Clive's point about "coherence of image and argument" struck a chord with me, since on more than one occasion (one of them last week!) I've unsuccessfully attempted to Shanghai just part of an allusion to serve my purposes. Sadly, in each case I've ended up with the full allusion, and all its unwanted baggage, along for the ride.
Last year, I tried to use only two elements of the Oedipus story: first, his commendable desire to take steps to nullify the prophecy that he'd abominate his home with murder and incest; and second, the fact that his "preemptive strike" (of leaving his adoptive home Corinth) ironically brought about the very situation he'd been avoiding (since only then did he came into contact with his birth family in Thebes). I wanted to establish a parallel between that irony and this one: namely, that some Americans' commendable aim of "making the world safe for democracy" was justifying the erosion of precious civil liberties at home and earning the condemnation of the world community--thus making the world much unsafer for democracy. Sadly, when I referred to Oedipus, there was no way to untangle my intended statement from the suggestion of multigenerational unseemliness in the Bush family, and that CERTAINLY wasn't the statement I was trying to make.
In the most recent instance, I tried to make my own use of the same classical war quotation that Harold Bloom used as the title of a well-known essay prefacing a well-known poetry anthology. My employment of a quotation so strongly linked to Bloom might have worked, had my argument had anything to do with Bloom's; but it didn't, and so members of the poetry-reading public familiar with the essay would assume from my poem that I had either misunderstood or deliberately mischaracterized Bloom's position.
I guess I'm learning...slowly...that many allusions and images are too powerful to be used so narrowly and selectively. Even if you only mention an eyelash of it, people can't help conjuring the rest of the elephant.
Julie Stoner
[This message has been edited by Julie Stoner (edited March 02, 2004).]
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