Hidden messages in the kind of Easter eggs that can’t be eaten

I spent the Easter weekend hunting Easter eggs – not the kind you eat, but those you find in books. I learnt only recently (embarrassingly recently, if truth be told) that a little game I’ve been playing with myself for the past three decades as I write my novels, has a name. And the name of the game is hiding Easter eggs.

Literary Easter eggs (broadly defined as intentionally obscure references, the meaning of which the reader can only uncover with specialised knowledge or research) have probably been around for as long as we’ve had literature. Acrostic poems, in which the first letter or syllable or word of each new line spells out a word or message, can be seen as examples. But the phrase “Easter egg” to describe this device comes from the early days of video games.

Apparently a programmer named Warren Robinett, frustrated by the fact that the company Atari didn’t credit the designers of the games, hid his name in a secret chamber of the 1979 game Adventure. When a teenage player wrote to Atari after discovering the message (“Created by Warren Robinett”), the company realised that it would be too expensive to remove the code. This was a problem, until another designer, Steve Wright, suggested they keep it and even encourage further hidden messages, because for the players it would be as exciting as discovering hidden Easter eggs.

Voilà, a phrase was coined, but it took another decade or two until the geek culture of gamers became mainstream enough for the term to be adopted by literary critics and viewers. Before the early 2000s, many novelists regarded the references they were hiding in their work simply as inside jokes. Or subtext, for the more academically minded. For me it was mainly a little fun to lighten up the long and lonely stretches of writing.

Before I give you a few examples, I have to confess that my other activity during the past weekend was burrowing down a rabbit hole of internet research to find the origins of this and other literary terms. (Or perhaps I should call it a bunny hole, to stay with the Easter theme.) I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that “Easter eggs” had been found on screens before they appeared in books. “MacGuffins,” after all, had become part of movie culture long before we started spotting them in literature.

It was the great director Alfred Hitchcock (or one of his screenwriters, according to some sources found in my internet rabbit hole) who first used this Scottish surname for the typically irrelevant objects or devices planted in his movies to motivate the characters and move along the plot.

For instance, the stolen money that drives the actions of the female protagonist in Psycho – and indirectly leads to her death in that terrifying shower scene. This is what Hitchcock would have called a “pure MacGuffin”, vitally important to the character, but vague, even meaningless, to the average viewer.

Famous MacGuffins from other directors include the falcon in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, the meaning of “Rosebud” in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, and The Dude’s ruined rug in Ethan and Joel Coen’s The Big Lebowski.

But there are countless pure and less-pure MacGuffins in movies and books, ranging from The Ring in The Lord of the Rings to Dorothy’s red slippers in The Wizard of Oz. I have even used MacGuffins in my own books – or so I’ve been informed. In Borderline (Grensgeval in Afrikaans) the female protagonist discovers a letter written by a Cuban soldier in the Angolan-South African war of the 1970s, which leads her on a wild goose chase all the way to Cuba, 40 years after the letter was written.

“Nice MacGuffin,” a clever male reader told me. “Is it a MacGuffin?” I asked, flabbergasted. “I thought it was just a letter.”

No, it’s a MacGuffin, he insisted, because the contents of the letter are not revealed until right at the end. Like the last scene in Citizen Kane when you see Kane’s childhood sleigh with the name Rosebud painted on it. Although I was flattered by the Orson Welles comparison, I’m still not totally convinced that the letter was a MacGuffin. (Perhaps this conversation gave me just another example of mansplaining rather than an example of a MacGuffin.)

On the other hand, I’ve been blissfully unaware that I’ve been hiding Easter eggs in my work ever since my first adult novels were published 30 years ago, so I suppose I might also have been creating the odd MacGuffin without knowing what I was doing?

My favourite Easter eggs are frequent cameo appearances by characters from older books when I write a new book. The usual suspect is Griet Swart, eponymous heroine of my first adult novel, Griet skryf ‘n sprokie (translated as Entertaining Angels) in 1992.

It all started when she popped up as a guest at more than one party held by the group of friends who are the main characters in Breathing Space (Wegkomkans) in 1999, and then she featured in the dreams that Hester Human was writing down in Time Out (Stiltetyd) in 2006, and then she became one of the friends to whom Clara Brand wrote letters in the epistolary novel Just Dessert, Dear (Dis koue kos, skat) in 2010.

There were other appearances too, but I didn’t have the time to search for Griet in all my books over the Easter weekend. I do remember that in my last novel, Still Breathing (Laaste kans), published in 2023, she writes a letter from Italy which is read aloud at Adriaan’s 70th birthday party.

Perhaps this is simply a lazy way of keeping regular readers up to date with what’s been happening in Griet’s life ever since she met the Italian Luca in Travelling Light (Griet kom weer) in 2002 – without having to go to the trouble of writing another follow-up book.

But then how do I explain that I’ve been doing it with other characters too, from early on, and that most of them are not as easily recognisable as Griet? Mart Vermaak from Childish Things (Dinge van ‘n kind) has cameo appearances in at least three later novels – which I won’t name, because the whole point of an Easter egg hunt is that you should search for the eggs, isn’t it?

Sometimes obscure cameo characters from one novel become more important characters in a later novel, and when I hide such an Easter egg I know that 90% of readers will never find it – which hopefully makes it more rewarding for the small number of dedicated readers who can connect the dots.

I never warn readers about these “inside jokes” when I’m promoting a new book. When you explain an inside joke to half the world, you take away half the fun. But since I’m now writing about it, for the first time ever, I might mention that there’s a married couple named Anton and Sandra who are minor characters in Entertaining Angels, while in Borderline, written a quarter of a century later, the protagonist’s middle-aged sister is named Sandra, who used to be married to a guy called Anton... I’ll just leave it there and let you draw your own conclusions, dear reader.

The closest I can come to an explanation for all these cross-references, apart from the fleeting moments of private pleasure they provide during the long haul of novel writing, is that I’m creating a fictional universe, from book to book, peopled by fictional friends and acquaintances and friends of friends who grow older in real time, as I do.

And when the real world gets me down, as happens all too often nowadays, I can escape to this parallel universe where I can empathise with absolutely everyone, despite knowing their darkest secrets and their foulest deeds. If only real life worked like this, hey?

***

I passed Easter weekend without eating a single chocolate egg. I did enjoy a few bites of very dark chocolate, as I do almost daily, but I stayed away from the ridiculously expensive commercial eggs. I did, however, taste the first slender green asparagus of the season, grilled in the oven and served on a bed of mixed salad leaves. The detail that transformed the dish, not only visually, was the purplish pink magnolia petals which I scattered on the salad. DM

Republished from Marita van der Vyver’s Substack. Read more of her Substack pieces here.