And What If Overt Plot and Covert Progression Are Connected?

Responses to target essays often start with praise for the author before moving on to the real job of "targeting" him or her. My praise is framed as an anecdote and is, hopefully, more than an anecdote: In 2017, I attended the Fifth Conference of the European Narratology Network in Prague, where Shen, whose writings I had never come across before, had been invited as a guest speaker. I had just analyzed the graphic novel 300 by Frank Miller (Candel, "The Rhythms of Narrative Tension"), and entered the lecture room in the confidence of having shown how Miller had organized his characters in a cultural-semantic, quasi-rhythmic pattern and then undermined his whole initial message mid-way. As I was listening to Shen's explanation of covert progression, it suddenly hit me: the rhythmic pattern was correct, but the single puncture I had identified was in fact part of a covert progression. I listened to the end of the lecture, then went home and wrote about the covert progression of 300 (Candel, "Covert Progression in Comics"). The point of telling this anecdote is that in my experience Shen's theory has the potential to act as a horizon of expectations, a schema, maybe even a cognitive one: Shen often asks us to "open […] our eyes to" or "break free of the bondage of" ("'Covert Progression'" 5, 9). This is precisely the effect of her lecture on my understanding of 300.

However, when Shen demands that we "break free of the bondage," most often she means the bondage of, specifically, "plot" ("'Covert Progression'" 9). While Shen relates overt plot and covert progression through "complementar[ity] and subversive[ness]" (6), that relationship is reduced to the "meaning" of the overt and covert readings. Otherwise, and specifically in formal terms, Shen considers the covert progression "another textual movement" (4), consisting of "textual details that appear peripheral or irrelevant to the themes of the plot" (Shen, Style and Rhetoric 3; see also Hillis Miller xi). In Shen's account, meaning connects overt plot development and covert reading but form keeps them separated. This is an important part of the allure of the covert.

My specific experience with 300 questions this strict formal separation between overt plot development and covert progression. The plot of 300 is structured in terms of a particular sequence which, following Sternberg's nomenclature ("Telling in Time (II)"), could be called "curiosity-suspense-surprise": The story starts in medias res, followed by a delayed exposition which looks back to the past to provide missing information about the present (curiosity). The story then moves forward (suspense), punctured by a moment of surprise that rearranges our understanding of the whole story. This structure affects both the overt plot but also the covert progression of 300, for it is precisely each of these three narrative moments that allows us to read the Spartans as liberators from the Persian beast (overt) as well as the beast itself (covert).

If, as we have already seen, Shen is right in suggesting that covert progression is independent from the plot, this might disqualify my reading of 300 as a covert progression. At the same time, the covert reading of each of the three moments depends above all on the stylistic particularities of these moments, each of which changes the relationship between implied author, narrator, and implied reader. It is thus at the level of style rather than plot that the covert reading emerges. Thus, the covert reading is not a result of the plot, yet it happens "in plot," in fact, where plot becomes crucial. All this complicates my initial anecdote, for can I then really say that the scales fell from my eyes during that lecture (this is indeed how it felt) if my covert progression is not a covert progression?

Interestingly, the sequence suspense-curiosity-surprise does not only appear in 300, but also in two short stories Shen has analyzed: Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" and Ambrose Bierce's "A Horseman in the Sky":¹ All three narratives start in medias...