The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot
by Charles Baxter
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charles BaxterEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-07-24
ISBN: 1555974732
Number of pages: 120
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Book Reviews of The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot
Book Review: How To Think About the Unthinkable
Summary: 5 Stars
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)
Summary of The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot
Charles Baxter inaugurates The Art of, a new series on the craft of writing, with the wit and intelligence he brought to his celebrated book Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction.
Fiction writer and essayist Charles Baxter?s The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot discusses and illustrates the hidden subtextual overtones and undertones in fictional works haunted by the unspoken, the suppressed, and the secreted. Using an array of examples from Melville and Dostoyevsky to contemporary writers Paula Fox, Edward P. Jones, and Lorrie Moore, Baxter explains how fiction writers create those visible and invisible details, how what is displayed evokes what is not displayed.
The Art of Subtext is part of The Art of series, a new line of books by important authors on the craft of writing, edited by Charles Baxter. Each book examines a singular, but often assumed or neglected, issue facing the contemporary writer of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. The Art of series means to restore the art of criticism while illuminating the art of writing.
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