ABSTRACT
There are four good reasons why authors sometimes bury a significant dimension of their text in a cryptic subtext. These reasons include fear of social or political censorship, and a desire to intensify the potential esthetic effect of the text via indirection. These reasons also include the need to present a provocative message in a coded or allegorical form, and even the delight in teasing readers with an enigma. One can follow this process of subtextual encryption in a series of four interrelated texts, each of which contains its own specific secret message. These texts include the novella Aura by Carlos Fuentes, and the novella Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathanael Hawthorne. These texts also include the Rosa Diamond episode in Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, and what is perhaps the foundational text of poetic modernism, Stephane Mallarme's The Afternoon of a Faun. Mallarme has reversed the tragic direction of the Ovidian myth of Aura.
