It is a great pleasure and honor for me to write a Foreword for this distinguished book. Dan Shen is Director of the Center for European and American Literatures and Changjiang Professor of English Language and Literature at Peking University in Beijing. She has an international reputation as a narratologist and a stylistician. She serves on many Western editorial or advisory boards including those of the American journals Style and Narrative, the British Language and Literature and the European JLS: Journal of Literary Semantics; and she is also a consultant editor of Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Dan Shen has a distinctive, original, theoretical approach and a gift for perceptive close reading. Apart from her publication of numerous books and essays in China, she has published many essays in important journals in North America and Europe. She is in addition, as it happens, one of my oldest friends in China. I have watched with admiration the impressive development of her work and of her worldwide influence since I first met her in China some years ago.
Style and Rhetoric in Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots is the happy culmination so far of Dan Shen’s scholarly work. It embodies the accumulated wisdom of years of thinking, teaching, and writing in the field of narratology, stylistics, and rhetorical studies. This book combines admirably two distinguished scholarly accomplishments. It develops with impressive rigor and exigency a powerful new theory of narrative progression. It then shows in detailed readings of six short fictions in English how this theory may be used to illuminate the way meaning is generated by the words on the pages of these stories. Her exemplary six stories include three by Americans: one by Edgar Allan Poe, one by Stephen Crane, and one by Kate Chopin. The second part of the book then reads three stories by the New Zealand-born British writer, Katherine Mansfield. Since these stories are often taught in undergraduate courses in literature, Dan Shen’s book will be of great use to teachers of such courses.
This book is in the tradition of Neo-Aristotelian rhetorical narrative study, but significantly expands its scope by directing attention to the importance of stylistic analysis and the necessity for considering the context of creation, both having been consciously precluded by Neo-Aristotelian rhetorical critics in general. In the brilliant introductory essay to the book and in the readings themselves, Dan Shen puts in question such exclusions. She sees no reason not to take into account in a rhetorical reading of a given story the author’s life and social circumstances. An example is the brilliant and learned discussion of the “insanity debate” in American history in connection with her reading of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” As regards her forceful argument for including in a rhetorical reading the stylistic analysis of verbal complexities, it is particularly well backed up by her admirable reading of Crane’s “An Episode of War” and Mansfield’s “The Fly,” which convincingly demonstrates how stylistic analysis can make significant contributions to the interpretation of narrative texts. In addition, Dan Shen argues for the necessity in narrative criticism of making intertextual comparison between a given story and other related works, whether by the same author or by different authors. This point is especially well illustrated by her analysis of Mansfield’s “Revelations” and Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby.”
Most brilliantly and of crucial importance in her theorizing and in her readings, however, is Dan Shen’s recognition in various narratives of an often ironic discrepancy between the overt plot and what she calls a “covert progression” hidden behind the open one, as well illustrated by the six narratives analyzed in the book. The great Victorian poet and classicist Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing about the recurrent figures of speech in lyric sections of Greek tragedy, called a deeper level of meaning in a lyric passage an “underthought” hidden beneath the “overthought.” What Hopkins says seems prophetically to anticipate Dan Shen’s insights. “In any lyric passage of the tragic poets,” Hopkins wrote in a letter of 1883, “… there are— usually; I will not say always, it is not likely—two strains of thought running together and like counterpointed; the overthought that which everybody, editors, see … and which might for instance be abridged or paraphrased … the other, the underthought, conveyed chiefly in the choice of metaphors etc used and often only half realized by the poet himself…. The underthought is commonly an echo or shadow of the overthought, something like canons and repetitions in music, treated in a different manner.” The difference of course between Greek tragedies and Dan Shen’s short fictions, as she observes, is that the “covert progression” in prose narratives is expressed not so much in metaphors as in many details of story-telling, and it is an under-current that runs throughout the text, rather than a local deeper meaning as the poetic “underthought.” Hopkins, moreover, does not allow for the outright dissonance or contradiction that Dan Shen persuasively identifies in the relation between overt and covert progressions in some of her stories.
The “covert progression” in prose fiction is often ironic in nature. This type of irony, as Dan Shen convincingly argues and shows, differs from previously noticed types of irony in that it not only is pervasive, characterizing the text throughout, but also often constitutes an additional ironic layer behind the irony of the plot development, either complementing or subverting the latter.
Recognizing and demonstrating the presence of covert progressions in narrative fictions is the strikingly original and groundbreaking focus of Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction. Starting from Aristotle, many narrative critics, for all their theoretical sophistication, tend to assume that a novel or short story has a single textual movement—the plot development (of course often with various forms of branching or narrative embedding). They have focused on the plot and have made diversified efforts to uncover its deeper levels of meaning. The “covert progression” is a different kind of deeper-level meaning, a hidden textual movement running parallel, or as an alternative, to the plot. But of course not every fictional narrative has a covert progression. Indeed, many do not, but in those narratives that have a covert progression, it is not to be missed since, as Dan Shen’s analysis shows, our understanding of the ethical import and aesthetic value of the text or of the author’s rhetorical purposes can be severely affected if we overlook the covert progression.
