Allusion without Displacement

A reading of James Mulhern’s essay and its annotated allusions.

The question

An allusion can enlarge a passage or quietly shrink it. The person described becomes an illustration, and the scene becomes a riddle answered in another book. So the question is one of proportion: how much of the scene remains once its source is audible?

The essay names its debts at the start. It is “Inspired by the words of Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, Dickinson, and other patron saints of American literature.” It sets lifted sentences beside student replies: “This ain’t math, Mr.,” “Mr. Mulhern be on crack,” and “That’s so gay.” That gap drives the essay. This reading calls the relation allusion without displacement: the inherited line and the ordinary scene stand together, and neither cancels the other.

Four kinds of allusion

The annotated borrowings differ in kind, and treating each resemblance as a quotation overstates the case.

Pronouns do the work

The patron-saint borrowings change by pronoun. Each moves a private vocation into address to a room.

The Thoreau line comes from the Journal, not Walden. “My Business is Circumference” comes from a letter, not a poem. Only the closing pond image comes from Walden. These shifts show on the page, so they count as evidence. They make the practice democratic in address, a claim about what the sentences do and not about the writer.

Unnamed borrowings

Pope. “But always, hope eternal” compresses a line from An Essay on Man. It reads as an idiom, so the scene works without Pope.

Rich. “Literature, as I see it, is the ladder hanging close to the side of the schooner” borrows from “Diving into the Wreck.” Rich’s diver descends alone. The essay makes the climb collective and resisted: “Mr., I ain’t getting wet for nobody.”

Fitzgerald. “All of us run fast, stretch our arms farther, until one fine morning we are older” echoes The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald faces a receding future; the essay faces a past that keeps arriving, in former students now “in their thirties.”

Eliot. Two borrowings from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” sit within a few sentences: “Students come and go” and “how they would fix you in some formulated phrase.” Prufrock cannot ask his question. The narrator asks his: “What did they see when they looked at me?” This reversal best shows an allusion changing meaning while the scene stays whole.

Joyce, Dante, Bunyan. The notes call the Joyce and Dante borrowings echoes and say the Bunyan phrase only evokes its source, so hold all three lightly. The classroom scenes work without them.

The sacred, hedged

Religious vocabulary runs through the essay: “patron saints,” “communion,” “the Holy Spirit,” “a sacred self deep inside.” The text stays guarded. The Holy Spirit appears with a question mark: “A palpable energy (the Holy Spirit?) moves through all of us.” The narrator also withholds his view from a student who doubts the Jonah story: “I don’t say, what I really think—that a literalist interpretation of the Bible is ignorant, dangerous, and offensive.”

Two things follow. The sacred register grows out of concrete scenes: a couch hidden under red cloth, a mattress outside Circuit City at 2 a.m. The narrator also sets Jung, Jonah, Hughes’s “Salvation,” and Dickinson side by side without ranking them. That supports calling the stance non-hierarchical. It argues against calling the narrator devout. The closing line is still framed as a thought: “I think, This is communion, and teaching will be the pond that I bathe in each morning, every new day.”

Who can hear it

The students cannot hear Whitman or Eliot. They hear a teacher saying strange things. So the practice is democratic in address and unequal in recognition: everyone in the room receives the sentences, but only some can name them. The scene works for all of them, which is what “without displacement” means. The depth of reading differs.

The wording proves presence, not intention. The opening sentence names the four saints, and the author’s own commentary says he borrows gladly and openly. Claims that every unnamed allusion is deliberate rest on that commentary, not on the essay itself.

What the reading shows

In “Teaching at Fifty-Six,” inherited language is compressed, re-addressed, and set against ordinary speech, and the ordinary scene survives. Pronoun changes re-voice Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson for a class. Unnamed borrowings from Pope, Rich, Fitzgerald, and Eliot are re-aimed, and the Eliot reversal turns a fear into a question. The religious vocabulary is present and hedged. Whether this holds across the fiction needs separate readings, each checked against the published text.

Works Cited

All Essays Teaching at Fifty-Six The Allusive Method