We can’t go back to that time, nor—in the main—should we want to do so. The world of literary studies has become, to a great extent (though not completely), democratized and pluralized, with beneficial effects for scholarship and teaching. But the question remains about that elusive, and to some extent delusory, “larger picture.” The old divisions and categories—period, genre, author, nation—have all been questioned, their borderlines exposed as permeable (when does medieval begin or end? Do terms like epic and pastoral have modern and postmodern equivalents? How do we assess collaborative or collective authorship? Does it matter whether Beckett is an Irish author or a French author?). After decades in which master narratives were set aside in favor of the local, the particular, the outsider, and the idea of bricolage, there is an understandable longing on the part of students, and of some teachers and scholars, for a broader arc, a story if not a picture.
The language of specialist and generalist is sometimes deployed as a kind of code, implying that members of the former are technocrats (or even bureaucrats) and careerists, while the latter are genuinely committed to literary study and, as a strong and insistent subtext, to teaching, by which is meant the teaching of undergraduates (and non-majors) rather than graduate students. This divide, too, I think is false, and not only inaccurate but meretricious. It sets up the terms of apparent difference in a way that fails to understand or to value the continuum between teaching and scholarship, intellectual excitement and painstaking research, pleasure and profit, learnedness and learning.
My own education was as a generalist, and I am to a certain extent a generalist still, “dabbling,” as the dismissive term has it, in periods and others not “my own.” From time to time I have taught courses on Jane Austen as well as Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, on modern and postmodern drama as well as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, on detective fiction (from Oedipus to Agatha Christie to Crick and Watson’s double helix), on literary and cultural theory, and on ghosts in literature, as well as what used to be called survey courses in English literature, the epic and the novel, and drama from the Greeks to the present day. If we were to try to adapt the terms of Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” to the realm of literary study, rather than of literary production, I would be pretty clearly on the side of the fox rather than the hedgehog.7 Or, to put it another way, my interests are transhistorical, eclectic, thematic, and theoretical. I am less interested in thick description and period-based work, more intrigued by following out an idea, an intuition, a hunch, or a series of associations wherever they lead me. But I am deeply committed to research, to evidence, to documentation, to the acknowledgment of prior scholars’ work, and to other things that belong to the apparatus of scholarship.
So for me, the dichotomy between so-called specialists and so-called generalists is a false divide. Since I believe, along with many of the critics I have cited in these pages, that the colloquy is always being held across the centuries between and among writers, whether of fiction, poetry, drama, or any other genre, to specialize will mean to know the intellectual surround (as well as the historical background) of any given author’s work, its precursors and successors, its effects and affects. What I want to emphasize here, though, is the distinct kind of pleasure that comes from connecting one literary work or phrase or character or passage with another—the experience that is sometimes called getting, or catching, or recognizing a literary allusion.
The Fate of an Allusion
The title of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is a reference to the theme song of Disney’s Three Little Pigs (1933), but it would have no resonance if the name Virginia Woolf didn’t already carry some important connotative power (feminist writer; major twentieth-century novelist; innovative stylist; Bloomsbury icon). Albee apparently said that when he saw the phrase scrawled on a mirror, he thought of it as “a rather typical, university intellectual joke.”8 It’s hard to know whether such a joke would today be the typical product of college wit. Or take a slightly different kind of example, T. S. Eliot’s play Sweeney Agonistes, which offers a wry reference to John Milton’s verse tragedy Samson Agonistes (1671). The titles of both Sweeney Agonistes and Gary Wills’s biography Nixon Agonistes (1969) assume at least a fleeting familiarity with Milton’s poem, or at least with its title. As with Albee’s Virginia Woolf, the wit lies in the apparent disjunction between the original and the subsequent allusion.
But the practice of allusion seems to have moved from the realm of classic literature to popular culture and politics. The old-style literary allusion required that the reader or hearer identify the reference. Thus, the American poet Amy Lowell could, in 1912, title a poem “Fresh Woods and Pastures New” and assume that her readers would understand the allusion to the last line of Milton’s “Lycidas.” An exhibition of Dutch seventeenth-century landscape drawings with that title toured in 2000, having originated in a university art gallery. Slate used the same phrase appositely as the title of a posted item on the move of a professor from one law school to another; the professor, it turned out, was writing a book on law and Shakespeare, so he was twice embarking on a new venture, field, and vocation.9 But these audiences of readers are comparatively cognoscenti. How many readers would catch a witty reference to “fresh woods and pastures new” today?
