{"id":20000,"date":"2013-04-13T06:30:50","date_gmt":"2013-04-12T18:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=20000"},"modified":"2013-04-04T22:16:46","modified_gmt":"2013-04-04T09:16:46","slug":"allusion-in-literature-eyeless-in-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2013\/04\/13\/allusion-in-literature-eyeless-in-gaza\/","title":{"rendered":"Allusion In Literature: “Eyeless In Gaza”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>On Thursday I posted on “Five Books That Changed Me”, one of which was Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless In Gaza.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the interim, someone remarked to me, “What an odd name for a book.”<\/em><\/p>\n

To which I began to reply, “It alludes to…”<\/em><\/p>\n

And someone else present put in, “The Old Testament story of Samson and Delilah, of course.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“Ye-es,”<\/em> I said, “ultimately. But the more direct allusion is to the poem by John Milton, <\/em>Samson Agonistes, which includes the phrase: <\/em>“Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him\/\/Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves …”<\/p>\n

So the book title alludes to the poem, which retells the biblical story—<\/em>which together made me reflect that one of the elements I love in literature is the way a story may have added depth through allusion of this kind to preceding works, whether it is prior works of literature, or sources such as the Bible, or—as is often the way in speculative fiction—to myths and legends.<\/p>\n

So long as they’re out of copyright, of course… \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Thursday I posted on “Five Books That Changed Me”, one of which was Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless In Gaza. In the interim, someone remarked to me, “What an odd name for a book.” To which I began to reply, “It alludes to…” And someone else present put in, “The Old Testament story of Samson and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funstuff","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20000"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20009,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20000\/revisions\/20009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}