What's the most subtle literary allusion you've found in a book?

Submitted by tillerman35 t3_11503e9 in books

By "subtle" I mean one that you think very few people, if any, would catch. That could be for a number of reasons. Perhaps the way it's presented is very off-hand (some others like to "hide" allusions, others like to knock you over the head with them). Or maybe it's referring to a work that few people would have read, or a passage in a well-known work that isn't often quoted.

I'll give you the one I'm thinking of as an example.

In the book "Little, Big" by John Crowley, the main character (at the time) receives a gift of a hat. The paragraph reads:

> "What more?" Mr. Woods said, looking around him, finger to his lips. Mrs. Underhill with one of her needles pointed to a round leather box on top of the cupboard.
Right! Mr. Woods said. "How about this?" He finger the box from its high place until it fell into his arms. He popped open the lid. "A hat!"
It was a red hat, high-crowned and soft, belted with a little plaited belt in which a white owl's feather nodded. Mr. Woods and Mrs. Underhill said Aaaaah, and watched closely as Mr. Woods fitted it to Smokey's head. ...

I'm spoiler-izing the following few lines so I don't ruin the book for anyone (plus you can make your guess and see if you're right!)

If you need a little hint: >!The book is subtitled "or, The Fairies' Parliament"!<

>!The paragraph I quoted is referring to a poem called "The Fairies," by William Allingham. It starts with:!<
>!Up the airy mountain,!<
>!Down the rushy glen,!<
>!We daren’t go a-hunting!<
>!For fear of little men;!<
>!Wee folk, good folk,!<
>!Trooping all together;!<
>!Green jacket, red cap,!<
>!And white owl’s feather!!**<
>LINK TO FULL POEM!<

Subtle? Or am I underestimating the number of people who would catch this reference? I'm 100% sure this is an allusion to the work I mentioned because the 6th line quoted above is used in a completely off-hand manner in another of the Author's books.

NOTE: This is a do-over. The first time I submitted this, I had issues using the spoiler tags.

9

Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

Bazinator1975 t1_j905cz5 wrote

I teach both The Outsider (some may know it as The Stranger) by Albert Camus, and There There by Tommy Orange, to my senior (in Canada, Grade 12) English classes.

It was only after two years of teaching both that I picked up on a line in the first chapter in There There narrated by Edwin Black, an obese young man who has been constipated for several days. At one point, he comments, "You could either shit or not shit."

I immediately grabbed a copy of The Outsider and turned to a few pages before the end of Chapter 6 in Part I, in which Meursault muses (with a gun in his pocket), "I realized at that point that you could either shoot or not shoot."

The fact that Tommy Orange is very well-read, and his character, Edwin, has a M.A. in Comparative Literature, leads me to think it is not a coincidence.

11

boxer_dogs_dance t1_j8z0gvc wrote

Terry Pratchett's Discworld is full of them. If you visit r/Discworld you will find discussions.

3

McJohn_WT_Net t1_j8yxnco wrote

In To Kill a Mockingbird, older narrator Jean Louise reports a conversation her younger self, Scout, had with Miss Maudie Atkinson about the notorious neighborhood recluse Boo Radley. Scout tells Miss Maudie the rumors about Boo, and Miss Maudie dismisses them with disdain, blaming them in part on local gossip Stephanie Crawford.

"Stephanie once told me that she woke up in the middle of the night and Boo was standing by her bed, looking down at her," Miss Maudie says. "I asked her, 'What did you do, Stephanie, move over in the bed and make room for him?' That shut her up."

Jean Louise comments, "I was sure it did. Miss Maudie's voice was enough to shut anyone up."

Took me years to get that joke.

2

Lord0fHats t1_j8zx9c2 wrote

To this day, I do not believe I would understand the subtext of Hills like White Elephants without being told what it was. I'm not sure if it's a changing of the times sort of thing. Maybe.

But god damn is the actual meaning of what's going on buried in there in a way that the whole conversation is very confusing until you know about the part that isn't being said.

2

Jack-Campin t1_j90ofpq wrote

I vaguely remember that Allingham poem (haven't read Little, Big) but it was decades ago and no way would I have got that reference.

This kind of thing leaves you vaguely paranoid that just about any book might be up to tricks you're not getting.

I haven't read Nabokov's Ada but saw a review of it when it came out, by the New Zealand writer Bruce Mason. He mentioned an offhand phrase that seemed to come out of nowhere, "Te Work-Basket". Mason was alerted by the "Te", which is Māori for "the". Like me he didn't know what "work-basket" was in Māori so he looked it up. "Paro no mahia". Māori has no "s" sound, so that's the closest you can get to "paronomasia" - which is ancient Greek for "pun".

I'm sure the reader's experience was greatly enhanced by that. My reaction was, bugger it.

2

[deleted] t1_j8zvq8l wrote

[removed]

1

CrazyCatLady108 t1_j8zzakn wrote

No plain text spoilers allowed. Please use the format below and reply to this comment once you've made the edit, to have your comment reinstated.

Place >! !< around the text you wish to hide. You will need to do this for each new paragraph. Like this:

&gt;!The Wolf ate Grandma!&lt;

Click to reveal spoiler.

>!The Wolf ate Grandma!<

1

KermitTheArgonian t1_j94fs8c wrote

In Stephen King's "The Langoliers", Albert imagines the voice of his father saying: "That's no way to treat an expensive musical instrument!", which is a verbatim line from Jim Steinman's "Love and Death and an American Guitar". I don't know whether that was intentional or coincidental, but I like to imagine Sai King would dig such a creepy poem enough to slyly quote it in a creepy novella.

1

tillerman35 OP t1_jae4oxk wrote

Nice one! I agree. King would not do something like that unintentionally, and his twisted sense of humor is definitely the kind that would prompt him to include that little reference.

1