Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

13.1 Allusion
Unit 13 Intertextuality and allusion
Section 3 Attributing meaning

An ’allusion’ occurs when one text makes an implicit or explicit reference to another text. In an explicit verbal allusion an actual quotation is made and signalled with quotation marks. In an implicit verbal allusion, no signal is given and the original wording is sometimes changed to suit the new context. Thus the opening of Wordsworth’s The Prelude(1805) alludes to the end of Milton’s Paradise Lost(1667) without actually quoting from it:

The earth is all before me: with a heart

Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,

I look about, and should the guide I choose

Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,

I cannot miss my way.

        (The Prelude, I, 15-19)

The World was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:

They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.

         (Paradise Lost, XII, 646-9)

13.1.1 Allusion as a means of establishing a relation to a cultural or literary tradition

Allusion serves to place a text within the textual network that makes up a cultural tradition. Because of this, allusion can be used simply as a way of adding cultural value to a text. This is a common device in advertisements. For example, in the Observer magazine of 8 May 1988, there are four advertisements that use allusions in their captions, including: a Renault car advertised with the caption ’A room of my own’, and Cadbury’s Bournville chocolate advertised with the caption ’If Chocolate be the food of Gods, Heaven must be in Birmingham’. One of the reasons for making such allusions is that they are thought to invoke some of the cultural connotations of the source text and, by a process of transference, bestow them on the product being promoted. Thus, in the first example (which has a picture of a woman in a Renault car), women are being encouraged to buy a Renault car by suggesting that it will grant them some of the independence that Virginia Woolf was seeking for women in A Room of One’s Own(1929). Such allusions can also serve to flatter readers - giving those who recognize the allusion the illusion of being superior to those who don’t even realize that an allusion is being made. The Cadbury’s advertisement therefore implies that it is only ’highly cultured’ people - those with the ’good taste’ to recognize an allusion to Shakespeare (the first line of Twelfth Night) - who will fully appreciate Bournville chocolate. Curiously, the advertisements in the Observer magazine of 20 February 2005 are contrastingly light on allusions, except for ’South American Odyssey’ (advertising a holiday in South America) - and, even in this example, it is perhaps not necessary for readers to realize that this is a reference to one of Homer’s epics, since the word ’odyssey’ has come to mean any long, eventful journey (sixteen nights, in this case!).

Allusions are also used in the titles of newspaper and magazine articles. The New Scientist magazine of 20 March 1999 includes the following titles: ’Forever Young’ (article about the youthfulness of New Scientist readers); ’The Long Goodbye’ (article about the extinction of the North Atlantic right whale); ’Something Rotten . . .’ (article about bluebottles); ’For Your Ears Only’ (article about radio); ’Trouble in Paradise’ (article about ecological loss in Caribbean islands); and ’Where No Chip Has Gone Before’ (article about Motorola). Here the allusions are primarily to pop songs, films and television, reaching back to the 1970s or before, and to well-known literary texts. We might understand the consistency in the range of these allusions as a product of authorship, arising from the identity of the magazine’s editor (perhaps one person with a particular kind of cultural knowledge writes the titles). At the same time, this consistency also positions the reader by telling the reader who recognizes the allusions that this magazine is for him or her - that is, for a person of a certain age and with a certain range of cultural knowledge.

13.1.2 Varieties of allusion

Texts may allude to other texts in a variety of ways, of which these are the most common:

1 Through a verbal reference to another text (as in the way The Prelude refers to Paradise Lost through a similarity of phrasing).

2 Through epigraphs (an inscription at the beginning of the text). T.S Eliot’s poem ’The Hollow Men’ (1925) has an epigraph taken from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness(1899/1902): ’Mistah Kurtz - he dead’. This invites the reader to look for a significant relationship between the poem and the novel - which is perhaps that both texts suggest there is hollowness at the heart of European ’man’ in the early twentieth century.

3 Through names of characters. Thus the name Stephen Dedalus, the central character in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), refers to Daedalus, a character in Greek mythology who ’made wings, by which he flew from Crete across the archipelago . . . his name is perpetuated in our daedal, skillful, fertile of invention’ (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable).

4 Through choice of titles. Thus the title of William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) is an explicit allusion to Macbeth’s despairing claim that life is nothing but ’a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’ (Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606), V, v, 26-8).

13.1.3 Allusion in film, TV and music

The process of allusion is not confined to literature and advertisements, but may be found in most cultural and artistic forms. Music may allude to earlier music (e.g. Stravinsky’s allusions to Bach, or the Beatles’ allusions to the French national anthem and ’Greensleeves’ in ’All You Need is Love’). A complex example is presented by the band Big Daddy, who released a record called Sgt. Peppers (1992) - a reworking of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) performed entirely using instruments and musical styles of the 1950s. The Beatles’ original record itself alludes to, and reworks, 1950s’ music (among other kinds of music), but when Big Daddy re-performed it as a 1950s’ record, styles merely alluded to in the original became the songs’ dominant style. Woody Allen’s films frequently make allusions to literature and to other films: Play It Again Sam (1972) is a striking example that makes a series of allusions to Casablanca (1942). Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) exists within a complex network of allusions to Conrad and Eliot: it is in essence a rewriting of Heart of Darkness, but towards the end the Kurtz character (played by Marlon Brando) reads Eliot’s poem ’The Hollow Men’ - which reverses the relationship between Heart of Darkness and ’The Hollow Men’ noted earlier. A combination of musical and narrative allusion indicates that the television series Star Trek Voyager (1995) is a version of The Wizard of Oz (1939): the TV theme tune begins with a five-note motif that, stripped of its initial note, is the beginning of the film’s most famous song ’Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, while the film’s basic story is reproduced in the television series - which is about a spaceship that is captained by a woman and crewed by individuals who represent accentuated traits but lack certain qualities; the ship and crew are swept into another part of the galaxy, where they kill the ’wicked witch’ who brings them there and then try to get home. Even characters’ clothing in the TV series can be part of the set of allusions to the film: the alien creature ’Neelix’ is dressed and whiskered like a munchkin in the film.

