62 pages • 2 hours read
Geraldine BrooksThe Secret Chord
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Music and the Harp
Geraldine Brooks says that her inspiration for the book came as she watched her son play Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah on the harp, so it is no surprise that music is a recurring motif in The Secret Chord. Music reveals the emotional depth of David’s character when he mourns Yonatan, expresses joy over his new city, or feels the pain of his sin. More than anything else, the recurring sound of David’s music reveals him to be more than a blood-soaked warrior and a slave to lust. The Hidden Complexity of Character comes through in the complexity of the music. Brooks lets metaphors for the music cascade across sentences. At one point, she describes David’s playing as combining the urgency of a trumpet, the awesome power of the wind, the sweetness of singing birds, the fear caused by howling beasts, the smoothness of silk, the warmth of fur, the glitter of gold, and the fierceness of lightning (130). David’s ability to convey emotion not only makes him interesting, but it also gives him a power over others, as seen in his ability to calm Shaul’s madness and to inspire warriors.
The most important aspect of music is that it reveals the truth. As a child, David had to be furtive around a family that hated him. The harp is how he “found his voice” (37). Most often, music reveals David’s feelings, but it also can reveal the truth about others. When David’s soldiers conquer Jerusalem, Natan hears, “the sounds of soldiers carousing, their wine-drenched voices rising in tuneless victory songs” (175). Their music has no depth or power. It makes the victory seem hollow, especially in comparison to the elaborate description that follows of how David’s peaceful pursuits have created a city of song:
As word spread, musicians and singers—men and women both—flocked to his service. You could not walk the lanes without hearing delightful sounds issues from nearly every casement: lutenists and flute players, singers and drummers. The life of the city moved to the rhythms and melodies of an every-changing musical score (177-78).
The contrast between the two descriptions forms a key moment in Brooks’s pondering of the question of violence; it doesn’t answer whether violence is necessary, but it does make clear that peace is a higher calling.
Brooks ends the book by describing the outpouring of civic joy at Shlomo’s coronation, which once again transforms David’s city into “an accidental choir, an unintended orchestra” (300). The true goodness of what has been created fully reveals itself in that musical sound, which just for a moment becomes the perfect, utterly glorious “secret chord.” All that is best in human endeavor and in our complex human character reaches its peak in musical expression.
The Eagle and the Buzzard
Shlomo’s eagle serves explicitly as a symbol of kingship. Natan first recognizes the boy of his visions as a king in part because he has an eagle on his arm. Natan guides David to recognize Shlomo’s potential as his successor by pointing to his eagle. “‘There is beauty and power there,’ I said softly. ‘And I don’t speak only of the bird. […] I speak of the boy—the young man—who has mastered this bird’” (259). In teaching Shlomo, Natan uses the bird to explain the traits of a good king: visionary, able to surpass his followers, and able to provide for his people. Shlomo adds that power can be abused—some kings are as ruthless as a predatory eagle in taking what they want.
While Brooks openly lays out the symbolism of the eagle, she makes two less visible references to a very different type of bird for David. The first description of David in battle mentions “a carrion bird” (9) flying overhead, which turns Natan’s attention to David at a crucial moment. In another battle passage, David is said to “swoop in like a buzzard” (55), a specific type of carrion-eating bird. Brooks’s choice of words here subtly connects David to the dead bodies on the battlefield and contrasts him with his peace-loving, eagle-training son.
The Written Word and Memory
At the end of the Prologue, Natan ponders his prophecies and his completed chronicle. Comparing his spoken words to the concrete scrolls in his hand, he thinks, “Words. Words upon the wind. What will endure, perhaps, is what I have written. If so, it is enough” (3). For a prophet who believes himself to be uttering divine words, it is a bold statement. He places his own written words above God’s by claiming that his are more enduring.
The relationship of the written word to memory is a recurring motif. When Natan first learns to read and write, he is amazed by the “great power” of scratches on parchment or clay tablets that could transfer thoughts over distances or even “make a man live again, long after he had died” (72). As he matures, he develops a more complex, ambivalent view. He remembers that his father had some king’s now unreadable inscription on a basalt stone propping up a wall. As he interviews people, he finds that their memories sometimes contradict each other (a discovery that reflects Brooks’s journalistic experience). Mikhal challenges Natan to think about bias in written chronicles when she claims that writers never think a woman’s love worth mentioning (there is a hidden irony here, since Brooks takes the fact of Mikhal’s love for David directly from the biblical writer in 1 Samuel 18:20). Nearing the end of the book, Natan confesses that he is having trouble learning Egyptian hieroglyphs because “their meanings are various and dependent on context” (205). This statement sums up the written word in The Secret Chord: it does something to capture the truth but there is always ambiguity. While Natan does not fit the trope of the unreliable narrator, these scattered musings on the unreliable nature of writing remind the reader that different interpretations of events are always possible. Knowledge is always dependent on context, an insight that informs the major themes of The Hidden Complexity of Character and Necessity as a Justification for Violence.
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