Happenings and Story:: A Response to Dan Shen's "Covert Progression"

Dan Shen's stimulating target essay deals with a central phenomenon of narration and enriches narratology with essential insights into the acts of reading and giving meaning. To begin with the latter, the "covert progression" is not part of the narrated "plot" (whatever the meaning of this ambiguous word) but rather owes itself to an insertion by the recipient in the meaning–giving act. In this respect, it is not obligatory and will be slightly different in each act of reading, just as any concretization of a depicted action is (cf. Ingarden). However, the overtly narrated story may contain more-or-less hidden clues that steer the inference of unstated storylines in a certain direction. James Phelan, to whom Dan Shen frequently refers, would perhaps call these elements "recalcitrant materials" (161). If one accepts the dichotomy of happenings and story that ultimately goes back to the Russian formalists (Schmid, Narratology 195–97), one could say that in the case of covert progression certain strands of the tellable happenings were not selected for the story but are noticeable as nonselected items in one way or another. Although the covert progression exists only in the reader's co-creation of the story, the anchor point must lie in the overtly told story itself, in some quality of a character or some detail of the narrated action, if the inserted elements should not be freely invented. The reader is tempted to trace the line from the anchor points indicated by some of the selected elements and to arrive at an alternative story by including some nonselected elements. Finding the anchor points for a covert progression that does not lead into the void but can be combined with other textual elements to form an alternative line requires a hermeneutic effort. Dan reports that her attempts sometimes fail.

In Katherine Mansfield's "Revelations," she finds such a subliminal or undercurrent line in protest against "patriarchal oppression." The social circumstances prevailing in her time forced Mansfield, so is Dan's conclusion, "to create an overt plot to portray a 'selfish female of neurotic temperament'" but at the same time "a covert progression to ironize the social forces reducing her to such a state" (9). I wonder why Dan does not pay more attention to another revelation that plays a no-less-important role in the narrative titled "Revelations." At the hairdresser's, where Monica takes refuge in her emptiness ("What would she have done without her hairdresser," Mansfield 153), everything is different today than usual. Madame hardly greeted her. Her face was whiter than ever. George—"young, dark, slender George" who always did her hair—has not yet appeared. Monica is getting impatient and thinking about leaving. When George finally shows up, he is unshaven and obviously not well-rested. Monica is deeply offended by the treatment, which is quite different from the usual ceremonies, and sets off. On Monica's departure George says, "The truth is, madame, since you are an old customer—my little daughter died this morning" (155–56). This blow not only brings out a completely different side of life and manifests the social otherness but also suddenly changes the whole interpretation and the competition of overt plot and covert progression. In view of the young hairdresser, who has to suppress all his existential pain in order to please the spoiled social lady, all other revelations and the conflict between selfishness and patriarchal oppression are minimized to nothing. From the horror of the other, real life, manifested by belated and unshaven George, Monica, who has already imagined herself "free of Princes' at one-thirty," flees to Princes' to meet Ralph, for whom she is a "tiny kitten in the swans-down basket." The revelation that the heroine experiences becomes clear on her journey to Princes': "all the way there she saw nothing but a tiny wax doll with a feather of gold hair, lying meek, its tiny hands and feet crossed" (156). In the imagination of this "meek doll," she merges the image of the dead girl with her own image. And...