Margaret Atwood

382 MARGARET ATWOOD MARGARET ATWOOD One of the most allusion-studded things I've done was The Handmaid's Tale, the very title of which is an allusion: to Chaucer, and also to the Bible. The Bible is flagged in one of the two epigraphs, which is from Genesis, and which gives us also the name for the Re-Education Centre in the book: The Rachel and Leah Centre. Then there are, of course, the false quotations from the same book, and the mis-attributions: 'From each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs' is of course a garbling of Marx, but is ascribed, by the Gilead regime, to St Paul. This kind of allusion, in the late twentieth century, is likely to be employed for purposes of irony, or mischief: you get the force of the solemnity or at least the good faith of the original and also the contrast with the triviality or bad faith of its employment (not the triviality or bad faith of the author, I hasten to add, but of the characters in the story). Literature - like culture, like memory - is a many-layered thing (the allusion to a well-known popular song of the fifties will not have escaped you). You can never write on the same wall twice (note the allusion to the well-known Chinese proverb), because, no matter how much we would like to believe we are starting with a clean slate (note the allusion to the well-known pedagogical cliche), many moving fingers have already writ, and having writ, moved on (Who? WHO? Could it be Fitzgerald's Rubdiydt? Alluding, again, to the Bible, to that famous football passage? Meanie! Meanie! Tackle! Crush their shins!). Language, after all, is a sort of graffettucine : many strands, sinuously intertwined, and hard to ingest with blunt instruments. The proverbial can of Verms (portmanteau for Verb Forms). James Joyce has a lot to answer for. The most characteristic form of allusion , in this day and age, is likely to be what used to be called a pun. Updating a little: my most recent sins of this kind can be found in the story 'Wilderness Tips,' in the book of the same name. The characters in this story are staying at a summer cottage which is named 'Wacousta Lodge.' Only some readers will know at first glance that this name is an allusion to a nineteenth-century romance, and, of these, only a few will have actually read the book. But then, only a few of the characters in the story have read it, too: thus illustrating the present-day difficulties inherent in the practice of allusion: now that there is no longer a body of work with which we are all supposed to be more or less familiar, how can you count on anyone getting it? When Adrienne Rich says, 'Every woman's death diminishes me,' how much is lost if we've never read John Donne, male writer - white male writer - eek! Christian white male writer - though he may be? And when Pamela, in 'Wilderness Tips,' says, 'Geology is destiny,' what ceases to reverberate if we - by some happy chance - have never been subjected to the 'Biology-is-destiny' rubrics of the Freudianists? Soon everything will come with footnotes, even in first editions. ...