In a letter of 1883 to his friend A. W. M. Ballie, Gerard Manley Hopkins draws a distinction between “overthought” and “underthought” when discussing lyric passages of Greek tragedy. The overthought is the surface meaning that the readers and editors see, and the underthought is another story carried on beneath the surface and expressed “chiefly in the choice of metaphors etc used and often only half realized by the poet himself” (Hopkins 1995: 174; see also Frye 1990: 57–58). A similar situation can be found in many fictional prose narratives, where our surface reading, or the way the overt plot moves, exists in tension with a very different and powerful dynamic that focuses, at a hidden and deeper level, on aesthetics and ethics, among other kinds of thematic import.1 This hidden dynamic, which complicates the audience’s response in various ways, is what I call “covert progression.” But of course, the covert textual progression in prose fiction differs from the poetic underthought in more than one way. While the poetic underthought is a local deeper meaning “in any lyric passage” (Hopkins 1995: 174), the covert progression is an undercurrent running throughout the prose text; while the poetic underthought rests on the suggestive meaning of figurative language, the covert progression in prose narratives characteristically relies on non-metaphorical stylistic and structural techniques; while the underthought is often only half-consciously conveyed by the poet, the covert progression usually forms a purposeful rhetorical strategy of the prose writer. Moreover, while the underthought Hopkins had in mind is a positive undercurrent of the text, the covert progression this book investigates conveys an ethical import that can either be harmful (see Chapter 3) or beneficial (see all the other Chapters). Despite all these differences, the covert progression in prose fiction and the poetic underthought have essential similarities: both are a deeper-level textual movement that is aesthetically conveyed, and both form a significant counterpoint that supplements or contradicts the surface meaning, thus complicating the audience’s response in various ways.
This book selects six short stories to illustrate how stylistic analysis is indispensable for uncovering the covert progression through rhetorical criticism. Short fiction is chosen as the object of investigation chiefly out of two considerations. First, using short stories as illustrations facilitates the revelation of a typology of different forms of covert progression. In Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren only use short stories to illustrate the functioning of different elements of fiction, and, in like manner, this book uses short stories to show the different ways in which the covert progression relates to the thematic implications of the overt plot development. Second, we are hard put to carry out a comprehensive analysis of style in long fictional narratives. Stylistic analyses of novels usually only deal with certain passages, a tiny portion of the long text. Although we can assume that “any passage is a microcosm of the whole” in terms of the importance of style in a given text (Phelan 1981: 20), to uncover the covert progression we have to trace the stylistic patterning from the beginning to the end of the text. This can only be conveniently carried out in short texts. Not surprisingly, this book, as a pioneering attempt to show different forms of covert progressing, confines its analysis to short fiction.
Since the late 1970’s there has been an increasing study of narrative sequence, dynamics, and progression as a reaction to the more or less static models of plot structure as offered by classical narratologists. Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot (1984) is a pioneering book that puts emphasis on the forward movement of plot/plotting and of reading (see also Sternberg 1978). Drawing on psychoanalysis, Brooks treats a narrative as “a system of internal energies and tensions, compulsions, resistances, and desires” in the temporal dynamics that shapes a text in the onward reading process (1984: xiv). In rhetorical narrative criticism, James Phelan sees a narrative as a “progression” built on unstable situations both in the story and in the discourse presentation. As for the story level, where the characters and/or their situations undergo some change, “the report of that change typically proceeds through the introduction, complication, and resolution (in whole or in part)” of “instabilities” within, between or among the characters (Phelan 2007: 7). In terms of discourse presentation, there exist “tensions” in the form of a discrepancy in knowledge, judgments, values or beliefs among authors, narrators, and readers (ibid., see also Phelan, 1996: 217–18). For the past twenty years or so, Phelan has taken the leading role in investigating narrative progression with his four brilliant and influential books (1989, 1996, 2005, 2007) and numerous essays. In the field of stylistics, Michael Toolan (2009) takes a computer-assisted corpus analytic approach to narrative progression, investigating how the text’s lexico-phrasal patterning guides readers’ expectations and responses. The investigation contributes to a fuller understanding of how words on the page give rise to “such distinct impressionistic reader judgements as ones of suspense, surprise, secrecy or gaps, mystery, tension, obscurity, and even incoherence” as the text progresses towards the end (2009: 1). The increasing interest in the dynamics of textual movement and reading activity has greatly enriched our understanding of narrative fiction, shedding much light on the functioning of the text and the communication among authors, narrators, and readers (see also Sternberg 1990, 1992, 2006; Richardson 2002).
As the definite article “the” in Brooks’ Reading for the Plot indicates, narrative criticism so far has focused on one textual progression based on the instabilities in the plot or main line of action, although various attempts have been made at discovering deeper layers of meaning of this progression.2 But in many fictional narratives, especially shorter ones, there exist two textual movements that still need to be distinguished. One is plot development, a major focus of attention since Aristotle. As we know, “plot” is a very elusive term in narrative theory, one that has received various definitions (see Cuddon 1979: 513–14; Dannenberg 2005: 435–39; Sternberg 1978: 10–14). In common terms, plot is the development of a narrative’s sequence of events. In Story and Discourse, Seymour Chatman (1978: 45–48) distinguishes between the traditional “plot of resolution” and the modern “plot of revelation.” In the former, events are causally related and progress towards the denouement, marked by a completed process of change of a certain kind (Crane 1952 a). In the latter, by contrast, it is “not that events are resolved (happily or tragically), but rather that a state of affairs is revealed” (Chat-man 1978: 48).
However, behind the plot development—no matter whether the events are connected by causality and resolved in the end or linked by contingency and created to display a state of affairs (often character-oriented)—there may exist a parallel textual movement that runs throughout. The latter conveys a different thematic import and often contains various textual details that appear peripheral or irrelevant to the themes of the plot. This complication of the textual dynamics gives rise to the complication of the reading activity when the covert textual movement gradually comes into view.
The present inquiry is concerned with the ethically oriented and aesthetically created kind of covert progression, which may be defined as:
The covert textual progression is an ethical-aesthetic undercurrent running throughout the text behind the overt plot development. The relation between the ethical significance generated by the covert progression and the overt plot varies from narrative to narrative, ranging from supplementation to subversion, which complicates the audience’s response in various ways.
Two things should be noted here. First, I follow Wayne C. Booth, the founder of contemporary rhetorical study of narrative fiction, in using the term “ethics” or “ethical” in a broad and flexible sense, making it carry the weight of political criticism as “a rough synonymy” for ideological criticism (1988: 12) and, moreover, treating it as covering both “good” and “bad” qualities (1988: 8).3 An “ethical” message or choice, that is to say, can paradoxically be bad or “unethical.” Second, the covert ethical progression foregrounds the connection between ethics and aesthetics in that it is characteristically created by the implied author with subtle stylistic and structural devices. The process of uncovering the covert progression is a process of revealing the intricate relationship between artistic techniques and ethical concerns. In other words, it highlights how ethical issues can be non-didactically, finely, and uniquely conveyed by the literary writer.
