Knowing and Playing: The Literary Text and the Trope Allusion

Ancient rhetoricians and poets never identified allusion, nor do their Medieval and Renaissance heirs devote attention to the trope in treatises on poetics. In contrast to metaphor, allusion is relatively ignored in literary theory even today, and is inadequately defined as “indirect or tacit reference.”1 John Hollander recently suggested a reason for this neglect, when he wrote that the diachronic aspect of allusion, its reversion to something prior in time, upsets our spatial conception of figuration.2 In addition to its diachronic powers, allusion invokes “the other,” something actually existing outside the alluding text—a fact which contradicts New Critical doctrine, as well as current conceptions of the text as “possible world,” and self-referential theories of literary language. Allusion, in short, calls into question certain of our fundamental beliefs concerning textuality. To discuss allusion thus requires revisionary thinking about literary discourse, both of which I shall attempt here as I toy with the notions of knowing and playing in their psychological relations to the text and to the trope allusion.

Freud believed that literature knew, in its own way, everything that he did. As he said on several occasions, “The poets discovered the unconscious before I did.” By this, Freud meant that the content of literature contained