One of the things I love in reading is the sudden expansion of consciousness that you get when an allusion comes alive in your mind. My most vivid reading memories from teenage years involve experiences of that kind.<\/p>\n
In one, I was fourteen, in a Spartan holiday camp in the lovely Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa, reading C S Lewis\u2019s That Hideous Strength<\/em>. We children were in one chilly, bare-floored, stone-walled \u2018rondavel\u2019 hut, our parents in another. Suddenly I came on the statement that Merlin\u2019s magic ultimately derived from … Numenor! I loved The Lord of the Rings<\/em> and had already read it several times. More than fifty years later I can remember the physical shock reading Lewis\u2019s allusion gave me, how it made me leap off the bed I was on and run from our rondavel to my parent\u2019s one to babble about it out to my father. This coming together of the two books was like an explosion in my brain as The Lord of the Rings<\/em> suddenly came alive alongside or underneath That Hideous Strength<\/em> and poured its energy through it.<\/p>\n For allusion to work like this, both the work that alludes and the one that\u2019s alluded to should be separate active presences in your mind before they combine. There\u2019s a reverse shadow of this process whereby you\u2019re shown an allusion to something you don\u2019t know and you follow it up to the point where the work alluded to becomes a full, independent force for you, expanding your consciousness in its own right and way as well as opening a fresh vista within the work that alludes.<\/p>\n Most of\u00a0 the time, I suppose, allusion brings a quieter pleasure, neither a sudden imaginative explosion nor the discovery of a new reading interest but the sense of imaginative threads being gathered together or of perspectives opening as one walks round a garden or dark side streets opening off the lit road one\u2019s walking down.<\/p>\n What I think is imaginatively and aesthetically almost valueless, however academically useful it may be, is the kind of secondary allusion-gathering whereby some reader\u2019s guide points out a reference and you simply clock it, taking its point on trust.<\/p>\n An example, in my own case, would be the allusion to Ezekiel in the second part of \u2018Ash Wednesday\u2019. I love the singing of the scattered bones, find what they say haunting and poignant, and think that in reading the passage I\u2019m in touch with the feelings Eliot was trying to evoke. The Commentary in Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue\u2019s The Poems of T. S. Eliot<\/em> gives the passage from Ezekiel 37, 1 \u2013 11 that Eliot draws on, and it is delightful in itself. I can\u2019t say it\u2019s made any difference to my sense of \u2018Ash Wednesday\u2019, though. Before it can do that I\u2019ll need to absorb it separately and in the context of absorbing the whole Book of Ezekiel. I suspect that won\u2019t really change anything in my understanding of the poem. I suspect Eliot has imported and recreated everything he needed for his immediate purposes. What I can never have is the shock of pleasure I can imagine some readers felt in seeing how Eliot had given new meaning to something they\u2019d already absorbed in Bible classes or reading \u2013 or the sense of reprobation others no doubt felt in seeing something important to them misappropriated, as they\u2019d see it, to purposes they disapproved of.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the things I love in reading is the sudden expansion of consciousness that you get when an allusion comes alive in your mind. My most vivid reading memories from teenage years involve experiences of that kind. In one, I was fourteen, in a Spartan holiday camp in the lovely Drakensberg Mountains in South […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2472"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2472"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2473,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2472\/revisions\/2473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}