ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
12.2
12.2
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William Gruber
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Allusiveness for a writer is like the kinesphere for a dancer, a transparent bubble the performer inhabits both physically and psychologically. For dancers, the kinesphere is a real, physical space for mirroring and testing bodily movements; with writers, the kinesphere comes into view whenever you notice that the words you’re reading belong not just to the person whose name is on the title page but also to other texts within reach. Here’s a simple example. In Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder describes the first evening she and her family spent at a new homestead in the Osage Diminished Reserve in the Kansas Territory. Wilder’s memory of that long-ago night is amazingly detailed, even to the menu her mother served for dinner: stewed jackrabbit with dumplings, cornbread, and coffee sweetened with store-bought sugar in honor of their guest, a “Mr. Edwards,” who had come that day from more than two miles away to help raise the walls of their cabin. After dinner, family and visitor gather by the fire for singing and dancing. Meanwhile, outside the new house, the wind ripples the tallgrass, a full moon shines, and “all the prairie,” Wilder writes, “was a shadowy mellowness. Then from the woods by the creek a nightingale began to sing. Everything was silent, listening to the nightingale’s song.”
Wilder’s autobiography brings to life a childhood filled with beauty and tranquility, and it’s hard to resist its spell. The only problem is with that bird. The Kansas prairie in the nineteenth century was home to dozens of species of warblers and thrushes, but the closest nightingale, according to the Audubon Field Guide I have just consulted, would have needed to hear Pa’s fiddle from a long way off. As any encyclopedia or ornithology website will tell you, the nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchosis) ranges widely throughout both Europe and Asia, but its achingly beautiful song can be heard live in North America only in zoos. A nightingale singing outside a pioneer family cabin is a fictitious addition to an otherwise factual account; its kinesphere is romantic literary tradition, not personal history. Wilder’s bird is allusive, not mimetic. Allusiveness sprawls across all literature; at one extreme is plagiarism, at the other, echo or parody, while everything in between usually goes unnoticed, like the subsurface 9/10ths of an iceberg. Some allusions are easy to see because authors showcase them. One example comes from a short story by John Updike about the malaise of an American tourist on a holiday cruise up the Nile. In titling his story “I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying,” Updike alludes ironically to a speech by Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra. Antony’s speech is widely known, and most of Updike’s readers would have recognized it. Those same words have been used in poems by Civil War Brigadier General William Haines Lytle of Cincinnati, killed at Chickamauga Creek on September 20, 1863, and by Louis MacNeice in “Sunlight on the Garden”: “And soon, my friend/We shall have no time for dances . . . The earth compels/We are dying, Egypt, dying.” Often, allusiveness is like an invisible message written in milk; it comes into view only for those who can decode it. To call it out seems pedantic. In graduate school my friends and I printed and distributed copies of a fictitious literary journal called The Chidiock Tichborne Newsletter that included an article titled “Old Norse Remnants in the Poetry of Chidiock Tichborne.” We thought it was a slick literary satire, in the spirit of Mark Twain’s hysterical “The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper” or “Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play” from The Onion. Not everybody who read the newsletter was amused, however; the person who then taught Anglo Saxon literature was so angered that he sought initially to have the writer expelled from the program. Reading for allusiveness is ongoing, the work of a lifetime. Here’s another example: Joan Didion, near the end of her lovely and wistful tribute to an aging Hollywood superstar, “John Wayne: A Love Song” (1968), recalls dining with the actor and his family at an upscale restaurant in Chapultepec. Talk and wine flow liberally--“We’ll need some Pouilly-Fuisseé for the rest of the table,” he [Wayne] said, “and the red Bordeaux for the Duke”--while in the background guitarists alternately strum the folk song, “Red River Valley” and the theme music from Wayne’s 1954 film, The High and the Mighty. It’s a moving, sentimental scene, but in telling her story, Didion, as is her habit, offsets