Response to Dan Shen

Let me begin by thanking Dan Shen and the editors at Style for the invitation to contribute to the special issue and to respond to the target article by Dan Shen. I admire her work and vast knowledge, to which the target article testifies. I am grateful for the opportunity to engage with her ideas and suggestions, which in the current context specifically concerns what she coins "covert progression."

Dan Shen is aware that "covert progression" sounds like a concept that would come close to several existing ones and that it needs to be distinguished "from other kinds of deeper-level meanings" (Shen, "Dual" 2). It speaks to Shen's erudition that she carefully compares her suggestion to no less than five other comparable concepts with which she does not want it confused ("covert plot," "second story," "submerged plot," "submerged narrative," and "short story" ["Dual" 3–6]). In all instances, Shen successfully explains how her suggestion does not amount to the same as any of these existing terms. It remains, however, much less clear what exactly it is, and not only what it is not. Tellingly, Shen never defines the proposed concept but perpetually talks about it in terms of how it "is essentially different from" (3), "complicates reader's response in a distinct way" (2), "further complicates the picture" (1, abstract). The distinctiveness of the "distinct" way remains relatively vague, though, and this is further put into relief by the extremely broad brushes used to paint the theoretical landscape that forms the background of the suggestion. Thus, whereas the comparison with the five mentioned concepts is useful and illuminates what Shen is not suggesting, the overall theoretical backdrop for the article is so general that it misses out on the opportunity to describe Wahlverwandtschaften in the form of affinities to some existing theories and differences from others. Instead, narrative theory is described several times as one big lump spanning a couple of millennia from Aristotle onward:

Since Aristotle, investigations of narrative fiction have focused on the plot development.

(Shen, "Language" 17)

Ever since Aristotle, the critical field has taken for granted that narrative dynamics of mimetic fiction reside in the plot development, which may have different branches or layers and which may be interpreted from diversified perspectives.

(Shen, "Dual" 1)

Given the Aristotelian tradition […]

(8)

[…] the narrative critical tradition since Aristotle […]

(9)

I find it hard to subscribe to a picture of narrative theory as relatively homogenous and unified from Aristotle until today. It seems to me that referring to plot-oriented approaches to narrative, cognitive narratology, rhetorical narratology, unnatural narratology, and fictionality theory as one big Aristotelian narrative tradition is misleading and unhelpful. Within narrative theory there are diverse and often conflicting interests: in mimetic functions or in mental processes or in narrative as action or in the unnatural or in the purpose and intention. Shen's suggestion does not manifest itself with any clarity by stating that this alleged Aristotelian tradition is what "we" must "break free" from. (Shen, "Dual" 9, 10 et passim). This serves to make it unclear if the suggestion is supposed to subvert, supplement, complement, or replace literary theory, narrative theory, or narratology, respectively. The ambivalence towards existing tradition(s) also becomes visible in the call for the need to break free from the "bondage" (Shen, "Dual" 1, 9, 10) of the critical tradition and "break free of the shackle of the narrative critical tradition […]" (10). If narrative, critical tradition is really one whole—and a whole at that, from the bondage and shackles of which we need to break free—then is the concept of covert progression (self-declaredly in a secondary relation to overt progression) a part of, and extension of said tradition, or an alternative to it?

To put it differently, clearly several theorists over the last century have offered opinions that are equally or more dissimilar to Aristotle's than Shen's opinion that some narratives contain a covert progression in addition to an overt progression. Some distinctions would be helpful, therefore, to clarify the relation between existing theories and the new suggestion. Peter Brooks...