Masters of Allusion: The Art of Poetic Reference | Hacker News Reader

Masters of Allusion: The Art of Poetic Reference

nytimes.com

36 pointstintinnabula28 comments

> such a nice way to describe a move I keep seeing in contemporary poetry, a move I’ve liked every time I’ve seen it, which sits somewhere between the door knocker epigraph and the elusive uncited allusion. Here’s an example, in a poem called “Nicholson Baker & I,” from Catherine Barnett’s book “Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space”: “‘Open the second shutter/so that more light may come in,’/said Goethe on his deathbed.”

This technique is less contemporary than the author thinks. Marianne Moore was writing with incorporated quotations a century ago, combining epigraph, endnotes, uncited allusion, and direct quotations in the text itself.

https://archive.ph/a6wUa

I've always wondered if it is worth creating a literary map where one can follow the allusions and other type of references in different works. There is something like that for the books of Pratchett, but I don't know whether people would find such a wiki interesting.

Sounds like a lot of work, so you would need to be highly motivated.

It would be lots of work, but it could be easier if there are enough volunteers.

This is a good idea, as evidenced by the existing fan wikis. People love to geek out cataloging / cross referencing their favorite worlds, and it’s not like the impulse itself is going to be limited to Harry Potter or marvel. For highbrow literary stuff though, expertise might be extra helpful and extra rare. Maybe the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy might be a better collaborative model than fan wikis or Wikipedia. Idk for sure, but I assume contributing an SEP write-up might be somewhat more of a resume-builder than contributing to other places, which may help to incentivize experts to contribute.

The other problem is just copyright. People don’t expect fan wikis to include a lot of primary material naturally, but it would be frustrating to try and get new insight to literature while constantly pausing to find the source material. There’s lots of poetry in the public domain, but if you start thinking about recent stuff that’s worth a deep dive (say the postmodern canon) it gets harder.

This is just an idea, so any model is possible at this stage. The map would be attracting expert contributions only if the experts think that it is benefitial to them, while fans would do it just for the joy of doing it.

Regarding copyright and contemporary poetry - if the copyright holders find the exposure antithetical to their interests, they will be skipped and that's it. I know though that even now I'm reading books and not catching stuff. I believe that such a resource might enrich the experience of many readers and that's why I'm toying with the idea every now and then.

I’m not sure how Terry Pratchett relates to poetry.

There is the Annotated Alice in Wonderland, however that was seemingly more about contemporary issues at the time.

I once was at a talk on Science Fiction, quite an interesting one on the authors favourites, it was though like an annotatated list of references for Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Much as I absolutely love HHGttG I feel I missed out on how much better it actually is by not being aware of these references.

Poetry has no monopoly on allusions and lots of books allude to other books. More importantly, Pratchett's wiki has the annotations that I'm interested in 1 and which could be useful outside of poetry.

1. example: https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/soul-music.html

So the thing about the allusions and references in literature (or any other art) is that its somewhere between hard and impossible attribute them exhaustively and conclusively.

Sometimes they're intentional, explicit, and umambiguous inserts by the artist, who may or not admit to them for various readons.

But more often, they're subjective associations made by an individual observer (perhaps even the artist-as-observer), with at best a dynamic and often-disputable consensus among clusters of such observers.

Conceptually, each user of a system like yours might anticipate a map that's meaningfully different from that of any other user.

There's still something imformative and expressive in publishing a map of "well, this is what I/we see as the allusions and references here" and visitors might be inspired to new windows on familiar works, but it mostly wouldn't have much a ground truth beneath it.

It would, in fact, just be a work of art itself.

I've often wanted something like this for music or video games. The "truth" of the reference doesn't much matter. The point for me is: I like this thing, now I want to try some things that are related to it. However, I would appreciate if some lines are marked as factual and have a citation that such-and-such creator listed it as a direct inspiration.

I have also wished such a thing existed, something like genius.com but for literature (I know there are some works of literature on there, but for numerous reasons its not a perfect match).

Sometimes I end up looking at commentary on a work and it will talk about the allusions, but I only do that in the more extreme cases; to me commentaries often feel like a waste of time.

Fortunately, computer science and every single other discipline, topic, and community doesn't chronically suffer from the exact same issue.

