In my last post I cautioned readers against borrowing metaphor and imagery from the common stock of generic language. This time I’d like to do the opposite: to extol the virtues and indeed the joy of borrowing ideas, words, even whole phrases from others. No, this is not a blog post on academic citation (which is also important!). Instead, I’m talking about allusion.
By allusion, I mean deliberate reference to an external source that incorporates the context, content, or power of that second text into the first. This isn’t a dictionary definition, and I’m interested more generally in the act of referring outwards to something else and importing meaning from it. We encounter allusion regularly, and often unthinkingly: “That’s always been his white whale”; or “The office has Big Brother vibes.” These are closer to the category of dead metaphor than I would like, but they’re functional examples of the form. Allusion is not limited to stock phrases or formal analysis, though; references to internet memes follow the same rules. Across all contexts, I just think allusivity—the practice of making allusions—is neat.
A big part of why I enjoy it is the winking nature of the act. The allusion is extra, a bonus, an Easter egg without which the sentence should still function, though perhaps as a less interesting version of itself. It’s a tiny piece of code intelligible when you and the author are in sync, when you understand them in meaning and tone well enough that both minds race outwards to the same point. In that new place you grab all the meaning you can hold—or as much as you think the author who led you there would grab—and dash back to the point of departure, all in an instant. Maybe you do this with an author across the room, across a generation, or across millennia. How cool is that?
Let me give an example. I once read a speech by a living person I admire. The details are not important, aside from the fact that the group who would be hearing the speech was in the midst of a contentious time. It was not a national thing, not a political thing, just a moment of tension and a speech that was intended to move the group toward toleration and goodwill among each other. In the peroration—the closing section of the speech—the author included the phrase “as surely they will be.” Aha! Some of you may know where this is going, and if so, I hope you shared the same joy I did at seeing the connection.
The same phrase appears at the very end of Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, in the final sentence: “The mystic chords of memory … will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” In its own context the phrase was innocuous, suited to its surroundings and functional, if slightly formal. As an act of allusion, however, it summoned into fraught circumstances an echo of one of the great orators of the past and his earnest, optimistic plea for reconciliation. Beyond the slightly uncommon rhythm, it was not marked as special in the speech. It was just a door quietly left open, an invitation for those who notice it.
All this from five words, none of them particularly remarkable on their own.
This may seem stilted and academic, but the same process plays out constantly at every level of discourse. That movie you saw with a college roommate years ago has a line you continued to quote to each other until it became shorthand for something more abstract. Maybe it has been shortened to one noun, an adjective, a defining quality that includes—for the two of you, at least—an entire context and force that you can use to color, to add nuance to, even to undermine an otherwise separate text or speech act. You’ve created a piece of code that makes your language richer, incorporating by reference more than the words themselves. This is allusion.
I don’t want to range too far from allusivity into the private languages that families and partners inevitably create from constant communication, but shared references—knowing what someone is alluding to—are part of how we signal what we mean, and how we show that we are speaking to each other, two of a kind. The joy and satisfaction come not from being smart or clever enough to understand the erudition of a famous author; it is just the gratifying feeling of being an insider, of sharing in the feeling of camaraderie.
That aha moment, the spark of connection, is one of the quiet pleasures of both reading and writing. A small phrase opens into a bigger conversation, and we can follow the path that another author has carved through time. And you, as you write, can do the same, leaving echoes and invitations for yet other readers to follow. Go ahead and borrow.
Banner: Ibrahim Miranda, Island Laboratory or 7 Wonders, 2012, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum (2021.568).