The chapters that follow all try to reveal, through stylistic analysis among other methods, a covert textual progression, its relation to the hidden ethical stance of the implied author, its rich aesthetic value, and the subtle way in which it complicates the audience’s response. For the convenience of discussion and illustration, I will offer here brief sketches of the covert textual progressions uncovered in the later chapters, where attention will also be directed to the complicated readerly dynamics corresponding to the complicated textual dynamics. As regards the covert textual movements sketched here, any point that falls short of clarity may gain substantiation and clarification from the detailed discussion in the latter part of the book.
Overt plot: A neurotic character narrator who insists on his sanity tells the story of his conceiving the idea of killing an old man with a “vulture eye,” his careful execution of the murder, his hiding the dismembered corpse under the floor, and finally, when three policemen come to search the house, his hearing the increasingly loud beating of the old man’s heart which leads to his admitting his crime.
Covert textual progression: Throughout the text, there are two ironic undercurrents, one main and the other subsidiary. The main one, created primarily with stylistic choices showing the protagonist-narrator’s continuous dissemblance and his taking unethical delight in it, centers on his unwitting self-condemnation: He unconsciously projects his own dissemblance onto the policemen, condemns the projected dissemblance as immoral and finds it extremely unbearable, which leads to the exposure of his crime. The subsidiary one, resting on the interaction between the stylistic choices depicting the unreliable narrator’s continuous insistence on his being sane and the insanity debate in that historical context, centers on the narrator’s unwitting self-conviction. The two undercurrents form an overall dramatic irony, implicitly conveying a moral—how one’s self-satisfying hypocrisy can lead to one’s downfall.
Overt plot: An unnamed lieutenant is wounded in the right arm during the intermission of a battle. He goes to a field hospital to have the wound treated, perceiving a battle going on in the distance, and at the end he arrives home with only one arm.
Covert textual progression: There is a sustained ironic undercurrent to deprive the wounded lieutenant of manhood and dignity, which joins forces with the strategies of replacing fighting against enemy with internal conflicts and rendering the battle scene meaningless to form an overall satirical covert progression against war and romanticized notions of heroism.
Overt plot: Désirée is a foundling adopted by the Valmondés. After growing to womanhood, she is wooed and wed by Armand Aubigny, a neighboring planter and bearer of one of the finest names in Louisiana. She gives birth to a son who looks to be of mixed race. Armand spurns both mother and child for the black blood, and Désirée, carrying her baby, commits suicide.4 At the ending of the narrative, Armand gets to know that the son’s African features come from himself instead of Désirée. This overt textual progression primarily forms an indictment of the Southern racist system.
Covert textual progression: Primarily through the interaction between subtle stylistic choices and a surprise ending, there is created an undercurrent building up a fictional world where all (really) white characters never perpetrate racial discrimination and racial oppression, making life gay for enslaved blacks and happy for free blacks, and where, in contrast, (really) black characters are guilty of racial discrimination and the only person who oppresses black people in a cruel manner is a black planter. There is thus implicitly created a dual vision of slavery: positive slavery under white masters and negative slavery under a black master. This dual vision implicitly attributes the sufferings of the blacks to the black blood and unobtrusively mythologizes and endorses the white-dominated Southern racist system.
Overt plot: Monica Tyrell always suffers terribly from her nerves in the morning. This morning she is awakened by a strong wind, and then she flies into a rage after receiving Ralph’s well-intended invitation to lunch at Prince’s. Upon getting her first revelation concerned with freedom, she races off to her hairdresser’s. She snaps at the hairdresser George for his unusual absent-mindedness. Then George tells her that his daughter—a first child— died that morning. Monica rushes out to take a taxi to Prince’s. On the way she sees a flower shop and wants to buy flowers for the little girl, but the driver fails to hear her tap at the window and she finds herself at Prince’s already. The overt plot is regarded by many critics as an exposure of the weaknesses of the female protagonist.
Covert textual progression: Through the use of free indirect discourse among other stylistic devices, there is created a continuous undercurrent that indicates how patriarchal forces reduce the upper-middle-class Monica to a mere “doll” of men and deprive her of all her worth except youth and beauty that she no longer possesses as a 33-year-old woman. This largely accounts for her suffering from her nerves and other weaknesses. The covert progression doubles the object of authorial irony: both the protagonist’s “feminine” weaknesses and the Western hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculinist domination, the latter forming the most important reason underlying the former.
Overt plot: Miss Meadows, a thirty-year-old spinster, is in a very bad mood on her way to teach a singing lesson. When in the classroom, she treats her girl pupils coldly and wickedly because her fiancé Basil has broken off their engagement. Then she is summoned to the school office where she receives from Basil a telegram to promise marriage again. This transforms her into a warm, joyful and kind woman.
Covert textual progression: Primarily through the subtle manipulation of focalization (point of view), there is created a continuous undercurrent which indicates that what Miss Meadows dreads most is not losing Basil the man, but other people’s prejudice in the phallocentric society against a woman unwanted by men. The phallocentric discrimination implicitly threatens her job, even her room for survival in society, and it therefore reduces her to behaving in an abnormal and wicked way. The text progresses to show Miss Meadows’ great joy and her returning to her usual kindness when being (temporarily) free from that kind of social prejudice. The covert progression forms a veiled yet highly dramatic protest against patriarchal discrimination against women.
Overt plot: Mr. Woodifield, who retired after having a stroke, makes his weekly visit to his old boss in the office. He tells the boss about the graves of his own son and the boss’s son, who were both killed in the war. After Woodifield leaves, the boss recalls his son in pain. Then he notices that a fly has fallen into his inkpot and is struggling to get free. The boss first lifts the fly out of the inkpot, then he changes his mind and keeps dropping blots of ink on the fly until it is killed, which leaves the boss wretched, frightened, and forgetful.
Covert textual progression: There is an undercurrent that secretly unifies various stylistic choices which appear digressive to the main line of action. This undercurrent forms an overall irony against the boss’s vanity and self-importance. The enfeebled Woodifield (whose frailness gives the boss self-satisfaction), the boss’s newly decorated office (which he keeps showing off to his friends), the boss’s son (the boss’s pride and a tool to carry on his business), and the fly (with which the boss increasingly identifies) successively and implicitly function as a vehicle to bring out the boss’s vanity and self-importance. Ironically, when the son is killed in the war and the fly by the boss himself, the boss becomes (before he can find other means to help regain his self-importance) similarly broken and wretched.
As the above sketches indicate, the covert textual progression in prose fiction is often ironic in nature. Irony is usually classified into two basic categories: verbal and situational. The former involves a discrepancy between the literal/ostensible meaning and the intended/implied meaning of a statement, while the latter typically concerns an incongruity between the expected outcome of an action and its actual (unexpected or undesired) outcome. Classical examples of situational irony include that in Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare 2007b) where “the fine speeches and grandiose ideas eventually produce nothing,” or the tragic irony in King Lear (Shakespeare 2007a) where Lear rejects the daughter who loves him most (Cuddon 1979: 335– 40; see also Booth 1974; Colebrook 2004; Fowler 1973: 101–2; Muecke 1982). The ironic covert progression studied in this book has two distinctive characteristics. First, it is a sustained ironic movement from the beginning to the end of the text, and local elements often become ironic only in relation to other elements in the covert progression. It thus differs from the more local “verbal” and “situational” irony. Second, it is an additional ironic layer behind the irony of the plot development (see Chapters 1, 4, and 5) or behind a plot development that is basically not ironic (see Chapters 2 and 6).
