Allusion

Definition:
A brief, usually indirect reference to a person, place, or event--real or fictional. Adjective: allusive.

According to their content, allusions may be historical, cultural, mythological, literary, political, or
private.

See also:

Commonly Confused Words: Allusion and Illusion
Intertextuality
Pastiche
"Printed by Mistake," by Horace Smith

Etymology:
From the Latin, "to play with"

Examples and Observations:

"I violated the Noah rule: predicting rain doesn't count; building arks does."
(Warren Buffett)

Allusions to a Line by John Donne*
"Never send to know for whom the grave is dug, I said to myself, it's dug for thee."
(E.B. White, "Death of a Pig." The Atlantic, January 1948)

"Never send to know for whom the earth moves; if you're lucky, it moves for thee."
(William Safire, Coming to Terms. Doubleday, 1991)

Allusions to Frost and Shakespeare
"Even sports newsletters allude to [Robert] Frost. When a New York Giants tackle was diagnosed
as having cancer, Inside Football commented, 'The rest, since there was no more to build on there,
turned to their affairs.' That's an allusion to a 1916 Frost poem about a boy's accidental death: 'No
more to build on there. And they, since they/ Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.' (The
poem's title is 'Out, Out--,' itself an allusion by Frost to [William] Shakespeare; after Lady Macbeth
dies, Macbeth speaks of life's shortness, 'Out, out, brief candle!')"
(William Safire, "On Language: Poetic Allusion Watch." The New York Times, July 24, 1988)

"Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the
moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future
generations."
(George Bernard Shaw)

Allusions to Comic Books
"Comic books have become reference points in the most popular and the most esoteric fiction and
art. Everyone understands a Superman allusion or a Batman joke."
(Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow, Basic Books, 2005)

"I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father, Jor-el, to
save the Planet Earth."
(Senator Barack Obama, speech at a fund-raiser for Catholic charities, October 16, 2008)

An Allusion to John Kennedy's Inaugural Address
"Senator Obama's call to 'ask not just what our government can do for us, but what we can do for
ourselves' had an even more direct connection to the inaugural address of the first G.I. Generation
president of the United States."
(Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, Millennial Makeover. Rutgers Univ. Press, 2008)

Characteristics of Effective Allusions
"An allusion which is explained no longer has the charm of allusion. . . . In divulging the mystery,
you withdraw its virtue."
(Jean Paulhan)

"When they fail, allusions leave us exposed: either enmeshed in inelegant, patronizing
explanations or cast adrift with insufficient provisions on the murky seas of a childlike half-
understanding. Failed allusions produce feelings of betrayal on all sides because they reveal
mistaken assumptions about shared frames of reference and like-mindedness. . . .

"Unlike most tricks, the allusion triumphs only when people know precisely how it is done."
(Elizabeth D. Samet, "Grand Allusion." The New York Times, Feb. 3, 2012)

Allusions to "Little Red Riding Hood"
"Extended allusion can be used to show how deeply a story like Little Red Riding Hood is
embedded in our subconscious and how it colours our vision of the real world. In Anthony Browne's
The Tunnel (1989), . . . . Little Red Riding Hood is never mentioned in the text, but the numerous
pictorial allusions to the well-known tale constitute a narrative thread that winds its way through the
illustrations. The intertextual relationship is established in the first full plate, which contains several
transparent allusions to the classic tale. The red coat with the hood which hangs visibly on a hook
behind Rose's bedroom door, and which she later wears when she goes outdoors, sets up an early
connection between the heroine and Little Red Riding Hood."
(Sandra L. Beckett, Recycling Red Riding Hood. Routledge, 2002)

Literary Allusion as a Rhetorical Trope
"Allusion, I suggest, functions like the trope of classical rhetoric. A rhetorical trope is usually
defined as the figure created by dislodging of a term from its old sense and its previous usage and by
transferring to a new, proper, or 'strange' sense and usage. The gap between the letter and the
sense in figuration is the same as the gap produced between the immediate, surface meaning of the
word or phrase in the text and the thought evoked by the allusion. The effect could also be
described as a tension between the literal and the figurative meaning, between the 'verbum
proprium' and the 'impropium.' In both allusion and the trope, the poetic dimension is created by
the simultaneous presence of two different realities whose competition with one another produces
a single more complex reality. Such literary allusion produces the simultaneous coexistence of both a
denotative and connotative semiotic."
(Gian Biagio Conte, quoted by Joseph Michael Pucci in The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the
Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition. Yale Univ. Press, 1998)

* The quotations from E.B. White and William Safire allude to this line by poet John Donne (1572-
1631):

[A]ny man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to
know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
(Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 1624)

Pronunciation: ah-LOO-zhen
Also Known As: echo, reference, intertextuality

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