Thoughts on "Dual Narrative Dynamics"

I've already expressed my appreciation for Dr. Shen's theory and the way she has worked it out in her recent book, Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction (Abbott, Review), of which her target essay can be considered a compact quasi-precis. And as her thesis is provocative in the best sense, I want to address in these remarks some of its provocations and the questions they raise.

Shen's primary advice for readers is to keep in mind the possibility that "dual narrative dynamics" are at work in a fictional text. But to see this duality when it happens requires "breaking free of the shackles" of a plot-centered critical tradition that goes back to Aristotle. Reading for the plot, she argues, has blinded us to the possibility of covert progressions that either expand or subvert the meanings that emerge from a purely plot-centered reading. Crucially for her argument, what is found operating covertly is not another plot, like Cedric Watts's "covert plots" or Kelly A. Marsh's "submerged" plots. These are still plots and, as such, elicit the same kind of plot-oriented understanding. The same could be said of the many psychoanalytic or Marxist approaches that unearth their respective masterplots from seemingly innocent works of narrative art.

So, Shen's first provocation is not the idea of a covert progression, per se, but rather a covert progression comprised almost entirely of stylistic elements—imagery, narratorial tone, paratextual details, supplementary incidents, Phelan's "recalcitrant materials" (Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric), and so on. In other words, there can be progressions of the whole that include the plot,¹ and there can be covert progressions (Shen's), more reflective than affective, comprised largely of stylistic elements. These progressions flow beneath the plot and its plot-dominated progression, generating meaning that expands or undermines meanings generated by the plot. In the crowded field of reading by suspicion, for Shen what is suspect is plot itself and its meaning-generative power.

A provocation that runs in tandem with this one is Shen's insistence that a covert progression's freedom from plot implies that what drives it is some other source of narrative power. However, lacking plot, it lacks the primordial power of narrative to elicit curiosity, suspense, and surprise (Sternberg, Expositional Modes). And the value of this plot-based power is the way it can enchain the reader's feelings to almost everything else in the realm of thought, feeling, and judgment. But the thought, feeling, and judgment that are riding on Shen's covert progressions are, by comparison, induced by a less dynamic dynamic (if I may), a reflective, possibly lyrical, frame of mind that floats as it were sideways to the action that is running the narrative.²

One idea that was strengthened and elaborated in poststructuralist theory is that fictive texts of any length and complexity always exceed interpretation. Shen touches on this issue when she asks how a covert progression differs from "other kinds of deeper-level meanings" ("'Covert Progression'" 2). But the "other kinds" of meaning in this context derive from familiar kinds of submerged structures that have been found in fictional texts—covert plot, second story, submerged plot, submerged narrative (3–6)—all of which, in contrast to covert progressions, "invariably operate within the plot development itself" (3). So, instead of saying "your interpretation is incorrect," you might say, "yours is a plot-oriented interpretation and therefore insufficiently correct." For all its originality, then, Shen's theory of covert progressions abides within the New Critical standard of the work of art as an organic whole, undiminished by dangling appendices. In other words, covert progressions, however subversive, like those in Mansfield's "Revelations" or Chopin's "Désirée's Baby," depend for their success on the plot-generated meanings with which they coexist.

A provocation that follows from this is Shen's proposal that dual textual dynamics invite dual interpretive responses from readers (2). How this works cognitively is probably beyond current research into reader response. But could we say that, once revealed as a current...