The New Criticism movement is well known for its concern with irony in prose fiction as well as in poetry (C. Brooks 1948, 1968, 2005). In Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren set store by irony, but their attention is limited to the irony of one textual movement— that of the plot development itself. Concerning Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” they ask a hypothetical question: “Would there be an irony in the story even if she [the female protagonist] had never learned the true nature of the jewels?” (Brooks and Warren 1979: 72). They likewise direct attention to the facts that the irony of the plot in John Collier’s “De Mortuis” is “based on a general view of life, the surprising and comic way in which things happen,” and that the irony of the plot of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” rests on another generality, “the doubleness of human nature” (Brooks and Warren 1979: 73). Brooks and Warren’s discussion is quite representative of traditional investigations on irony in prose fiction.
In rhetorical studies, starting from Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), critics have paid much attention to narrative or “structural” irony (Abrams and Harpham 2009: 166). Instead of focusing on the events themselves, rhetorical critics are concerned with the “secret communion” between the implied author and the implied/authorial reader at the expense of the narrator: “We travel with the silent author, observing as from a rear seat the humorous or disgraceful or ridiculous or vicious driving behavior of the narrator seated in front” (Booth 1961: 300). But attention is usually devoted only to one level of irony, especially that against an unreliable narrator’s mis-reporting, misinterpreting, and misevaluating (Phelan 2005). By contrast, this book directs attention to two levels of irony, one explicit and the other implicit. In Chapter 1, for instance, apart from the irony against the unreliable narrator’s misreporting that has attracted previous critical attention, there is revealed a hidden overall dramatic irony centering on the unreliable narrator’s unconscious self-condemnation and self-conviction. This kind of ironic undercurrent increases the distance between the narrator and the author/reader. In Chapters 4 and 5, behind the irony against the protagonist in the overt plot, there is uncovered a deeper ironic progression against social forces which largely account for the weaknesses of the protagonist. This kind of ironic undercurrent shortens the distance between the protagonist and the author/narrator/reader.
When the present project is only concerned with one level of irony, it is a level that has remained hidden behind a non-ironic overt textual movement, such as in Chapters 2 and 6. In Chapter 2, the hidden irony is directed not so much against the characters as against romanticized notions of war and heroism, to which the characters fall victim. In this light, this kind of ironic undercurrent shares an essential similarity with that in Chapters 4 and 5, but the distance between the characters and the author/narrator/reader is somewhat increased rather than shortened as compared with that in the non-ironic overt textual movement. In Chapter 6, by contrast, the protagonist himself forms the butt of irony in the covert textual movement, and the distance as such is much increased.
As we know, ironic meaning is covert meaning. Having seen the difference between irony in covert progression and previously discussed irony, we now come to the question: What is the difference between covert progression and other types of covert meaning? I would like to start answering this question by considering the relation between covert progression and what Armine Kotin Mortimer (1989: 276–98) calls “second story” beneath the surface of various short stories.
On the face of it, “second story” bears a striking similarity to covert progression in that “a second story that is not told outright” is also “an undercurrent of suggested meaning” (276) essential to a fuller and more accurate reading of the work as a whole. But in fact second story is drastically different from covert progression. The primary example of second story Mortimer (278–83) offers is from Maupassant’s “Room 11.” At the end of the narrative, the extramarital affair in room 11 between the wife of Magistrate Amandon and her lover is discovered by a police commissioner. The tale ends with the words the police commissioner “gave them their liberty, but [he] was not discreet. The next month, Magistrate Amandon received an advancement with a new residence.” So there arises the “riddle”: Why is the magistrate promoted? The answer is unknown to the magistrate himself. To this riddle, Mortimer (280) claims, “only a second story will supply the correct answer.” In the given text sequence, the second story hides between the “indiscretion” of the police commissioner and the promotion and new residence of Amandon. The second story, which readers have to infer to make sense of the plot development, “establishe[s] the connection between the downfall of the wife and the elevation of the husband”: the indiscreet police commissioner has informed Amandon’s boss of the extramarital affair, and the boss has taken advantage of Amandon’s wife, who “has so well pleased her husband’s boss” that he rewarded her by promoting her husband (280–81). Likewise, the other second stories Mortimer (283–93) discusses invariably take the shape of an untold “secret” which the reader has to infer in order to have a complete plot line.
The essential difference between the second story and the covert progression lies in the following four aspects. First, while the second story relates to a local gap in the action, the covert progression is a continuous under-current running from the beginning to the end of the narrative. Second, Mortimer’s second story, in the shape of “an adulterous love affair, murder, incest, [or] perversion,” is an indispensable constituent of the plot, while the covert progression is another textual movement which runs parallel to the plot development and goes in a contrastive thematic direction. Third, while the second story, as a missing link in the plot itself, is what the reader “is actively solicited” to supply (276), the covert progression, as an under-current behind the plot development, tends to elude the reader’s conscious attention. Fourth, while the second story, as an untold “secret” in the plot, “risks platitudes as soon as it is exposed” (ibid.), the discovery of the covert progression is aesthetically appealing and ethically thought provoking, and the effect increasingly intensifies in the process of gradual discovery.
Another type of covert meaning is discussed by Mary Rohrberger in Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story (1966). Inspired by such New Critical works as Richard H. Fogle’s (1952) study of imagery patterns in Hawthorne’s fiction, Rohrberger (1966: 105–23) draws a distinction between “simple narrative” and “short story.” The former is a tale whose “total interest lies on the surface level,” with “no depths to be plumbed” (106). A case in point is Somerset Maugham’s “The Colonel’s Lady,” where “by no stretch of the imagination could either the situation, the action, or the characters be taken as symbols” (109). In contrast, the “short story” has a deeper level of meaning (106). An example is Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly,” whose plot development is marked by rich symbolic meaning, with the fly functioning “as a symbol for all the characters in the story” (Roheberger 1966: 71).
On the face of it, the deeper level of meaning Rohrberger discusses is quite similar to covert progression in that it not only enriches the thematic dimension of the text but also leads to the reader’s complicated response. But in fact the two essentially differ, since Rohrberger’s deeper meaning hinges on whether the plot or situation itself has symbolic implications, whereas my concern is primarily with a non-symbolic covert textual movement that parallels the plot or situation. This difference emerges from our contrastive views of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The tale is dismissed by Rohrberger (1966: 120–21) as “a simple narrative” because “everything contributes to it [the plot] and to the final effect of terror” and there is “no suggestion given within the framework of the story to direct the reader to meaningful implications.” But I have singled out the tale for investigation (see Chapter 1) since it has a covert progression centering on the protagonist-narrator’s unconscious self-condemnation and self-conviction as mentioned above. Interestingly, both Rohrberger and I find Mansfield’s “The Fly” valuable but for very different reasons. Rohrberger sets store by the narrative because its plot is marked by rich symbolic meaning. In contrast I attach importance to the narrative particularly because it has a covert progression conveying irony against the boss’s vanity and self-importance, a non-symbolic under-current behind the symbolic plot development.
