Rhetorical Devices: Allusion

I thought that I would write a series of short articles explaining the various literary devices that we can use to enhance our public speaking.  This is my second article, which is about allusion.

The word “allusion” is derived from Late Latin, “alludere”, which denotes a pun, metaphor, or parable.  However, in English, an allusion is a figure of speech, a rhetorical device, in which an object, an event, or, indeed, anything, from a distinct, unrelated context, is referred to.  This may be a direct reference, such as phenomenon from popular culture, or is may be a subtle reference known only within a certain group.  This makes allusions a useful device to make a crowd feel like they are part of an in joke, and create intimacy with the audience.  Technically, an allusion is a passing or a casual remark that has a wider meaning.  It is an incidental mention of something, whether direct or indirect, which has a broader implication.  For example, you could say, of someone whose business venture failed spectacularly, “His Titanic has sunk.”

Richard F. Thomas, in “Virgil’s Georgics and the Art of Reference, from Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, distinguished six specific categories of allusive reference applicable to a wider cultural sphere:  casual reference, which is “the use of language which recalls a specific antecedent, but only in a general sense” that is relatively unimportant to the new context; single reference, where the audience is intended to “recall the context of the model and apply that context to the new situation”; self-reference, where you reference your own body of work, or even the same speech; corrective allusion, where the imitation is clearly in opposition to the original source’s intentions, perhaps, a parody; apparent reference, where the allusion seems to refer to something specific, but is found to be otherwise upon closer inspection; and multiple reference or conflation, which is several simultaneous allusions to several sources, but fusing them into something new.

Examples of literature replete with various types of allusions include Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” or Thomas Stearns Eliot’s “The Waste Land”.

For example, in Homer, brief allusions to the mythic themes of the generations prior to the main narrative abound, because they were already familiar to the epic’s audience.  This is common in all sagas, across many cultures.

Martin Luther King, Jr., famously alluded to the Gettysburg Address in the beginning of his “I Have a Dream” speech, by starting it with “Five score years ago ...”; reminding the audience of Abraham Lincoln’s “Four score and seven years ago”, which opened the Gettysburg Address.  This was a clever attempt at equating the gravity of his speech with the Gettysburg Address.

Another form of an allusion is a sobriquet.  A sobriquet is a title or phrase we associate with something else.  For example, instead of referring to Singapore, we call it “The Lion City”; or New York is “the Big Apple”, or “the city that never sleeps”.

Certain allusions should be avoided in speech because they have been diminished through overuse, becoming trite and a cliché.

An example is “15 minutes of fame”.  This is based on a quote by Andy Warhol, the 20^th century American artist.  He commented on his sudden popularity, saying, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”  Today, every time someone gets airtime on the news, we hear someone talk about those “15 minutes of fame”, an allusion to Andy Warhol’s remark.

Another famous example is “Catch-22”.  This phrase originates from a 1961 Joseph Heller novel by that name.  Catch-22 is set on a U.S. Army Air Force base in World War II; “Catch-22” itself refers to a regulation that states an airman’s request to be relieved from flight duty can only be granted if he is judged to be insane.  However, since anyone who does not want to fly dangerous missions is obviously sane, there is no way to avoid flying those missions.

In the book, the unnamed old woman in Rome explains that Catch-22 means: “They can do whatever they want to do.”  This alludes to the theme of the novel where authority figures consistently abuse their powers with impunity.  In our current era, “Catch-22” has come to describe any absurd or no-win situation.