Let’s take another example, perhaps a more familiar one to modern readers, the phrase “miles to go before I sleep” from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” (The alert reader of this book will see that I got from Milton’s woods to Frost’s woods by a process of association, though it is more conventional to associate Frost’s entry into the woods with that of Dante in his Inferno.) In any case, “miles to go before I sleep” has had a lively itinerary, having been used in 1974 as the title of a movie about a lonely senior citizen (played by Martin Balsam) and, with signifying parentheses, as the title of a love song, “Miles to Go (Before I Sleep),” which appears on a 1997 CD by Celine Dion. Arguably, audiences for both works would recognize the allusion to Frost, one of the most frequently taught lyric poets in the high school curriculum.
Some authors—like Laurence Sterne, for example, or T. S. Eliot, or James Joyce—demonstrably use allusion as a major constituent part of their own creative work.10 Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is, in formal and intellectual terms, both a tapestry of allusions and a send-up of, or a challenge to, the very idea of allusion. But if an allusion falls (or is dropped) and no one catches it, does it really allude?
T. S. Eliot famously added learned footnotes to his poem The Waste Land when it was published in 1922. References to Virgil, Dryden, Pope, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Ezekiel, Dickens, etc., are essential to the structure, tone, and content of the poem, but the footnotes are selective, didactic, and (deliberately?) pompous and condescending. In a preliminary note, for example, Eliot cites “Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge)” and “another work of anthropology … one which has influenced our generation profoundly: I mean The Golden Bough.”11 (No author is cited here; those who don’t know, don’t know.) Eliot proceeds to comment that “Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.” The tone is droll, deadpan: there are sheep and goats, insiders and outsiders. And the language is scholarly piling-on: “anyone,” “immediately,” and the tantalizingly vague “certain references.” Again, if you know, you know. These are parody footnotes, allusions to footnotes, allusions to allusions. Yet, like many others of my generation, I wanted to know what the poets knew. Eliot’s poem and its footnotes were my homeschooling. I went in quest of the works of Mr. Frazer, The White Devil, and the philosophical writings of F. H. Bradley. I read Dante and Spenser and whatever translations of the Upanishads I could find. I also bought and read Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, a slim book that became a must-have on the bookshelves of the time, right next to all those New Direc
tions poetry paperbacks.
Much critical sport has been made of Eliot’s learnedly mocking footnote on the song of the hermit-thrush, which cites the bird’s Latin name (Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii), Chapman’s commentary on it in the Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, and a further ornithological observation from the annotator-poet: “Its ‘water-dripping song’ is justly celebrated.” What Eliot doesn’t mention is that the hermit-thrush is Whitman’s bird and plays an important role in two of the best-known poems in the American canon, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d,” Whitman’s poem on the death of Abraham Lincoln, in which the solitary thrush becomes an American elegist and muse. This is a kind of allusion by omission, even a misdirection ploy, as the diligent student is invited to hunt down Frank Chapman’s field handbook to regional birds (not even the author’s full name is given) rather than to speculate upon the canonical place of the hermit-thrush in poetry.
But these notes, however belatedly added to the poem, are themselves works of art rather than of scholarship, as the next footnote makes clear. “The following lines,” writes Eliot, “were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s) …” No academic could get away with this insouciance or this inexactitude. Despite my early eagerness to follow the track of the poet’s reading—rather like J. L. Lowes’s exhaustive study of Coleridge’s reading in The Road to Xanadu—such notes are tantalizing digressions rather than allusions, since their associations (assuming them to be truthful rather than completely fictive) are personal rather than public.
Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions were much of the moment when Eliot was writing. The unsuccessful but heroic Endurance expedition took place in 1914–16, and Shackleton died on yet another voyage to Antarctica in 1922, the year The Waste Land was published. But it’s also the case that the “delusion” to which Eliot here refers, on the part of the explorers in extremis, “that there was one more member than could actually be counted,” has its familiar literary-historical counterpart in the famous stories told about the early performances of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, when “the visible apparition of the Devill” was said to have joined the actors onstage.12 (The fact that Shackleton was educated at Dulwich College, founded by Edward Alleyn, the Elizabethan actor who played Faustus on this occasion, may be put down to one of those coincidences it is perhaps not worth considering too curiously.)