A distinction made by Clare Hanson in Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980 is also relevant here, one between “those works in which the major emphasis is on plot and those in which plot is subordinate to psychology and mood” (1985: 5). The latter type, as pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe (e.g. “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “Ligeia”), contains “static works in which images and stylised dramatic scenes act as ‘objective correlatives’ for states of mind or feeling” (Hanson 1985: 4). What is relevant is the stress Hanson lays on the stylistic aspect of the “static works” characterized by symbolic or expressive images. Indeed, in the field of short fiction studies, many critics, at least from the times of New Criticism and prior to the reign of cultural studies, have placed great interpretive weight on stylistic choices in symbolic or imagist works. The basic assumption is that this kind of short story, like poetry, is “a concentrated form, wrought out of an intensification of thought and feeling and demanding an equivalent stylistic intensity” (Hanson 1985: 3). However, the investigation of style here, as in the case of Mansfield’s “The Fly,” has usually not led to the discovery of a covert progression behind the “psychology and mood.”
Although Mortimer, Rohrberger, and Hanson are all concerned with the short story, what they investigate—a gap or missing link in the plot, a symbolic structure or an imagery pattern of the plot—is not exclusive to this genre. Even less exclusive are the ironic implications of plot as investigated by Brooks and Warren in Understanding Fiction, a book that only uses short stories as illustrations. In the introduction to The New Short Story Theories, Charles E. May summarizes the debate on whether the short story is a unique narrative form. Positioning himself in the “family resemblance” camp, May acknowledges that, except for brevity, there are no “exclusionary characteristics” that distinguish the short story from the novel, but there is “a network of similarities and relationships within examples” of the short story as a genre (xvii–xviii). I subscribe to this position. Like Rohrberger’s symbolic structure (which is also found in novels such as Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), the covert progression the present project explores is not confined to short stories.
In the field of short fiction, as in the field of the novel, existing investigations of covert meaning—no matter whether they deal with the ironic, the “secret,” the symbolic, or the imagist aspect of meaning, and no matter how much interpretive weight is placed on style—have usually not paid attention to the narrative’s covert progression as such. This neglect may be largely accounted for by the extent to which, starting from Aristotle, critical attention has focused on plot development—whether on the multiform significance and dynamics of the instabilities in the traditional plot of resolution or on the symbolic meaning of the modern “plot of revelation.” Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for instance, has appealed to numerous critics, including many psychoanalytic ones in the latter half of the twentieth century. Such analysts have focused on its plot (the premeditated murder and the exposure of the crime) or the inner drama developing along the plot, though they have approached it from various angles and often revealed a deeper level of meaning in it. To uncover the covert progression, however, we need to look behind the plot for an alternative, complementary development, which centers on the narrator-protagonist’s self-satisfying dissemblance culminating in his unconscious self-condemnation, and which is joined by a subsidiary undercurrent centering on the narrator’s unconscious self-conviction in that historical context (see Chapter 1). Here we may even claim that the narrative has three parallel progressions, one overt and the other two covert, instead of viewing the two as branches of a single covert progression constituting an overall dramatic irony.
In terms of the modern symbolic or imagist texts, to unveil the covert progression, we also need to find out whether there is an undercurrent that is alternative or parallel to the symbolic structure or imagery pattern of the plot or the state of affairs represented there. In Mansfield’s “The Fly,” unless we open our minds to two thematic progressions, we are hard put to discover the covert one centering on the boss’s vanity and self-importance behind the overt one concerned with war, death, grief, helplessness, victimization, and so forth (see Chapter 6). In Mansfield’s “Revelations” or “The Singing Lesson,” we also need to search for the possible existence of an alternative undercurrent in order to discover the covert progression focusing on social forces, which runs contrastive or counter to the overt one focusing on the protagonist’s own behavior (see Chapters 4 and 5).
In some cases, if we free ourselves of the bondage of the plot development and consciously search for the possible existence of a covert textual progression, we may perceive what we have already experienced without being aware of it. As we will see in the survey of existing criticism in the later chapters, when we think that the text only has one progression, we tend to map onto the themes of that progression whatever textual elements we find relevant in order to have the thematic unity of the text. But some elements may pertain to the covert textual progression that runs contrastive or even counter to the thematic implications of the plot. On the other hand, when we believe that the text only has one progression, we may also dismiss various textual details as unimportant or irrelevant to it, but these details may play a very important role in the covert progression. In such a process of sorting out textual elements for the one progression we have in mind, we may suppress or distort various effects of the “covert” textual elements we originally experienced. To recognize the covert progression therefore is in a sense to restore the suppressed or distorted effects. However, it would be going too far to claim that the revelation of the covert progression always functions to spell out what readers have already experienced. As we will see in the later chapters, the covert progression is characteristically based on very subtle stylistic patterning, which requires conscious and careful exploration of the text. Indeed, this book aims not only at directing attention to the covert textual progression as a significant principle of narrative structure, but also at contributing, from a fresh angle, to a better understanding of narrative techniques, especially of the relation between artistic stylistic patterning and a continuous ethical undercurrent.
It seems redundant to assert that in those narratives marked by a dual dynamics as such, to have a proper understanding of the implied author’s rhetorical purposes and to get closer to the authorial norms, it is crucial to uncover the covert progression. To succeed in this attempt, it is very important, as I will argue and show below, to integrate stylistic analysis, contextual consideration, and intertextual comparison into rhetorical criticism.
Contemporary rhetorical narrative criticism has been shedding significant light on the relation among the implied author, narrator, character, and audience. Wayne C. Booth and James Phelan have successively figured as leaders of its two stages of development, first from the 1960s to the 1980s, and then from the 1990s up to the present. Booth and Phelan are respectively representatives of the second and third generations of the neo-Aristotelian Chicago School of literary criticism. Although the latter generations of the neo-Aristotelians differ from the first in significant ways, such as moving from the primary concern with the poetic (the text) to a concern with the rhetorical (author-audience communication) or with the rhetorical-poetic (Phelan 2007: 79–94), in some important aspects they both bear the imprint of the first generation as represented by R. S. Crane. The early neo-Aristotelians, on the one hand, marked off their approach from other branches of criticism and, on the other, advocated pluralism or the coexistence of different approaches. The disciplinary boundary has enabled the Chicago School to take on its own characteristics and contribute to the study of literature in its unique ways. But the boundary has also brought certain limitations. There are two self-imposed preclusions that have very much persisted up to the present in the rhetorical study of literary narrative: first, the preclusion of style or language, and second, the preclusion of the context of creation.
The first generation of Chicago critics followed Aristotle in subordinating literary language to the larger structure of the work in a given genre. The basic assumption is that disregarding style or language enables them to focus on the “architecture” of literary works, or more specifically, to concentrate on “how fully a given poem exemplifies the common structural principles of the genre to which it has been assigned” (Crane 1952b: 1–2). Moreover, the early Chicago critics engaged in a fierce polemic against New Critics whose exclusive concern with language and irony they found excessively limiting (see Phelan 2007: 79–87). The antagonism of the Chicago School towards the language-oriented New Criticism added to the preclusion of the analysis of style.
