The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [35]
Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions were much of the moment when Eliot was writing. The unsuccessful but heroic Endurance expedition took place in 1914–16, and Shackleton died on yet another voyage to Antarctica in 1922, the year The Waste Land was published. But it’s also the case that the “delusion” to which Eliot here refers, on the part of the explorers in extremis, “that there was one more member than could actually be counted,” has its familiar literary-historical counterpart in the famous stories told about the early performances of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, when “the visible apparition of the Devill” was said to have joined the actors onstage.12 (The fact that Shackleton was educated at Dulwich College, founded by Edward Alleyn, the Elizabethan actor who played Faustus on this occasion, may be put down to one of those coincidences it is perhaps not worth considering too curiously.)
What I want to emphasize is not the creative process, the ways—direct and oblique—that poets and writers get their ideas and find their words, but, rather, the difference between a reference and an allusion, indeed between a literary allusion (pointing toward another literary work or phrase) and a historical allusion. The borderline is tricky and fluid: if the phrase “who is the third who walks always beside you?” were taken by Eliot from the language of one of the Antarctic accounts, it would be—by my admittedly ad hoc standards—a literary, or perhaps better, a textual allusion. But if Eliot is imagining the phrase, taking an idea and bringing it to verbal life, then (for me) he is using Shackleton as a source, the way Shakespeare uses Holinshed’s Chronicles as a source, not as an allusion.
Why should this distinction matter? you may well ask. Because, I might reply—assuming we were to remain in this subjunctive mood—it speaks again to the heart of the literary enterprise. A conversation among texts is different from a conversation among persons, and a literary allusion is different from a historical reference. To take up the third, and manifestly overdetermined, case I mentioned above, that of James Joyce, whose range of literary and cultural allusion is simply staggering: to identify the Irish physician, poet, footballer, and wit Oliver St. John Gogarty as Joyce’s inspiration for the figure of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses is perhaps an interesting piece of historical fact. But when Stephen Daedalus in the same novel is obsessed with the phrase “Agenbite of inwit,” that is a literary allusion—as, indeed, is Stephen’s surname (and, if we want to pursue the question, his given name). The Ayenbite of Inwyt, as the title is usually spelled, is a Middle English work, the title of which means Prick of Conscience or Remorse of Conscience. Again-bite and in-wit are nicely Joycean terms that originate, here, in a mid-fourteenth-century Kentish dialect.
Allusion as a literary practice differs from the concept of intertextuality in that it ordinarily presumes an intention on the part of the author, whereas intertextuality—a term coined by the theorist Julia Kristeva—posits a relationship between or among literary works, a kind of textual conversation that is observed, participated in, and augmented by the reader. Now, obviously, the reader also participates, as we have seen, in getting or catching an allusion, and it is conceivable that some allusions are unconscious rather than conscious on the part of the author. Some of the most basic questions about authorial intention and authorial control of meaning touch upon this kind of issue: did the writer intend an allusion to poem X or author Y? If he or she cannot be said to have done so, then the claim is sometimes made that the critic is “reading too much into” the work, as if that intensive reading process were not legitimate, were not, in fact, at the very heart of the literary enterprise (and the “use” of literature).
Literary allusions may be overt or covert, manifest or hidden, direct or indirect, faithful or parodic. But there is a dog-whistle