Show and tell
Revealing backstory through objects and exposition
One of my regular assignments this semester is an “aesthetic blog” on various craft elements, completed at the end of each unit. I’ve decided to share a version of these blogs here. The post for the first two units can be found here and here. This unit, the third of six, focused on backstory.
I grew up in Minnesota, with an American father and and Irish mother. As a result, my Americanness—my Midwesternness, even—is fairly obvious wherever I am. It is there in my language and mannerisms; it is there when I answer basic questions about home and where I am from. In the U.S., I am American. In Ireland, I am American too.
Growing up, I took it for granted that my Irishness would be apparent to those around me, even if it took a bit longer for it to emerge. My mother’s voice carried an accent that, however indecipherable to me—it sounded, to my ears, no different from an American voice until I was well into high school—laid plain her roots to everyone else. I had only to wait for my peers or teachers to encounter her, to hear her speak, and this part of my family background—and, by extension, this part of me—would become clear.
But when I left home for college, I realized, for the first time, that it would be entirely possible for this part of myself to go wholly unarticulated. For it to remain hidden indefinitely. As a new adult, moving about with increasing independence in the world, I had a greater degree of control over what parts of myself I revealed, what parts I wove into the narrative I offered others. Each time I moved, each time I found myself in a new community, I confronted the same question: whether, when, how to reveal this part of myself to others.
Of course, this happens with other parts of ourselves too, aside from cultural or familial identity. Introductions to new people are interesting to me in part because they can’t contain everything, and so the person must make choices about what is most essential, most fitting to reveal first. But the real pleasure lies in the gradualness of learning who a person is, the way that the true introduction unfolds over time, a series of intended and unintended revelations that shape your understanding of them.
I’ve been thinking about this presentation of self—the way we disclose pieces of who we are over time—in relation to the problem of backstory in fiction writing. That is, how writing reveals “the pre-history of a moment, character, place, or thing within a story.”1
On the one hand, no one wants a dump of information at the start of a story, just as no one wants to exchange their full biographies when they meet for the first time. On the other hand, fiction depends upon some form of knowledge and intimacy with the characters, with the story itself.
How to reveal backstory artfully, then, is a necessary challenge.
Backstory through objects
My first instinct—stemming from the repeated creative writing directive “show don’t tell”—is to avoid exposition, to find ways to embed backstory into the narrative without stating it directly. To let it emerge from. . . well, elsewhere. The usual suspects, perhaps: dialogue, action, interiority.
Or, maybe, from objects.
In “Talking Forks,” Charles Baxter argues that objects have an inner life, an emotionality.2 The feelings ascribed to objects don’t correspond directly to character, but they can, in certain circumstances, reveal something of that character nonetheless. When a feeling is too large or intense or violent for a character to contain it, the surrounding objects and the setting become the site for that oversized emotion.
The attribution of human emotion to objects is what John Ruskin termed the pathetic fallacy. Ruskin believes that people err when they project their emotions into things. In Baxter’s explanation:
Ruskin is describing the distortion of perceptions that, he believes, occurs when someone has what he calls “violent feelings.” Violent feelings, he says, produce a “falseness in all our impressions of external things. . . Feelings. . . can be compared to things, but the separateness of the emotions and the things must be maintained. (68)
Baxter disagrees, noting that Ruskin’s views emerged at a particular moment in time, the late 19th century, when the rise of the novel as a dominant form led to delineations between fiction and poetry. “Poetry,” Baxter says, “was supposed to get the spirit, and fiction got the material world” (71), meaning that “the relationship between the inner life of human beings and the inner life of objects [became] almost exclusively a matter for poetry” (70). But such an assignation is arbitrary: Why should poetry get the spirit, the irrationally emotional objects? Why not fiction too?
In practice, of course, fiction writers ignore Ruskin’s mandate all the time, to great effect. Baxter spends a good amount of space pulling in examples of objects (and settings) in fiction that have been infused with emotionality: shirts in The Great Gatsby, the Ramsays’ summer home in To the Lighthouse, the glass menagerie that gives Tennessee Williams’s play its name. Baxter observes:
To write about such spiritual conditions, an author might do better to describe the furniture as a character sees it than to describe the consciousness of the person entering the room. How a person sees the things that surround him usually tells us more than an explicit description of his mood. The things carry the feeling. (73, emphasis mine)
It is not a fallacy to grant things these emotions in writing because we do, in fact, grant them emotion all the time.
Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” makes this plain.3 In this story, we’re introduced to the characters overwhelmingly by the objects they carry. The characters—American soldiers in Vietnam—carry a physically, but also emotionally, heavy load. The objects characterize them both as indistinguishable members of the troop (they all carry the same standard issue gear) and as individuals circumscribed into this role (their selection of additional items reveals their idiosyncracies in background, values, interiority).
The objects tells us about who these men were in their past, civilian lives, what parts of themselves they’re trying to carry with them into the war. Condoms, a diary, comic books, the New Testament. Dope, extra rations, a hatchet, a photo. But these past selves become burdensome, incompatible with the ever-erasing identity of “soldier.” The backstory, for these men, is simultaneously who they were, who they still are, and who they cannot be anymore.
