{"id":1848,"date":"2019-05-02T23:47:43","date_gmt":"2019-05-02T23:47:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/05\/02\/foreshadow-forward-echo-back\/"},"modified":"2025-01-08T20:43:14","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T20:43:14","slug":"foreshadow-forward-echo-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/05\/02\/foreshadow-forward-echo-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Foreshadow forward; echo back. How writers harness the power of the callback"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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In his “New in Town” <\/em>standup comedy special, John Mulaney tells how, when he was 10, he was in love with his babysitter, who he thought was much older. But as an adult, he discovered she\u2019d been only 13 at the time of his crush.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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That his parents would have hired someone so young makes him indignant. \u201cIt would be like you\u2019re going out of town for a week,\u201d he says, \u201cand you hire a horse<\/em> to watch your dog.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Big laugh.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Much later in the show, he talks about going to a high school party where the host\u2019s parents were gone and everybody drank too much and did risky things: “We were like dogs without horses!”<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Huge <\/em>laugh, followed by applause, even though the line, on its own, wouldn\u2019t be especially funny or even clear.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Thus the power of the callback, which may be the standup comic\u2019s most useful and dependable tool. Well-constructed callbacks elevate an ordinary observation to the level of hilarity, flatter the audience (always a good thing) for picking up on it, and provide a sense of continuity to the whole routine.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The device is mentioned<\/strong> in every guide to comedy. Less recognized is its value in all sorts of other forms of writing, fiction and non-fiction alike. One of my favorite theatrical callbacks is in Frank Loesser\u2019s masterpiece “Guys and Dolls.”\u00a0<\/em>In the first act, gambler Sky Masterson and \u201cmission doll\u201d Sarah Brown have a duet in which both describe how \u201cI\u2019ll Know\u201d when they have encountered their soulmate. When it\u2019s Sky\u2019s turn, he sings and Sarah interjects:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cMine will come as a surprise to me.
Mine I lead to chance and chemistry.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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SARAH (spoken) Chemistry?
SKY (spoken) Yeah, chemistry.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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By the end of the act \u2013 surprise! \u2013 Sarah has fallen for Sky and expresses it in her number \u201cIf I Were a Bell.\u201d This time she sings and Sky<\/em> interjects:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cAsk me how do I feel from this chemistry lesson I’m learning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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SKY (spoken) Uh, chemistry?
SARAH (spoken) Yes, chemistry!<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In movies, a great callback is in “Kramer vs. Kramer.” <\/em> A frustrated and exhausted wife, played by Meryl Streep, has just flown the coop, leaving her baffled husband, Ted (Dustin Hoffman) to care for their young son, Billy (Justin Henry). Dad resolves to make breakfast, but knows nothing from French toast. It is, of course, a disaster, with pans clanging, curses flying and egg-soaked bread burning. Months later, Billy is about to go live with his mother. It\u2019s breakfast time again. Robert Benton\u2019s screenplay says that Billy and Ted<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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stand side by side, like a surgeon and his assistant. Spread out on the counter in front of them are the makings of French toast. The following is done with great efficiency, in contrast to the first time we saw them go through the same ritual. They work in silence except for an occasional command.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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As a director, Benton improved on his own screenplay. In the filmed scene, with Ted an expert short-order cook and Billy his sous chef, there isn\u2019t even an \u201coccasional command.\u201d It\u2019s my favorite silent scene is a sound movie.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Writers have known<\/strong> about the power of callbacks for a long time \u2014 at least since “Canterbury Tales,” where, as the writing guru\u00a0Roy Peter Clark describes in his book “The Art of X-Ray Reading,”<\/a>\u00a0Chaucer deploys an elaborate one based on the Absolon\u2019s previously established squeamishness regarding farting.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s “Slaughterhouse-Five”<\/a> may have more callbacks than any other single work. He returns to certain images and phrases again and again in different contexts: people nestled like spoons, \u201civory and blue\u201d feet, a bird going \u201cPoo-tee-weet!\u201d Vonnegut uses the repetition less for comedy than for emotional impact and thematic resonance. He is a character in and narrator of the novel, as well as its author, and on page 5, he says that late at night, \u201cI get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses.\u201d He repeats the mustard-gas-and-roses line four pages later, just so we won\u2019t forget it. It comes up again on page 92, this time in reference to the breath of a fictional character, Billy Pilgrim. The payoff comes on the second to last page, when Billy, at this point imprisoned by the Germans in World War II, is ordered to dig up the bodies of people killed in the bombing of Dresden. \u201cThe stink,\u201d Vonnegut writes (and note how he signals significance by reversing the order of the terms), \u201cwas like roses and mustard gas.