Wall of Allusion

As the first atmospheric river of the season washed over the coast, the streetlights buzzed and flickered, casting long shadows that stretched across the pavement like ghosts struggling to break free from the roads.

Rain tapped at the window like a prehensile chorus of infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters espaliered over infinite time.

And then the same old story clicked in, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing: I was sitting in my office, listening to the ceiling fan fail at its one job, when she walked in.

This dame had legs like sonnets and eyes like a well-executed metaphor — beautiful, dangerous and slightly over your head if you weren’t paying attention. A look that could make a thesaurus blush.

Pressed between all those curves and promises, she was carrying an envelope that smelled like mystery. Or possibly mothballs.

She dropped the envelope onto my desk and a whole lot of trouble into my lap. The room’s 60-watt lightbulb, dangling precariously from the chipped ceramic socket on the ceiling, caught her high, shadowed silhouette … and I had a vision of what moths see in a flame.

“Something’s gone missing, Mr. Bailey,” she said, voice like honey and gravel in a blender. “But then, surely a man in your business is aware of this.”

“What is it this time?” I growled, striving for the dulcet assurance of Robert Mitchum but croaking more like RFK Jr. over a rancid plate of week-old roadkill. Suddenly realized I hadn’t spoken in days. “Dignity? Syntax? Synecdoche? And don’t call me Shirley.”

“Allusions,” she said. “The real McCoys. Literary bones. Titles with backstories. Passing, indirect references. People used to recognize them, but we’re obviously losing the connecting threads.”

I cracked the envelope. Scribbles, annotations, half a coffee ring. Literary breadcrumbs — the kind that lead you into the woods and never back out. Ghosts of allusions past. The sort of stuff only college professors and desperate New York Times Saturday crossword solvers still cared about.

Just what I needed. An existential crisis in manila.

“Missing literary references?” I asked, blinking like any red-blooded heterotextual who accidentally wanders into a graduate bluestocking seminar on Pedantic Who Gives a Crap?

“Exactly,” she said. “Track them down. Find the sources. Make sure the people who keep throwing these titles around without knowing where they come from know they’ve been seen.  These titles — they used to mean something. They had roots. Depth. Now if they use them at all, people toss them about like decorative throw pillows in a TikTok bookshelf tour.”

I nodded, trying not to look like I was the guy who once confused John Donne with Don Juan.

She handed me the first one, seemingly as a bit of a softball test: Far from the Madding Crowd.

My brain hiccuped. “That’s not Thomas Hardy’s phrase,” I said, mentally scrolling through the dusty attic of my undergrad memories. “That’s from Thomas Gray. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Hardy purloined it and added healthy doses of tragedy and emotional constipation. Tale of two Thomases.”

She nodded back, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips.

“That’s right. Gray’s lines go: ‘Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife / Their sober wishes never learned to stray.’ The poem is about escaping the noise of the world, about finding peace in the quiet countryside. Hardy ran with that and applied it to a theme of isolation — but in a way that made it his own, turning it into a metaphor for his characters’ struggles with love, fate and ambition.”

Well, in the immortal words of Annie Hall, la dee da, la dee da, la la.

In the anti-intellectual, post-literate society we all inhabit, it’s considered pretentious to know this stuff. Pompous. Flatulent. Inutile.

But maybe milady here was casting pearls before swine. And maybe I was growing a little curly tail.

There was a time when anyone reasonably well-read — at least up to a Canadian or American high school standard — would pick up on connections between one artistic work and another.

When James Baldwin titled his semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain back in 1953, he knew pretty much everyone would catch the reference to the African-American spiritual song and Christmas carol from an oral tradition dating to at least the 19th century. The song itself includes several biblical references, particularly the Annunciation to the shepherds described in the Gospel of Luke.

When Chinua Achebe published his novel about Western missionaries “civilizing” eastern Nigeria in the 1890s, titled Things Fall Apart, he could be confident that most readers would recognize the line from W.B. Yeats’s chiliastic poem “The Second Coming”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

That confidence would be misplaced today. If you read Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men or saw the Oscar-winning film based on it, did you catch the allusion to Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium”?