This tendency was inherited by contemporary rhetorical critics. In the afterword to the second edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983 [1961]), Booth very much persists with his underplaying language or style in the first edition because of “the non-verbal basis of fictional effects” (1983: 461). To him, the earlier Chicago critics’ development of Aristotle’s method provides “the most helpful, least limiting view of character and event—those tough realities that have never submitted happily to merely verbal analysis” (1983: 460). He subscribes to Joseph E. Baker’s view (1947: 100) that the “aesthetic surface” of fiction is found, not in words, but in the “world” of character, event, and value “concretely represented and temporally arranged” (quoted in Booth 1983: 480).
The preclusion of language is reinforced through rhetorical critics’ drawing on structuralist narratology. Many rhetorical critics today have adopted the narratological distinction between story and discourse (see Shen 2005a; 2002). “Discourse” is defined in narratology as “the signifier” (Genette 1980: 27) or “the expression, the means by which the content is communicated” (Chatman 1978: 19), which seems to form the whole level of presentation. But in effect narratology’s “discourse” only covers structural techniques, very much to the exclusion of style or verbal techniques, except for some overlapping areas such as focalization/point of view or speech presentation (see Shen 2005b). Let us compare the following two observations made by Michael Toolan in his Narrative (2001) and Language in Literature (1998) respectively:
(1) That is to say, if we think of histoire/story as level 1 of analysis, then within discourse we have two further levels of organization, those of text and of narration. At the level of text, the teller decides upon and creates a particular sequencing of events, the time/space spent presenting them, the sense of (changing) rhythm and pace in the discourse. Additionally, choices are made as to just how (in what detail, and in what order) the particularity of the various characters is to be presented…. At the level of narration, the [structural] relations between the posited narrator and the narrative she tells are probed. (2001: 11–12)
(2) So one of the crucial things attempted by Stylistics is to put the discussion of textual effects and techniques on a public, shared, footing…. The other chief feature of Stylistics is that it persists in the attempt to understand technique, or the craft of writing. If we agree that Hemingway’s short story “Indian Camp,” and Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” are both extraordinary literary achievements, what are some of the linguistic components of that excellence? Why these word-choices, clause-patterns, rhythms, and intonations, contextual implications [of conversation], cohesive links [among sentences], choices of voice and perspective and transitivity [of clause structure], etc. etc., and not any of the others imaginable? (1998: ix)
It is not hard to find that narratology’s “techniques” (structural choices) in the first quotation are drastically different from stylistics’ “techniques” (verbal choices) in the second.5 Although the term “rhythm” appears in both quotations, it means entirely different things in the two different contexts. In the stylistic context, “rhythm” means verbal movement resulting from the features of words and their combination (e.g. poetic meter, sentence length, or the use of punctuation), whereas in the narratological context, “rhythm” refers to the structural relations between textual duration and event duration, such as detailed scenic presentation versus brief summary or ellipsis of events.
In Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978), Seymour Chatman observes, “My primary object is narrative form rather than the form of the surface of narratives—verbal nuance, graphic design, balletic movements. ‘Style’ in this sense, the properties of the texture of the medium, is fascinating, and those who have read my work know that I have spent many hours on it. Here, however, I am concerned with stylistic details only insofar as they participate in or reveal the broader, more abstract narrative movements” (10–11). This preclusion of style is carried over into his more rhetorical Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (1990).6
In his ongoing effort to offer a comprehensive account of the rhetorical theory of narrative, James Phelan has published five books (1981, 1989, 1997, 2005, 2007). The first Worlds From Words: A Theory of Language in Fiction presents an admirable analysis of fictional style, but the author’s basic position is that “language, though it varies in importance from one work to the next, will always remain subordinate to character and action, which he views as essentially nonlinguistic elements of fiction.”7 Not surprisingly, Phelan’s second book is entitled “Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative.” However, being highly competent in verbal analysis, Phelan has paid some attention to style in his later work especially in discussions of voice and unreliability. In general, rhetorical critics focus on character and action, more or less to the neglect of various stylistic details in their investigation of author-audience communication.
As distinct from cognitive criticism that aims at accounting for the interpretation of conventional/generic audience or actual readers, the most important task of rhetorical criticism is to try to carry out authorial reading—to try to enter the position of the implied reader or authorial audience so as to investigate the communication between the implied author and his/her ideal, hypothetical addressee.8 The degree of success of this effort depends on how accurately the critic can infer the implied author’s norms. In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth says,
“Style” is sometimes broadly used to cover whatever it is that gives us a sense, from word to word and line to line, that the author sees more deeply and judges more profoundly than his presented characters. But, though style is one of our main sources of insight into the author’s norms, in carrying such strong overtones of the merely verbal the word style excludes our sense of the author’s skill in his choice of character and episode and scene and idea. (1983: 74; italics added)
Although Booth sees style as an important channel to get access to the author’s norms, he leaves it out because “merely verbal” analysis does not allow us to gain a good understanding of character and event. I fully agree with Booth and other critics that an exclusive concern with style or language is limiting. But why not pay attention to both aspects? Starting from the early neo-Aristotelians, there has appeared a self-imposed unhappy choice: Either paying attention to character and event while neglecting style or paying attention to style while neglecting character and event. Making either choice may lead to a partial or distorted picture of the author’s norms since, as pointed out by Booth (1983: 73–75), the norms are to be inferred from the “artistic whole” or “the sum” of the implied author’s choices. Booth observes,
If everyone used “technique” as Mark Schorer does, covering with it almost the entire range of choices made by the author, then it might very well serve our purposes. But it is usually taken for a much narrower matter, and consequently it will not do. (1983: 74)
Booth’s “it will not do” applies to the exclusion of style, a very important aspect of technique. Indeed, if examining style can bring out that “the author sees more deeply and judges more profoundly than his presented characters,” neglecting style may easily result in a misunderstanding of the author’s norms. In terms of the dual dynamics of narrative fiction, the covert progression often rests on subtle stylistic choices that function to shape character and event in significant ways. In Chapter 2, for instance, various stylistic choices form a continuous undercurrent directing irony at romanticized notions of war and heroism, behind a somewhat non-satirical description of “an episode of war.” In Chapter 6, for another example, subtle stylistic choices interact to direct sustained irony at the protagonist’s vanity and self-importance behind a plot development concerned with very different thematic issues. In such cases, only by integrating style into rhetorical criticism can we more successfully enter the position of the authorial audience and carry out authorial reading. Nevertheless, it is not sufficient merely to integrate style. In order to make rhetorical criticism more powerful, persuasive, and shareable, it is also necessary to integrate relevant contextual and intertextual matters.
The rhetorical study of fictional narrative is in general marked by the preclusion of the sociohistorical context of creation, especially the biographical information of the “real author.” This preclusion can be traced back to the first generation of Chicago critics, who unequivocally precluded sociohistorical context in the neo-Aristotelian tradition seeing literary works as imitations. In his landmark essay “History versus Criticism in the Study of Literature,” Crane, after pointing out the limitations of the historical approach on the aesthetic side, privileges literary criticism as “reasoned” discourse “about the works themselves and appropriate to their character as productions of art” (1967 [1935]: 11).
