Texts

All good fiction is layered. In fact, for me personally, this is what distinguishes good fiction from amateurish fiction. It's a skill I have yet to fully grasp: In every good piece of literature or other fiction, there is more to the work than what we see first-hand.

This is actually quite a simple concept to grasp - although there's certainly enough information that it will doubtless take a while to absorb it all - but generations of literary analysts and English teachers have managed to wrap the simple concept in some wonderfully complicated words. In the typical fashion of long words used by English teachers, despite making the subject more complicated, these do manage to give us a deeper look into the various layers.

Text Structure

The basic structure of text and its surrounding texts is roughly as follows. From most "external" at the top to most "internal" at the bottom:

Paratext

v

Metatext

v

Text

v

Subtext

What is Text?

Obviously to understand all of the weird names, we need to understand the base around which they're built. It's not particularly complicated most of the time. In books it's easy. The "text" is everything that we see written in a book that is part of the book itself - everything we are explicitly told.

In scripts and screenplays, the definition gets a bit wobbly. Some people insist that the text of a script is everything written down in the script itself. Others, however, insist that since the script is meant to be performed on stage, only the spoken words of the characters are text.

This line becomes even more blurred with actual performance. Obviously in a movie or television series there is no "text" per se, but we still use the word to describe what we see. The most common point of view - though not by any means a universally accepted one - is that the text comprises everything we, the audience, actually see.

Metatext

The text about the text.

Metatext is everything directly related to a work that is not part of a work itself. Note that, despite the fancy italic tagline above, it is not enough for it to be merely about a work - it must be intrinsically linked to the work, normally giving information about it, without strictly being a part of the "text" itself.

For a book, this could mean footnotes, annotations, and so on. Some people consider the stage directions in a play to be metatext, while others consider them part of the text itself. Things like character notes for the actors and director, however, or notes on stage design for productions of the play, are certainly metatext. Even movies have metatext: Think of the text scrolling across the bottom of the screen telling you where and when this scene is taking place, or the various overlays placed over the film to show that the scene is being viewed with binoculars, for example, or from a handheld camera.

Metatext is useful because it adds depth to the work. This does two things: Firstly, it helps pull the reader or watcher into the world of the story, ensuring their suspension of disbelief and making the story more real to them. Secondly, and this is not to be disregarded, it lets the writer(s) show off all their fancy research and/or the work they've put into building the world surrounding the story.

Paratext

The text surrounding the text.

Paratext is everything about a work of fiction that does not form "part of" the work itself. The term encompasses a broad spectrum of things: Everything from the title or blurb of a book, to movie posters and trailers, to (according to some) previews and reviews of the work.

Paratext doesn't contribute to the story itself, but it does serve one important role: It brings in audiences, be they readers or cinema-goers. It's a quirk of the human psyche which is the core of modern marketing: A catchy title, engrossing tagline, or well-designed poster can bring more people to a work of fiction that actually making the fiction a little better for the same total investment of money and time.

Subtext

The text beneath the text

Subtext is really the odd one out in this lineup, because it does not, in the strictest sense, exist. When someone tells you to "read between the lines", they're telling you to read the subtext. Subtext is the meaning that is not written down, and it is absolutely essential to fiction. In fact, the ability to quickly and easily grasp subtext is the hallmark not only of a good writer, but of a good reader as well. Many great works of fiction seem incomprehensible or pointless if you only take them at face value. The subtext of these works often holds more meaning than the text itself - although whether this makes the work a work of genius or insufferably impenetrable depends on who you ask.

Subtext is also far more integral to good fiction than meta- and paratext. A book can exist without a blurb or a review, but without any meaning beneath the text of the book, it's ultimately just a wall of writing. Subtext is also far more complex than the metatext and paratext I've discussed above. In fact, there are many subtypes which we group together under the name "subtext":

Contextual Subtext

Subtext about what, when, where and so on

The most basic form of subtext, contextual subtext is everything that we can deduce about the environment (the context) of the story's events without actually being told. This means things like the time of day, or the location of a story. For example, if a conference room is introduced early in the story, and its description includes a distinctive mahogany conference table, any reference to a mahogany table in a later scene implies that the scene is set in the same conference room, even if we're never explicitly told that.

Likewise certain other things. For example, imagine a TV series involving a team of forensics experts. Working in the lab, Expert A, a DNA specialist, discovers something of importance to the investigation. Cut to the next scene: Expert B, an interrogator, is telling a suspect about the new evidence. We don't actually see Expert A telling Expert B this information, but the implication is that this happened; it's certainly unlikely that the interrogation expert discovered the information himself.

Character Subtext

Subtext about what characters think

The most basic rule of good fiction is good characters. "Good characters" means, quite simply, more than one dimension: There is more to the characters than meets the eye. This "more" is exactly what character subtext is.

There's a somewhat overquoted piece of writing advice which applies to all subtext, but particularly to this: "Show, don't tell." Rarely in a piece of good fiction will we be told that a person is easily irritated; instead, we will be shown them getting irritated in a situation that normally wouldn't be irritating. Likewise with relationships: Instead of being told that Angela and Bruce have a rocky marriage, we'll see them having a marital spat.

Character subtext also refers to the dimensions of a character which we never see: Their thoughts and feelings, and how they react internally to what's happening around them. In almost all books, we only know the characters (perhaps excluding a single viewpoint character) from their actions. The assumptions we make about the causes for those actions are the subtext: We're never told, for example, that so-and-so intensely dislikes office politics, but we can clearly see it in the way they behave. Furthermore, we might be able to make assumptions about the reasons for this dislike if we observe their actions closely enough.

This enhances the characters in two ways: Firstly, it's easier for us to believe what we see than what we're told by a narrator or another character - especially since unreliable characters and even unreliable narrators are increasingly popular devices in modern fiction. Secondly, giving characters more depth makes them more real to us, allowing us to be drawn into the concerns and emotions of the characters themselves.

"Supertext"

Subtext which overarches, not underlies, the text

Not all subtext is strictly "between the lines". Some, you could say, is actually a lot bigger than the lines. I'm calling it "supertext" because it sounds cool and I've never actually heard a name for it. This is stuff like themes or plot arcs - the meaning which hovers over the entire story.

Look at the theatre classic The Crucible by Arthur Miller. It was written around the time of the McCarthy trials, an infamous miscarriage of justice, and it was written by a victim of this miscarriage of justice. It was written about the Salem witch trials, another infamous miscarriage of justice. The two are never explicitly linked, but the connection is clear. The same thing occurs throughout fiction.

Why We Have Them

All of the various texts don't exist arbitrarily. In the world of fiction, anything superfluous tends to die off quickly, but all of these have been around in some form or another from the very beginning of fiction. Folk stories, the very first fiction, have text, metatext (the storyteller's comments on the story), paratext ("I tell you what, kids. Sit quietly, and I'll tell you a really great story tomorrow."), and subtext (for starters, the moral intent of the story). All of these survived even until today.

The reason they survived is because ultimately they make the story more real to us, and that is the hallmark of truly brilliant fiction: That just for a moment, we can abandon our conscious disbelief and lose ourselves in a world where anything and everything is possible.