A seven-minute read about…

• ‘Narrative echo effects,’ a concept explored by Charles Baxter in his essay, ‘Rhyming Action;’
• ‘Secret strings,’ a literary analysis technique/game used by Michael Rosen when teaching students/children, which includes looking for what I believe to be narrative echoes;

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I start this post with a misunderstanding I had about metaphors with my cohort during this week’s seminar. A while ago, I posted a small excerpt from a story I’ve been writing on and off:

https://brologue.net/2024/02/28/my-god-pure-productivity/

It pains me to spoil what’s going to happen, but just as their discussion starts to turn sour (the Light King REALLY hates the idea of a Pawn delivering mail – it’s a satire of feudalism, and Pawns don’t deliver mail), the King and Ernest are interrupted by a painter and decorator, who’s just about finished painting the Grand Hall in a particular shade of blue. It’s very popular with the aristocracy.

Once the King meets the Courier, they¹ get a tour of the Palace’s hallways before moving to a secret war room to discuss strategy, known only to those who the King trusts the most (it’s wartime). This room has presumably been painted with the same shade of blue, except by Ernest.

Much, much later, Ernest is going to betray the King². I had an idea for how this betrayal might manifest in the world around him. One day, he enters the secret war room to find that the ‘premium’ paint has begun to bubble and crack well before its time. Once, he could’ve hired any painter in the land, and now he finds he can’t even trust his confidants. Just as the knockoff paint deteriorates, so too does his grip on power.

This is supposed to trigger the King’s undoing, his slow descent into madness driven by his untangling of what he perceives to be Ernest’s web of lies. This, however, did not convince my cohort. It’s not that it was banal per se, or unrealistic – they just didn’t find it a very fitting example of what Charles Baxter calls ‘narrative echo effects.’ If anything, what I’ve done is quite literal, not metaphorical.

Poets can’t not come back to an object to save themselves. Baxter knows – he used to be one. By the same token, he argues that us prose writers are often afraid to deploy the same technique at the risk of sounding ‘corny,’ or – heaven forfend! – melodramatic. The dose makes the poison – and for us, said dose is homeopathic – ‘so subtle a touch that the reader barely notices:’

The image or action or sound has to be forgotten before it can effectively be used again.

Charles Baxter, Rhyming Action

I didn’t argue with my cohort. I’m not going to excuse my story by saying most of it hasn’t been written yet. Not getting metaphors is most definitely a ‘me’ problem. After our seminar finished, the first thing I did was look over Baxter’s ‘Rhyming Action’ essay with the knowledge my cohort gave me. I needed to retread an example that Baxter gave us of a narrative echo.

Here’s the quick rundown of Baxter’s analysis of Lolita: prior to the episodes of sexual abuse, a not-insignificant amount of attention is paid to how much Lolita enjoys chewing gum. Once Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty (his doppelganger) have deprived Lolita of all her innocence, Humbert attacks Quilty in a shootout of operatic proportions; he blows a pink bubble as far as his final breath will stretch it, and then dies.

Baxter’s interpretation is that this bubble represents the innocence that the men have taken from Lolita, stored inside them, now corrupted by blood. So, in a word, this is basically trying to smuggle Chekhov’s gun past the reader’s critical faculties³. Most people who develop a connoisseurship for short stories should know that everything mentioned in the first act is mentioned for a reason. A narrative echo, then, tries to mention the gun and hide it at the same time.

I realised this morning that I’ve come across a similar concept long before Baxter brought it to my attention. Michael Rosen, a writer of many talents⁴, often uses a game when teaching writing to students or children, called ‘secret strings:’

https://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2021/04/my-secret-strings-game-to-unlock-texts.html

In his most recent book, Rosen’s Almanac, he writes:

Writers try to make links that are there, but affect us without words in the text saying that that is what they want to do. This is a crucial part of how literature is as much about feeling as it is about ideas.

