What Is an Allusion?

Abstract

What is an allusion?1 The answer seems obvious at first. An allusion is an indirect reference. While this definition may be a convenient starting point, it is, as we shall see, not a satisfactory final answer. But why ask the question at all? Most educated people have a fairly clear idea of what an allusion is and have done well with it. This may be the case, but I would suggest that literary theory is the worse for not having come to a clearer understanding of this term. There is, to be sure, no shortage of studies detailing the use of allusion. Witness, for example, the vast quantity of work devoted to T. S. Eliot's use of allusion in The Waste Land and Alexander Pope's use of allusion in The Rape of the Lock. Still, what nearly all such studies neglect is the basic question: What is an allusion? And the result is confusion. Whereas there is no shortage of theoretical work on such subjects as irony and metaphor, there is a scarcity of theoretical work on allusion, a small number of articles, and no books.2 One might suggest that the reason for the scarcity is that it is just not a very important or interesting topic, but surely this is not the case. Allusion is bound up with a vital and perennial topic in literary theory,-the place of authorial intention in interpretation, and in literature itself allusion has become an increasingly pivotal device. How different would twentieth-century poetry be without ubiquitous allusion? As we shall see, allusion is a difficult and elusive topic. Still, difficulty alone cannot explain the lack of attention to allusion, and, thankfully, it is not the purpose of this paper to explain this lack of attention. Rather, here we shall provide an answer to the question: What is an allusion? To begin, we shall articulate a definition of the term. We shall then consider, in detail, the role of intention in allusion. Finally we shall consider accidental associations, the reader's response independent of authorial intent.