Dan Shen has a conspicuously sharp analytical mind. Her mind is much given to making distinctions and refinements in her theoretical formulations and in the details of her readings. She distinguishes, for example, between covert progressions that reinforce the overt action and those that contradict the apparent meaning of the story. An example of the latter is Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby.” This story appears to be anti-racist, but it covertly reinforces racial stereotypes. A close reading not only of narratological complexities but also of subtle verbal complexities is necessary to uncover the covert progression. Shen Dan succeeds brilliantly in doing this.
A concern with the ethical implications of narrative fictions has been an important part of narrative studies ever since Wayne Booth’s work and before. Dan Shen continues this tradition, but her recognition of covert progressions that work in sometimes dissonant counterpoint to overt progressions leads her to see and to show in detail that the ethical implications of a story like Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” or Mansfield’s “The Fly” may be quite different from the evident one or from the one previous critics have identified.
Dan Shen’s brilliant reading of Poe’s story is characteristic of her interpretations of the six exemplary short stories she chooses. Her reading of “The Tell-Tale Heart” exhibits impressive mastery as well as sharp criticism of previous scholarship on the story. Dan Shen needs to clear the ground, so to speak, to make way for her strikingly original reading of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” She also deploys thorough knowledge of relevant biographical and cultural contexts (such as the history of the “insanity debate” mentioned above). Bringing all these powerful tools of interpretation together, including an original analysis of the poetry/prose distinction in Poe’s essays, Dan Shen shows in detail that “The Tell-Tale Heart” deploys “dramatic irony with a significant ethical dimension.” While the plot development is marked by irony at the unreliability of the narrator, the “covert progression” of this story is one of the narrator’s “unconscious self-condemnation” and “unconscious self-conviction.” “Poe,” says Dan Shen, “seems to make the protagonist’s unconscious self-condemnation and unconscious self-conviction reinforce each other in order to convey the implicit moral in a highly dramatic and ironic manner.”
Another superb reading by Dan Shen is the chapter on Katherine Mans-field’s “The Fly.” After a succinct summary of the wide range of previous readings by other critics, Dan Shen turns to her own close rhetorical reading of textual detail in “The Fly.” Her reading shows convincingly that the overt plot progression, the story of the protagonist’s grief over his son’s death in World War I and his wanton killing of the fly on his desk by dropping ink on it until it stops struggling to survive, is supplemented by a more covert textual movement ironically revealing the boss’s vanity and self-importance. Dan Shen shows that in “The Fly” the covert progression supplements the overt plot progression and its meaning. Since none of the strikingly diverse previous published readings has noticed this covert progression, Dan Shen’s brilliantly convincing new reading solves what has been a crux in the interpretation of a classic short fiction. As Dan Shen says in her concluding recapitulation, “Numerous existing interpretations of ‘The Fly’ have shed much light on the narrative from various angles and have greatly helped reveal the rich thematic significance and complicated dynamics of the plot development. But no matter how cogent, ingenious, thorough, and deep-going the analysis is, the picture that emerges is bound to be a partial one unless we perceive at the same time the ironic covert progression behind the symbolic plot development. The two progressions—the plot centering on war, death, grief, time, existence, victimization/being victimized etc. and the covert progression concentrating on the boss’s vanity and self-importance—constitute two interacting dimensions of the whole textual dynamics. They complement each other in characterizing the boss and in generating thematic or ethical significance of the narrative.” Dan Shen’s chapter on Mansfield’s “The Fly” is a spectacular confirmation of the heuristic power of her new theory of double textual dynamics in short fictions. Her theoretical presuppositions really do work admirably as a way of producing convincing and sharable readings.
I have singled out Dan Shen’s readings of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and of Mansfield’s “The Fly,” somewhat arbitrarily, as exemplary of her procedures in all of her readings and of their uniform high quality. I leave it to the reader to find this out for herself or himself in the other readings. I have immensely enjoyed reading this superb book. I have learned much from it. It has led me, for example, to think about the way Dan Shen’s assumptions and procedures work splendidly as a way of accounting for the narrative and ethical complexities of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Other readers will think of other texts that would be illuminated by Dan Shen’s insights.
It is not often that a major breakthrough occurs in a well-established discipline like rhetorical narrative studies. Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots is definitely such a book. I commend it enthusiastically to all readers interested in narrative fiction.
—J. Hillis Miller
Deer Isle, Maine