Dual Narrative Progression as Dual Authorial Communication: Extending the Rhetorical Model

From the middle to the end of the twentieth century, the critical field witnessed first the death of the author (focusing on the text), and then the "death" of the text (focusing on the reader or sociohistorical context). It is the rhetorical approach to narrative led by Wayne Booth and more recently by James Phelan that has consistently put stress on authorial communication, especially the author's rhetorical purposes (in the words of Phelan's target essay "a teller [author] using resources of narrative to achieve a purpose in relation to an audience"). The new century has seen the "resurrection" of the author and the critical field is moving toward a more balanced concern with the author, the text, and the context, a balance that is, in effect, inherent in the rhetorical approach, although its contextual potential was for a long time suppressed or hidden from view for various reasons (see Shen "Implied;" also see below).

An important aim of Phelan's target essay is to extend the rhetorical model or the model of narrative communication in general by taking into account character–character dialogue. To see things in perspective, I would like to introduce the diagram (Figure 1) of "discourse relations involved in the novel" as offered by Leech and Short (215–16).

First of all, I have to point out that the distinction between the upper two levels of communication is based on a misunderstanding of the "implied author." As I argued at length elsewhere (see Shen "What"), Booth's distinction between the Implied Author and the Real Author is actually that between the (role-playing) person in the process of writing and the same person in daily life, out of the writing process. As far as the creative process is concerned, we only need to consider the implied author (whose image is implied by all the textual choices he or she has made during this process), but if we want to know how the textual choices are affected by life experiences in historical context, we need to examine the relation between the implied author and the real author (the same person out of the writing process).

Figure 1.

In light of this, we can leave aside the first level of discourse relation in the above diagram. As for the second, the "message" is the whole text the implied author has created with the implied reader in mind. Since the implied author has no voice, he or she has to use a narrator (or multiple narrators in the case of multiple levels of narration) to convey the story to the audience (narratee, narrative audience, authorial/actual audience).

As regards the third level, character–character dialogue is part of the message the narrator conveys to the audience. To know the implied author's rhetorical purposes and the thematic meaning of the text, we need to examine character's dialogue together with character's action, thought, emotion, and so on as represented through various structural and stylistic devices (in Phelan's term, "resources"). But as far as communication is concerned, character–character dialogue can be singled out to form another level of discourse relation. In this sense, Leech and Short's model lends itself to Phelan's concern with the "synergy" among the channels of communication involving character–character dialogue and the channel(s) of communication involving the narrator's (or narrators') telling the story (with the implied author as the creator and authorial/actual readers as part of the audience).

With this clarification paving the way, I try to extend the rhetorical model of narrative by considering dual narrative progression and dual authorial communication. In many fictional narratives, there is a textual movement behind the plot development. I have elsewhere designated the former "covert progression" which complicates the audience's response in various ways (Shen "Covert," Style, "Dual Textual," "Dual Narrative"). The double narrative progressions involve two channels of authorial communication, conveying the implied author's different rhetorical purposes, arousing contrastive or even opposed response from readers. The relationship between the covert...