“A rose is a rose is a rose,” some might say. But this designation is only for the literal, not for the literary.
For the literary, a rose is rarely only a rose because it’s rarely only a rose in literary books.
Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, would agree.
Shannon’s ideas have transformed the world. The words you are now reading on your screen are thanks to his revolutionary ideas on communication.
Much has emerged from his seminal paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (see link: http://worrydream.com/refs/Shannon%20-%20A%20Mathematical%20Theory%20of%20Communication.pdf).
His ideas have led to the transmission of electronic signals across oceans and to the compression of information into computer-readable 0’s and 1’s.
But his theory also applies to artistic texts.
In Shannon’s terms, we might say that an artistic text “has high entropy.”
Look at this ice cube.
The water molecules in an ice cube align themselves into the crystalline structures we see in snowflakes.
But when the ice melts, the molecules scatter into many more possible positions. This increase of disorder is called “an increase in entropy.”
If the water is boiled to make steam, the entropy increases even more. This would be analogous to a text such as “hskdljdb beun nsdkfd ljm bnd n bndp b jjk.”
The disorder of nonsense is certainly less beautiful than a sonnet by Shakespeare. Indeed, if the entropy (disorder) of a text is too high, it ceases to be language.
But when a text has a very low entropy (when it is predictable and conventional, and written in simplistic sentences), then it is capable of only a few coherent interpretations.
A Harlequin romance has lower entropy than Antigone by Sophocles because much more can convincingly be said about Antigone. That is, Antigone is a more interesting text, interpretable in many different ways.
Most popular books sustain only one coherent reading.
A story such as Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, however, can stoutly support very diverse interpretations.
The Metamorphosis is simultaneously a fantasy of being transformed into a beetle; a commentary on the dehumanizing effects of work; a moralizing tale of an insect with a human heart; a fairy tale in the tradition of the evil sister; a metaphorical description of clinical depression; a recounting of a nightmare; a tour de force patterned on the number three and the opening of doors; an erotic tale accompanying a morning erection that has been sprung by the picture of a woman whose forearm is inserted into a muff; and so on.
Thus, to say that the entropy of an artistic book is higher than the entropy of a simplistic book is to say that the information contained in a complex and unusual book is higher than the information contained in a simplistic and conventional book—and though this is an obvious observation, it must nevertheless be stated; otherwise, it might be as unnoticed as the fact that suitcases would be more easily transported if they had wheels, an obvious improvement that ought to be have made years before it was made, which would have prevented many pulled muscles.
Indeed, an artistic text is probably most interesting when its possible coherent interpretations (its entropy) matches the possible interpretations (the entropy) of our ordinary experience, which includes the extraordinary events of our lives, such as birth and death, two favorite extremes of great authors everywhere, and also the experiences of love in all of its flowering variety. The artist tends to choose these universal topics because they offer the opportunity for a manifold of fruitful perspectives, many of which are even contradictory.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & literary novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, available at Amazon. He is currently writing two new novels and a play.