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. “Baxter is smart about all aspects of craft.” ― The Corresponder “A wonderful new volume about writing that's also about reading and the ways we make meaning in our lives.” ― The Observer CHARLES BAXTER is the author of ten books, including The Feast of Love , a finalist for the National Book Award, and Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction . He teaches at the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis. The Art of Subtext Beyond Plot By Charles Baxter Graywolf Press Copyright © 2007 Charles Baxter All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-55597-473-2 Contents Introduction, The Art of Staging, Digging the Subterranean, Unheard Melodies, Inflection and the Breath of Life, Creating a Scene, Loss of Face, CHAPTER 1 The Art of Staging Books sometimes fall into your hands in the oddest ways. Meeting up with a particular work of literature may have an eeriness of occasion that resembles an accident that is not really accidental. Bernardo Atxaga's novel Obabakoak, for instance, was recommended to me late one night in a Barcelona restaurant after much conversation and a great deal of wine. I wrote down this curious title on a sodden piece of paper and put it into my wallet. For the next month, every time I tried to get out some dollar bills or a picture ID, my note with the stuttering cryptic word "Obabakoak" printed on it would drop out and fall to the floor. Time and again, I would pick it up and put it back into my wallet. Time and again, the piece of paper, still smelling of wine, would reappear. After some hunting on the web — the book is out of print in the United States — I finally obtained a copy, and soon after I did, the piece of paper obligingly disappeared from my wallet. Obabakoak is a wonderfully peculiar novel. Written originally in the Basque language and published in 1988, then translated into Spanish by the author and subsequently translated from its Spanish version into English by Margaret Jull Costa and published in this country by Pantheon in 1992, it was yanked out of print a few years later. Such was the obstacle course in the American literary marketplace for a book whose specialty is a kind of intimate, wry muttering. (One of its chapter headings is titled, "How to Plagiarize.") Early on in Obabakoak — the title refers to the goings-on in the Basque village of Obaba — we are introduced to a character named Esteban Werfell. At the same time and in the same paragraph we are also introduced to the library where he writes. Esteban is a literary type, and he is surrounded on all four walls by about twelve thousand leather-bound volumes, some of them his own purchases and some of them his father's. In this room, among all these books, there is one window. ... a window through which, while he wrote, Esteban Werfell could see the sky, the willows, the lake and the little house built there for the swans in the city's main park. Without really impinging on his solitude, the window made an inroad into the darkness of the books and mitigated that other darkness which often creates phantoms in the hearts of men who have never quite learned how to live alone. Esteban's inner life is singularly like the room in which he sits. The parallelism is exact. The scene includes two complementary darknesses, the first a non-metaphorical darkness and the second being "that other darkness," the shadowy psychic world of Esteban Werfell's self-imposed imaginative conditioning that he shares with other men "who have never quite learned how to live alone." This community defined by solitude invites a party of phantasms and should be familiar to most writers and readers as the locale of emotional and cognitive associations. The literal window makes an "inroad" on the literal darkness, and its view of willows and lake and swan house eases Esteban's soul without touching his isolation. The willows and the sky and the swan house constitut