the sentimentalism with a critical deadpan, bringing the essay to a close with a backhanded compliment to the guitarists and their music: “They did not quite get the beat right, but even now I can hear them, in another country and a long time later, even as I tell you this.” It’s that prepositional phrase “in another country” that catches me up. Why is it there? Didion wrote the essay soon after she had returned from a trip to Mexico, describing events from a time when she was, literally, in another country, so you could say that she’s simply stating biographical fact. Yet no matter how technically accurate Didion’s stance with respect to the place she is remembering as she writes, I cannot hear her voice in this sentence without simultaneously hearing two voices distinctly not her own. First, and most clearly, I hear Ernest Hemingway and a 1927 short story titled “In Another Country,” a droll, sometimes lyrical narrative about soldiers who are recovering from their wounds in a hospital in northern Italy: In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains. There’s no way to prove that Didion knew that when she was remembering dinner with John Wayne, she was also remembering Hemingway. But that she had Hemingway’s story in the back of her mind is almost certain. Didion was steeped in his work; she was a lifelong admirer of Hemingway’s prose, going so far, she once said, as to copy his stories verbatim into her adolescent notebooks, just so she might permanently absorb the rhythms of his sentences. Even as Didion here sounds like Hemingway, however, Hemingway’s words in turn sound like those belonging to somebody else--Christopher Marlowe and his sixteenth-century play, The Jew of Malta. Hemingway’s title alludes to a conversation between Friar Bernardine and Barrabas: Thou hast committed . . . Grammarly would likely flag both these repetitions for a literary foul. Yet you wouldn’t call them plagiarism, even though Didion doesn’t acknowledge Hemingway—nor Hemingway, Marlowe—in the same way that Updike, Lytle, and MacNeice conspicuously referenced Shakespeare. You could compare Didion’s sentence to a palimpsest, which refers to an object originally made for one purpose and later refashioned into something else. Better still, with its implications of mysterious possession by the dead, you might say that when Didion wrote those words she was “channeling” Hemingway. Either way, the narrative voice is poignantly choral. My guess (though it’s impossible to know for sure) is that Didion, while composing that sentence, recognized the source of her words, was pleased by the familial associations, and hoped that her readers would feel the same frisson.
Writers are constantly carrying out a brisk, subterranean trafficking in allusions like these, so that one might even go so far as to say (as Harold Bloom once said) that all literature is plagiarism. On the first level of allusiveness, one encounters familiar, recycled expressions from well-known authors or popular culture. Recently, while reading a gen-ed book on mass extinctions I found the following sentence: “And while it is quite true that ammonite diversity had been on the wane as the Upper Cretaceous wore on, it is simply not true that they had dwindled down to a precious few.” This book was published in 1991, when the phrase “dwindled down to a precious few” would have been recognizable to almost any American reader (and writer) born in the first two thirds of the 20th century. It’s a well-known line from the ballad “September Song,” written in 1938 by the German composer Kurt Weill, first played in the Broadway Musical Knickerbocker Holiday and later popularized widely in recordings by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald. The familiar, melancholy phrase adds tongue-in-cheek, romantic texture to an otherwise toneless account of ammonite diversity during the Upper Cretaceous; the allusion gives readers who recognize it an unanticipated jolt of pleasure, like biting down on a nut in a spoonful of butter pecan ice cream. Later in that book, while summarizing yet more mass extinctions, the writer alludes to classic Hollywood westerns: “these taxa were very definitely cut off at the pass.” Overt allusions like these are common. Most allusions go unnoticed, however, simply because most readers are clueless when they encounter thefts as fleeting and deft as Hemingway’s and Didion’s. But that doesn’t mean they’re trivial. I was reading Norman Maclean’s historical account of a savage wildfire that broke out during the late summer of 1949 in a gulch along the Missouri River in northwestern Montana. Maclean (better known as the author of A River Runs Through It) had worked for the Forest Service in Montana before earning a doctorate in English literature from the University of Chicago; his nonfiction