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I\u2019m aware that the most famous repetition in “Slaughterhouse-Five” is the phrase \u201cSo it goes,\u201d which is intoned whenever there is a reference to death. And this might be a good time to sort out some different techniques related to or included in what I\u2019ve been calling the callback. Vonnegut\u2019s \u201cSo it goes\u201d is a refrain, as you would find in a song\u2019s chorus. Foreshadowing is a hint at what\u2019s in store \u2014 for example, the witches\u2019 prophecies in “Macbeth,” <\/em>and the terrible weather in “Great Expectations” <\/em>portending bad things ahead for Pip. \u201cChekhov\u2019s gun\u201d refers to a story element that more or less promises a callback. Anton Chekhov<\/a> expressed this idea in different phrasing on several occasions, for example: \u201cIf you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.\u201d In the opening of Shirley Jackson\u2019s short story \u201cThe Lottery,\u201d<\/a> we\u2019re placed in what appears to be an idyllic New England village on a lovely June day. In the second paragraph, Jackson introduces us to some kids, one of whom, Bobby Martin, \u201chad already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones.\u201d Those stones are a bunch of veritable Chekhov\u2019s guns, and they very definitely go off in the last line of the story.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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For feature and narrative journalists, a popular kicker, or ending, calls back to something that was mentioned earlier, often in the opening lines. Author and New Yorker contributor John McPhee<\/a> is especially fond of this kind of circularity, and uses it to good effect in a chapter of his book “Encounters with the Archdruid” that profiles a U.S. land official named Floyd Dominy. From our first meeting with him, Dominy is almost always pictured with a cigar, in the manner of an opera character\u2019s leitmotif or the objects held by saints in religious paintings. And it suits Dominy, suggesting some of his large personality bordering on arrogance, in his total assurance that damming up rivers is a good thing. McPhee takes us with him on a Colorado River rafting trip, and through one rapids, Dominy\u2019s cigar improbably stays lit. But then the raft enters the very big and very alarming Lava Falls. In a calm moment, Dominy hubristically lights up. The waters pound and engulf the raft, then deposit it in calm water. McPhee\u2019s kicker:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Dominy said nothing. He just sat there, drawing on a wet, dead cigar. Ten minutes later, however, in the dry and baking Arizona air, he struck a match and lighted the cigar again.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Wally Lamb<\/a> deploys a lovely long-game callback in his 1992 novel “She\u2019s Come Undone.” The main character, the damaged Elaine, takes to expressing herself through drawings on an Etch-a-Sketch. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, a psychic suggests she make a picture of \u201cwhatever might make you happy.\u201d She draws a guy, a really big guy: \u201cI covered his head with loops of curly hair and added eyes, a beard, linear eyeglasses\u2014wire rims.\u201d She decides it\u2019s an image of her future husband. It\u2019s not mentioned again for a 110 pages. Then Elaine, who\u2019s taking a college writing class, tells her friend about a guy in the class who\u2019s \u201cso huge he couldn\u2019t even fit in the desks.\u201d Five pages after that, we learn that he has \u201ca mopful of blond curls.\u201d They start dating, and \u2014 boom! \u2014 on the second-to-last page of the second-to-last chapter, he shows up with new glasses. Wire rims.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Game over.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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That\u2019s good stuff.<\/strong> However, I would like to say a word for writers who \u2014 like standup comics \u2014 employ callbacks in the middle. The effect is more subtle and less expected. When the longtime New York Times\u00a0<\/em>sports columnist Dave Anderson died last year, his\u00a0colleague George Vecsey reminisced<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I always whined about schlepping over from Long Island to New Jersey for Sunday football games, which Dave loved. The roads were confusing. The signs were misleading. The fans were drunk \u2014 on their way to the game! And traffic back home Sunday evening was inhuman.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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Dave told his petulant colleague: Didn\u2019t you know enough to get off at Route 46 and take the local road through Fort Lee to the bridge?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A few paragraphs later, Vecsey writes that Anderson\u2019s wife, Maureen, had died a few years before her husband:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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When I drove over for her wake, he needled me at the funeral parlor: Wow, I cared enough to brave New Jersey traffic. In a sad hour, we all laughed.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Straight to the heart.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Anne Fadiman\u2019s “The Wine-Lover\u2019s Daughter,”<\/a> a memoir of her father, Clifton Fadiman, has so many recurring notions and phrasing that when I was reading it, I started making a list. They include her parents\u2019 old-fashioned reference to themselves as \u201cthe Clifton Fadimans\u201d and some favorite terms of her father, including \u201chotsy-totsy,\u201d \u201cmeatball,\u201d and \u201coakling.\u201d I emailed Fadiman about it, and she responded by confirming that she was partial to the technique but unfamiliar with the term \u201ccallback:\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I’ve always thought of them as seeds planted early and harvested later. But that metaphor isn’t as good \u2026 since a seed can’t bear fruit until <\/em>it’s harvested, whereas \u2018callback\u2019 implies that the performance holds meaning on the first go as well, and that’s important. The first mention needs to work on its own; it should never have a sign over its head that says I’M BEING PLANTED.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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She said most of the callbacks in “The Wine Lover\u2019s Daughter” were at least partly humorous, but<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u2018Blessings\u2019 \u2014 what my nonreligious father always said when he bade farewell to a family member \u2014 is introduced on page 80 and then recurs on page 234, when my father is on his deathbed.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Fadiman is matched and probably surpassed on the callback front by British novelist Kate Atkinson<\/a>, notably in her most recent book, “Transcription.”<\/em> I emailed Atkinson, too, and told her I had covered both sides of a sheet of paper with all the callbacks in that book. Here\u2019s a partial list of phrases, words, or names that come up in the life of the main character, Juliet, that Atkinson returns to again and again:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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  • \u201cCan I tempt you?\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • \u201cAn eye \u2026 Two, even.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
