It's raining black cats and frogs

[William Zantzinger]

 Over the past two decades, theoretical interest in
intertextuality, presupposition, and influence has
generated a good deal of interesting discussion of the
device of literary allusion. This has led to a better
understanding of what the device is and how it
functions. A literary allusion is an explicit or
implicit reference to another literary text that is
"sufficiently overt" to be recognized and understood
by competent readers. It is "a poet's deliberate 
incorporation of identifiable elements from other
sources" and should be distinguished from
"intertextuality" in the "involuntary" sense of the
term. In Ziva Ben-Porat's formulation, a literary
allusion contains a "built-in directional signal" or
"marker" that is "identifiable as an element or
pattern belonging to another independent text."  By
definition, an allusion must be allusive (passing or
indirect) and thus is distinguished from what can be
called  reinscription. In an otherwise helpful
discussion of literary allusion, Robert Alter is
misleading when he describes Wallace Stevens' "Peter
Quince at the Clavier" as alluding to the story in the
Apocrypha of Susannah and the Elders, and Gerard
Manley Hopkins's sonnet "Thou art indeed just, Lord"
as alluding to the lines in Jeremiah that are its
Latin epigraph and are translated in its first three
lines. These are reinscriptions or, in Alter's own
phrase, "midrashic" amplifications of antecedent
texts, not allusions to them. Nor is an allusion the
same as quotation, the exact and explicitly signalled
transfer of one text into another. "Quoting poems,"
Leonard Diepeveen explains in his study of American
Modernist poetry, "incorporate phrases in the new
poetic text that precisely duplicate the verbal
patterns of the original source, stealing for the new
poem the conceptual content and the texture of a
previously existing text." While "alluding texts
attempt to assimilate their borrowings [and do] not
present the allusion as a self-contained texture," 
the exact texture of quotations introduces a
"disruption" into the host text. 

For John Hollander (not to be confused with Charles
Hollander), the crucial difference between an allusion
and an echo is that the echo "does not depend on
conscious intention." In many cases, however, no clear
indication of conscious intent is provided by the
author. For example, George Herbert's "Affliction"
contains the line, "My thoughts are all a case of
knives." Elizabeth Bishop may be said unequivocally to
refer to Herbert's poem in her lyric "Wading at
Wellfleet" because she puts the phrase "all a case of
knives" in quotation marks. On the other hand, Philip
Larkin's poem "Deceptions" contains the line "Your
mind lay open like a drawer of knives." That Larkin
consciously intended to allude to Herbert's
poem cannot be unequivocally claimed. But it does pass
Perri's test of being sufficiently overt to be so
taken by competent readers. In Ben-Porat's terms, it
is a "veiled referent" but nonetheless the marker of a
literary allusion. 

Seamus Heaney's frequent employment of literary
allusions, sometimes tacitly and sometimes with
panache, makes his poetry an excellent place to
explore these questions. Let us begin with the first
poem in the "Singing School" sequence from North,
whose title alludes to Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium."
"The Ministry of Fear" (its title alludes to a Graham
Greene novel) is addressed to Seamus Deane, who was
Heaney's schoolmate at St. Columb's College….

"Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney"
Mcsweeney, Kerry
_Syle_ ,  Spring, 1999

Available on-line 

Back to Pater. 

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has
been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism
whatever, and in æsthetic criticism the first step
towards seeing one's object as it really is,
is to know one's own impression as it really is, to
discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. 

The Renaissance:  Studies in Art and Poetry
By Walter Pater

The first step. 

To Nabokov's Lectures On Literature

"The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine,
is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a
book."  

Nabokov LOL.3-4

The reader's primary objective is to have as complete
as aesthetic experience as possible, given her own
capacities and the sensibilities, preoccupations and
memories she brings to the reading. Critics tend to
focus on the admittedly important question of how
books differ in their ability to generate such
intensity and complexity, such tingling in the spine. 

I think Charles Hollander misreads Nabokov's Lecture
and that his claim that Pynchon has internalized much
of Nabokov's teaching is preposterous. That being the
case, Hollander's reversed polarity image is
marvelous, enchanting even. 

Here's what Charles Hollander says, 

In Lectures on Literature, Nabokov asserts that only
individual writer matters
not literary movements, nor isms), and that he writes
only for the individual reader. The act of reading, at
best, can create an artistic harmony between the
reader's and the author's minds. A major writer is
part storyteller, part teacher, part enchanter: a
great writer is a great enchanter. Great literature is
made up of  magic, story, and lesson, and the good
reader reads the book of genius, "not with his heart,
not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is
there that occurs the telltale tingle." Nabokov sought
the tingling spine as the antenna for his heart,
and devised a literary means of unleashing kundalini
forces for the purposes of producing
emotional-intellectual- physiological quivers in his
readers. Whether or not Pynchon ever studied with,
met, or knew Nabokov on sight, he seems to have
internalized much of Nabokov's teaching and example;
but he      transforms the tingle of pleasure into the
chill shiver of paranoia, the eel in the bowels of
fear: same process with reversed polarity [3].

Charles Hollander
Pynchon Notes 26-27, spring-fall 1990, pp. 5-59
http://www.vheissu.be/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm#n_%22

This is what Nabokov says, 

Since the master artist uses his imagination in
creating his book, it is natural and fair that the
consumer of a book should use his imagination too. 
There are, however, at least two varieties of
imagination in the reader's case. So let us see which
one of the two is the right one to use in reading a
book. First, there is the comparatively low kind which
turns to support to the simple emotions and is of a
definitely personal nature. (There are various
subvarities here, in this first section of emotional
reading). A situation in a book is deeply felt because
it reminds of us of something that happened to us or
someone we know or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures
a book mainly because it evokes a country, a
landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically
recalls as part of his own past. Or, and this is the
worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself
with a character in the book. This lowly variety is
not the kind of imagination I would like readers to
use. 

VN LOL.4

More from Nabokov and Brain McHale later. 

N says, it is natural and fair that the reader  of a
book should use his imagination. While  N Lectures (N
Lectures are Lit-Crit and this holds true of Lit-Crit
generally) are focused on the admittedly important
question of how books differ in their ability to
produce a tingling in the spine of the reader, in this
Introductory lecture, Nabokov is focused on the reader
and reading. N's ideal reader is not passive. He needs
to use his imagination. To match the intensity and
immensity of a master writer, a reader needs to toss
off (was going to type slough…but…) the self-image of
the passive reader receiving shocks from verbal
stimuli. Only then can the quality of the work be
realized. This is why Nabokov emphasizes reading for
details and rereading. N stresses that a good reader
pays close attention to details and the world the
author creates. Does Little Buttercup have red hair or
blonde? Is Benny Profane left-handed? Does Slothrop
have a beer belly? And, the reader must pay close
attention to the qualitative nuances produced while
reading. These are produced not simply or only by the
words arranged on the page by the author, but also by
the reader's judicious managing of his responses to
them.  

The reader's response to the verbal stimuli is
ephemeral and personal and it can not be held static
so that it may be evaluated  with any degree of
thoroughness. While reading, the author's words
commingle with the stuff of reader's imagination and
memory. This experience is unique for each reader and
it cannot be shared directly with anyone. Someone else
cannot directly evaluate it. It is transitory. It has
an inward character. Nevertheless, when we discuss
literature we must have recourse to memory and that
inward imaginative stuff. Anathema though these may be
to those who seek to argue some objectivity, these are
essential components of the reading process. 

TBC Hollander, Nabokov,  and McHale-paranoid
postmodern text processing, allusive openness and
constraint. 



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