Abstract
Alongside the increasing expansion of narrative study to various media and social activities, the study of narrative fiction has entered a new stage in the new century. In terms of the study of fictional narrative progression, the new century saw the publication of, among others, James Phelan’s Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (2007) in the narratological field and Michael Toolan’s Narrative Progression in the Short Story: A Corpus Stylistic Approach (2009) in the stylistic field. Pioneered by Peter Books’s Reading for the Plot (1984) as a reaction against the static models of structuralist narratology, the study of narrative progression over the past 30 years or so has been shedding significant light on the working of fictional narratives and the interaction among authors, narrators and readers. Dan Shen’s Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots breaks new ground in the study of narrative progression by directing attention to the fact that, in many fictional narratives, ‘the progression of the plot exists in tension with a very different and powerful dynamic that runs, at a hidden and deeper level, throughout the text’ (p. 1). This hidden textual development is what she calls ‘covert progression’. That is, many fictional narratives, here short stories as the cases for illustration, can be more complex than they first appear or have up to now been understood. With the revelation of the aesthetically-wrought and thematically-oriented covert progression, the established themes of the plot development as recognized by previous critics may turn out to be less rich, or even against the real rhetorical purposes of the implied author.
Shen’s book is in the tradition of Neo-Aristotelian rhetorical study, but as Phelan says in his endorsement, the book ‘significantly expands its scope’. Apart from elucidating her theory of the ‘covert progression’, the Introduction of the book explains the self-imposed limits of the neo-Aristotelian tradition and explicates the necessity to extend the scope of study to style, extra-textual context, as well as intertextual comparison. The body of the book well exemplifies the interpretative gains out of the expansion of rhetorical narrative study to such areas. Since the covert textual progression ‘is characteristically based on very subtle stylistic patterning’ (p. 12), Shen argues for careful and thorough analysis of linguistic and structural choices in order to trace the aesthetic-ethical undercurrent throughout the text in relation to the relevant biographical and cultural contexts and intertextual associations.
The body of the book consists of two parts. Part One reveals the covert progressions in the short fictional works by three American authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane and Kate Chopin. Chapter 1 focuses on Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. It begins with Poe’s own theory of prose fiction, revealing that, in contrast with his overall aesthetic conception of poetry, Poe in effect holds a non-aesthetic view of the subject matter of prose fiction behind his emphasis on structural unity concerning the form of this genre. This brings in Shen’s challenge to the established opinions of Poe’s exclusive concern with aesthetic structural unity in prose fiction as well as in poetry. With this paving the way, this chapter reveals, through a careful tracing of the stylistic patterning in the narrative’s structural unity, an ethically oriented covert progression in which the narrator-protagonist is delighted in his own hypocrisy and he finally projects his own dissemblance onto the policeman, leading to the exposure of his crime. The revelation of this textual undercurrent is complemented by the uncovering, through combining textual analysis with the consideration of the historical context of the insanity debate, a related undercurrent culminating in the narrator-protagonist’s self-conviction. Since this double-layer covert progression is closely associated with the narrator-protagonist’s multiple unreliability, the investigation functions to enrich the discussion of narratorial unreliability by directing attention to the multiple interplays between the unreliable and the reliable.
Chapter 2 explores the covert progression in Stephen Crane’s ‘An Episode of War’, which has been widely regarded as a realistic description of war. However, Shen demonstrates that stylistic choices are used to build up a satirical undercurrent throughout the text to convey ‘the meaninglessness of war and the illusory nature of romanticized heroism’ (p. 71), which subverts the themes of the overt plot and invites drastically different interpretive, ethical and aesthetic judgments from the readers. As in other chapters of the book, the intratextual analysis is backed up by intertextual comparison with other relevant narratives and by biographical and contextual information.
Kate Chopin’s ‘Désirée’s Baby’ has been conveniently understood as an anti-racist short story. But in Chapter 3 a careful tracing of the stylistic patterning throughout the text brings to light a racist undercurrent conveying the superiority of the white blood over the black blood, mythologizing the white-dominated Southern racist system and inviting totally different judgments from readers. While the textual analysis is backed up by contextual information and intertextual comparison, the chapter also directs attention to the fact that the implied author’s racial stance varies from text to text, and in some Chopin narratives, the implied authors hold very different views towards the black characters.
