ALLUSION

1.    Definition.

Allusions are far from being the sole preserve of literature. Cinema painting and music frequently contain quotations from other works. Early still-lifes in particular depended on a rich vocabulary of symbols which many admirers are unaware of today.

Allusions, in general, are when the author makes a reference to another person’s work. The author may either mention the allusion or compare the allusion to their topic. For instance, they might name their character after someone in the Bible or from Myths. An author may compare their character or scenario (using some form of a metaphor) to a literary work. There are three major forms of allusions: biblical, classical, and literary.

·         Biblical: Biblical allusions encompass any of the stories or people in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

·         Classical: Classical allusions most commonly refers to Greek or Roman mythology. Common examples used are: Zeus, Hercules, Aphrodite (Venus), Ares (Mars), and Icarus.

·         Literary: Literary allusions is the broadest of these three categories. Literary allusions can be references to famous books, essays, speeches, movies, artists, and authors. Examples of popular references in this category include famous quotes from any piece of work like "Give me freedom or give me death", references to the Declaration of Independence, mentioning artists names like Picasso or Da Vinci, etc.

An allusion is a reference to, or representation of, a place, event, literary work, myth, or work of art, either directly or by implication. M.H. Abrams defined allusion as "a brief reference, explicit or indirect, to a person, place or event, or to another literary work or passage". It is left to the reader or hearer to make the connection (Fowler); an overt allusion is a misnomer for what is simply a reference.

An allusion is a literary device that stimulates ideas, associations, and extra information in the reader's mind with only a word or two. Allusion means 'reference'. It relies on the reader being able to understand the allusion and being familiar with all of the meaning hidden behind the words.

In literature, an implied or indirect reference to a person, event, or thing or to a part of another text. Allusion is distinguished from such devices as direct quote and imitation or parody. Most allusions are based on the assumption that there is a body of knowledge that is shared by the author and the reader and that therefore the reader will understand the author’s referent. Allusions to biblical figures and figures from classical mythology are common in Western literature for this reason. However, some authors, such as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, deliberately use obscure and complex allusions.

Allusions in writing help the reader to visualize what's happening by evoking a mental picture. But the reader must be aware of the allusion and must be familiar with what it alludes to. Allusions are commonly made to the Bible, nursery rhymes, myths, famous fictional or historical characters or events, and Shakespeare. They can be used in prose and poetry.

In general, the use of allusions by an author shows an expectation that the reader is familiar with the references made, otherwise the effect is lost. A piece of writing with many allusions (some of which may be very obscure) will be very rich with evoked images, but will do nothing for a reader who is not well-read.

2.   Scope and History

An allusion is a literary term, though the word also has come to encompass indirect references to any source, including allusions in film or the visual arts. In literature, allusions used to link concepts that the reader already has knowledge of, with concepts discussed in the story. In the field of film criticism, a film-maker's intentionally unspoken visual reference to another film has come to be called an homage. It may even be sensed that real events have allusive overtones, when a previous event is inescapably recalled by a current one. "Allusion is bound up with a upon the ready stock of ideas or emotion already associated with a topic in a relatively short space. Thus, an allusion is understandable only to those with prior knowledge of the covert reference in question.

 

3.   Functioning

A sobriquet is an allusion: by metonymy one aspect of a person or other referent is selected to identify it, and it is this shared aspect that makes an allusion evocative. In an allusion to "the city that never sleeps", New York will be recognized. Recognizing the figure in this condensed puzzle-disguise additionally serves to reinforce cultural solidarity between the maker of the remark and the hearer: their shared familiarity with The Big Apple bonds them. Some aspect of the referent must be invoked and identified, in order for the tacit association to be made; the allusion is indirect in part because "it depends on something more than mere substitution of a referent". The allusion depends as well on the author's intent; an industrious reader may search out parallels to a figure of speech or a passage, of which the author under examination was unaware, and offer them as unconscious allusions— coincidences that a critic might not find illuminating. Addressing such issues is an aspect of hermeneutics.

