Reading Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot and A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance
I first read A.S. Byatt’s Possession more than 20 years ago. I remember reading it night after night in the middle of a winter snowstorm in a house in Connecticut I no longer own. Each night I read until I was too tired to keep my eyes open. At first, fixated on the plot: the slow unfolding literary mystery about the relationship between Randolph Henry Ash and Christobel LaMotte, two poets hatched in A.S. Byatt’s extraordinarily fertile imagination. I became as obsessed with finding out what the novel’s protagonist, Roland Michell, would discover about the poets’ relationship as he was, and as attached to the outcome as Maud Bailey soon would be. As the parallel love story between Michell and Bailey intertwined with the romance between Ash and LaMotte, I rooted for both pairs of lovers and railed against the others arrayed to defeat them, including, sometimes, the lovers themselves. I loved the language, the humor, and the parody at the heart of the novel, as much as I loved the story itself.
I decided to read the book again three years ago. By then, I’d started to write my own historical novel, Cities of Women, and thought reading Possession more closely would help me with problems of structure. The second time I read the novel less focused on story and more on how the book was put together. I wanted to understand how the author was able to interweave so effectively a contemporary story with one from a century earlier. I paid attention to voice more than character, and to the use of various devices, such as the invented poetry and letters, to carry the plot forward.
The second reading helped me think through how to create scene and authenticate place and time. I came away overwhelmed by the sheer inventiveness of Byatt’s prose and language. I also missed a lot more I didn’t even know I’d missed until I read Baxter’s The Art of Subtext. I’d missed the literary strategies Byatt used to signal the underground of the novel, its subtext. I had been pulled by the novel “in the direction of the unsaid and unseen” (Baxter 36) without recognizing how that had happened.
“A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.” (Baxter 35-6) Behind the literal story, or foreground, of what is happening in the novel exists the story’s “true subject” (Baxter 29) or subtext (Baxter 3). The subtext exists beyond plot in the “realm of what haunts the imagination: the implied, the half-visible, and the unspoken” (Baxter 3); it is a “subterranean realm with...overcharged psychological materials” (Baxter 3). A story’s subtext is the sound of its “ghosts moaning from beneath the floor” (Baxter 5)
How does a writer make those ghosts moan or show what cannot be seen or heard? To answer this question, Baxter offers a detailed explication of the elements of craft involved in the creation of character, setting, scene, action, and dialogue, which enable a writer to evoke subtext or disclose the story’s unstated true subject. Throughout each of the chapters, he provides close readings of literary examples to illustrate various strategies of staging, or what he calls the “micro-detailing” of scene writing that can lift a story “out of the literal into the unspoken” (Baxter 14).
As someone who has worked in theater as a playwright and a producer, I found Baxter’s theatrical metaphor of “staging” to be an immensely helpful way to explain the elements of craft with which to evoke subtext. In an intricately staged story, the writer is not only a writer, but also a director (Baxter 94). By placing the characters in conflict-ridden scenes, in a specific setting, at a specific distance from each other, speaking dialogue in a specifically inflected way, shifting tone, denying or filtering what is being said, gesturing toward characters’ interior life through facial expressions and body language, the writer directs the reader to the story’s underworld of emotional complexity. I thought about all this as I read Possession for a third time and, for the first time, understood how Byatt had intimated the story’s subtext with cleverly placed, elaborate details.
“Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble...readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently, or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know or how” (Byatt 512). The first time I read Byatt’s novel, I highlighted the entire paragraph in which this passage appears, along with the entire paragraph before it. To me, these paragraphs expressed a reader’s experience of the sublime in literature “as though the words were living creatures or stones of fire” (Byatt 512). Byatt differentiated this kind of experience from the possessive approach to literature, life, and love she parodied in the approach to literature of various academic characters she’d created, who were pursuing the LaMotte/Ash letters. Now, after reading Possession for the third time through the lens of Baxter’s exposition of the art of subtext, I saw how Byatt used color, gesture, action, and scene to elaborate the “intense pleasure of reading” (511) and to evoke in the reader a sense of what the story is really about: sometimes when you get what you think you want/desire, you might lose what you really want/desire. (“Roland’s find had turned to be a sort of loss” (Byatt 510)).
Baxter describes the importance of setting as a staging area for character. Through detailed descriptions of where he is and how he feels about where he is, Byatt immediately establishes Roland Michell as a kind of plodding scholar. We first meet Roland in the Reading Room of the London library, “Roland’s favorite place” (Byatt 4). He has seated himself at the “small single table he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high sunny window, through which you see the high green leaves of St. James Square” (Byatt 4). He is in a stuffy library through which the green world is visible. He takes copious notes, meditating “on the tiresome and bewitching endlessness of the quest for knowledge” (Byatt 7).
Roland is disappointed and stuck, and his being stuck—at a job with no future, in a cramped, claustrophobic apartment “in the basement of a decaying Victorian house” (Byatt 11), living with a woman he no longer really loves—has compromised his appreciation of the literature he is studying: poetry. Byatt’s descriptions make the reader feel the lifelessness in Roland’s scholarship; he’s bored with his life. Only when he discovers letters hidden in a book by Vico kept in Ash’s collection is he “seized by a strange and uncharacteristic impulse of his own” (Byatt 10), an impulse that breathes new life into his otherwise dreary existence. For the rest of the novel, he becomes obsessed (possessed by?) a quest for what he thinks he wants: no longer to feel like a scholarly failure, no longer to live a dinghy life.
I think the novel’s subtext is about what Roland and Maud “actually want but can’t own up to” (Baxter 37). Although written in a scene featuring Mortimer Cropper, Byatt gestures in the direction of this subtext with the following: “All of us have things in our lives which we know in this brief, useful allusive way, and neglect deliberately to explore” (Byatt 118). Roland and Maud want to possess the letters to settle (possess) the story of the meaning of the relationship between Ash and LaMotte. These love letters symbolize what they can’t own up to wanting themselves: they both want love. Yet, at another level, the subtext is also about “the discrepancy” (Baxter 37) between what Roland and Maud say they have wanted and what they actually get.
They tell each other how much they have always wanted solitude, wanted to be alone, unencumbered, which Byatt expresses with the metaphor of wanting a clean, white bed. Love is part of “all the things we grew up not believing in” (Byatt 550), Roland says near the end of the novel. Yet, love is what they get in the end. “In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell...a green smell...It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful” (Byatt 551).
Thinking about what Baxter wrote about “character wants” as starting points for plot and how wants are connected to subtext prompted me to think about Verity and Beatrice, the two main characters in my novel, one modern and one ancient. What do they want? Will they get what they want or something else? At first, Verity seems to be searching for truth and Beatrice for beauty. Eventually, these two impulses converge in a quest for the sublime.
The glittering images in the illuminated manuscripts are central to the story because they are more than simply beautiful objects. They signify what lies hidden behind them: the power of the collaborative work that produced them. Verity’s discovery of Beatrice’s significance to Christine de Pizan’s work triggers her realization that, even if she does not succeed in convincing the scholarly world of the accuracy of her discovery, the friendship between Beatrice and Christine she uncovered through her research ultimately rejuvenates and fulfills her. My novel’s “true subject” or subtext is the human search for company, for connection.
WORKS CITED
Byatt, A.S.. Possession: A Romance. Vintage, 2000.
Baxter, Charles. The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. Graywolf Press, 2007.