Although Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction has focused primarily on six short fictional narratives, the findings can be extended to many others: in addition to the overt plot development, there is frequently a covert textual progression which develops important countervailing or supplementary themes that are crucial to the proper understanding of the implied author’s rhetorical design. It is true that what is covert for one reader might be overt for others. But as indicated by the present analysis, the covert progression may remain covert. Indeed, despite the rich variety of reading strategies over the past century or so, the covert progressions in the six narratives under discussion, which were published at least ninety years ago, have eluded previous critics. This is not surprising. Starting from Aristotle, critical attention to narrative movement has focused on the sequence of actions, on, that is, the development of the plot. Modern narratology, since the Russian Formalists, operates with two sequences: one, the story events in their original causal, chronological order (the fabula); and the other, the textual sequence of these events (the sjuzhet). As regards the sjuzhet, narratologists have fruitfully investigated various authorial/narratorial formal operations on the fabula, but they have not typically paid attention to another textual movement behind or underneath the plot development. To descry the covert progression, it is a prerequisite that we free ourselves from the bondage of the critical tradition and open our minds to the possible existence of a parallel or alternative textual movement behind the plot development.
The previous chapters have shown from various angles that stylistic analysis is indispensable for uncovering the covert progression. For the past half-century or so, many literary critics have remained resistant to stylistics because they tend to believe that the “stylistic insight ultimately proves no more far-reaching than an insight reached by simply intuiting from the text” (Simpson 2004: 3). Answering the challenge, this book tries to demonstrate how stylistic analysis can help advance literary interpretation. Stylistics, which was quite popular in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, was almost “dead” there in the late 1980s and 1990s because of the attacks from deconstructive and reader-response critics, coupled with the shift in attention from the text to sociohistorical contexts, but in the new century it has been enjoying a gradual revival in the United States. In Britain and many other countries, although stylistics has retained its momentum and has played an important role in college education and academic research, it has not been very successful in appealing to literary critics because efforts are not often made to show the usefulness of stylistics in helping produce new literary interpretations. This project hopes to contribute to the revival of stylistics in the United States and in attracting the attention and participation from literary critics over the world. With the wide audience in mind, I have tried to avoid linguistic technicalities to make the stylistic analysis more accessible to literary critics.
Before bringing the book to an end, I would like to offer the following eight theses for uncovering the covert progression:
Thesis one: In many fictional narratives, there are dual narrative dynamics—a covert progression behind the overt plot development, but the covert is not immediately noticeable and we need therefore make a conscious effort to search for it.
Thesis two: Different implied authors of different narratives may hold divergent stances. To uncover a hidden progression in a narrative conveying a particular stance, we often need to break free of the received understanding of the author’s ethical and ideological positions.
Mansfield, for instance, is widely regarded as a non-feminist writer and this general image can easily lead to the neglect of a feminist covert progression in some of her narratives like “Revelations” and “A Singing Lesson.”
Thesis three: To discover the covert progression, we need to pay attention to both stylistic and structural techniques.
As we have seen in the previous chapters, style often functions to shape character and event in very subtle and significant ways, thus more or less changing on a deeper level the nature of the communication among authors, narrators, and readers. However, contemporary narratology and rhetorical narrative studies have often focused on structure and very much neglected or consciously precluded the linguistic details of the text, with, of course, the exception of linguistically-conveyed structural features such as voice and perspective. I have called for careful consideration of style in those fields in the Introduction and elsewhere (see Shen 2005, 2011b). This is particularly important in the case of narratives marked by a covert progression behind the plot development, since the covert progression is characteristically wrought by the implied author with subtle stylistic choices, and we need to trace carefully the stylistic patterning from the beginning to the end of the text to discover the implicit textual dynamics.
Thesis four: Attention to the covert progression often reveals covert motives or other not immediately apparent causes of characters’ behavior.
In Mansfield’s “The Singing Lesson,” for instance, Miss Meadows’s bad mood and wicked behavior in the earlier part of the narrative and her later transformation into a happy woman is indeed caused by Basil’s breaking off their engagement and his later promise of marriage. But stylistic analysis leads us to recognize a covert progression and find the deeper social causes underlying her behavior. The covert progression dramatically indicates and implicitly protests against the phallocentric social prejudice against a woman unwanted by men, social prejudice which drives the woman into despair and reduces her to behaving in a wicked way. In the covert progression hinging on this deeper social cause, Miss Meadows’s “wicked” behavior becomes quite understandable and as a result readers’ ethical judgments and affective responses to her change. In “Désirée’s Baby,” things go in a different direction: Armand’s cruelty towards the slaves and his “colored” wife and son appears to be a result of the influence of the Southern racist system, but on a deeper level, it is attributed to his black blood by the covert progression.
Thesis five: Textual elements which are peripheral or redundant to the overt plot development may take on much importance in the covert progression.
In “An Episode of War,” for instance, the lieutenant’s dividing coffee and a brigade’s “making coffee and buzzing with talk like a girl’s boarding school” have little or no role to play in the main line of action, but they are important constituents of the covert textual progression that emasculates the soldiers throughout. On the other hand, although the lieutenant’s injury and amputation are key events in the plot development, they are not that important to the covert progression which does not rest on instabilities of the story events, but on the clash between what is conventionally expected of heroic soldiers and how the soldiers are made to appear in the narrative.