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees —

Those dying generations — at their song

Ah, and speaking of songs and dying generations. Their fans don’t always pick up on it, but pop and rock artists have been mining the literary canon for years.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but think Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” (Emily Brontë), Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” (Tolkien), Green Day’s “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?” (J.D. Salinger), Lana Del Rey’s “Body Electric” (Walt Whitman), the Cure’s “Killing an Arab” (Albert Camus).

Dylan draws on Homer, Rimbaud, Poe, Emerson, Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hugo, the Tanakh, the New Testament … this could take a while. You don’t have to dig very far into the Beatles’ discography to find traces of Lewis Carroll, Thomas Dekker, James Joyce, Shakespeare, the Tao Te Ching, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And whether or not your average Swiftie catches the ghostly origins of the tropes, motifs and well-crafted expressions T-Swizzle loves to throw out, she’s heavily indebted to the likes of Fitzgerald (“happiness”), Daphne du Maurier (“mad woman”) and Samuel Coleridge (“the albatross”).

Sort of a tortuous poets department.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Reading Beauty was getting restless. She tossed another title on the table.

“How about Of Human Bondage?” she asked, her thighs glinting in the dim light. Eyes, I mean. I always mix those two up.

“Spinoza,” I said, confidently — then immediately regretted it, like when you volunteer to explain a meme to your parents. Ah, hell, in for a penny press ...

“See, doll, the great 17th-century rationalist said we’re slaves to our passions, and that freedom comes only from understanding the nature of our desires and then showing them who’s boss. Somerset Maugham pilfered the title and turned the idea into 300 pages of a man being repeatedly emotionally punched in the kidneys by his own bad decisions.”

“Exactly,” she said, looking at me like I was either a promising ghost buster or a tragic case study in mansplaining with an arrested adolescent urge to present myself as a swashbuckling pettifogger. Who you gonna call?

Either way, I was starting to feel confident — which is always when I get into trouble. She dropped another one: The Grapes of Wrath.

“Book of Revelation,” I said. “ ‘And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.’ Steinbeck made it about migrant workers. Turned biblical fury into social protest. Saw your apocalypse and raised you labour rights.”

By now, I was sweating under the collar, mostly because the fan had stopped altogether. But also because this dame had more literary ammo than a book club on Adderall.

Take Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night, I heard myself volunteering, even as elbow pads sprouted unironically on my immoral soul.

“Most people think it’s a story about love gone wrong, about mental illness and heartbreak. And it is. But the title comes from a famous poem, too — Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale: ‘But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night …’

“Fitzgerald’s characters were just like Keats’s nightingale, like Keats and Fitzgerald themselves when it comes to it — doomed to burn brightly for a short time, only to be extinguished by the weight of their own desires. ‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations …’ ”

Then it hit me: This dame might as well be Daisy from Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. The unattainable ideal. All charm, all chaos, hiding behind money and metaphors.

I could sense Nick Carraway’s reflection on the destructive nature of people like Daisy and her abominable husband rolling around somewhere in the back of my skull: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

No, wait. That’s the Trump cabinet.

But I forgot where I was entirely when she leaned in again and the thrilling trill of her laughter dissolved my brain into so much bubbly bubbly bubbly Eno.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” she whispered. “And please spare me any guff about Guns N’ Roses.”

“That’s from Robbie Burns’ Comin’ Through the Rye. A bawdy little number about frolicking in fields. Salinger twisted it. Holden Caulfield sees himself as the guy catching kids before they fall — you know, from innocence into adult disappointment and taxes. Mark David Chapman saw himself the same way.”

She nodded slowly. “Sharp thinking, Bailey.”

“Aw shucks,” I said. “In my business, you better have a knack for finding ghosts. Besides, I’ve just been around too many English teachers with strong opinions and access to PowerPoint.”

Then came one I’ve already mentioned: The Sound and the Fury.

“Shakespeare,” I said, my brain now on autopilot. “From Macbeth: ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ William Faulkner ran with it and made it even more confusing, which is pretty damn impressive when you think about it.”