Part Two shifts attention to three narratives by the New Zealand-born author Katherine Mansfield partly for the purpose of showing how covert progressions work in different ways in the narratives by the same writer. Chapter 4 focuses on Mansfield’s ‘Revelations’, which is generally taken as a satire on a neurotic upper-middle class woman. But a thorough stylistic investigation especially concerning the functioning of free indirect discourse uncovers a covert progression that obliterates the narrative distance between the female protagonist and the narrator/author/reader and turns the accusation against the woman to an accusation against the oppression of upper-middle class women by the patriarchal society.
Chapter 5, on ‘The Singing Lesson’, pays particular attention to how the shift in point of view and the use of metaphorical language help to construct a covert progression behind the plot development, thus disclosing the interplay between the heroine’s dread of losing her fiancé in the plot and her fear of other people’s prejudice in the society in the undercurrent, the latter in effect underlies her morbid and wicked behavior. The revelation of the covert progression enables readers to gain a much better appreciation of the aesthetic quality of the work as well as its ethical significance.
While the covert progressions in ‘Revelations’ and ‘The Singing Lesson’ both more or less function to subvert the overt plots, the covert progression in Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’, as explored in Chapter 6, operates to complement the themes of the plot development. Previous readings tend to focus on how the boss torments the fly as an analogy to how the war torments his son. But Shen’s careful tracing of the stylistic patterning uncovers an ironic undercurrent throughout the text against the Boss’s vanity and self-importance, which complements the overt plot centering on war, death and victimization themselves.
In the Coda of the book, Shen offers eight theses for uncovering the covert progression. The first thesis calls for a conscious effort to search for it. This thesis can be regarded as the prerequisite for discovering the undercurrent paralleling the plot development. The six narratives under investigation were published in the 19th or early 20th century, and have received much critical attention, especially ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘Desiree’s Baby’ and ‘The Fly’, but it is proposed that the covert progressions have largely eluded the attention of previous critics. This is primarily due to the fact that starting from Aristotle, critical attention has focused on the development of the plot, with much effort to unearth the deeper meanings of this explicit textual movement. By contrast, Shen’s book is a pioneering attempt to investigate another textual movement paralleling the plot development. In each chapter of the book, many linguistic details that appear to be insignificant or even irrelevant to the plot are revealed to be significant to the covert progression. If we do not open our minds to a parallel textual movement behind the plot development, we may easily overlook or consciously dismiss such linguistic details.
Since such linguistic details are subtle stylistic choices, the book well shows that stylistic analysis is indispensable for uncovering the covert progression, thus helping demonstrate the capability of stylistics to advance literary criticism. One contribution to literary criticism lies in the book’s revelation of another kind of irony previously neglected – the irony in the covert progression. With the exception of ‘Desiree’s Baby’, all the covert progressions as revealed in the book are ironic in nature. This type of irony differs from previously discussed types of irony in that it is an ironic undercurrent progressing from the beginning to the end of the text, while local elements often take on an ironic ring only in relation to other elements in the plot. Moreover, it is another ironic layer behind the irony of the plot development (see Chapters 1, 4 and 5) or behind a plot that is basically not ironic (see Chapters 2 and 6).
It may well be that many fictional narratives do not have a covert progression. But in those that do have it, if we only pay attention to the plot development and neglect the undercurrent, we may fail to enter the position of the authorial audience, only getting a partial or even wrong picture of the thematic significance of the text, a one-sided or distorted picture of the main characters, and may fail to appreciate the aesthetic value of various linguistic details which are important to the covert progression but appear digressive to the plot development.
Shen’s book points to a new direction in the investigation of narrative fiction. Hopefully in the future increasing attention will be paid to the revelation of covert progressions in prose fiction – n long as well as short texts, and in other fictional genres as well. The interest of the book for readers of this journal, beyond careful individual analyses of the specific stories, is the bringing into productive dialogue of stylistics and more mainstream narratology.