[HN Gopher] Masters of Allusion: The Art of Poetic Reference
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Masters of Allusion: The Art of Poetic Reference
Author : tintinnabula
Score : 32 points
Date : 2025-01-19 16:52 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| brudgers wrote:
| https://archive.ph/a6wUa
| gostsamo wrote:
| 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.
| pmdulaney wrote:
| Sounds like a lot of work, so you would need to be highly
| motivated.
| gostsamo wrote:
| It would be lots of work, but it could be easier if there are
| enough volunteers.
| photonthug wrote:
| 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.
| gostsamo wrote:
| 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.
| zeristor wrote:
| 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.
| gostsamo wrote:
| 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
| swatcoder wrote:
| 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.
| samspot wrote:
| 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.
| JoelMcCracken wrote:
| 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.
| miltonlost wrote:
| > 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.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| 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.
| swatcoder wrote:
| 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.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| 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.
| photonthug wrote:
| 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.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| 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.
| JoelMcCracken wrote:
| Reminds me of Foucault's Pendulum. Great book, worth
| reading, and extremely relevant to our day.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| 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/Holderlin'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).
| rectang wrote:
| 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.
| jal278 wrote:
| 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.
| rectang wrote:
| > _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.
| miltonlost wrote:
| > "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.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| 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.
| barrettondricka wrote:
| 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.
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