If you know anybody or anything that knows/has solved this gatekeeping problem with any level of consistency, please share.

Ehhhhhhhhh

I think art should be able to speak for itself, not mire itself in an endless chain of correspondences. It gets very pretentious very quickly—the brilliance of Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art is that it does not neccessarily need to reference anything else—Heidegger’s is a philosophy of fundenmental ontology, so there’s no need to see a past, and yet it surrounds itself with a history from which is is foreclosed. The freedom comes in the recognition of the absence of full correspondence.

That's a valid aesthetic norm to adopt, and I can see how its a practical one if history and culture strike you as too expansive and disorienting and if you feel like you need a strictly conceptualized aesthetic in first place.

It sure precludes a lot of art that others have found especially stirring, though, and rejects much of what empowers art to be communicative in a social context.

It's valid, but extremely narrow and devaluing, so probably not the norm to expect many artists, patrons, or casual appreciators to adopt for themselves.

What is an artwork if it is not striking? Just because someone tells you you’re supposed to like it? That’s close to navel-gazing. Georg Trakl was frequently referenced by Heidegger and Derrida for just this reason, his poetry is strange, uncomfortable, alienating: you don’t need a degree to feel it.

I think you could say that Heidegger actually defeated his own argument here. Lots of people will never think of him, or Van Gogh, or beat up old peasant shoes, without free association that connects and enriches each of the individual threads.

For those that aren’t aware of the context.. much has been written about this, and it’s a shorthand for a long and interesting conversation. See for example https://harpers.org/2009/10/philosophers-rumble-over-van-gog...

Http://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/11/29/schapiro-contra-heidegger-the-controversy-over-a-painting-by-van-gogh/

So much depends on a pair of shoes, which reminds me pleasantly of how much depends on a red wheelbarrow, and that’s how knowledge/appreciation of one thing introduces or enriches another.

Yes but that’s also the attitude of someone in psychosis: to connect everything, to relate everything to everything else. We miss gaps, breaks, what is irreconciliable, incomprehensible in the work of art: and the attempt to reduce that gap in the dream of a potential full correspondence is a violent fantasy.

Reminds me of Foucault's Pendulum. Great book, worth reading, and extremely relevant to our day.

I was thinking of that book when I wrote my reply!

This just dodges the issue by playing games with language and insulting anyone that doesn't agree. One can also argue that separating everything from its natural and appropriate context with some crowbar of the intellect is a violence. And while connecting the unconnected might be mental illness, insisting that nothing can ever be contextually related to anything else is also madness.

Heidegger and Van Gogh are literally and very directly entangled. Trying to understand one without the other will result in an incomplete or impoverished understanding, and if Heidegger doesn't like disproving himself this way then he shouldn't have written one important work that referenced another while claiming all works can/should stand alone. This is not even really a matter for interpretation.. like, if the painting did stand alone before, it cannot afterwards. This conversation is part of the evidence for that, but don't take my word for it. Googling "heidegger shoes" will immediately drop you on Van Gogh paintings.. the mutual reference / footnotes on both works are written into history already in many ways.

Meanwhile, Schapiro on Heidegger points out Heidegger's own fantasy- the idea that the shoes belonged to peasant woman, whereas it's more likely they belonged to the artist. What's the argument for preferring random speculation about the shoe-owner and rejecting more informed speculation about how historical/cultural context shaped the subject matter? One can think of any kind of wild subjective thing while engaging with art and art-appreciation, but if you're ignoring all the wider context as irrelevant, or insisting that context isn't even real, that won't make for a very coherent or well-informed position. It's art, so feeling something is more important than being well-informed.. but OTOH, if your goal is to engage with a work then "ignoring as much context as possible" isn't usually a great strategy.

Its impossible to ignore the correspondences, but there's a difference between taking context as such as given, and recognizing that the tensions out of which a work of art comes to be (recall the example of the Greek Temple) are already within a foreclosure of a fullness that would exclude all difference. Hence, context is nothing but irreconcilable difference.

As a tangential observation, I discovered something surprising in the etymology of "to remain," which serves as a microcosm of Heidegger's philosophy.

First, consider this word2vec equation: being + time = to remain.

