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Allegory
Definition of Allusion
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals, historical events, or philosophical ideas... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to... read full definition
Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Oedipus:
In the following passage from Chapter 7, Ong Tot Oppong, an anthropologist from the first Ekumenical landing party, muses on the nature of psychosexuality on Gethen. He utilizes allusion in the process:
Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.
Consider: A child has no psycho-sexual relationship to his mother and father. There is no myth of Oedipus on Winter.
This passage directly references the Greek mythical protagonist Oedipus, a man infamously fated to marry his mother and kill his father. The narrator alludes to Oedipus here in order to claim a lack of anything remotely Freudian in Gethenian societies. Hermaphroditism does away with much of sexual psychology—indeed, most (if not all) of Freud's work. Ong, ever the biased anthropologist, implies through his phrasing that psycho-sexuality is the default. While Gethenians may be alone as hermaphrodites amongst the various human-descended lineages, their biological reproductive function is no outlier. Many species are hermaphrodites; many more are asexual. Ong presumes sexual dimorphism as a default, biasing his own writing against the Gethenian perspective. In all of his musings on Gethenian sexual physiology, Ong displays his presumptions.
Related Themes:
Chapter 18
Explanation and Analysis—Wrestling with an Angel:
In the following passage from Chapter 18, Genly muses over Estraven as he sleeps, early in the morning in their shared tent. In the process of musing, Genly includes what appears to be a biblical allusion:
Estraven meanwhile engaged in his customary fierce and silent struggle with sleep, as if he wrestled with an angel. Winning, he sat up, stared at me vaguely, shook his head, and woke.
This passage references Jacob "wrestling" with an angel, in Genesis 32:22: "So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”' This excerpt has been interpreted by certain scholars to be vaguely homoerotic, implying an intimate relationship between Jacob and the angel in question (at times referred to as God himself). With this interpretation in mind, Genesis 32 becomes a fitting allusion: Genly and Estraven, too, share a relationship that is vaguely homoerotic. While Estraven is neither a man nor a woman, Genly refers to his companion as a man more often than not. It is this bias that also lends their progressing relationship its homoeroticism.
Related Themes:
