The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot by Charles Baxter

Author:Charles Baxter [Baxter, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Reference, Writing
ISBN: 9781555970963
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2007-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

At the end of this speech, the author notes that Addie turns her eyes toward Marian, eyes that have gone bright. “This old woman,” the author notes, “was looking at her with despair and calculation in her face.” We then get an image of her false teeth and tan gums.

“‘Come here, I want to tell you something,’ she whispered. “‘Come here!’”

Marian is frightened, we’re told, and her heart nearly stops beating for a moment. Then Addie’s companion says, “‘Now, now, Addie. . . . That’s not polite.’”

This scene, packed with seemingly contradictory emotions, throws into a blender Marian’s fascination and terror, Addie’s despair and calculation, her companion’s fake sentimentality and cynicism—the scene is a mixture of despairing comedy, pathos, terror, and metaphysical giddiness. These elements are built into Addie’s speech through the repetitive use of words like “empty,” “talk,” and “stranger,” and the use of carefully deployed dashes and pauses. And they are then cemented by the brilliant tag following the speech, noting that Addie is now turning toward Marian with despair and calculation on her face. Addie is not feeling one thing. She is feeling several emotions at once. One of them makes her pitiable, the other makes her dangerous. We then learn that today happens to be Addie’s birthday.

As if this weren’t enough, when Marian leaves, the nameless woman (the other half of this terrible octogenarian tragicomic vaudeville team) who has been playing the straight woman to Addie’s riffs of calculation and despair, this nameless woman then goes into a riff of her own. “In an affected, high-pitched whine she cried, ‘Oh, little girl, have you a penny to spare for a poor old woman that’s not got anything of her own? We don’t have a thing in the world—not a penny for candy—not a thing! Little girl, just a nickel—a penny—’”

The “affected, high-pitched whine” notation tells us that this woman may have fallen into a moment of senile dementia. Or, more likely, she may be playing a role for her own amusement to scare and disconcert Marian, or maybe to get some money out of her. Like the woman in Katherine Anne Porter’s scene, Welty’s old woman is theatricalizing her own situation and speech. But no reader, I suspect, can be sure exactly what the tone is, and our uncertainty parallels the uncertainty that Marian must feel. You can see clearly and distinctly what you see, but you simply can’t be sure of what you’re looking at.

The scene presents these women, as Samuel Beckett does his tramps, with all the complicity of art, of realism flying off into the metaphysical and then flying back. The scene’s feeling-tone can’t be described in one word. What’s going on is too overdetermined for that.

Much can be said for the uses to which the opposite—an uninflected voice—may be employed. Zombie voicings in literature may well echo our current conditions, particularly the bureaucratic ones, better than the hot-to-the-touch effects of inflection. There is something about uninflectedness that suits trauma, and data fatigue, and anonymity, very well.

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