Fond Allusions

 

Post before last, I took a canter on a favorite hobbyhorse, suggesting that literature and language are really all one thing, parts of a single vast continuing interaction, and that that is one reason for including a healthy slug of whatever we are calling literature (almost any definition is too restrictive) in almost any English classroom.

Truth is, I don’t really know how to support this grand and hazy notion, not systematically.  But I can at least share a little collection I have been compiling lately. The following snippets from the New York Times all show literary influences cropping up, in surprising ways, in otherwise ordinary, non-belletristic prose.

Specimen #1:

In “the Obama Boom” (2/11/16), Paul Krugman, one of my favorite columnists, assails the conservative fiscal doctrine that “job creators” must be shielded from taxation:

On one side, this elite is presumed to be a bunch of economic superheroes, able to deliver universal prosperity by summoning the magic of the marketplace. On the other side, they’re depicted as incredibly sensitive flowers who wilt in the face of adversity — raise their taxes a bit, subject them to a few regulations, or for that matter hurt their feelings in a speech or two, and they’ll stop creating jobs and go sulk in their tents, or more likely their mansions.

Did you catch it? There in the last line is our old friend Achilles, hero and antagonist of the very oldest of Western classics, the Iliad, doing what he has always done: sulking in his tent, leaving his army exposed and understaffed, nearly bringing on disaster. The image, for those who get it, nicely clinches Krugman’s little satire on the travesties of trickle-down.

Specimen # 2:

A day or two earlier, in “Germany on the Brink,” a skeptical meditation on the country’s struggles to assimilate a tide of Middle Eastern refugees, Ross Doutthat concludes as follows:

prudence requires . . . closing Germany’s borders to new arrivals for the time being. . . . It means giving up the fond illusion that Germany’s past sins can be absolved with a reckless humanitarianism in the present.

It means that Angela Merkel must go — so that her country, and the continent it bestrides, can avoid paying too high a price for her high-minded folly.

No points will be deducted if you find no literary allusions here at all.  But what about the strangely starchy, old-fashioned diction in “fond illusion” and, further down, “bestrides”? The more you stare at these words, the stranger they seem, sitting there in an otherwise nondescript block of journalistic prose. Rather, what’s strange is that they aren’t strange — that they fit in so readily until we begin to question them.

“Fond illusion” is of course a set phrase, of a kind that all speakers and writers use liberally, George Orwell’s strictures notwithstanding. You can argue that it is in effect a single word, its meaning not so much derived from the constituent terms as from a sort of special charter or secondary convention. But to the extent that the phrase is the sum of its parts, “fond” is being used in a distinctly archaic sense: it means not “affectionate” but “crazy” — exactly the sort of miscellaneous factoid that English majors happily glom onto as they trot around somewhat aimlessly amid the classics. (Repeat after me: gay means happy, still means always, nice means fussy, die means orgasm.)  Doutthat is not alluding to any particular work but, if you will, to a whole body of texts that use “fond” in the older sense.

And then, “bestrides”: why? Why not “dominates,” say, or “rules”?  One possibility is that Doutthat simply likes the arch overtone that somehow clings to the word. But more likely I think is that he fully intends a reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where early on Cassius, one of the prospective assassins, harangues Brutus about Caesar’s over-reaching:

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs and peep about

To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

Cassius, you might notice, is also making an allusion, though not exactly a literary one. He expects that Brutus (and Shakespeare expects that we) will readily visualize the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the wonders of the ancient world, straddling the entrance to the harbor, with full-rigged ships sailing under his crotch: an image that conveys both the scale of Caesar’s pretensions and their incongruity. Meanwhile Doutthat, with his single one-word choice, implicitly compares Germany to both Caesar and the statue, suggesting all sorts of possibly relevant analogies.

