The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot (Art of...)

I selected this book on a recommendation from a magazine and it has become a well worn reference in my library of how-to books. I recommend reading it through fast as you can, to get a feel for the concept. Then read it again for the depth. Subtexting sounds very techincal and cold, but the concept is anything but.

I was inspiried by the book and base my plot planning and character development on this concept for every project. Subtext is a writer's secret weapon. I recommend every writer take heed.

Harmonics, A Dark and Stormy Knight, Orphan Records

Subtext is that elusive detail that can make or break your story....It is that little extra....Charles Baxter has the subject covered in an easy to read fashion..Will help you put that "extra" in your work to catch a publisher's or production company's eye....

In The Art of Subtext, Minneapolis novelist Charles Baxter has gone well beyond other books on the writing of prose fiction. Baxter believes that fictional techniques work when they are rooted in basic cultural assumptions; therefore, his technical advice comes from a provocative meditation on who we are today. He asks why, for instance, writers no longer introduce characters with lengthy verbal portraits of their faces. To summarize Baxter crudely, it is because in a world of makeovers and simulations, we no longer trust appreances. The techniques by which an author creates subtext are important precisely because in our culture truth itself has gone underground. The Art of Subtext is published by Graywolf Press.

It is plenty easy to talk about beginnings, middles, and endings, about point of view, about writing with clarity or writing with verve or writing with meter in mind. And we can, again with ease, talk the talk we usually talk about round versus flat characters, and how this writer or that one achieves roundness, say, in a major character, by way of the contradictions the character holds in tension, or in a minor character by some telling and complicating detail that exists in tension with the role that character is playing. And we can invoke Henry James and E.M. Forster and Percy Lubbock--all the usual suspects--and in so doing impart the wisdom we've all long been imparting to one another about point of view and the relationship between plot and character and the urgent need (reader's as much as writer's) for something to matter deeply to the character.

And all of these wisdoms are wise, and even though so precious few of us do them well, it's not terribly difficult to learn something about what they mean, and in so doing use them to make competent stories that show something about something, and that carry with them the added virtue (and it is a virtue) of not being boring.

The problem, though, is that, as Francine Prose recently took an entire book to explicate, there are a whole lot of near-universally lauded stories and novels that couldn't care less about some or all of this easy-to-discuss wisdom, and which nonetheless are possessed of that elusive magic that elevates story to lasting literature, on account of something that does something difficult to articulate.

We've moved, in other words, out of the realm of the Aristotelian Unities (at least in the most reductive interpretation of the same), and into the realm of Anton Chekhov and William Trevor and much late-model Alice Munro. Those writers for whom the word subtlety is invoked either as blessing or hellfire-and-damnation. The head-scratchers, as a usually charitable friend liked to uncharitably characterize them.

Literary critics have long had much to say about these writers and their works, and writers have long admired them, but there has been a dearth of intelligible assessments by writers about how these stories manage to imply and embody so much more than their size would seem to accommodate. Into this breach steps one Charles Baxter, whose exploration of subtext attempts, to quote the introduction, "to demonstrate how to think about the unthinkable," and "show you how to see the unseen."

The key to seeing this unseen, Baxter shows the reader, is a careful study of story's surface, and he offers a critical toolbox. There is a chapter on the revelation of character through dramatic placement, which uses "parallel darknesses" in the Basque novelist Bernado Atxaga's Obabakoak as a lens through which to see more clearly how subtext rises from complications of metaphor, which themselves rise from a multiplicity of surface details--"hyperdetailing" is what Baxter calls it, in a profitable digression on Frost's "Home Burial"--and a deep and sustained attention to them. The burden, clearly, is on the reader, to gaze into the hyperdetailing as deeply as the story means to allow the reader to do, but the writer keeps up his or her end of the contract by placing the character or characters in a position of special discomfort, so that they are "forced through desperate circumstances to gaze upon the world in an abnormally attentive way."

One thing Baxter seems to be noticing, here, is the thing that narratologists have been telling us for a long time, which is that the imposition of narrative is in some regards an arbitrary pursuit, given the steady stream of information that bombards us daily. For some writers, this presents an opportunity to do something mimetic in the story, by way of a corollary bombardment of detail "in pursuit of meanings that words and objects will yield to when used as means but not as ends."

Here one is reminded of the Edward P. Jones novel The Known World, in which one character might be abandoned mid-breath for another whose story does not necessarily dovetail with that of the character in whom story had invited us to invest our emotional energies, at which point the reader realizes that the possible number of stories is at least as great as the number of characters that populate any given scene, and that the privileging of one above the other might be little more than another manifestation of the self-service to which humankind seems excessively prone.

Successive chapters tackle "how fiction writers pay attention to the way people no longer pay attention," the distance and tension between what a character wants and what a character says he or she wants, "how to think about the unheard," reading and writing inflection, the virtue of ignoring mother's advice against "making a scene," and the near-lost art of portraiture, by which Baxter means, quite literally, the rendering of the physical face.

Space does not allow much more talk about Baxter's explications, but that's probably for the better, because The Art of Subtext operates in a manner similar to what it advocates, by way of an accumulation of detail, and by careful arrangement of what is shown, so it would take a review the length of the book to begin to approximate the singular argument the book has made by book's end. This is a critical triumph, to be sure, but also an aesthetic one. Like Baxter's earlier volume Burning Down the House, The Art of Subtext is a profound and necessary service to reader and writer alike.

(this review originally appeared in Pleiades)

Baxter offers a beautifully written, unique perspective on a topic (subtext) that is rarely covered effectively in writing guides. His book reads like an extended essay and provides concrete examples of the various aspects of subtext. He goes beyond craft and succeeds in uncovering the mechanics of the art of writing. This book would be enjoyed by those who are seriously interested in the art/craft of writing and are also well-read. Baxter's approach is intellectual, philosophical and profound. Not your basic soup to nuts approach but more suited to the thoughtful writer/reader.