She sat back. “So these titles — they’re fingerprints. Traces. Breadcrumbs, as you say.”

I kept going without further prompting. Brave New World — “That’s from The Tempest. Miranda sees mankind for the first time and says, ‘‘Oh wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in’t!’

“Pretty ironic, given that in Aldous Huxley’s world, everyone’s basically an automaton with an orgy schedule. Like at a future White House ballroom site, only with less destruction.”

She stood up abruptly, brushing off her coat like she hadn’t just sat through a TED Talk delivered by a detective with a God complex and a Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia.

“You catch ghosts, Bailey. That’s why I came to you. Might even be one myself.”

Could sense I was losing the room. I tried to be smooth while stretching this out as long as she or anyone else could endure it.

“Haven’t even scratched the surface, doll,” I said, reaching for my over-the-counter antacid brand and totally missing the glass. “Take Hemingway’s title For Whom the Bell Tolls — that’s from a John Donne sermon. It’s about how we’re all connected. Every death matters. Hemingway didn’t just write about war — he wrote about everyone’s war.”

“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog — Dylan Thomas making a cheeky nod to Joyce. Joyce nodding to Rembrandt’s 100 or so self-portraits.

“The Remembrance of Things Past, C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s title for his famous translation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, comes from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, itself a reference to the phrase in the Bible.

“E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India? From a title to a poem by Walt Whitman. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim? A music hall ditty (Oh lucky Jim / How I envy him). Eliot’s The Waste Land? More allusions than a semester’s worth of footnotes and an entire Taylor Swift LP — the Fisher King, Shakespeare, Ovid, Hinduism, Baudelaire, Dante, your mom, my therapist … this rabbit hole goes deep, sister!

“Or how about Tom Stoppard’s tremendous play Arcadia? Packed with literary references to Byron’s poetry, such as ‘She Walks in Beauty,’ and allusions to the Gothic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, including Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe’s work. Not to mention being thematically linked to the Romantic era in literature and Regency-era comedies like those by Jane Austen. 

“The title Arcadia is from Sir Philip Sidney,” I remembered without remembering why. “Pastoral utopia in a world of idealized beauty in the 16th century. Stoppard borrowed it for a play where math and sex meet poetry and thermodynamics. Honestly, I still don’t understand all of it, but it feels smart, so I nod a lot.”

She nodded back. Or maybe she was nodding off on her feet. I suck at reading facial expressions.

“Authors have been raiding the works of their predecessors since time immemorial. Montaigne’s essays are littered with quotations from writers from antiquity, and the classical writers of Greece and Rome themselves begged, borrowed and stole from each other. Plato makes extensive use of the pre-Socratics, particularly Pythagoras, who …”

At that point the door creaked shut, her intoxicating perfume lingering like a final stanza in a poem by an Italian poet from the 13th century. Dante, presumably. And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burnin’ coal, pourin’ off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.

So yeah. By getting carried away, I’d blown another date with Daisy Destiny. Or whatever her name was. Not everyone wants to know where the ghosts come from. Mostly they just want the story, not the scaffolding on which it’s built. I get that.

But allusions don’t sleep. They haunt, they whisper, they wait. And me? I’ll be here, in the dark, chasing footnotes few care about anymore.

That famous opening gambit in “The Waste Land” about April being the cruellest month takes one back to the opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / the droghte of March hath perced to the roote.”

Chaucer’s line takes you to the opening of Petrarch’s Sonnet 42: “The spring returns, the spring wind blowing softly / Sprinkles the glass with gleam and glitter of showers.”

Petrarch was echoing what the French call reverdie (in English, re-greening), a genre of spring and rebirth poems that go way, way back.

You get much more out of an allusive master like Eliot if you know a bit of this stuff, as previous generations did. Basic familiarity with Homeric myths is the passe-partout to cracking Joyce’s Ulysses. (Not that Homer. D’oh!)

To slightly amend an observation by the late, great Tom Lehrer, which itself riffed on a well-known maxim, literature is like a sewer: What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

I sighed, staring out the window as the rain sprinkled the glass with the gleam and glitter of autumnal showers.