Inside Paradise Lost
by david quint
princeton, 344 pages, $35
Early on in Inside Paradise Lost, David Quint writes a sentence that is at once simple and, for this reader, simply terrifying: “The series begins with Virgil’s own submerged reference to Lucretius.” The series Quint has in mind is the series of allusions in Milton’s epic to the flight and fall of Icarus. Allusion is the calling to mind of something without mentioning it, and its performance presupposes that the reader or hearer will be in possession of—and indeed be possessed by—layers of sedimented knowledge. Allusion is actually quite common; in ordinary speech and conversation, we cannot do without it, for if everything mentioned were immediately glossed, a single page of text would stretch into hundreds of pages and assertion would be forever deferred.
Even allusion presuming erudition is not all that rare. In the aftermath of the Bernie Madoff scandal, the New York Post, hardly a highbrow venue, published a piece on an investigative committee’s rough treatment of Ezra Merkin, a close Madoff associate. The headline read “Ezra Pounded.” Readers were expected not only to recognize the allusion to Ezra Pound, but (and I know some will think this a stretch) to recall Pound’s anti-Semitism and to reflect, perhaps, on the contribution Madoff’s actions might make to the resurgence of that virus.
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