotions reflected in a work of literature. They verify his interpretation of the text and help to grasp what it means because: (1) foregrounding establishes the hierarchy of meanings and themes, bringing some to the fore and shifting others to the background. In this way it helps not only to comment on the thoughts explicitly formulated but also stimulates the reader's intuition in noting text implications; (2) foregrounding provides the necessary cohesion between the elements on all levels and also between the parts of the text; (3) foregrounding enhances the emotional response of the reader and the aesthetic pleasure received; (4) foregrounding intensifies memorability, and thus helps to keep in mind distant contextual ties in the process of reading and to remember the text afterwards; (5) foregrounding helps to obtain new linguistic information, to guess the meaning and function of linguistic elements hitherto unknown. Foregrounding is justly called the core of reader-centred stylistics because it provides a theory of analysis with the help of which a reader develops the habits necessary for active and independent reading, and is safeguarded against jumping the limits of permissible variation. By way of conclusion we can now point out that stylistics has to concentrate on the addresses because the general cultural level of those we teach depends to a great extent on their capacity to find information they need, to know where to find it, and to remodel it in accordance with their own aims and problems. They must also know how to transmit it further. The pragmatic approach to literature in terms of the reader's response demands a corresponding development in the techniques of describing literary texts. The concept of foregrounding as used in Decoding Stylistics provides an adequate basis for this description combining the possibilities offered by linguistics, poetics, text theory and some other branches of knowledge concerned with communication processes. 1 See R. Fowler, Style and Structure in Literature: essays in the new stylistics, Oxford 1975, A clear modern expression of how the concepts of modern linguistics are applied to the study of prose is given in G. N. Leech and M. H. Short, Style in Fiction: a linguistic introduction to English fictional prose, London 1981. 2 See for instance A. E. Darbyshire, A Grammar of Style, London 1971. 3 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism, New York 1929. 4 T. S. Eliot, "The Music of Poetry", in Poets and Poetry, ed. by Ch. Normann, London 1965. 5 See J. C. Ransom, "Wanted an Ontological Critic", in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. by S. Chatman and S. Levin, Boston 1967. 6 M. Riffaterre, "The Stylistic Function", in Proc. of the 9th Intern. Congr. of Linguistics, ed. by Lunt, Cambr, Mass. 1964. 7 M. Riffaterre, Essais de stylistique structurale, Paris 1971. 8 JI. B. Щep6a, Избранные работы по русскому языку, Москва 1957. The first article was originally published in 1923, the second in 1936. 9 Ю. Степанов, Французская стилистика, Москва 1965, сс.284 – 3рр. 10 I. Arnold & N. Dyakonova, Analytical Reading, Leningrad 1962. 11И. Арнольд, Стилистика современного английского языка, Ленинград 1973, 2-е изд. 1981, и И. Арнольд, Стилистика декодирования, Ленинград, 1974. 12 A considerable number of dissertations was defended on these topics in the Leningrad University and Herzen's Teacher Training Institute (by I. Bannikova, M. Bukovskaya, S. Boldyreva, E. Gomberg, R. Kiseleva, E. Kononenko, V. Malachova, N. Nevara, M. Obnorskaya, V. Tarasova and others). 13 P. L. Garvin, ed. and transl, A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style, Washington 1968. 14 J. Mukarovsky, "Standard Language and Poetic Language", in Garvin, Prague School Reader. 15 Ю Тынянов, Проблема стихотворного языка, Статьи, Москва 1965. 16 S. Levin, Linguistic Structures in Poetry, The Hague 1962. 17 G. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, London 1973. The book contains an extensive treatment of foregrounding but the term is given a slightly different interpretation as compared to what is suggested here. Leech treats foregrounding as deviation. 18 Dell Hymes, "Phonological Aspects of Style; Some English Sonnets", in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. by S. Chatman and S. Levin. 19 See B. Hernstein-Smith, Poetic Closure. The Study of How Poems End, Chicago 1970.
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