Introduction

ELEANOR COOK Introduction We hear it in news broadcasts, we use it ourselves. ('Not with a bang but a whimper.' 'The centre cannot hold.') And we all know about the man who complained of a performance of Hamlet: well acted, but the play was nothing but a tissue of quotations. Has anyone ever counted? Line for line, Hamlet must be the most quoted, alluded to, echoed - and what verb, by the way, should we use? Which is one way of starting to think about allusion. Allusion may seem a small matter, and yet it shows in little what we choose to remember from the past, what we 'would not willingly let die,' as Milton puts it. Allusion keeps certain words alive, or it tries to. At Laguna Pueblo ... many individual words have their own stories. So when one is telling a story, and one is using words to tell the story, each word that one is speaking has a story of its own, too. Often the speakers or tellers will go into these word-stories, creating an elaborate structure of stories-withinstories .1 Just so. All words have stories, and good poets know these stories better than anyone, for they know words as they know people.2 Allusion is one type of word-story, one way of remembering word-stories. In ordinary usage and in elementary literary handbooks, the words 'allusion' and 'reference' are synonymous. We talk of 'alluding to' the character of Hamlet or the Dtory of David and Bathsheba, even though we repeat no words at all from Shakespeare or the English Bible. In critical usage, it's handy to distinguish allusion from reference, allusion here meaning the precise verbal repetition of sentences, phrases, words, even syllables. ('To be or not to be.' 'Thou art the man.') This includes play against the original wording, for we need to know the original words in order to enjoy the play. (See Margaret Atwood on 'Meanie, meanie.') It's also useful to distinguish specific allusion (which has a single origin) from what might be called general allusion, for example to a formulaic saying ('Once upon a time,' 'Amen'). This matters because good allusive practice often brings a weight of context to bear, and we want to know what context. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1992 /289 290 ELEANOR COOK Sources are different from allusions, just as source-hunting (the old Quellenforschung) is different from the study of allusion. And not all uses of memory are equal. See, for example, Milton on the unthinking citation of sources, as if such citation in itself guaranteed authority:3 '... men whose learning and belief lies in marginal stuffings, who, when they have like good sumptors laid ye down their horseload of citations and fathers at your door ... ye may take off their pack-saddles, their di:lY's work is done' (Reason of Church Government, Pref II). It's this kind of allusiondropping that can give allusion studies a bad name, as can some sourcehunting . Sources differ from allusions in that a reader is not expected to recognize a source or to enjoy the pleasures of inference. In The Waste Land, where allusion functions as both a subject and a method, some of Eliot's notes provide sources, while others point to the origin of allusions. Notes on Chapman's hermit thrush and Shackleton's expedition offer sources; words from, say, Shakespeare or Marvell are allusions. The Waste Land focuses on memory, when it can bear to do so, memory that is not quite right. Some memories seem too loud, while others seem to be evaded. Or else memory is lost, especially communal memory. Allusion is part of this whole process of remembering and not remembering and mis-remembering, of speech and silence. Literary critics often place allusion in the large domain now known lW the term 'intertextuality' (introduced by Julia Kristeva and the Tel Quel group). 'Intertextuality' is the commodious term for reading a given work as the nexus of all the other verbal works that surround it and inform it. In theory, such surrounding is infinite, for one word leads to another. In practice, choices are made, by poet...