On subtlety

So, I just got finished watching Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, and I must say it's made an impact on me. So because of that movie, I'll be doing today's post on subtlety.



Now, it is very important to remember that subtlety is part of what makes a story bearable. Every story worth reading has some subtlety in it, even the most overblown fantasy and sci-fi (Warhammer 40k comes to mind) has some amount of subtlety in it, no matter how small. Otherwise you end up with something along the lines of the infamous 'SPESS MEHREENS' speech. All bluster and no substance. Subtlety, you see, cannot be substance in and of itself, subtlety is a quality. However, substance cannot exist without subtlety. Ice cannot exist without being a solid, but 'solid' is a quality, it cannot be ice on it's own, follow?

Subtlety then is yet another component of storytelling that simply cannot be done without if one wishes to tell anything even vaguely approaching a serious story, even non-serious stories need some degree of subtlety. Subtlety gives characters life as much as unsubtlety (Struggling for words here). Without subtlety, all actions and events would seem exaggerated. I would say that one would have to make an effort to write a story with no subtlety at all. Therefore, it is the skillful use of subtlety and it's relative abundance that improves a work, rather than it's mere existence.

Let's take another example to help get me going, shall we? Let's take All Quiet on the Western Front as a prime example of subtlety and... Guns of the South as a non-subtle example. Now, one might object to this, say that the two works are as different as apples and oranges and one cannot compare them. But I disagree, one can compare apples and oranges, apples have a sweeter taste and a firmer skin, while oranges tend to more spongelike in consistency and quite tangy. But that's beside the point. While I realize that these two works are completely different in purpose, time, style, just about everything that can be compared, I promise I will only compare the subtlety or lack thereof of the two works in comparison to one another rather than quality or style.

Guns of the South is a work that works (Ha) on a relative lack of subtlety. Hell, the book is about time-traveling racists who give Robert E. Lee AK-47s to beat the Union with. I don't think subtlety ever consciously crossed Mr. Turtledove's mind. There are characters who are bloodthirsty raving monsters, and characters that are good, honest open-minded types, and very little gray area between the two. All the actions of the characters are dramatized, overwrought reactions, everything that happens is a big dramatic ordeal. Every battle is a massacre, every conversation is world-changing and so on.

All Quiet on the Western Front, on the other hand, almost defies my previous statement about a work not being able to be made entirely out of subtlety. I believe that nothing can sum up the book's style and feeling better than the foreword itself:  

"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."

Every part of the book revels in subtlety. Every moment is carefully crafted as to give a sense of overwhelming despair, to give a sense of a changed man who no longer looks upon the horrors of war as frightful, but so commonplace that he no longer feels that he is himself. Battles are not long, drawn out narratives of excitement and violence (And one is almost certain that they should not be) in order to draw attention both to Paul's mindset and to emphasize the actual important events that happen. The subtlety of Remarque's storytelling makes every event more meaningful rather than less. By not exaggerating events with overblown prose and pages of buildup, he manages to make every event count, he manages to do what a thousand pages of purple prose would not and could not do.


And that's about all I have to say. I ran out of steam early on this one, I blame it on watching Stalker and thinking "I need to make a post on subtlety" once I finished picking up the pieces of my blown mind up off the floor.