If the first generation of Chicago critics, like other formalist schools in the early twentieth century, ruled out sociohistorical context as a reaction against long-term prevalent and privileged historical approach to literature, the second generation started working at a time when formalist criticism had already gained the upper hand and hence the preclusion of context was more or less taken for granted. In the preface to The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Booth unequivocally asserts, “in pursuing the author’s means of controlling his reader I have arbitrarily isolated technique from all of the social and psychological forces that affect authors and readers.” Indeed, when Booth was writing, the centrality of the text was so firmly established that it was even difficult to talk about the communication between the author and the reader. Faced with the formalist climate, the rhetorical Booth puts forward the concept of the “implied author,” which on one hand makes the author text-based and on the other enables the rhetorical critic to talk about the means the author uses to persuade the reader. Although the “implied author” (the second self) is connected with the “real author” (the first self) in various ways, Booth, with his neo-Aristotelian orientation and in that extremely formalist climate, emphasized the importance of paying sole attention to the role-playing “implied author” on the occasion of writing, to the exclusion of the “real author” in daily life outside the writing process (see Shen 2011, 2013).
When the second edition of The Rhetoric Fiction was published in 1983, the academic climate had shifted from the formalist to the sociohistorical and political, and the book’s ahistorical position had been subject to much critique. In the afterword to the second edition, Booth takes a partially defensive and partially concessive stance. He insists on his “transhistorical” (not antihistorical) position in studying the rhetoric of fiction versus studying its political history (413), but he praises Bakhtin for his ideological and historical criticism of literary works (414–15). Subscribing to the distinction made by Peter J. Rabinowitz (1977, 1987) among the “authorial audience,” the “narrative audience,” and the actual readers, Booth on the one hand emphasizes shared response among “the relatively stable [authorial] audience postulated by the implied author—the readers the text asks us to become” across historical contexts (420), and on the other acknowledges that different actual readers with different critical presuppositions—such as male versus female readers—tend to come up with different readings.
If the contexts of literature basically fall into two kinds—that of creation and that of reception, the latter, as Booth’s 1983 afterword indicates, has found its way into rhetorical criticism through the distinction between the authorial audience and actual readers. Under the influence of contextualist approaches and in order to account for the difficulties actual readers have in entering the authorial audience, many rhetorical critics have investigated how flesh-and-blood readers’ different experiences, knowledge, and sociohistorical positioning lead to divergent readings.
As regards the context of creation, some rhetorical critics have paid attention to the historical development of techniques or genres, or to the sociocultural norms the text reflects, follows, or transgresses for certain effects (see, for instance, Booth 1983: 414–15; Rabinowitz 1987: 68–74; Chatman 1990: 198–99; Phelan 2007: 89–90). But such investigation is scanty, and with some exceptions (especially Ralph W. Rader, who challenges Crane’s ahistorical position), what has remained absent from rhetorical criticism or the Chicago School in general is attention to the biographical information of the real author.9 This persistent preclusion has to do with reasons both internal and external to rhetorical criticism.
Externally, contextualist narrative studies also tend to overlook the biographical information of the real author because of, among other things, disciplinary orientation and/or the long-term impact of the “intentional fallacy” argument. Cultural studies have focused on the relation between literature and various aspects of culture, such as politics, law, business, or other arts. Cognitive narratology, because of its primary concern with readers’ cognition, when paying attention to context, has focused on the context of reading. Bakhtinian critics, when paying attention to context, have concentrated on the influence of social discourses or cultural forces on the text. Since the contextualization in rhetorical criticism is very much a result of the influence of contextualist approaches, the latter’s leaving out the biographical information of the real author has lent itself to the former’s preclusion in this aspect.
Internally, rhetorical criticism’s preclusion of the real author has much to do with Booth’s concept of the “implied author.” From the first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction to the recent essay “Resurrection of the Implied Author” (2005), Booth draws a sharp distinction between the “implied author” and the “real author” or “the flesh-and-blood person” (the FBP), and he stresses that only the former is relevant to rhetorical criticism.10 No matter in what sense the “implied author” is understood (see Shen 2011), rhetorical critics in general have confined the consideration of author-audience communication to the text-based implied author on the one hand and various kinds of present-day audience on the other. Even in his attempt to historicize the narrative communication diagram, Harry Shaw (2005) still leaves out the “real author” and only argues for the historicization of the narrator.
In rhetorical criticism, we try to enter the position of the authorial audience— “the hypothetical ideal audience for whom the [implied] author constructs the text and who understands it perfectly” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005: 543). To enter more successfully the authorial audience, we need to infer as accurately as possible the intention, purposes, and norms of the implied author. As I discussed in detail elsewhere (Shen 2011, 2013), although later theorists have much mystified Booth’s “implied author,” in the encoding process the implied author is no other than the person “who writes in this manner” (Booth 1961: 71). Insofar as the encoding process is concerned, the difference between the “real author” and the “implied author” is in fact that between the person in daily life and the same person in the process of writing in a particular manner or assuming a particular stance, which may be contrastive or even opposed to that the “real author” takes in daily life. Our knowledge about the “real author” (involving the experiences of the person over the whole span of her life) comes from various biographical and historical materials, while our knowledge about the implied author (on the occasion of writing that particular text) comes from the text itself—the implied author’s image is to be inferred from the “completed artistic whole” of that particular text (Booth, 1961: 73).
Nevertheless, in order to enter successfully the position of the authorial audience, we often need to take account of the historical context and the biographical information of the real author. As regards the historical context, the implied author writing at a given historical time may have in mind an authorial audience with access to certain historical knowledge that is indispensable to our correct understanding of the textual norms (Rabinowitz 1977: 126, 1987: 21). When Henry Fielding was writing Tom Jones in eighteenth-century England, he had in mind an authorial audience with knowledge of the latitudinarians and eighteenth-century thought, and our failing to pay attention to the cultural context may lead to a partial understanding of the authorial norms (see Rader 1999). When Edgar Allan Poe was writing “The Tell-Tale Heart” in nineteenth-century America, he was writing for an authorial audience with knowledge of the insanity debate in that historical context, a knowledge that is indispensable for perceiving the ironic undercurrent centering on the narrator-protagonist’s unconscious self-condemnation (see Chapter 1). Similarly, when Katherine Mansfield was writing “The Singing Lesson” in early twentieth-century England, she intended the text for an authorial audience who knew that Victorian England regarded a woman who could not catch a husband as worthless, a kind of social knowledge necessary for discerning the covert textual progression as an implicit protest against phallocentric social forces (see Chapter 5).
In terms of biographical information, if the fictional narrative is somewhat autobiographical, gaining access to the real author’s relevant experiences may shed light on the implied author’s textual norms and rhetorical purposes.11 When the implied author’s textual choices are not modeled on the real author’s experiences, if the authorial stance on the occasion of writing is linked with or affected by the real author’s experiences prior to the writing process, taking account of the real author’s relevant experiences will enable us to understand better the implied author’s rhetorical purposes and thematic design.