Specimen # 3:

 

This one really is strange and fun. In “Leo, Hillary, and Their Bears” (1/10/16), Maureen Dowd works up a clever extended comparison between Hugh Glass, the Leonardo DiCaprio character in The Revenant, and Hillary Clinton in her current presidential campaign. In the best scene of the year’s most assiduously overpraised movie, Glass of course is horrifically mauled by a huge method-acting grizzly bear; likewise Hillary, in Dowd’s take, has been mauled by the bearish Trump in their set-to over who is and is not sexist. Here are the last sentences of the column:

If someone had to be collateral damage, it was not going to be Hillary. For now, she will have to deal with that old show business saw: Exit, pursued by a bear.

Brilliant! But it has to be said that Dowd’s nerve fails her slightly; if she is going to be highbrow, she should go ahead and be highbrow.  The reference is not in fact to a “show business saw” (what could it mean if it were?) but to the most famous stage direction in Shakespeare, the one that cues the sudden flight of Antigonus in Act III, Scene 3 of The Winter’s Tale, as he sadly abandons the infant Perdita, Oedipus-style, in the wild: odd associations to find here in the midst of a political column. Dowd seems to know that not one reader in ten will get the reference; hence her faux gloss.

But then, almost any communication will be a layering of more and less accessible meanings. Earlier in the passage, “collateral damage” can be tagged as a much more transparent allusion. It is Pentagon speak, and would not have made much sense before (I think) the First Gulf War, when it came in suddenly and massively. (Or was it during the 2003 invasion? It is so hard to keep one’s wars straight these days). You don’t really get it until you have heard it used in connection with one of those aerial videos that show a smart bomb destroying a bad guy and one hundred relatives. Clearly, this allusion is harder-working than the other, more necessary to the overall march of meaning. Antigonus and Perdita are lagniappe.

How many more such examples could be given? Why, messieurs and mesdames, as many as you like. From a January 31 Times editorial endorsing John Kasich: “The battle to be the Republican choice for president has been nasty, brutish and anything but short.’’ Perhaps three readers in four will have at least a faint memory of the catchphrase being riffed on: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”;  of these, perhaps a tenth or twentieth will remember that it comes from Thomas Hobbes’s seventeenth-century classic, Leviathan.  From a January 12 op-ed on rape culture by Ta-Nehisi Coates: “The scorned enjoy no rights that the powerful must respect” —invoking the language of the Dredd Scott decision to convey both the gravity of the wrong and its systemic nature.

Of course, here we begin to see that there is nothing all that special about literary allusions per se: other kinds of cultural references work just the same way, humming along in the machinery of language. Elena Kagan, in a dissenting opinion in Harris v. Quinn: “Readers of today’s decision will know that Abood does not rank on the majority’s top-ten list of favorite precedents.” Fussbudgets might feel that the language is inappropriate to a Supreme Court proceeding; everyone else will enjoy the reference to the David Letterman Show — or to a meme that by now has grown far beyond that locus classicus, on the strength of constant riffing and imitation from every quarter. A similar evolution can be traced with the most famous line of a pretty good movie, Jerry Maguire (1995). Having seen the error of his wandering ways, Jerry makes a long, passionate speech in good rom-com form, to which his lover replies, rather dryly, “You had me at hello,” then repeats the line. Tickled by her ungainly eloquence, the public has gone on to make this a nifty idiom, which the kids now repeat without ever having seen the movie. “You had me at ‘Big Mac.’” “You had me at ‘skip school.’”  

Plainly, we could go on and on. Language, I want to say, is steadily, ineluctably allusive, much as it is steadily, ineluctably ambiguous (so that we can keep using it to mean new things) and steadily, ineluctably metaphorical (because how else can you express a thing, except by comparing it to something else?) Allusions, indeed, seem to operate just like metaphors: at first they are conscious or archly hyperconscious, but after a while we take them for granted, and it is then, after they are “dead,” that they do their best work, settling in to become bits of routine verbal equipment. So there is no requirement that either speaker or listener really recognize the way an expression tropes on its sources. How many sportscasters have said “this game was a tale of two halves,” and how many of those have actually read the Dickens novel whose title they are invoking? How many speakers have referred to “the road not taken” or even “the road taken” without ever reading the Robert Frost poem, much less understanding that the phrase, there, is used in a mainly ironic sense? My grandmother, once, chiding me for rattling off dinnertime  grace too quickly:  “My words fly up, my thoughts  stay here below.” She had no idea she was quoting (and slightly mangling) Hamlet. Nor did my father, solemnly telling me “To thine own self be true,” really mean to place himself in the shoes of Polonius, the clown in the same play. 