What I want to emphasize is not the creative process, the ways—direct and oblique—that poets and writers get their ideas and find their words, but, rather, the difference between a reference and an allusion, indeed between a literary allusion (pointing toward another literary work or phrase) and a historical allusion. The borderline is tricky and fluid: if the phrase “who is the third who walks always beside you?” were taken by Eliot from the language of one of the Antarctic accounts, it would be—by my admittedly ad hoc standards—a literary, or perhaps better, a textual allusion. But if Eliot is imagining the phrase, taking an idea and bringing it to verbal life, then (for me) he is using Shackleton as a source, the way Shakespeare uses Holinshed’s Chronicles as a source, not as an allusion.
Why should this distinction matter? you may well ask. Because, I might reply—assuming we were to remain in this subjunctive mood—it speaks again to the heart of the literary enterprise. A conversation among texts is different from a conversation among persons, and a literary allusion is different from a historical reference. To take up the third, and manifestly overdetermined, case I mentioned above, that of James Joyce, whose range of literary and cultural allusion is simply staggering: to identify the Irish physician, poet, footballer, and wit Oliver St. John Gogarty as Joyce’s inspiration for the figure of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses is perhaps an interesting piece of historical fact. But when Stephen Daedalus in the same novel is obsessed with the phrase “Agenbite of inwit,” that is a literary allusion—as, indeed, is Stephen’s surname (and, if we want to pursue the question, his given name). The Ayenbite of Inwyt, as the title is usually spelled, is a Middle English work, the title of which means Prick of Conscience or Remorse of Conscience. Again-bite and in-wit are nicely Joycean terms that originate, here, in a mid-fourteenth-century Kentish dialect.
Allusion as a literary practice differs from the concept of intertextuality in that it ordinarily presumes an intention on the part of the author, whereas intertextuality—a term coined by the theorist Julia Kristeva—posits a relationship between or among literary works, a kind of textual conversation that is observed, participated in, and augmented by the reader. Now, obviously, the reader also participates, as we have seen, in getting or catching an allusion, and it is conceivable that some allusions are unconscious rather than conscious on the part of the author. Some of the most basic questions about authorial intention and authorial control of meaning touch upon this kind of issue: did the writer intend an allusion to poem X or author Y? If he or she cannot be said to have done so, then the claim is sometimes made that the critic is “reading too much into” the work, as if that intensive reading process were not legitimate, were not, in fact, at the very heart of the literary enterprise (and the “use” of literature).
Literary allusions may be overt or covert, manifest or hidden, direct or indirect, faithful or parodic. But there is a dog-whistle aspect to the process: some readers will hear the signal, and some will not. A reader who has never encountered the classical epic (or read any of the critical scholarship) may miss the fact that Joyce’s Ulysses is based on Homer’s Odyssey. More basically yet, that reader may not register the importance of an English-language poem designed or written in twelve books (Spenser’s plan for the unfinished Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, both reflecting on Virgil’s Aeneid), or hear the echoes and revisions of Milton’s poem in Wordsworth’s Prelude. All of these were standard literary-historical expectations for students of the canon in the middle of the twentieth century—as indeed was the Virgilian sequence of pastoral elegy, eclogue, and epic in the evolution of a poet. Or the notion of the “elegy on the death of the poet,” written by a mourning, and surviving, successor.
Such allusions are formal, not verbal, although some tropes can be both, like the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, or of Paradise Lost, passages the English student was in the past often expected to memorize and know by heart (in an idiom that goes back to Chaucer). Even the number of lines—the first eighteen lines of The Canterbury Tales, the first twenty-six lines of Paradise Lost—were engraved upon memory. Here they are:
Whan that Aprill with his shouers soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour:
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
5
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tender croppes, and the younge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
10
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sundry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
15
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blissful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
—Geoffrey Chaucer,
“General Prologue,” The Canterbury Tales
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
5
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
10
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aeonian mount, while it pursues
15
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou O spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
20
Dovelike sat’st brooding on the vast abyss
And mad’st it pregnant, what in me is dark
Illumine; what is low raise and support;
That, to the height of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
25
And justify the ways of God to men.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1
The Use and Abuse of Literature Page 8