To take “Désirée’s Baby” for an example, previous critics have put this narrative in the anti-slavery tradition as represented by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But Kate Chopin, both before and after her marriage, showed firm and continuous support for the Confederate cause and strong objection to the abolition of slavery. Her husband was a racist, her father-in-law a harsh slave owner, and her half-brother fought for the Confederate army. This formed a sharp contrast with the background and experience of Harriet Beecher Stowe (see Hart 1983: 642). The biographical information of the historical Chopin can shed much light on the intention and purpose of the implied Chopin in creating the racist covert progression in “Désirée’s Baby” (see Chapter 3).
However, in investigating the relation between text and context for inferring more accurately the implied author’s norms, we must keep in mind that the text is always primary and we need to respect the text fully. The primacy of the text can be seen in the following aspects. First, if one fails to respect the text fully, the emphasis on cultural context may lead to severe distortions of textual facts (see Chapter 3 for a critique of Bauer’s imposition of context on text). Second, acquiring information about the real author is not sufficient for an adequate understanding of the implied author’s textual choices. Some critics have a good knowledge about the racist family background and personal experience of the historical Chopin, but without examining the stylistic and structural choices of “Désirée’s Baby” itself in a careful and comprehensive way, they still have missed the racist undercurrent and misinterpreted the implied author’s norms (see Chapter 3). Third, as pointed out by Booth when expounding the concept of the implied author, “just as one’s personal letters imply different versions of oneself, depending on the differing relationships with each correspondent and the purpose of each letter, so the writer sets himself out with a different air depending on the needs of particular works” (1961: 71). Although bearing the same name, the different implied authors of different narratives may take divergent stances due to different thematic designs. Given such differences, to gain a better understanding of the authorial stance of a particular narrative, we must, in the first place, carry out carefully a stylistic-structural analysis of the text itself and take the contextual information only as supplementary.
In order to unveil the covert progression and infer the implied author’s norms more accurately, we also need to integrate into rhetorical criticism the consideration of relevant intertextual matters. It should be noted that, following Aristotle’s emphasis on genre, neo-Aristotelian rhetorical critics have paid much attention to the function of generic conventions, norms, and deviations (see, for instance, Booth 1983: 432; Rabinowitz 1987: 70–75). But apart from generic issues, there are other intertextual matters that need to be taken into account in inferring the implied author’s norms of a specific text. What I see as especially important to rhetorical criticism is the comparison of stylistic features between the text under investigation and other related texts. The relations between the two basically fall into two kinds: intertextual contrast and intertextual similarity.
In investigating “An Episode of War,” for instance, if we pay attention to the contrast in stylistic choices between this narrative and another war narrative by Stephen Crane—“A Mystery of Heroism”—we may gain a much better understanding of the ironic covert progression in question (see Chapter 2).
Not only intertextual contrast but also intertextual similarity can shed light on the text under investigation. To take Mansfield’s “Revelations” for an example, a stylistic analysis of Mansfield’s depiction in “Prelude” of Beryl’s conscious awareness of the opposition between her false self and her real self can cast much light on how patriarchy imposes a false self on the female protagonist in “Revelations.” Further, if we compare “Revelations” with Ibsen’s A Doll House and examine carefully the similarity as well as contrast between the two texts in depicting the female protagonist, we may see much better how Mansfield is directing implicit irony against patriarchal discrimination and subjugation of woman through a covert textual progression (see Chapter 4).
For the past eighty years or so, generations of neo-Aristotelians consciously precluded, to different extents, style/language and context of creation in order to be better critics of the text or better rhetorical critics of author-audience communication. The present project argues and tries to show that integrating style, context of creation, and intertextual comparison can help us become better critics of the text or better rhetorical critics of author-audience communication since the integration enables us to interpret more accurately the norms and functions of the text and the rhetorical purposes of the implied author.
In order to uncover the covert progression in rhetorical criticism, we also need to bear in mind that the textual undercurrent is not immediately noticeable, and we need therefore make a conscious effort to search for it. This is especially so when the undercurrent is made up largely by textual elements that appear to be digressive or peripheral to the plot development. When we gradually discern the covert textual progression, our response will in various ways become more complicated.
In discussing readers’ responses in the genre of narrative fiction, two issues should first of all be clarified. One is the distinction between responding as a professional critic and responding as an ordinary reader, and the other is what standard we should use for measuring the worth of a given text.
While an ordinary reader reads a fictional narrative, like reading a newspaper report, usually only once from the beginning to the end, a professional critic tends to read the chosen text over and over again, both forward and “backward” (to explore the connection of a later element to earlier elements), until having more or less grasped a deeper level of meaning or a covert progression of the text. When discussing the (authorial) audience’s response to the textual progression in a critical essay or a book, professional critics are usually not talking about the initial response but the response out of more than one reading. The more complex or ambiguous the textual movements or the more deep-going the response, the more times of reading may be involved. This forms a contrast to experimental investigations that record actual readers’ first response to a text. While we should be fully aware of the somewhat hypothetical nature of non-experimental discussions of textual progression, we should also acknowledge that it is the legitimate and proper way to do it. After all, when we talk about the dynamic textual structures in literary criticism, we are always talking about the findings out of more than one reading. As regards the covert textual progression, it usually requires more readings (both forward and “backward”) to discover than the overt. The process of discovery will vary from critic to critic and is therefore hard to share, but the covert textual progression itself, once brought to light, should be sharable if the analysis is on solid and persuasive ground.
As regards the second issue, I find the tripartite distinction made by Phelan (2007) among the interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic judgments very helpful since it enables us to approach the response to narrative fiction in a more balanced manner than many previous critics. Even Booth seems to use ethics alone as the gauge: when a work initially much appreciated is later found to be ethically problematic, it is then deemed “worthless” despite its aesthetic value such as “genuine qualities of humor and imaginative vitality” (ibid.: 75–76). There is no doubt that our ethical judgment will affect our aesthetic appreciation, but it seems to go too far to use ethics as the sole criterion in evaluating narrative fiction. Phelan’s model helps us to see how our interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic judgments interact and affect each other (as well exemplified by Phelan’s Experiencing Fiction).
The following chapters will each explore the particular response to the specific covert textual progression in question, and here I shall discuss in a general manner how we may respond to the different types of relation of the covert textual progression to the overt plot development. Such relations fall into two basic categories: the subversive and the supplementary. In one category, we can further distinguish different subtypes, each inviting our response in a certain way. I would like to discuss here two subtypes of the subversive category and two subtypes of the supplementary.
When the covert textual progression subverts the overt plot development, it is always in the shape of a deeper dynamic meaning structure subverting, in part or in whole, a superficial one. But the covert is not always to be accepted.
