For example, saying that something is ” like the Trojan War” is a reference, while Vonnegut setting the events of Cat’s Cradle in Ilium, New Jersey is an allusion. That they also work on a further, more informed, level adds richness and depth to the narrative for those who recognize them.
That’s because allusions have to work in the narrative, as part of the narrative, whether the reader recognizes their source or not. Shandon finds the song they’re singing “easy to appreciate,” even though he doesn’t understand any of the allusions in it. But they actually function in a different way from regular references. Allusions are often defined as “indirect references” because the source material is never cited you either recognize it or you don’t. The second is a kind of game, in which they see how many of the allusions they recognize.Īnd it’s allusions that make the whole thing work. The first is the level of the narrative, the action, the plot. The readers’ minds work on two levels as well. It was easy to appreciate, but I would have had more chuckles out of if I had known, as the others did, about the personages involved. What had impressed me was that this friar was well-informed and had a lot of fun out of that fact alone… I glimpsed the concept that to know a thing for itself could be a source of joy. Half of it was giving itself gleefully to the moment, while the other half was revolving a new idea. Shandon himself, without being aware of it, provides the key to enjoying the book:Īt times the mind works on two levels at once, and it was so with mine on this occasion. Now this might strike you as a bit overwhelming, or even a bit tedious, but it isn’t. His degree is in business administration. What adds to the pleasure is that Shandon himself has no idea of what’s happened to him. From the very first, every person he meets, every place he goes, everything that happens to him, alludes to some piece of literature. It doesn’t take long, in fact he’s still in the water, for the well-read person to begin to find a certain quality of familiarity in the narrative, to figure out that Shandon has made landfall in the Commonwealth of Letters. Clarence Shandon – re-christened Silverlock due to a white streak in his hair - on his journey of self-discovery after being shipwrecked on the shores of the Commonwealth. On the surface, the book tells the story of A. It doesn’t take very long to go from these thoughts to the great masterwork of this type, John Myers Myers’s Silverlock. It’s also a bit intimidating, from the point of view of a writer, to realize just how thoroughly de Camp and Pratt had to know their source materials. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s Compleat Enchanter and it occurred to me that one of the great pleasures of that work is encountering familiar myths, persons, and fictional events in a new guise and from a new perspective.
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