Often enough, allusions can seem oddly pointless, even distracting. After the most recent Republican debate debacle, the Times editorial board said of Ted Cruz that “his support among evangelical Christian voters could be endangered if he’s successfully portrayed as someone who will stoop as low as he needs to in order to conquer ” — a nod to Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773). Even those who remember that wonderful play will struggle to find any connection between its romantic hijinks and the very different kinds of stooping and conquering that were featured in  Republican Cage Match Ten, or whatever the number was. You get the impression that those words in that order were used merely because the phrase was lying around handy.

Again, it does not matter so much whether Krugman’s reader really pictures hulking, sulking Achilles there in the tent: we get the drift of the argument quite well anyway, for good, clear writing is always overdetermined, offering a variety of means for homing in on the intended meaning. The non-hip reader can even (why not?) go on to use the allusion himself, blindly, without ever picking up Homer, for we are all expert mimics, and now he can simply ape Krugman. Similarly, Doutthat does not really need to know that his “bestrides” harks back to the lean-and-hungry Cassius: he only needs to have a decent ear for the way he has heard the word used before — for the tang of irony that still clings to it even after most of the Shakespearean context has dropped away.  

To speak at all, it seems, is to make an allusion of some sort, whether it is to the King James Bible or to an argument you heard Jimmy Apodaca having with Betty Pendergraff in fourth grade. The reasons for this have to do with how we come to possess language in the first place, and with the need of speech to hedge its bets. We Homo sapiens do not come from the factory with our vocabularies neatly pre-installed. We have to build up our own existential lexicons through a chancy process of imitation and inspired guesswork, one that leaves us potentially in the situation of Mrs. Malaprop. It is not dictionaries or grammar books, Lord knows, that give us fluency and precision.  What cements the meanings of words for us, what gives us at least a best guess about what they will mean to others if we dare to use them, is our vivid memories of having heard them used before (including unconscious memories, including composite memories, including plenty of extra context and detail). Learning language on the job, we parrot each other on principle, and I use what you said yesterday as the template for what I am trying to communicate today, and this is how language goes forward and builds itself up. Poets and artists can rightly claim (as they always have) to be the primary creators of language, but in a close second place is everyone else.

So how good an argument does all this give us for including Literature in the curriculum? Oy vey, not that good at all! For if an average shovelful of English, dumped in the pan and swirled around in the stream for a while, yields an exciting nugget or two of Shakespeare or King James or Emily Dickinson, it also yields nuggets of Yogi Berra, Aesop, the IRS Code, Warren G. Harding, Beyonce, three dozen movies, and everything else you can name. If literary allusions are just a particular instance of a general linguistic process, and if you don’t even have to get them in order to grasp what you are hearing or help form what you are saying, then they don’t seem to add all that much to the curricular claims of literature. Shakespeare may be a special case; I could see a quick unit in pre-K. But is it worth laboring so hard just to be the only person in the room who recognizes a largely buried, possibly unintended reference to Melville or James Joyce?

Still, the way the classics go on echoing and re-echoing through the language, long after what had seemed to be their deaths, is interesting, suggestive, and fun to notice. And if the student brain is not filled with literature, exactly, it had better be filled with something, or Johnny will miss not just the literary references but all the other ones as well. He will struggle cluelessly, never finding a point of entry into anything he reads. Then his papers really will be awful, no matter how much you immerse him in the cheery, can-do protocols of Comp.