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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26184
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26184
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

First, I think we need to make a distinction here between what we might call Easter eggs -- little in jokes of the sort of which Stephen Moffat and his cronies are particularly fond. Sherlock and Dr. Who are full of these, and they encourage the fandom to go looking for more, finding many were I am sure none were intended.

This is all quite different from subtext, which is the broader intention of the text. Thus in _Oliver Twist_, the subtext is a condemnation of the workhouse system. In _The Once and Future King_ (I'm with Lin Carter in regarding this, not LOTR, as the greatest fantasy novel of the 20th century) Merlyn educates the Wart by turning him into various animals where he learns about their various social systems, from the totalitarian thought control of the ant colony to the libertarianism of the wild geese. Each one of these stories has a subtext about the nature of human societies. There is also a progression in them in which the Wart's future as King Arthur, and the trials of his office are foreshadowed. They combine fancy and delight with a growing weight of responsibility and doom. All this is subtext beneath simple animal fables.

The big difference between Easter eggs and subtext is that Easter eggs are smaller than the story while the subtext is larger than the story. An Easter egg can be added or subtracted from a story without changing it fundamentally. But with a subtext, the story exists at all only to support and express the subtext. The subtext is why you write the story in the first place.

The relationship between story and subtext is, I think, one of the most important ones in literature. Nominally, the subtext could be expressed in an essay. It is an argument about politics or philosophy or psychology or theology or metaphysics and can be argued plainly as such. Why do we then cloth our subtext in story? Because by doing so we humanize the argument. At the political level, we feel sympathy for Oliver Twist in a way we do not feel sympathy for a statistic. At a philosophical level, TH White can express the contrast of the beauty and inexpressible kindness of the world with its limitless cruelty and the futility of even the most virtuous and well meaning striving, in far more concrete and moving terms through the career, loves, and doom of Arthur, in a way no mere essay could ever capture.

So, subtext first, then text, then Easter eggs. Or, to put it another way, if a novel were a cupcake, the cake is the subtext, the structure which holds everything up, the icing it the text, the story, which attracts the eye, and the Easter eggs are the sprinkles on top.

Not every story has a subtext, of course. Many are no more than a yarn, and there is nothing wrong with a yarn. Many other works strive to have a subtext but fail to keep it sub. It bursts out in little aggrieved essays or didactic passages which both bore and spoil the story.

The other important thing about subtexts is that they are not hidden. Yes, the author must be careful not to have them break out and become super-textual, but at the same time, they are not trying to conceal their meaning or intent. They are saying what the want to say as clearly as they can (or as clearly as the prevailing censorship regime will let them) while maintaining the clothing of story on which the engagement of human sympathy depends.

The reason we have to explain subtext to students of literature today is not that the authors were hiding their subtext, but that the modern student of literature is not familiar with either the specific conditions or the time and place in which the author wrote, nor with the stories and the allusions which the author used to express their meaning as clearly as they could to their contemporaries.

Easter eggs, on the other hand, are intentionally hidden as part of game the author is playing with the reader, challenging them to prove they are as clever as the author is.

Original score: 6