Allusion: Student Explanation and Worksheet

Allusion—Bringing One Story into Another

 Allusion is the reference within one story or poem to another.  The power of an allusion is extraordinary, if one is alert to it, as it suggests an entire realm of characteristics and incidents called out by that connection.

For example, here are H. G. Wells’s opening lines of his novel, The Time Machine:

The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled…

If we are not alert, we miss the significance of the beginning of this characterization.  Peter Rabinowitz, a literary scholar, reminds us that “Eyes are among the more reliable visual guides to character in fiction.”   But, even if we know that, we might not understand why “grey eyes” are important—unless we have read the Odyssey: 

            Athena glared at him with her owl-grey eyes…(I.49).

            And Athena, her eyes grey as saltwater…(I.331).

With these words the Grey-eyed One was gone…(I.336).

Until grey-eyed Athena cast sleep on her eyelids…(I.384).

The remaining task is to link the two pairs of grey eyes, which is easy if you know that Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom.  Wells expects you to know this.

The allusion tells us that Wells’s Time Traveler is wise like Athena.  We know this before we know much of anything else about the character.  But we know a lot, and we can form an hypothesis about the Time Traveler’s behavior throughout the novel.

           

Some allusions are so common they have become clichés.  Weaknesses are “Achilles’ heels;” lands are as pristine as the “Garden” or “Eden;” when small schools tip off against big schools it’s always “David against Goliath;” riddles or mysteries are “sphinxlike;” delusional “tilting at windmills” is “quixotic;” trying to navigate between two unacceptable alternatives is like passing through “Scylla and Charybdis;”  and the ideal society is “El Dorado.” 

On the other hand, allusions can evoke in the alert and knowledgeable reader’s mind the echoes of an entire story, one that the author is not only pointing to but often commenting on or elaborating for her own purposes. 

So when Josef Skvorecky’s narrator, a Czech ex-patriate English professor in the book The Engineer of Human Souls, describes a pen-chewing student “with lips like the dead Ligeia’s” (6), this is what he wants us to imagine:

            …the color disappeared from both eyelid and cheek, leaving a wanness even more than that of marble; the lips became doubly shrivelled and pinched up in the ghastly expression of death; a repulsive clamminess and coldness overspread rapidly the surface of the body; and all the usual rigorous illness immediately supervened. I fell back with a shudder upon the couch from which I had been so startlingly aroused, and again gave myself up to passionate waking visions of Ligeia.

This passage from the Edgar Allan Poe short story, “Ligeia,” gives us a grim picture of the coed in Skvorecky’s classroom, the victim of a leaky pen she’s been nervously chomping on.  It’s meant ironically and humorously, though, which also we won’t get if we don’t know the allusion.  Or that it even is an allusion. 

You’ll recognize allusions chiefly by identifying words or phrases that seem out of place with the rest of the language in the passage you’re reading.  The Wells allusion notwithstanding, most are pretty straightforward.  “Ligeia” seems otherwise out of place in the student’s description if it’s not an allusion. Even the “grey eyes” reference to Athena would have been obvious to anyone familiar with the Odyssey, simply because there are so many repetitions of that description in the poem.

Most allusions will point you to stories of the Bible or Homer or Greek and Roman mythology.  That’s why your 7^th grade English teacher had you read all those myths.  You can hardly read an English poem of the 17^th, 18^th, or 19^th Centuries without encountering allusions to those sources.

As it happens, “Ligeia” is the name of one of the Sirens, minor deities who were credited with enticing sailors to their destruction with their beautiful voices.  Odysseus had his sailors stuff their ears with wax while tying him to the mast so he would be able to hear them without giving orders that would have destroyed the ship.  So Skvorecky’s allusion was to Poe’s story whose title was itself an allusion.  All Western literature, so it is said, returns to Homer one way or another. 

As we’ll see, novelists and poets aren’t the only writers who use allusions.  Contemporary non-fiction writers access the same literature common to all English speakers, using it to elaborate their arguments.  There is no escaping allusion without missing meaning at the same time.

So to read well you have to be well read.  It’s circular, certainly, but the more you read the more you know, and the better reader you’ll be. 

Allusions in Action

Each of the quotations below features an allusion from the book All the Devils Are Here, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera and a NY Times article on visiting zoos.  Determine three things:

·         What is the allusion?

·         What does it allude to?

·         How does the allusion complete the meaning of the quotation?

1.    As the Fed continued to increase interest rates—it did so seventeen times in a row between June 2004 and June 2006—Kurland became increasingly worried about the housing market.  But within the company, he and others who felt that way were the Chicken Littles.

2.    By the end of 2006, Countrywide had $2.8 billion worth of residuals [the riskiest of loans] on its balance sheet, representing about 15 percent of Countrywide’s equity.  The company’s internal enterprise risk assessment map—a key risk report—was flashing orange.

3.    Said another analyst:  “I told Angelo that his Achilles’ heel was funding.  In his typical way, Angelo said, ‘You’re all wrong.’”

4.    We’re used to the killing of enemies, but we reserve a special circle of hell for people who set fire to zoos.

5.    It’s the ultimate massacre of the innocents.

Exercise

Write an allusion to the following characters and stories:

1.    Sisyphus

2.    Pangloss

3.    The three little pigs.

4.    The boy who cried wolf

5.    Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

6.    Chicken Little

Copyright Russ Markert: faultline.blogspot.com