Probing Covert Progressions

Dan Shen has done impressive work in a number of fields of narrative theory for many years. Perhaps her most substantial achievement is her theory of covert progression, a contribution that promises to extend and refine our concept of plot. The positions she advances also invite further discussion. Concerning her target essay, one question that arises involves literary history. Many of the key examples offered by Shen (as well as by other theorists of comparable adjacent concepts) come from early modernist writers including Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Katherine Mansfield, and Franz Kafka, along with semi-modernists like Edith Wharton and Isak Dinesen. To these we may add a few earlier figures like Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce whose work is often said to prefigure modernism. One could easily adduce still other authors like James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Katherine Anne Porter. So, our first question is whether this is a distinctively or typically modernist phenomenon, and whether there is something in modernist poetics that induces it to gravitate toward such covert progressions? If so, are there historical, literary, or other reasons that suggest why this kind of plotting would flourish in this period?

We also wonder whether contemporaneous history may serve as a covert progression? A number of German and Austrian novels, written after World War I, depict the world before the war that would soon engulf and transform it. The reader is usually aware of this historical context; in fact, a comprehensive reading of these novels presupposes such knowledge. It is also true that, in other cases, specific historical events may be unanticipated: the first part of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is set during a lazy summer afternoon and evening sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century. Then ten years pass, during which World War I has occurred and utterly transformed the lives of all the surviving characters. History has been unfolding all along, though it is never referred to by the characters in the first part of the text. Would the movement of history be a covert progression?

Our next questions concern the presuppositions and the extent of Shen's model. Shen mentions that her search for covert progressions is sometimes prompted by the digressive elements, the "local deviations in the plot." As she states in theses six and seven, some digressive elements will coalesce into a coherent theme (or character image or aesthetic value), which will be the covert progression. Moreover, in her discussion of Mansfield's "Psychology," she argues that while the overt plot is one of revelation in the sense that events are not resolved, the covert progression propels us toward a definitive resolution. In other words, she seems to suggest that there is coherence and resolution beneath the ambiguity and digressions within the overt plot. Her narrative model appears to expect and presuppose completeness and coherence in the text. Would Shen agree with this characterization? More specifically, what would Shen do with texts that defy any resolution, overt or covert, such as those that have a more pervasive and unresolvable ambiguity, for example, Henry James's "The Figure in the Carpet"?

These issues in turn suggest the larger question, "What is not a covert progression?" Dan Shen seems to present us with a binary option: some narratives have overt plots and covert progressions; others don't. Our experience with literary phenomena indicates instead that there is usually a number of gradations, each recognizably different than the one before. A model based on a spectrum of possibilities usually provides a more accurate representation than a dyadic or triadic model. Are there partially covert progressions, or covert partial progressions? How do we determine what is and what is not a covert progression?

Another question that arises is for whom does the story have a covert progression? In many of the stories adduced, the reader is limited to the perspective of a single character; we discover the covert progression when that character does, or when those around them do. But there are almost always other characters who know the full account of what...