A good case in point is Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby,” which might be regarded as being marked by what Rabinowitz (1994) calls “rhetorical passing”: a racist text passing off as an anti-racist text. When anti-slavery modern readers discern the racist covert progression behind the overt anti-racist plot, they will refuse to enter, or will rather retreat from, the “authorial” reading position and will enter instead a resistant and critical reading position. It is significant to note that modern readers, when discovering the racist textual progression, may not totally dismiss the work. “Désirée’s Baby” has been widely regarded as a literary masterpiece not only because of its (superficial) moral thematics but also, perhaps more importantly, because of its highly aesthetic/dramatic quality. The racist covert progression is created with remarkable ingenuity, which is aesthetically appealing. The process of uncovering the covert textual progression is a process of the interaction among complicated interpretive judgment, growing ethical objection, and ambivalent aesthetic judgment. The interpretive judgment is complicated partly because we feel at once regret (at having been deceived by the textual appearance earlier on) and delight (at now being cognizant of the true stance of the narrative). The aesthetic judgment is ambivalent in that our objection to the author’s ethical stance reduces our aesthetic appreciation on the one hand, but the exploration of the covert textual progression leads to the discernment of more ingenious aesthetic skills on the other. Significantly, because of the subversiveness of the covert textual progression, its discovery characteristically leads to drastic changes in our perception of various textual details and in our emotional reaction to the characters, who are now seen as serving different or opposite ethical ends.
“An Episode of War” and “Revelations,” for instance, belong to this sub-type, but the relations between the covert progression and the overt plot involve different kinds of contrast (and hence may be further divided into hypo-subtypes). “An Episode of War” has to do with the contrast between satiric and (non-satirically) realistic: the overt plot seems to represent an episode of war in a realistic and non-satirical way, but the covert progression conveys the author’s anti-war stance by satirizing romanticized notions of heroism. “Revelations” has to do with the opposition between social and personal: the overt plot seems to show the protagonist’s personal weaknesses while the covert progression indicates that the weaknesses are largely to be accounted for by social factors. No matter along what line of development, the covert textual progression, being subversive in nature, will significantly alter the ethical import of the whole narrative in the reader’s eye and lead to a drastic change in the reader’s perception of various local details and reaction to the protagonists, who are now “transformed” either from an ordinary army man to an object of satire (who also invites the reader’s sympathy as a victim of war), or from a morbid being in herself into a victim of social forces.
If the covert textual progression supplements the overt plot development, it sometimes does not affect our response to the overt plot, but it always operates to complicate or enrich, though in a less radical way, our perception of the whole narrative, which is now seen as taking on additional ethical function and aesthetic value.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a good case in point: its overt plot goes along the crime and legal-punishment line and its covert progression more subtly in the same direction, along the line of self-condemnation coupled with self-conviction. In contrast with Category A, here the overt plot development is not seen as deceptive but as presenting a surface level of meaning, with the undercurrent conveying an additional deeper level of meaning. Because of the same direction shared by the two progressions, the perception of the covert here does not alter the perception of the textual elements associated with the overt, but it does alter the ethos of the whole narrative since the text is now seen as having more ethical depth and aesthetic ingenuity. The process of responding to the covert progression is marked by new interpretive delight (at having uncovered a deeper textual movement), growing ethical insight, and increasing aesthetic appreciation.
“The Fly” belongs to this subtype, whose covert progression has an ethical concern quite different from that of the plot development. Because of the different directions the two progressions go along, the discovery of the covert will more significantly change the ethos of the whole narrative. In “The Fly,” the uncovering of the covert progression increases to a notable extent the ethical irony of the text with the boss now perceived not only as a victim of war/fate and a victimizer of the fly but also as the butt of the irony directed against vanity and self-importance. Apparently, the discernment of the covert progression in this subtype will somewhat change the perception of the relevant textual details. The change in the understanding of the ethical concerns of the narrative is typically accompanied by increasing aesthetic appreciation of the author’s artistry in subtly creating the dual dynamics.
While being aware that for some readers of some fictional narratives, authorial reading is very difficult or even impossible to arrive at and that no reading of a literary narrative is definitive, I hold the rhetorical assumption that a significant value of reading narrative is to share readings.12 There are at least four kinds of shared reading. In the first kind, different actual readers recognize the dominant patterns of the authorial communication and interpret the text in similar ways. In the second kind, actual readers have experienced certain effects of the work without being fully aware of them, but when these effects are pointed out, readers recognize them as part of the authorial communication. In the third kind, different actual readers miss the same key aspects of the authorial communication and so still interpret the text in similar ways. In the fourth kind, these shared misreadings become revised; in this kind, actual readers encounter a new interpretation that they find more adequate to the authorial communication and more persuasive than their own and so they share the new reading. In this book, my arguments about covert progressions are also arguments for shared readings of the second and fourth kinds. My claims are that readers who have focused only on the overt progressions have either felt but not done justice to the covert patterns or that their attention to the overt has led them to miss these subtler patterns. In some cases, I realize that the present interpretations may at first appear more or less unexpected. But it is in the nature of the covert not to be initially noticed, and I hope that my attention to “overall” patterns of style and structure and to intertextual and contextual matters will lead my readers to share these readings. This kind of shareability is particularly valuable in testifying to the usefulness and advantageousness of the approach adopted in arriving at the new reading. Despite the fact that literary texts often contain gaps, ambiguity, or indeterminacy, and that actual readers often face a range of obstacles to entering the authorial audience, the rhetorical approach the present project advocates and practices remains committed to the principle that our efforts to seek shared readings not only can help resolve critical controversy but also can enhance our appreciation of the communicative achievements of the authors whose works we love to read and to teach.13
The chapters that follow will explore in detail the covert textual progressions and the ethical-aesthetic effects they generate in six short fictional narratives. The chapters fall into two parts. Part One, comprising Chapters 1 to 3, deals with three short narratives by the American authors Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane, and Kate Chopin. They not only are famous short fiction writers but also characteristically create short fiction with complicated dynamics. Part Two, consisting of Chapters 4 to 6, probes into the different ways of progressing covertly in three narratives by Katherine Mansfield. These six narratives span nearly a century from the 1840s to the 1920s and represent different period-styles: romanticism (Poe), realism (Crane), regionalism (Chopin), and modernism (Mansfield).
There are three reasons why Part Two should concentrate solely on an author like Mansfield. First, Part One is devoted to American authors, and it is right and proper for Part Two to be devoted to the works by the (New Zealand-born) British author Mansfield, so as to present a somewhat balanced picture of Anglo-American narratives. Second, while it is important to see how dual narrative dynamics function differently in the narratives by different writers, it may also be helpful to see how they function in different ways in the narratives by the same writer and, moreover, even for conveying similar ethical significance. Chapters 4 and 5 unravel two covert progressions in Mansfield’s narratives that convey a somewhat feminist ethical import but in very different ways. Third, the present project focuses on short narrative fiction, a genre in which Mansfield figures as a most prolific and prominent writer. Mansfield is well-known for her depiction of female experiences, and Chapters 4 and 5 investigate two short narratives respectively portraying an upper-middle-class lady and a school teacher, while Chapter 6, as a way to offer some balance, explores a short narrative where male characters take center stage.
Because of the limited space, the present project can only uncover the covert progressions in a handful of short fictional narratives. But the following point involving three interrelated aspects should become clear: If a fictional narrative has dual dynamics but we only pay attention to the overt, we will either get a partial picture (if the covert supplements the overt) or a false picture (if the covert subverts the overt) of the ethical import of the text; we will only see a more flat or a distorted image of the characters involved; and we can only appreciate the narrative’s aesthetic value in a limited and one-sided way. The process of experiencing the covert progression is a process of gaining a relatively fuller, more balanced, or more accurate understanding of the ethical import and artistic quality of the whole work.