There is such a rich symbolism in the first section of Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno – an ostensible collection of short stories that may as well be a fragmented novel, as they all web together by the end – about a Soviet image censor, a kind of artist who specializes in erasure. The character goes to work in a bunker every day where he is tasked with eliminating the faces and bodies of convicted dissidents from the archives of approved images, a task which demands that he carefully reconstruct a background in the negative space where the body was, filling in the light, adding details of the world that would have been in the image but for the dissident’s presence, sometimes adding other people and faces in their place where the context requires it, before sending the sanitized image back to be displayed somewhere. Our protagonist has a history of erasure himself, having allowed his own brother to be taken by the secret police in his youth, and so he approaches this task with a reverence and penitence that makes every reverse-portraiture almost prayerful. And without alerting his superiors, wherever he can, he subtly adds into that negative space a face that could have been his brother, at different stages of his life, if he had lived to reach them.
It makes me think of an overused prescription in writing, which states that one must always show and never tell the facts of the story. If you had to teach what this means in practice, this would be the object lesson. Because the rule is not really editorial in nature – it has to mean more than simply stripping out the expository parts of your story and adding in some kind of action in its place. Action can be prone to glide along the surface, action can obscure the interior of the character as often as it illuminates it. Showing something feebly is less useful than just telling it. So you have to imagine the action that is so expressive in its nature as to render all of the explanation you might otherwise give it useless. That is more than just censoring your explanatory urges. That is imagining a world more perfect in its impulse to self-expression.
In the expressive gesture Marra gives us here of erasure-as-creation, as-penitence, as-protest, there is so much conveyed about the character and his society that any explication you might add would only reduce its impact. If you teach writing, or are trying to teach yourself, it’s worth the time to internalize.