Theorizing Dual Progression: Some Questions for Dan Shen

Abstract

I'm flattered that Dan Shen identifies her work on dual narrative movements as an extension of my efforts to theorize progression, but I declare upfront that I do not have any proprietary claim on that concept or on the broader rhetorical narratology underlying Dan's inquiries. Let a thousand flowers bloom in the expanding rhetorical field! And let individual gardeners cut and cull the results as they deem best. That said, since Dan and John V. Knapp asked for my views, I'm happy to offer them, for whatever they're worth. I find that the flowers Dan has planted deserve to be nourished, even as I pose questions about possible ways to redirect their growth.I endorse Dan's project for intertwined practical and theoretical reasons. On the practical side, authors have constructed important narratives with dual progressions. Even if we set aside for now the status of any of the narratives Dan discusses, we can point to such indisputable cases as Nella Larsen's Passing, with its overt story of racial passing and its covert one of sexual-identity passing (see Rabinowitz), and the anonymous “Female Ingenuity,” memorably analyzed by Susan S. Lanser as she launched feminist narratology, with its overt story of marital happiness and covert story of marital distress. Ian McEwan's Atonement offers a fascinating variation because the overt/covert relationship is as much about the nature of the telling as about the told: its first three parts are overtly marked as only McEwan's novel, but the final part (overtly) reveals that they are simultaneously and covertly Briony's novel (see Phelan, Experiencing 109–32, for a discussion of the consequences of this revelation). Since dual progressions are a thing, a comprehensive rhetorical theory needs to give an adequate account of them. Drawing on her notable skills as a close reader and a careful logician, Dan offers important steps toward that account: a clear definition of covert progression (“a hidden dynamic paralleling, at a deeper level, the … overt dynamic throughout the text” [Shen, “‘Covert Progression’” 2]); a taxonomy of relations between the covert and the overt; fifteen theses about how to identify covert progressions and their effects; a consideration of how dual progressions entail other dualities of narrative elements.I find three claims central to Dan's account: Covert progressions run parallel to rather than being integrated with overt plots. This claim underlies the way Dan differentiates her views from those of other theorists of “deeper meaning” such as David H. Richter (on covert plot), Armine Kotin Mortimer (on second story), and Kelly Marsh (on submerged plot). These theorists, in Dan's view, see the second layer as ultimately becoming part of the primary one, while she sees that layer as a separate movement.Covert progressions either complement or subvert overt plots, though the specifics of the complementarity or subversion can vary from narrative to narrative.Narratives with dual movements entail multiple other dualities, including those involving event structures, characterization, and implied authors (IAs) and authorial audiences (AAs). My main questions are about (1) the dualities of authors and audiences in claim #3 and (2) how to determine whether a reader's discovery of a covert progression is part of an authorial design. In addition, my question about dualities will lead to questions about claims #1 and #2.About the IA, Dan writes, “in a narrative with dual dynamics, instead of inviting readers to infer one image of the implied author, the text invites readers to infer two contrastive or even opposed images … from the two narrative movements” (“‘Covert Progression’” 22). About the AA, she writes, “Corresponding to the dual image of the IA, there are two contrastive or opposed positions of the ‘authorial audience.’ In Mansfield's ‘Revelations,’ the authorial audience position for the overt plot is non-feminist and that for the covert progression is feminist” (22). Dan's formulations logically follow from the claim that dual movements are parallel, and they capture the idea that an actual reader who recognizes the two tracks will be following authorial invitations in each track.But isn't there an agent who constructs the two tracks of movement, and an audience who recognizes that agent and their dual-track communications? Should we be talking about three images of the IA—or, as I would suggest, a single overarching one? Should we be talking about three AAs—or, again as I would suggest, a single overarching one? In “Revelations,” why not call the authorial agent responsible for constructing the two movements the implied Mansfield—and recognize that those movements don't have separate and distinct IAs? Similarly, why not identify the audience position from which one can perceive both the feminist and the nonfeminist movements as that of the AA?Consider responses of possible actual readers. The actual reader who perceives only the nonfeminist plot and the actual reader who perceives only the feminist countermovement would each overlook a significant part of the narrative communication, and, thus, by definition, not be full members of the AA. In order to signal that such readers are responding to part of the communication, we may want to designate them as “stuck-in the-primary” or “stuck-in-the-secondary” readers, respectively. We can add that in “Revelations” (and in some other cases such as Passing and Atonement, though not in all, as “Female Ingenuity” indicates) such partial readings have some rhetorical merit. But if actual readers don't recognize both movements, they are missing crucial parts of the communication from IA to AA.On to ripple effects of this question about dualities. If we understand the IA and AA as similar to those in narratives without dual movements, should we give more emphasis to the interaction among the two textual patterns than to their parallelism?I find an unresolved tension in Dan's discussion of the parallelism between the two movements. On one hand, her contention that the movements are separate underwrites her delineation of dualities and her claims for what distinguishes her approach from those of other theorists of covert or submerged materials. On the other hand, in her discussions of both complementary and subversive relationships, she discusses how the movements affect each other. I infer that she would respond by saying that the movements are recognizably distinct but their presence in the same text inevitably produces mutual influence. Fair enough, but my question, then, is why not conclude that the singular IA crafts the two movements to interact so that they ultimately produce