narrative Young Men and Fire, published posthumously in 1992, tells the story of the Mann Gulch fire and the thirteen smokejumpers who died fighting it. Near the end of the book, Maclean relives events from the stance of those who, like spectators of ancient Greek tragedy, could see the fated end of events even from the moment of their beginning: [f]rom the elevation of retrospect we can see it all coming together more clearly and sooner than those who were there and running. For us the signs are many that in minutes the blowup would bring a total convergence of sky, young men, and fire, and after that the dark. And after that the dark: when I first read that phrase I felt like Peter Falk, as Detective Columbo, zeroing in on a criminal’s slip up: oh, great line, Mr. MacLean, but you didn’t actually write that, did you? The immediate and most obvious allusion here would be to the penultimate lines of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous valedictory poem, “Crossing the Bar”:
Twilight and evening bell, Recognizing the source of Maclean’s words is like stepping into a familiar landscape. I like hearing the prior words of a Victorian poet, echoing down the years, and I think my reading of Young Men and Fire is richer, cannier, for not having those words singled out, quoted, and properly attributed to their real author. Allusiveness here is like the dap handshake that originated among soldiers during the Vietnam War--meaningful because it referenced shared, but unspoken, experience. When Maclean lifted words from Tennyson’s poem, it’s not clear who was in the grip of whom, since MacLean, who was primarily a Shakespearean scholar, would likely also have been thinking about the fate of the thirteen smokejumpers in the context of Shakespearean tragedy, and he would doubtless have been remembering the tragedy Antony and Cleopatra and the queen’s maid Iras’s morbid words to her mistress--“Finish, good lady; the bright day is done/And we are for the dark”--and while he was remembering Tennyson and Shakespeare--because he was remembering Tennyson and Shakespeare--Maclean would also have tapped into ancient biblical and Greco-Roman literature in which men and women, in their last moments before dying, mourn leaving the light. Allusiveness in this instance is not just a matter of one person deliberately burgling another person’s words. The relationship instead is interactive, kinesthetic. Even as he was describing the history of the death by fire of thirteen young men by alluding, whether knowingly or unaware, to Tennyson and Shakespeare, Tennyson and Shakespeare were themselves deforming Maclean’s history with a distinctly literary bias. I picture someone with an eidetic memory reading and after that the dark and simultaneously remembering the numberless analogues that preceded it, being moved by Maclean’s words and the weight of literary tradition they carry while at the same time wondering: how will this play out when I see it next?
“In the right mood,” says Elisa Gabbert, “reading The Waste Land, I can feel unhooked from time, like Proust’s narrator of Swann’s Way, dozing in his ‘magic’ chair.” Allusiveness is how literature keeps its past alive in its present; it’s a genealogical line, a family tree. In this connection I have remembered my grandfather, Martin Luther Gruber, who died in 1957, seven years before my wife and I met. She and I were looking at an old photograph of the Brownsville (Pennsylvania) Eureka Band, taken in 1903 when my grandfather, then in his 20s, had played the euphonium. I gave her the photo and asked if she could pick out my forebear. She spotted him immediately, standing in the back row, fifth from left. What gave him away? I asked. The resemblance was nothing specific; between him and me, so much looked different--clothes, height, age, Victorian handlebar moustache. Once again, she studied the picture of the boys in the band. “It’s just something about the eyebrows,” was what she said. |
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Bill Gruber is emeritus professor of English and former department chair at Emory University, the author of numerous scholarly articles and personal essays as well as multiple academic and nonfiction books including On All Sides Nowhere (2002, Bakeless Prize), Offstage Space, Narrative, and the Theatre of the Imagination (2010, finalist PROSE Award, Choice recommended book); Baseball in a Grain of Sand (2018, Casey Award finalist) and the pop science Spin: How the World (and Almost Everything in It) Turns (2023). His current project is a book on glass and glassmaking: The Window, the Mirror, and the Lens. Before becoming a college teacher, he worked as a reporter for The Camden Courier-Post (Camden, New Jersey) and The Age in Melbourne, Australia.
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