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  • \u201cWe must finish her off, I\u2019m afraid.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Father a fishmonger.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
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    What makes this work especially well in “Transcription” is that it relates to Juliet\u2019s discursive cast of mind. She worries, we\u2019re told at one point, that she may \u201cthink herself to death.”<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    Atkinson responded that she, like Atkinson, hadn\u2019t heard of \u201ccallbacks,\u201d but the term struck her as \u201cquite descriptive,\u201d and something she used not in many of her novels:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    “Life After Life” is, structurally, one big callback. “God in Ruins” <\/em>circles around one event all the time (the last flight). I was probably influenced there by both “Catch-22” and “Slaughterhouse-Five.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    For me, a novel is a very textural thing.  It\u2019s not a stream of unregulated words, it\u2019s something that has been put together like an artifact and it often needs a lot of \u2018pinning\u2019 (callbacks, I guess) to make sure it makes sense and that it\u2019s poetic in some way (I can\u2019t think of another word, so poetic will have to do for now). It gives a novel depth and heft. (Plus it gives me considerable pleasure.) A lot of this you don\u2019t always notice on one reading (I think) but it\u2019s still there knitting everything together, making the whole thing more than a sum of its parts, giving the reader a sense of cohesiveness (I hope!).<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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    A lot of this you don\u2019t always notice on one reading.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    That comment by Atkinson<\/strong> is a good lead-in to the limitations of callbacks. They demand attentiveness, and not all readers are attentive, especially in the distracting noises of the 21st century. As Anne Fadiman wrote me:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    It occurs to me that when writers use callbacks, they assume the reader will start on page 1 rather than dipping in here and there. I wonder if callbacks will be part of the collateral damage as readers’ attention spans get shorter and shorter and they become less and less likely to read in the sequence intended by the author.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    The takeaway is that a callback should not depend <\/em>on the reader or viewer remembering the first mention: The line or scene shouldn\u2019t puzzle or mystify her or him, but should function on its own in the piece. And that\u2019s true of all the examples in this essay, with the exception of John Mulaney\u2019s dogs-and-horses line.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    Moreover, while I hope I\u2019ve shown that first-rate writers use callbacks, callbacks are not a prerequisite for first-rate writing. It\u2019s the sort of thing that lapidary stylists like McPhee, Fadiman, and Atkinson are drawn to. But there\u2019s a whole other category of wonderful writers \u2014 the Dostoyevskys and Dickenses and Saul Bellows and David Foster Wallaces \u2014 who just plow ahead and never look back.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    Finally, it\u2019s possible to take this idea too far \u2014 larding a piece of writing or cinema with endless references to itself, so that it ends up feeling self-indulgent and navel-gazey. That\u2019s especially a danger with \u201cintertextuality,\u201d a literary-critical term meaning a reference in one work to another. Probably 50 percent of country songs, 75 percent of  hip-hop songs, and every movie in the Marvel \u201cuniverse\u201d are intertextual. This can be fun but it fairly quickly becomes self-congratulatory and exclusionary, calling to mind fanboys bragging about finding a secret message in a “Simpsons” <\/em>cel.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    The relevant, mildly derisive term for this is \u201cfan service,\u201d which originally referred to the insertion of irrelevant titillating or soft-core images in Japanese anime. Now, more generally, it means any fan-pandering feature that doesn\u2019t serve the story, such as breaking the fourth wall, gratuitous callbacks, or abundant \u201cEaster eggs,\u201d a term derived from computer games and programs that now refers to hidden treats or references.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    With those caveats stipulated, the comedian\u2019s callback is a potentially very effective technique for writers and artists of all kinds. It adds energy and kick, through a powerful chemistry.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    Yeah, chemistry.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The art of the callback in comedy, film, literature and journalism: When repetition isn’t redundancy, but theme and structure<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7782,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[68],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays-on-craft","authors-ben-yagoda"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nForeshadow forward; echo back. How writers harness the power of the callback - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/05\/02\/foreshadow-forward-echo-back\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Foreshadow forward; echo back. 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