William Irwin remarks that allusion moves in only one direction: "If A alludes to B, then B does not allude to A. The Bible does not allude to Shakespeare, though Shakespeare may allude to the Bible." Irwin appends a note: "Only a divine author, outside of time, would seem capable of alluding to a later text." This is the basis for Christian readings of Old Testament prophecy, which asserts that passages are to be read as allusions to future events.

 4.   Examples of Allusion

In Homer, brief allusions could be made to mythic themes of generations previous to the main narrative because they were already familiar to the epic's hearers: one example is the theme of the Calydonian boarhunt. In Hellenistic Alexandria, literary culture and a fixed literary canon known to readers and hearers, made a densely allusive poetry effective; the poems of Callimachus offer the best-known examples.

In discussing the richly allusive poetry of Virgil's Georgics, R.F. Thomas distinguished six categories of allusive reference, which are applicable to a wider cultural sphere. These types are

·         Casual Reference, "the use of language which recalls a specific antecedent, but only in a general sense" that is relatively unimportant to the new context;

·         Single Reference, in which the hearer or reader is intended to "recall the context of the model and apply that context to the new situation"; such a specific single reference in Virgil, according to Thomas, is a means of "making connections or conveying ideas on a level of intense subtlety";

·         Self-Reference, where the locus is in the poet's own work;

·         Corrective Allusion, where the imitation is clearly in opposition to the original source's intentions;

·         Apparent Reference ""which seems clearly to recall a specific model but which on closer inspection frustrates that intention" and

·         Multiple Reference or Conflation, which refers in various ways simultaneously to several sources, fusing and transforming the cultural traditions.

Allusion differs from the similar term intertextuality in that it is an intentional effort on the author's part. The success of an allusion depends in part on at least some of its audience "getting" it. Allusions may be made increasingly obscure, until at last they are understood by the author alone, who thereby retreats into a private language.

A literature has grown round explorations of the allusions in Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock or T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Martin Luther King, Jr., alluded to the Gettysburg Address in starting his "I Have a Dream" speech by saying 'Five score years ago..."; his hearers were immediately reminded of Abraham Lincoln's "Four score and seven years ago", which opened the Gettysburg Address. King's allusion effectively called up parallels in two historic moments. An allusion may become trite and stale through unthinking overuse, devolving into a mere cliché.

A few illustrations will show how the reader's need to & trace allusions varies.

A CARAFE, TIIAT IS A BLIND GLASS - Gertrude Stein

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling.

The difference is spreading

The weak semantic and formal cohesion are hallmarks of a modernist text. The weak coupling in

this example puts a further strain on the reader.

The form and thematic continuity do little to disguise the lack of higher level cohesion. The extensive use of puns to convey references means that coupling isn't wholly at the expense of the primary text. The references lead now here and don't interlink; if a few are missed it's not the end of the world. They're one-way - the poem doesn't suck significance in from distant texts. The combination of weak cohesion and numerically strong coupling is common in ludic and post-modernist work.

5.   The Mechanics of Allusion

According to Ben-Porot[ 5, p.l09J the process of a reader's actualization of an allusion involves

·         recognition of marker

·         identification of evoked text

·         modification of the initial local interpretation of passage

·         activation of evoked text

Full actualization may be frustrated at each stage

Recognition of marker - If an allusion is disguised or unobtrusive (it doesn't appear in quotes, it has a tempting non-allusive interpretation, etc) the reader may not realize that it exists.

Identification of evoked text - There is no longer a canon of work that the reader can be expected to know – reader ship is wider, the Bible is less popular, and there are more books.

Modification of the initial local interpretation of the passage - he-modernist poems more often than not had a primary meaning, perhaps based on initial observation.

Activation of evoked text - "While reading text, readers establish local coherence in short-term memory- small scale inferences from few small units of information...These hypotheses are refined as the reading of the text proceeds. In semantic memory, each concept is connected to a number of other concepts.