Then: "to remain" is the goal, while "mere remains" is the fate we want to avoid. This mirrors Heidegger/Hölderlin's quote: "where danger is, grows \ The saving power also."

Let's examine the etymology:

"To remain" comes from Latin "re-" + "-maneo". "Maneo" means "to stand," "to remain". So "to remain" literally translates to "to remain again". Intriguing.

"Remaneo" is affiliated with "remano", meaning "to flow back". As we dig through the stratigraphy of etymology, we stumble upon "wret-", the Indo-European root that led to "re-", associated with "returning" or "rising back up". By seeking the origin of "to remain" through the allegedly dead stacktrace of etymology, we realize we're merely iterating it over again.

This leads us into Proto-Indo-European territory: "men-".

    726 1 men- IE    2. menth- to rise, mount, tower
    726 2 men-  to press, step on, tread down
    726-28 3 men- IE    5. men- to think; mind, spiritual activity
    728-29 4 men- IE    meni- to diminish; small
    729 5 men- IE    3. men- to stay, remain, stand still

This leads to a profound realization: "to remain" is "to think again". Being and thought are the same. Or so is the literal translation of Parmenides that Heidegger insisted on—thinking over.

It also leads us to "to remind" (the Call), and "mindful" (Care).

Allusions are elitist.

Art always exists in some context, even if it's only the language of the work and its setting. Allusions add to that context, but in a way that insidiously empowers a handful of authority figures.

Allusions make interacting with a work akin to a treasure hunt, where the audience uncovers the author's "true intentions" clue by clue through consuming outside commentary. The clues are sourced from cultural authorities, including critics (such as NYT poetry columnists), academics, and sometimes the authors themselves.

I reject this gatekeeping, preferring to elevate the hyperspecific experience of the individual audience member above the experience that authority figures seek to browbeat into the the audience.

Every individual first experiences a work with only the context that they bring themselves, and that individual's first interpretation is completely valid. Their own emotional, instinctual reactions are "correct" for them, even when they fail to acknowledge allusive references or otherwise clash with author intent.

"Popular" art which stands on its own without needing critical interpretation does more for its audience than art which requires the accompaniment of a cultural tour guide. And audiences sense it, which is why popular art will always be popular.

This is naive 'populism': There's no way to avoid 'allusion' writ large -- e.g. do you object to biblical references, or to references to particular experiences that only some people have (heartbreak, death of a father)? Sure, some communities basically 'write for themselves' in a way that becomes inaccessible to outsiders w/o a lot of work. But that's fine -- I like a McDonald's hamburger as well as really nuanced flavors (for whatever reason I like nuance in how I make oatmeal that likely few others probably appreciate). Film buffs like the nuance/allusions in that medium; etc. Your comment seems like: "The stuff I like is the best and does the most for humanity" -- I think there is indeed an argument for art that is broadly appreciable, but your comment is a form of the 'gatekeeping' you criticize -- it's gatekeeping for art that doesn't require a lot of effort (for you, and those like you) to appreciate.

> do you object to biblical references, or to references to particular experiences that only some people have (heartbreak, death of a father)?

I mean allusions as discussed in the NYT article: "poetic references", or what we might also call "literary allusions".

> "The stuff I like is the best and does the most for humanity"

Fortunately, broadly appreciable art thrives independently of advocacy from me or anyone else.

> "Popular" art which stands on its own without needing critical interpretation does more for its audience than art which requires the accompaniment of a cultural tour guide. And audiences sense it, which is why popular art will always be popular.

Miley Cyrus' "Flowers", a pop song, alludes to a Bruno Mars song "When I Was Your Man". Allusions exist all over, of many different brows. There's nothing insidious about Dante alluding to Greco-Roman poets as well as his Italian political contemporaries.

LOL

Peak HN. “If it isn’t computers or viable within materialist reductionism and requires attention or effort then it’s elitist”

Maybe you just need to study more.

I wouldn’t want a half baked english student (in some perspectives, I might qualify as such) making judgement calls over the validity of one design approach over another when it comes to nuclear reactors.

Poetry is nuclear reactor of the soul and should be treated with as much reverence in your approach. What you think you understand is just a few glances at shadows. Keep going.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com