It's not uncommon for literature to allude to other works or history, one of the most popular examples are Virgil in The Divine Comedy, Ishmael in Moby Dick (an allusion to the biblical character), Finnegans Wake by Joyce, so on so forth. There is plenty of media both historical and contemporary that does this. However, there's certainly a hidden guideline on how to use such figures. I'm sure people wouldn't be happy if your allusion to a culturally significant historical figure is done in poor taste. I wanted to ask what's the general consensus or practice for using this device? I find it an incredibly intriguing literary technique for characters and I want to know more about what are the elements people consider or should when using it (plot relevance, proper research, etc.)
I think this is about intertextuality:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertextuality An approach I have found useful to this is to think of every word we say as an allusion to every other occasion it has ever been spoken in the language - this is part of how meaning is created. In dead languages, it's possible to work out a word's meaning by methodically trawling through every single example of where it was used. So for the OP's purposes, it isn't just names, any word can potentially be employed to create a reference point to another text. It's just that character names are (hopefully) more obvious to the reader and can therefore be used as a key. If another text is consciously being used, it's common to set up an array of connections at different levels. In the example of Moby Dick, we might name a place in our story after Ishmael just to flag up to the reader that there might be some intertexts coming up with Herman Melville. And then the frame of reference within that might be something our story talks about such as "superstition", so perhaps we want to have a prophetic dream but we have translated it somehow into the social media era, and the word "hearse" might then become a second-layer intertext, as in “And who are hearsed that die on the sea?”. By this point probably neither we nor the reader can fully explain what is occurring - intertexts reveal something mysterious about how language operates. I think most intertextuality is unconscious (so the OP is already ahead!). A far bigger problem is writers utilizing their culture's significant works without realizing they're producing a poor pastiche or knock-off-job of them. There aren't many rules on how to do it: in a way, what makes a novel... "novel" is that it creates new linkages of ideas and symbols inside its culture and inside its language. Whenever we are using another culture, we should be sensitive - whether that is inserting a significant figure into a story (e.g. comedic treatments of Jesus as an action hero) or just a word (e.g. Kanji tattoos). This is a huge topic but I'd suggest three things I remind myself most often are:- - it's on the writer to make sure the usage isn't offensive - if we are reaching for symbols or words from another culture we should know why - nearly all of the time it isn't a problem, but there is some sort of human tendency to "rubberneck" and connect to the riskiest topics, perhaps because we wish to share our concern or revulsion with others It might be useful to know more about what the OP has in mind.
This was incredibly insightful, thank you! I think you've hit the nail on the coffin with this, I wasn't familiar with this term until now. The main focus was how writers would use these figures in their own stories. The linguistic aspect is most definitely applicable and arguably the crux of this discussion. But what I had in mind were allusive characters in a story and the way they've used them. An example is Hell Screen by Ryonosuke Akutagawa, where the protagonist is derived from an older tale, but he changed the reading of their Kanji and the plot makes the two of them completely distinct. If I were to simply insert a literary character, let's say El Cid, but their character in the story is incredibly contrary and unrelated to the figure, what would be the signs of this kind of allusion?
I think that narrows it down usefully. Intertexts can run a whole spectrum from being used for a single throwaway joke to being the reader's only handhold on what's going on in the story. Re. Hell Screen I couldn't find any useful commentaries, but this story's setting would have been nearly 1000 years ago and generally the further historical figures fade into mythology the more flexibility there is to exercise some artistic license over them. Adaptations like Hell Screen can be seen as stories that are nearly 100% intertexts, but normally it's easiest to think of them as just being adaptations and narrow our analysis of 'intertexts' down to direct quotations or marked departures from the earlier versions. El Cid is historic not literary. He might be a relatively divisive figure: having had positive impacts on some cultures and negative impacts on others. If someone effectively split him in two by using aspects of his life to inform two different knights, that might be like Akutagawa's treatment of Yoshihide. If it's a modern-day story about skateboarders in Minneapolis and one of them is nicknamed 'El Cid', and like his namesake he is changing loyalties between two friendship groups - that might be a typical 'witty' intertext that informs the character whilst amusing some small percentage of the readership. It's also pretty easy to imagine situations where the use of this name might complicate readings / be 'destructive' (idk, maybe an intergalactic space hero sent to 'civilize' Berber-coded lizardpeople on a desert planet).
Thanks for the correction, I was focusing too much on Cantar de mio Cid rather than the historic figure.
