Allusions Can Be Helpful, But Too Often They're Not

Writers dearly love allusions, and for good reason: They permit us to show off our wit and erudition. Every writer likes to strut. Even so, allusions have their drawbacks.

All of us would agree, I suppose, that allusions should be reasonably clear to most of the audience for whom we are writing. Otherwise, allusions are pointless. Instead of clarifying, they mystify.

But the trouble with most allusions - most allusions that I see - is not that they are obscure. They are familiar, all right, but they are stale, flat and unprofitable. Same old characters from Greek mythology. Same old dog-eared quotations.

Therein lies the writer's problem. A good allusion adds spice to our writing. But suppose the spice has been too long on the shelf? Does it really add anything to the sauce?

Context tells it

This is the kind of thing I have in mind. Last August Newsweek devoted a page to street gangs. Neither police nor sociologists know quite what to do about them. "The experts who toil for solutions face a Sisyphean task."

Poor old Sisyphus! Back again. It's clear from the context that "Sisyphean" means "difficult" or "almost impossible." Few readers may remember the story exactly. Sisyphus was the fellow who angered Zeus and wound up in Hell. There he was condemned forever to roll a huge stone up a hill, only to have it fall back again. Maybe we don't know exactly what Sisyphus did, but we know what Sisyphean means.

The same article on street gangs noted some efforts to cope with them. Here the problem was not banality. It was just the opposite:

"There are even lawyers in Los Angeles who volunteer to spend time with young parolees coming out of the California Youth Authority; with all that aggression they could all grow up to be Arnie Becker."

Arnie Becker? Who he? The article never identified him. Probably the allusion was apt, but it was lost on me. (Since then I've learned that Becker is a lawyer on "L.A. Law.")

Last summer President Clinton went to Japan. Johnny Apple of The New York Times made this report: "Politically weak as he may seem in the opinion polls, he was a Brobdingnagian among Lilliputians in Tokyo, viewed against the untested and the shopworn leaders with whom he conferred."

Did most of the Times' readers get it? In "Gulliver's Travels," Jonathan Swift created the Brobdingnags, who were giants, and the Lilliputians, who were 6 inches tall. Apple's metaphor was perfect. In context his allusion was clear. Was it necessary to have read "Gulliver's Travels" to savor the sentence? Have readers come to know the Lilliputians too well? I'm asking you.

Last October the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News carried an editorial on the growing pains of Effingham County. The county is glad to have new residents, but the influx is overcrowding schools. "That leaves residents with a Scylla and Charybdis choice of either creating double sessions of classes or hiking taxes to construct new schools."

The same allusion cropped up in a piece by columnist Chuck Stone on the Middle East. "The Palestinian negotiators must continually walk the thin line between the Charybdis of a hard-line Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Scylla of an agreement with Israel that does not come off as a sellout of Palestinian interests."

Bless you, Scylla! And you too, Charybdis, monsters though you may have been. What would pundits do without you?

And there's that heel

I doubt that everyone remembers the life and death of illustrious Achilles, but his vulnerable heel survives. A year ago columnist Ellen Goodman sympathized with Zoe Baird, the president's first choice to become attorney general. Alas, Baird had failed to pay Social Security taxes on a domestic servant. This was her Achilles' heel.

During the presidential campaign, the Portland Oregonian reported that Clinton had a poor record of conservation in Arkansas. This was his "environmental Achilles' heel." David Broder, the columnist, last month remarked that recurring credibility questions "represent Clinton's Achilles' heel." The president is a many-footed man.

Achilles' heel, I submit, is an allusion that needs to be half-soled. It is worn out. So it is with Orwell's Big Brother, whose eye saw everything; so, too, with Don Quixote, who tilted at windmills. Is there any freshness left in the tale of the gullible emperor who wore no clothes?

Allusions are wonderful tools, but in the carpentry of wordcraft they must be skillfully used. Arcane allusions are useless. Dull allusions are as bad as dull knives.

(Copyright 1994, Universal Press Syndicate)