The Use and Abuse of Literature (11 page)

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

I print these two blockbuster passages together not because one refers to or alludes to the other but because between them, they could be said to author the English literary canon. How many students, even graduate students, can recite them now? Memorization, learning by heart, is out of fashion as a pedagogical skill, though students of all ages regularly memorize the lyrics of popular songs, the Pledge of Allegiance, and “The Star-Spangled Banner”—although the latter is often committed to memory phonetically rather than in terms of units of sense, like the
famous and comical rendition of a religious hymn as “Gladly the Crosseyed Bear.”

But there is much to learn from these passages committed to memory and recited out loud. The sequencing of ideas and rhythms in the Chaucer (“when,” “when,” “then,” as if there were an inescapable seasonal logic to these human migrations) and the Google Earth–like literary zoom lens, zeroing in on a tighter and tighter focus (from the calendar and the heavenly constellations to the desire for pilgrimage and the Canterbury pilgrims), are superbly indicative not only of the economy of art but of the wit of the poet. His ability to paint genre images comparable to that of Breugel (the birds are sleepless with spring fever and desires of their own) is matched by a poetic daring—and humor—that allows the last line to flirt with bathos, nine simple single-syllable words and a past participle expressing the homeliest of sentiments (“That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke”). “Seeke” and “seke” may rhyme, but aren’t they also homophones, words that share the same pronunciation? If so, what does that doubled relation (rhyme and homophony) do to the poetic logic? Does it make the sentiment seem redundant? Does it make the fictional poet-speaker sound unartful? And did I mention that this long unfolding pageant occurs over the course of a single sentence? Many critics have noticed that the weather report seems off: March in the environs of Canterbury is distinctly not a month of drought. This is a classical trope, the meteorology of Virgilian Rome, maybe, but not an accurate forecast for England. And yet those small birds are so distinctly native. Eighteen lines. And we have just begun to talk about them.

It would be possible to pose a similar set of initial questions and observations about the opening lines of
Paradise Lost
. A reader needs to start somewhere: since few English majors these days come to Milton with a prior knowledge of Homer and Virgil, of the traditional epic
invocatio
(address to the Muse) or
principium
(statement of the poem’s scope of action), or, indeed, of Latin syntax, will a close-reading strategy work for unpacking this powerful and moving passage? To begin a sentence or a work with
of
would be familiar structure in Latin, or in early-modern English (think of Bacon’s essays titled “Of Studies” or “Of Fame,” “Of
Youth and Age,” “Of Truth,” and so on, themselves based on classical models). But—or and—for a modern reader, the experience of waiting six lines to get from the prepositional clause (“Of man’s first disobedience”) to the verb (“sing”) is a powerful tactic of suspension and delay. Milton’s enjambments (the carrying over of the sentence from one line to the next) are celebrated, and they teach a great deal about how literature works. What is the effect of ending the first line of verse with “the fruit” and then carrying the sense over to the next (“Of that forbidden tree”)? The effect of double take here is similar to the enjambment of Richard III’s opening lines: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York” (1.1.1–2). In both cases, the listener needs to rethink the syntax, and therefore the meaning, of what has gone before. “Fruit” refers both directly to the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and also to the results, or consequences, of this transgression. And so on. The personal “I” appears in the middle of line 12, after the caesura, or the pause in the verse. The commas, line breaks, caesurae, personal pronouns, and verb forms (invocations, assertions, declarations) are all underscored in the process of reciting aloud. So “having” these twenty-six lines may give the reader—even, or especially, the reader largely unfamiliar with Milton—a template for interpreting, understanding, analyzing, and responding to the rest of this long poem.

The arts of memory go back thousands of years, to cultures and literatures that flourished before printing, and before sophisticated systems of number and placement were developed to assist in retaining and collecting ideas, words, lists, and places so they could be readily and systematically recalled. What people memorize is culturally indicative, whether it’s words to a pop song or lines from a political treatise. But to a large extent, memorization has faded from the practices of higher education in literature, even as research on historical memory, medieval “memory theaters,” and other mnemonic devices, architectural memorials, and false memory syndrome have increasingly interested scholars in other
disciplines. Being asked, or required, to memorize passages of poetry became associated with lack of imagination on the part of the teacher and lack of freedom on the part of the students.