This brief book examines those elements that propel readers beyond the plot of a novel or short story into the realm of what haunts the imagination: the implied, the half-visible, and the unspoken. That subterranean realm with its overcharged psychological materials is often designated as the subtext of a story. To discuss subtexts at first appears to be a hopelessly contradictory mission. It's like saying, "I am about to show you how to show the unseen." Or: "I wish to demonstrate how to think about the unthinkable."
Between stagings and subtexts a bewildering relation seems to exist. Writers must often use a staggering amount of surface bric-à-brac to suggest an indistinct presence underneath that surface. The stronger the presence of the unspoken and unseen, the more seemingly gratuitous details seem to be required, a proliferation that signifies a world both solid and haunted. What is displayed evokes what is not displayed, like a party where the guests discuss, at length, those who are not in attendance; we have all been to such parties. In this context the word "haunted" is probably apt. Our most haunting dreams, no matter how hallucinatory, are the most busily etched. The details themselves signal belief-weight, the gravity of a vision that can't be shrugged off—think of the hyperdetailing in The Garden of Earthly Delights, to take one example from visual art. That table in a nightmare comes complete with a frightening particularity. Its solidity and substance—its black sheen, its five asymmetrical corners, its immovable weight—attest to conviction and a kind of interior truth.
In fiction, the half-visible and the unspoken—all those subtextual matters—are evoked when the action and dialogue of the scene angle downward, when by their multiplicity they imply as much as they show. A slippery surface causes you to skid into the subtext.
In such writing, the reader slips beyond plot into another dimension. To take the reader into that critical twilight zone, that landscape haunted by the unseen, I have sought to illustrate the way the subtext—the unspoken soul-matter—is evoked in a story by discussing how characters reveal themselves through dramatic placement ("The Art of Staging"); what subtexts are made of and how they're brought to the surface ("Digging the Subterranean"); how fiction writers pay attention to the way people no longer pay attention ("Unheard Melodies"); how inflections take us, by means of tonal shifts, out of the literal and into the metaphorical and the suggestive ("Inflection and the Breath of Life"); how characters lose their surface-level self-possession ("Creating a Scene"); and, finally, how the face serves as a semi-reliable guide to those subsurface feelings whenever the mask appears to fall, or to fail ("Loss of Face"). Writers on the lookout for practical advice might find these examples suggestive, or, with luck, inspiring.
For the most part, I've chosen examples from fiction with which most readers should be familiar. And my critical approach has a certain retro quality here and there. In my earlier book of critical essays, Burning Down the House, I was eager to reintroduce an element of performative drama into criticism—criticism, the dreariest of the arts—by means of unsubstantiated generalizations and half-legitimated claims asserted at high volume. Here it seemed best to perform a few close readings, acting out the role of the critic-as-sleuth. The close readings seemed unavoidable in a discussion of texts haunted by their subtexts. Think of these essays, then, as the reports of a private investigator, examining a few stories with a magnifying glass, looking for the secret panel, the hidden stairway, the lovingly concealed dungeon, and the ghosts moaning from beneath the floor.