a single, albeit complex, progression?Furthermore, under what conditions should we designate one of the movements as “covert” (and hidden) rather “secondary” (and visible)? In Kafka's “The Judgment,” Dan notes that what she calls the covert progression takes up one-third of the story. In “Revelations,” Dan points to two striking passages early on as evidence of the implied Mansfield's feminist critique. Why call such salient material “covert”?Perhaps we should restrict the term and concept of covert progression to cases such as Passing, Atonement, “Female Ingenuity,” and, to take a contender from Dan's corpus that I'll discuss below, Kate Chopin's “Désirée's Baby,” in which the IA double-codes significant portions of the textual phenomena and invites the audience to initially focus on only one half of that coding? As Dan points out, in “The Judgment,” in “Revelations” and in many other cases, the IAs work by juxtaposing two different sets of textual phenomena rather than by having the same set signify in the service of two different movements. Since these different authorial strategies lead to noticeably different reading experiences for the AA (compare the experience of reading “Revelations” to that of reading “Female Ingenuity”), why not have our conceptual categories reflect that difference by reserving “overt/covert” for cases of double-coding and using some other distinction such as “primary/secondary” or “dominant/subordinate” for cases of juxtaposition?In turning to this question, I find Dan's analysis of Chopin's “Désirée's Baby” to be a useful test case. I cannot give the story the lengthy treatment Dan does (“Implied Author”), but I am less interested in offering a definitive reading than in modelling ways to assess hypotheses about covert progressions. In a rhetorical account of narrative construction, an IA uses the resources of storytelling (character, event, perspective, etc.) to shape story materials in some ways rather than others in the service of their larger purposes (see Somebody Telling). Another agent—say, a different IA or a shrewd reader—could take those same materials and shape them in different ways for different purposes. Thus, almost any hypothesis about a covert progression invites the question whether it has been constructed by the IA or the interpreter. On what basis might we decide?To answer, I pick up on Dan's reference to my interest in “recalcitrant materials,” that is, textual phenomena that resist an interpretive hypothesis. A persuasive interpretation either does not produce recalcitrant materials or shows that what may initially appear recalcitrant is actually compatible with its explanation. An interpretation that cannot persuasively account for recalcitrant material needs to be revised (or abandoned).With “Désirée's Baby,” Dan proposes that the implied Chopin double-codes two key sets of textual phenomena so that they simultaneously serve the purposes of the overt and covert progressions: (1) the racial identity of Armand Aubigny and his father (Black vs. white) and (2) their behavior toward their slaves (harsh vs. indulgent). This purported double-coding leads to an overt progression whose purpose is to indict the Southern racist system and a subversive covert progression whose purpose is to “[endorse] the white-dominated Southern racist system” (Shen, “‘Covert Progression’” 16). The message of this covert progression is that whites make “life gay for enslaved blacks and happy for free blacks,” while “black characters are guilty of racial discrimination, and it is only the black planter who oppresses black people” (“Implied Author” 290).Is there recalcitrance in the implied Chopin's shaping of her materials? I find none in the antiracist progression. The implied Chopin makes Armand's having Black blood while believing that he is white central to her antiracist purposes. She indicates that Armand's harsh behavior toward the slaves arises from a combination of his personal traits, beliefs about his identity, and his ideology: he has an “imperious and exacting nature” (175); believes that he is white; and is immersed in racist ideology. This combination fuels Armand's cruel rejection of Désirée and their son once Armand believes that they have Black blood. The implied Chopin then clinches the case for her antiracist position via her ironic ending, in which both Armand and her audience learn that he is of mixed race and thus the one responsible for his son's Blackness. As for Monsieur Aubigny, in order to set up that antiracist irony, the implied Chopin needs to motivate his marrying a Black woman. She supplies that motivation by giving him two main traits: a looser adherence to racist ideology than his son and the propensity to fall in love (which he also passes on to his son) “as if struck by a pistol shot” (173).When, however, I turn to the hypothesis that the implied Chopin shapes these same materials in the service of a racist progression, I find considerable recalcitrance. First, the implied Chopin includes Black characters who are not discriminatory toward other Black people. The most prominent is Armand's mother, who “adores” (178) him, but the implied Chopin also introduces the minor character Négrillon, characterized by Armand himself as a “great scamp” (175). More than that, she supplies no evidence that the slaves themselves are mistreating each other. (The explanation that the blood-behavior connection applies only to slave owners is implausible at best.) Even more recalcitrant is the implied Chopin's including details about Armand's behavior toward the slaves after he falls in love with Désirée: he treats them much the way his father did. If the implied Chopin wants covertly to signal that blood determines behavior, then she ought not to include these details. If, however, her purpose is to convey an antiracist position, then this inclusion works brilliantly: it shows that Armand's racism is stronger than his love for Désirée.In short, while Dan shows that the raw materials of “Désirée's Baby” can be shaped into a racist covert progression, we have reasons to question whether the implied Chopin is the agent of that shaping. An appropriate next step would be for Dan either to reclassify the story as not having dual movements or to attempt to show that what I regard as recalcitrance ultimately serves the implied Chopin's racist purposes. I would welcome such an attempt because it would contribute to the issue at stake here: how to distinguish between authorially designed and readerly constructed covert progressions.In conclusion, then, I applaud Dan's efforts to theorize dual progressions, and I hope that the questions I've raised can help advance the further development of her thinking.