The story begins with Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carrying letters from Martha, the girl he loves back at home—but who does not love him back. The first paragraph is mostly Jimmy Cross interacting with the letters. The care with which he handles them—wrapping them in plastic, washing his hands before holding them—imparts an emotionality to them. They hold Jimmy’s hope, fear, distractedness, longing, resignation.
The transition out of this first paragraph is abrupt. It ends with a kind of dreamy ambling: “At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin” (616). The second paragraph shifts tone and syntax bluntly: “The things they carried were largely determined by necessity” (616). And so begins a list of what the army has deemed as such, pages of equipment: “P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wrist watches. . .” (616). The unspoken commentary on the letters is: these are not necessary.
It’s a judgement that begins outside of Jimmy, but by the end of the story, he’s internalized it. One of his men is dead, and he blames it, in part, on his own distractedness. The feelings contained by the letters, which have now swollen to include guilt, are not only not necessary, they’re threatening. He burns the letters, admitting to himself as he does that it’s a pointless gesture. In the last few sentences, he deems love itself unnecessary: “Liutenant Cross reminded himself that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love; it was not now a factor” (632).
The letters and other objects do more than just convey backstory—this is a relatively small part of the work they do in the piece. But this last scene, anchored though it is in the present of the narrative, depends upon our understanding of who Jimmy Cross was before the war, and his shifting relationship to that past self over the course of the story. We see the men collectively disappear under the weight of what they carry, the objects themselves exerting a kind of power over them until they can no longer fully assert their own humanity against them anymore. Backstories emerge through the objects, but in the end the objects suppress them.
The case for exposition
Housing backstory within objects allows for a characterization that is implicit, indirect—again, in keeping with the whole “show don’t tell” dictum.
But, much like Ruskin’s instructions against the pathetic fallacy, this rule of writing is not a given. It’s an aesthetic judgement, one that emphasizes sight over sound, visual culture over oral tradition. And, just as Ruskin’s views were formed by the context of late 19th-century England, so too are other views on craft a product of our particular point in history—which includes the effects of colonization.4
Brandon Taylor’s Substack post “the underdark: a modified craftalk” offers a compelling case for telling, for using exposition to introduce a character’s backstory. Doing so, he convincingly demonstrates, is not dry or lacking in craft. In fact, it can reveal what he calls the “underdark,” or subconscious of the story. The action, the dialogue, the thoughts of a first-person narrator: all of these exist on the surface of the narrative. The conscious, in Taylor’s reading. The deeper, unspoken parts that they imply—these exist below the surface and form the story’s subconscious.
What exposition does, he says, is lay bare the subconscious. The subconscious can’t be shown—by definition, it’s precisely what’s not shown—but exposition can tell us what it is.
To illustrate, Taylor uses several examples, but my favorite comes from Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a moment in which the narrator reveals information about the romantic history between Mr. Wentworth and Anne:
He was not Mr. Wentworth, the former curate of Monkford, however suspicious appearances may be, but a Captain Frederick Wentworth, his brother, who being made commander in consequence of the action off St Domingo, and not immediately employed, had come into Somersetshire, in the summer of 1806; and having no parent living, found a home for half a year at Monkford. He was, at that time, a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy; and Anne an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling. Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love; but the encounter of such lavish recommendations could not fail. They were gradually acquainted, and when acquainted, rapidly and deeply in love. It would be difficult to say which had seen highest perfection in the other, or which had been the happiest: she, in receiving his declarations and proposals, or he in having them accepted. (qtd. in Taylor)
None of this occurs in scene; all feelings are stated directly. But, Taylor points out, that’s as it should be. The exposition comes after Anne re-encounters Wentworth, years after she allowed herself to be persuaded out of the relationship. The content of the exposition is precisely what their interaction does not show, what conversation would not reveal. In Taylor’s words:
The exposition explains, but more than that, it serves as a structural metaphor for the unconscious, for the unvoiced and unarticulated urges of the narrative. [Anne] cannot bring herself to explain the history. She can’t bear to say it aloud.
Exposition in this case (and several others that Taylor provides) is not a failure to show, but a decision to tell where telling is called for. And it’s telling that’s done artfully, inventively, pleasurably. It’s a moment of the narrative inviting the readers in deeper, allowing us direct access to what we would otherwise never see.
I like thinking about these two approaches—direct and indirect, telling and showing, exposition and objects—alongside one another. Mostly because no writer (none that I’ve encountered at least) uses one exclusively. There’s always some directness, some indirectness within a work. This seems true to life too. When we reveal ourselves, there’s a mixture of direct telling and indirect showing. A mixture of what we choose to say, and what any number of things might say for us.
Baxter and Taylor are both clear in their description of technique, in the way that they unpack what is happening within a text. But I find myself somehow thinking about the messiness of it all: how backstory and the past are like agential subjects themselves, pushing into more prominent parts of the story wherever they find the room, wherever that might be.
Definition from Brandon Taylor’s Substack post “the underdark,” discussed at the end of this post.
Baxter, Charles. “Talking Forks: Fiction and the Inner Life of Objects.” Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction, Graywolf Press, 2008, pp. 63-86.
O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000, pp. 616-632.
Many thanks to one of my classmates for raising this point in discussion and forwarding these links.