This thesis may even be applicable to different aspects of the same event or utterance. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the last paragraph goes, “‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here!—It is the beating of his hideous heart!’” As regards this single utterance, in the plot development where the resolution lies in the old man’s beating heart leading to the exposure of the protagonist’s crime, the emphasis falls on the last sentence, “It is the beating of his hideous heart!” But in the covert progression building up the overall dramatic irony, the emphasis falls instead on “Villains! dissemble no more!”—the unconscious self-condemnation of the speaker as the only dissembling villain in the narrative.
Thesis six: To bring to light the covert textual progression, we need examine carefully the implicit interaction among textual details— both story facts and discourse (stylistic as well as structural) devices— in different parts of the text.
We need to explore, behind the plot development, whether textual details—no matter how minor or redundant to the main line of action—in the beginning, middle and end implicitly play a similar thematic function. If we find such a pattern, we may see a continuous textual undercurrent that conveys a hidden thematic import. In “The Fly,” for instance, the discernment of the hidden similarity among the textual elements at different stages of the narrative enables us to descry a covert progression directing irony against the Boss’s vanity and self-importance. The discovery not only enriches our understanding of the narrative but also makes it possible to account for various story facts and discourse devices which appear redundant or digressive to the plot development.
Moreover, we need to find out whether there is any hidden contrast between or among similar situations. As discussed in Chapter 1, in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the protagonist-narrator’s contrastive attitude towards his own dissemblance (during the whole textual movement) and towards that of the policemen (at the dénouement) is of vital importance for the covert progression towards self-condemnation, a contrast that has been previously overlooked. In “Désirée’s Baby,” when Désirée’s white foster father asks Armand to consider Désirée’s obscure origin, it seems to indicate the racial discrimination on his part, but he himself does not hesitate to adopt Désirée with the obscure origin, and when Désirée is mistaken for being colored, he and his wife not only offer her their home but also claim her to be their “own.” This forms a contrast with the (really) black Armand’s racist behavior. Careful attention to the implicit and consistent contrast between the whites and the (really) blacks in similar racial situations in this narrative enables us not only to find out that Mr. Valmondé’s words merely form an artistic device of fore-shadowing but also to discern the overall covert mythologization of slavery.
Thesis seven: The covert progression may have to do with the life of the author and the historical context of creation, and attention needs to be paid to the relation between text and context.
As we have seen in the previous chapters (especially Chapters 2 and 3), paying attention to the experiences of the “flesh-and-blood person” outside the writing process may help much in discovering a covert textual progression that is associated in various ways with the author’s life.
It is of course also important to consider the relevant sociocultural circumstances (see especially Chapters 1 and 5). In Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the protagonist-narrator continuously insists on his sanity, a textual phenomenon that has received various interpretations but none appears convincing. By going beyond the text into the historical context, we can find that the narrator’s insistence on his sanity actually embodies Poe’s response to the contemporary controversy over the “insanity defense.” The murderous narrator’s sustained assertion in that cultural context that he is sane amounts to an unconscious self-conviction, adding a dimension to the overall dramatic irony and enriching the covert ethical progression. This case points to the fact that contextual information not only can test or back up the findings of the intratextual analysis but also may shed new light on certain textual phenomena.
However, we need to keep in mind that the text is always primary in exploring the covert progression. Some critics today tend to pay too much attention to the historical context while more or less neglecting the text. If one fails to respect the text, the emphasis on cultural context may lead to severe distortions of textual facts (see Chapter 3 for a critique of Margaret Bauer’s imposition of context on text). What we should do is to carry out a very careful stylistic-structural examination of the text while also paying sufficient attention to context.
Thesis eight: Attention often needs to be paid to the contrast or similarity between the text under investigation and other related texts.
In order to uncover the covert progression, we also need to pay attention to relevant intertextual matters. What is particularly important to the descrying of the covert progression is the detailed comparison of stylistic choices between the text under investigation and other related texts (see in particular Chapters 2, 3, and 4).
Of the eight theses, the last two usually cannot be used directly to uncover the covert progression, but they can be employed to test or back up the findings of the intratextual analysis, hence adding to the “shareability” of the investigation. As for the preceding six theses, in bringing to light the covert progression in a given narrative, some of them may be more important than others, and some may even be irrelevant; but they may also all come into play and lend support to each other.
The covert progression forms a significant part of the implied author’s rhetorical design, inviting the authorial audience to uncover and integrate a distinct line of textual dynamics, a line that complicates the audience’s response to the narrative in various ways. In the Introduction, I mentioned that the thematic or ethical import of the covert progression either supplements or subverts that of the plot development. The covert progressions in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fly” belong to the supplementary category, while the covert progressions in the other narratives under discussion are more or less subversive. In both cases, the covert progression plays a significant thematic and aesthetic role. If we miss it, we may only get a partial (in the supplementary case) or distorted (in the subversive case) picture of the thematics, the characters, and the aesthetic values of the narrative. In short, in those narratives marked by dual dynamics as such, it is necessary and desirable to go beyond the plot development and try to uncover the covert progression.