13.1.4 Allusion signals a relationship between texts

An adequate reading of a literary or other cultural text will need to recognize the significance of the ways it interacts with earlier texts. This involves trying to work out the similarities and differences between the two texts that are momentarily brought together by an allusion. By choosing the title The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner is presumably inviting us to compare the events and themes of his novel with Macbeth’s nihilistic despair. In A Portrait of the Artist, the name Stephen Dedalus invites the reader to look out for parallels between the novel and the story of Daedalus. Is there some connection with the notion of flight? Or is the emphasis on Stephen’s aspirations to be an artist (skilful, fertile of invention), or on failure (since Icarus, his son, dies), or on the father-son relation (death of the son because the father’s ingenuity fails)? A reading that approached the novel with this range of questions in mind would probably find that each of them is relevant in some way.

13.1.5 A way of reading allusions

Thomas Hardy’s novels can often seem overloaded with allusions, but some of them are charged with a significance that an adequate reading cannot afford to pass by. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), for example, Alec d’Urberville, Tess’s eventual seducer, makes an allusion that, if she had spotted it, might have allowed Tess to avoid her tragedy. Early on in the novel, Tess’s impoverished parents send her to work for a rich family to whom they mistakenly think they are related in some way. Tess’s new employer, Mrs d’Urberville, who knows nothing of the supposed kinship, sets her to work looking after her poultry and bullfinches. One of the responsibilities involved in looking after the bullfinches is to whistle to them in order to ’teach ’em airs’. Alec, Tess’s so-called cousin, spies her vainly attempting to practise whistling and takes this as an opportunity to flirt with her:

’Ah! I understand why you are trying - those bullies! My mother wants you to carry on their musical education. How selfish of her! As if attending to these curst cocks and hens were not enough work for any girl. I would flatly refuse if I were you.’

’But she wants me particularly to do it, and to be ready by tomorrow morning.’

’Does she? Well then - I’ll give you a lesson or two.’

’Oh no, you won’t!’ said Tess, withdrawing towards the door.

’Nonsense; I don’t want to touch you. See - I’ll stand on this side of the wire-netting, and you can keep on the other; so you may feel quite safe. Now, look here; you screw up your lips too harshly. There ’tis - so.’

He suited the action to the word, and whistled a line of ’Take, O take those lips away’. But the allusion was lost upon Tess.

The editor of the Macmillan edition of Hardy’s novel provides an endnote that tells us that Alec is alluding to the first line of the Page’s song in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), Act IV, scene 1. But this information, in itself, is not enough to allow us to understand the full import of the allusion. Without an understanding of the significance of the song in the context of Measure for Measure, the allusion remains lost upon us as well as upon Tess. It is only when we compare the situation in the novel with the situation in the text being alluded to that the significance of the allusion becomes apparent. Peter Hutchinson (1983) makes a succinct analysis:

The narrator may be suggesting that Tess is simply ignorant of the source . . . If we too are ignorant of this, we may assume that the reference is merely a means of contrasting Alec’s worldliness with Tess’s simplicity and uncultured existence. This is certainly part of its function, but the fact that the narrator terms the whistling an ’allusion’ may suggest that the original context of the song has some bearing on the present situation. In retrospect [when Tess has been seduced by Alec and abandoned by Angel Clare] we can see that it clearly does: the Boy sings these lines to Mariana when she has become a seduced and abandoned victim.

Thus the fact that the allusion is lost upon Tess proves fatal for her; a full understanding of the allusion thus adds to our sense of the text’s tragic irony (once we know how the novel ends).

It is possible to identify at least three separate stages in this analysis of the allusion in Tess of the D’Urbervilles:

1 The first step is to recognize that an allusion has been made in the first place. In Hardy’s novel, this is made easy because we are told that ’the allusion was lost upon Tess’, but not all allusions are so explicit. To a certain extent the ability to spot an implicit allusion is largely dependent on the reader having read the text being alluded to (thus the reader will have the feeling of having read something vaguely similar and will proceed from there). However, spotting an allusion is not so wholly dependent on chance as this suggests; it is often possible to detect the presence of an allusion because it will usually stand out in some way from the text that surrounds it - perhaps through differences of style or register (see Unit 7). For example, Ernest Hemingway quotes the seventeenthcentury poet John Donne in the title of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls

(1940), but we do not need to know this fact in order to recognize that the title uses a more archaic and ’literary’ phrasing than Hemingway usually employs.

2 The second task is to trace the allusion. In the example from Tess of the D’Urbervilles the editor does this job for us, and in some instances we will be familiar enough with the allusion to go straight to the original text; but in most cases we will have to do some detective work. The most obvious way to trace the allusion is to use the Internet. For example, a Google search on the words ’Take, O take those lips away’ takes us almost instantly to many websites that quote the whole lyric and give the information we need. In the past, the process of hunting an allusion was much more laborious and usually involved a trip to the reference section of the library to consult concordances or dictionaries of quotations. If this failed, it was often a matter of educated guesswork.

3 The third step involves a close reading of the section of the source text in which the word or phrase originally appears, together with some investigation of its significance in the text as a whole. At this stage you should try to work out the similarities and differences between the source text and the text being read. This should help you to establish why the allusion is being made and whether there is an ironic or parallel relation between the texts. Only by such a careful consideration of the source text (as the example from Tess of the D’Urbervilles demonstrates) can we be aware of the full implications of an allusion.