Interpretation of literary

§2. Informativity of the text

Informativity is the main category of the text, its ability to convey information, i.e. certain meaningful contents. The concept of information embraces a number of problems overstepping the limits of purely linguistic research. One of them is the problem of the new (the unknown). It is quite obvious, that the new can't be subjected to consideration without taking into account social, psychological, scientific, cultural, age, time and other factors.

The report which is new for one recipient and therefore carries certain information may be known or unintelligible for another and therefore devoid of information. What is new for one period of time will be well- known for the subsequent one.
Another question is the value of the received information. It is known that information, being repeated, loses its value and as a result ceases to be information. It is also known that some texts have unchangeable value. Their aesthetico-cognitive or scientific significance always remains in the treasury of human culture. They serve as a permanent source of the new and therefore they are always informative.
In written texts of different functional styles according to Prof. I.

18. 
    Galperin it is expedient to distinguish the following kinds of information:
    
    1. 
       content-factual (CFI.), b) content-conceptual (CCI), c) content- subtextual or implicit, CST).
       

Content-factual information contains reports about facts, events, processes which took place, or are taking place or will take place in the surrounding world, real or imaginary.
Content-conceptual information conveys to the reader the author's individual understanding of the relations described by means of CFI, his understanding of the cause and effect connections, their significance in the social, economic, political and cultural life of the people, including the relations between separate individuals, and their complex psychological, aesthetic and cognitive interaction.
Content-subtextual information is not explicit by its nature, it is not
expressed in the verbal layer of the text. It is a kind of sub-current concealed information that can be derived from CFI thanks to the ability of the language units to engender associative and connotative meanings as well as thanks to the ability of sentences united into syntactical wholes to convey increment of sense.
The Belgian writer-symbolist M.Meterlinx, author of "The Blue Bird'", was the first to take notice of subcurrent information in the text. This phenomenon was also studied by many Soviet scholars, such as T.I. Silman, I.R. Galperin, and V.A. Kukharenko. In her well known article "Subtext as a linguistic phenomenon" T.I.Silman states that subtext is the meaning of some events or remark which is felt by a reader but not expressed by the words in the imaginative text. V.A.Kukharenko looks upon subtext as implication, which suggests additional sense and emotional meaning. We follow Prof. I.R. Galperin's definition of subtext, given in the hook "Text as an object of linguistic research", because it is most complete and up-to-date: "Subtext is a purely linguistic phenomenon inferred from the ability of sentences to engender additional sense thanks to different structural peculiarities, to original combination of sentences, to symbolism of language facts". '
One of the characteristic traits of subtext consists in its inac- cessibility for immediate observation, it escapes attention in the first reading of the book and begins showing itself through the content- factual information in the second or third reading.
It is expedient to distinguish two kinds of CSI: situational and associative. Situational Cell appears in connection with the facts and events described before in long stories and novels. Associative CSl is not connected with the facts described before but appears by virtue of our conscience inherent habit to connect the verbal text with our accumulated personal or social experience. It is more ephemeral,
diffusive and uncertain and to a great extent depends on the reader's thesaurus.
As an example of the first kind of CSI we'll take an extract from J.Galsworthy's novel "To Let".
"When Fleur, after her hurried return from Robin Hill, came down to dinner that evening, the mood was standing at the window of Winifred's little drawing room, looking out into Green Street, with an air of seeing nothing in it. And Fleur gazed promptly into the fireplace with an air of seeing a fire which was not there".
The word "mood" personifies Prosper Profond as an embodiment of Postwar disillusionment and nihilism. The author's numerous references to this foreigner in the previous chapters as a sleepy Satan, groomed and remote, with thick pink lips and a little diabolic beard, a good devil with fabulous wealth, who could make expensive presents without an obvious personal motive, as a person who believed in nothing and was indifferent to everything; spreading around himself the atmosphere of mystery and "tomorrow we all die" feeling help to understand why he had an "air of seeing nothing". True to his cynical negating manner he saw nothing in a London crowded street, while Fleur, with her optimistic vitality, refused to yield to his demoralizing influence and prompted by her dislike for this dangerous man, saw a fire in the grate despite the fact that there were no burning coals there.
By this contrast the author emphasizes the British antagonistic
attitude to this suspicious alien.
As an example for the second kind of CSI we shall take the concluding paragraph of the story "A bit of Singing and Dancing" by Susan Hill. For fifty years Esme Fanshaw, the main personage if the story had been bound to her mother and obeyed her strict code of life. Now, after her mother's death she took a lodger into her house, but still her mother's conventionalities influenced her life.
One day Esme chanced to learn that her lodger (Mr. Curry) earned money by singing and dancing in the street. Her sense of respectability was shocked. Her mother would strongly disapprove of it. It was humiliating. But soon she managed to overcome her mother's prejudices as we see¹ it from the end of the story;
"But nothing was said that evening, or until some weeks later, when Mr. Curry was sitting opposite her, on a cold windy August night, reading from the volume COW to DIN. Esme Fanshaw said, looking at him, "My mother used to say, Mr. Curry, 'I always like a bit of singing
and dancing, some variety. It takes you out of yourself, singing and dancing". Mr. Curry gave a little bow".
It is not difficult to guess the subcurrent meaning of Esme's words. She no longer considers his occupation disgraceful and won't be ashamed of keeping him as a lodger. Mr. Curry appreciates the change in her altitude by his little bow.
Thus subtext is a kind of additional information which arises thanks to the reader's ability to see the text as a combination of linear and superlinear information. The greater is the wealth and diversity of the reader's thesaurus the more is his ability to perceive the untold and implied things in the text.
The final aim of interpretation is the extraction of the content- conceptual information, i.e. the formulation of the idea of a literary work. While revealing the conceptual, information, we try to penetrate through the surface structure of the text into its deep-level meaning and comprehend the author's message of the book. Thus we see that the decoding of the conceptual information depends on content-factual and subtextual kinds of information.
The factual information doesn't require any efforts for its grasping,
it is in the surface layer of the text and accessible in the first reading. The CFI is explicit by its nature, i.e. it is always expressed verbally. The language signs arc usually used in their direct logical meanings established by the social experience. This kind of information acquaints the reader with the plot of the book, its personages, their collisions and different accompanying events. Thus the typical trait of the CFI is its every day life character, •while the typical trait of the CCI is its aesthetic-artistic character. The comprehension of the conceptual information is possible only after serious cogitation over the literary work. The reader •should be acquainted with the book in its completeness, i. e. he should pursue it from the beginning to the end.
The conceptual information correlates with the idea of a book and draws the reader's attention to the problem of the new that the author propounds in his work. This concept of the new is hard to be revealed at once, it is discovered only after thinking over the content and comparing different facts of the book against the background of the entire text. The CCI is not always expressed with sufficient clarity. Therefore it affords and even urgently demands different approaches in its interpretation.
The CCI is predominantly a category of imaginative texts and it requires careful consideration and deliberation for its decoding. The
reader must creatively examine and reexamine all actions, events, processes and relations between the individuals in the society presented by the author in the imaginary world of his creation. That world approximately reflects the objectively existing social life.
It is rather difficult to evaluate the conceptual information not only for well-read people but even for sophisticated expounders, who often vary in their opinion about it. That leads to plurality in interpretation. This circumstance gives ground for dispute's which would be very useful in a students' auditorium.