Back in the dark ages when I was an undergrad, all budding English majors at my university were required to take a course called Foundations of Literature. The class was part
Cliffs Notes, part literary boot camp, and our affable drill sergeant was Laird Barber, an English professor in the classic mold: tweedy, ruddy, portly, well-traveled, and equipped with a pipe. His generous intelligence and deep-as-marrow grasp of the world’s great literatures were sometimes derailed, at least in his lectures, by…yes, you guessed it…absentmindedness.
Foundations of Lit was predicated on the simple idea that reading classic literature is a dependent-clause, networked experience. Understanding literature is only possible when the reader can navigate and make sense of mazy thickets of references to other, earlier works of literature which the work in question draws from, is based upon, satirizes, winks at, offers wry commentary about, worships, excoriates, or otherwise mentions. Works of literature don’t exist in splendid isolation; they’re built on the spines of everything written before them. Deep reading means getting the context set up by cultural, historical, and literary references embedded in the text. It means getting the inside jokes, hopefully even enough to laugh when the punchline rolls around. It means knowing that Shakespeare drew liberally from Holinshed for the history plays, based Julius Caesar on Plutarch, and used the Decameron as source material for All’s Well That Ends Well. More importantly, it means being able to glance and glide through allusions to biblical stories, Greek and Roman mythology (O Edith Hamilton, you bookish vixen!), and plots, characters, settings, and assorted story-furniture culled from thousands of years of storytelling and culture. It means having the skeleton key that unlocks literary puzzle-doors. It means reading and appreciating all of those earlier works, or at least MacGyvering together a rough understanding of their significance by taking a crash-course like Foundations of Lit. E.D. Hirsch took a stab at articulating this idea of collective “core” knowledge back in 1987 with Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and recommending a more systematic approach to teaching it; we’re all pretty familiar with the firestorm of controversy that followed and continues to smolder.
Unlike footnotes, which seek to elaborate and explicate off to the side—think of them as literature’s scenic detour (unless you’re David Foster Wallace, in which case the detour is the destination)—allusions are a kind of literary shorthand, where spartan economy of language is coupled with instant edification. An allusion evokes the whole previously-lived, previously-read package all at once. Like a memory suddenly brought to the surface (madeleine, anyone?), an allusion arrives in a rush, plops down on your lap, grabs your ears like handles, and demands attention. An allusion springs out fully armed and ready for action, like Athena popping out from Zeus’ cranium. You don’t get that from a footnote.
And you don’t get it from a link. Bud Hunt set up a sweet grammatical thought-puzzle the other day, asking whether hyperlinks might be adjectives. The jury’s still out on that one (you can still join in a lively debate on meaning, modification, and the permanence of parts of speech), but it made me wonder how the same linguistic litmus test applies to allusion. Might hyperlinks be allusions?
Allusions are like hyperlinks: They deliver a fully-absorbed story in a flash.
Hyperlinks are not like allusions: They deliver a story, but it still has to be absorbed (by reading from start to finish, by browsing, by skimming).
Allusions and hyperlinks are like each other: Their substance and meaning, and our ability to access them, may change over time. Websites change, are rewritten, disappear. Links break. Readers reread works of literature, suffer memory loss, experience life, alter their schema.
Allusions and hyperlinks are not like each other: Allusions function seamlessly within and are integral to the context of the text in which they reside; they modify without slowing you down. Hyperlinks don’t change the context until and unless you click on them, or mouse over them, or interact with them in some other way. Hyperlinks modify in the same way that a roadside historical marker does: by making you stop, get out of the car, read the thing, and maybe have lunch on that picnic table over there.
Set aside the fascinating English major wonkiness for a moment. This forking garden path leads right back to the 21st century literacies debate. One could argue (I’m not, but one could) that Google searching and the emerging semantic web render Hirsch’s idea of cultural literacy obsolete. Why do I need to know the story of Sisyphus? I can just Google it. If literary background knowledge is partly or entirely replaced by just-in-time hypercontextual linking, is a new kind of literacy at work? If so, what is it? Does it go beyond information literacy and critical reading? What do you call on-the-fly knowledge construction plugged in just in time to modify whatever you were reading in the first place?
And how do you teach it?
February 12, 2009 at 12:22 pm
YES, YES, YES. Write my doctoral thesis with me, Scott. Please.
February 12, 2009 at 12:27 pm
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February 12, 2009 at 1:32 pm
I’d be honored. You write the body, I’ll write the footnotes, and we’ll meet up later to see what matches.
February 13, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Aren’t these two different ideas? To make a well placed hyperlink that provides allusion, you have to read the target page first, not google it later. This only works if you’re the reader. But then if you don’t know Sisyphus, you don’t know the allusion, and you can’t google it. Someone has to know the allusion to put it in and more importantly, to add the link. Hyperlinking the allusion makes it easier for the reader, because the context is given to them on a silver platter, but it’s just as hard for the writer, who has to know to put it there in the first place.
February 14, 2009 at 1:09 pm
@A.Mercer: Your writer vs. reader distinction is useful. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree: SOMEONE has to know the allusion in the first place. In one sense, the writer takes on a quasi-teaching role by anticipating gaps in reader’ knowledge and planning ahead by leaving a hyperlinked breadcrumb trail of contextual clues. And there’s no better way to really learn something than by teaching it. That’s just a slice of what writers and writing are about, of course, and a writer may have a zillion other inscrutable reasons behind their compositional choices. To link, not to link, what to link?
My original question/point is actually about what we can breezily call the Silver Platter Problem. If context is provided for the reader via hyperlink, and said reader dutifully clicks through and reads/absorbs/learns/grasps the allusion’s gist (none of which is a given), I still spot at least two pitfalls:
1) doing a quick Cliff Notes-y cram to bone up on Sisyphus is an awfully pale substitute for coming to the text with prior knowledge born of study and deeper reading, and
2) meanwhile, the reader has lost the flow of the original passage.
The notion I was trying out is not that links can be the functional equivalent of allusions, but more that there’s a temptation to think they can be—and perhaps even compositional mission-creep heading in that direction. So I agree with you that they’re two different things, with some interesting overlaps. Notice that I tossed out the provocation with one hand while personally disowning it with the other.
I do think this raises important questions for teaching. If links and allusions are misunderstood as being the same things, how do you tease out the functional and literary distinctions? And, even more compelling to my mind, if links are increasingly being pressed into service as Cliff-Note-allusions, how do we help readers manage it all?
February 14, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Well, since my favorite way to deal with allusions in high school was to go to the Bible Concordance, I didn’t need Google to reach for a shortcut. I wonder if we’ll be able to read all the classics. There is so much knowledge out there, and so much that is being lost because of a loss of context. Think of the word schmuck, punk, and screwed which are now “clean” enough for general discussion, but were not very nice in their original context. I don’t think you can “know” all the context, and all the classics, but really getting know know some of the classics, and delve into them is worthwhile not just because you learn about that particular piece, but you learn HOW to do that with other pieces of literature. I think the thinking is more important than the piece, BUT the piece itself is not inconsequential.
February 17, 2009 at 7:00 pm
[...] lovely piece, hyper(con)text: an allusion is a link, but a link is not an allusion at Higher Edison discusses both hypertext as allusion, but in the context of traditional teaching of classics to [...]
February 19, 2009 at 10:21 am
Scott, would that be the David Foster Wallace approach to thesis writing?