Michael Rosen, Rosen’s Almanac (March 25th – “How do we read?”)

So when we first get a lot of information early on about how Lolita likes to chew gum, and later find that knowledge haunting us in the final act of her abuser’s life, is this not a bonafide secret string? First as an object of innocence, then as an object of corruption. This is what I mean when I think we’re trying to show the gun and hide it at the same time.

Now back to Ernie and the King. The physical, objective quality of the paint is not enough to make this a secret string. The paint needs to be paired with an event that makes it undergo a metaphysical transformation.

One of my cohorts made the following suggestion: what if, just after the King makes this discovery, he is attacked by an assassin in the war room; he escapes with his life and does a Bonnie Prince Charlie, going from house to house undercover? Then, once he’s put up somewhere, he looks up from his bowl the next morning to find… that very same blue, wall to wall.

Just when the King’s found security under a new roof, he’s immediately found himself in peril again. The blue goes from an object of the King’s status and power, to an object of his precarity. The assassin haunts him – their presence felt, without their existing, in that space and at that time.

More importantly: The King’s conspiratorial mind immediately makes the connection between the paint, which was not what Ernest said it was, and the assassin. To him, this is no coincidence: one of his confidants had to disclose this room, and it had to be Ernest.

One key difference between Rosen and Baxter’s theories is that Baxter is looking exclusively for a metaphorical link. Not all secret strings are metaphorical. In the 20th September entry of Rosen’s Almanac is an example of playing secret strings with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Lament:”

https://allpoetry.com/poem/8476165-Lament-by-Edna-St.-Vincent-Millay

Rosen chooses to first look at connections that are based on a whole group and parts derived from it, e.g. the dad’s ‘old coats’ being broken down into ‘little jackets’ and ‘little trousers.’ Looking for secret strings of a ‘narrative echo’ persuasion, we might instead pair this process with the lines, “Life must go on, / And the dead be forgotten.” The dad dies, and as life goes on, so his possessions are renewed, given new life; their old form is dead, and we must let go.

We might argue that this process of renewal is contradictory to the speaker’s message; on the other hand, in a hauntological sense, the ‘old coats’ represent a future, shared between the dad, mum, and their children, that has now been lost. At the very end, the line “Life must go on” is repeated again, followed by, “I just forget why.” This act of forgetting echoes our knowledge of the coats’ metamorphoses – they’re really choosing to forget a lost future. No contradiction at all.

This is how I think Baxter’s ‘narrative echoes’ and Rosen’s secret strings game are related. If I’m wrong on this, I’d love to know why.

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1. The Courier presents as male, but uses they/them pronouns. Every character who doesn’t know the Courier personally uses he/him; the narrator, and members of his family, use they/them. ↩︎
2. Yes, I’m very aware that naming the King’s closest confidant ‘Ernest’ is a subversion of the ‘Prophetic Name’ trope:
   https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PropheticNames
   This story is a satire. Also, I’m an Ace Attorney connoisseur, and my knees grow weak whenever we get a victim name like Deid Mann:
   https://aceattorney.fandom.com/wiki/Deid_Mann?so=search
   (Ace Attorney itself is a satire of the Japanese legal system.) ↩︎
3. As an aside, this wraps around nicely to my concept of Chekhov-Pratchett’s Post It:
   
   https://brologue.net/2023/12/31/users-arent-free-until-big-tech-is-wee/
   
   If in Act I a monopoly has you at its mercy, hope like hell that monopoly promises to not be evil. Not being evil means you have to get a lot of people in on not being evil – on post-its, DMs, in guest talks, in the canteen kombucha… Not being evil means you have to show the gun and hide it for as long as possible.
   
   Of course, by Act III, we regress to your usual Chekhov chicanery: someone’s going to dig up the post-its and find that nice ain’t good. ↩︎
4. And perhaps every bit the opposite of the caricature that Baxter paints of his erstwhile peers. I leave it to you to find the text to draw your own conclusions. ↩︎