In high school, we read Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. We watched Apocalypse Now outside of class, and all that. I loved it. I think Conrad’s a frickin’ genius, and continually marvel that English wasn’t his first language.
Anyway I found what I believed to be allusion to Heart of Darkness in “All This Time” by Sting: “All this time / the river flows / in the foreign light / of a northern sun. . .” This follows a verse on Roman ruins (“Teacher told us / the Romans built this place / built a wall and a temple in an edge-of-the-empire garrison town. . .”)
In the Heart of Darkness, Chapter 1 there’s a whole riff on how when the Romans came to England and traveled up the Thames, that they must have found it a dark and savage place. This parallels, of course, the ill-fated journey up the Congo River.
To my eighteen-year-old mind, this was all very deep, and must have been exactly what Sting had in mind, but people either seemed to not believe me, or didn’t think this was very interesting.
“Dude,” I said–for in those days it was common for the young people to say “dude”–I said, “The song is about a river.” Blank stares all around. My teacher was so profoundly unimpressed that I changed the topic of my essay for that unit to something about cannibalism.
Sting gets off on stuffing his songs with allusions, so thinking you’ve found one is an almost certainty :). For him it is the equivalent of being a good writer: “Hey, I can allude to other writers’ works … that makes me the, like, Eliot of my time or somethign right?” Full points to him for being well-read (well, by rock star standards), but I stopped buying into it when I got to college and found out that even Eliot gave up on using allusions as the meat of his poetry and wound up (gasp) writing.
As for allusions I’ve noted and been similarly impressed by, I guess I’d have to say I don’t go for the profound. I prefer the nice touch, I’d say.
Examples:
[li]There is (or was maybe, I can’t remember) a gangster in the Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker named Joe Broz. “Joseph Broz” were the first and middle names of Yugoslavian leader Marshal Tito.[/li]
In the episode of The Sopranos when Tony and his sisters go to discuss funeral plans for their mother with the funeral director, the scene is shot exactly the same way a similar scene from The Godfather is shot.
I agree with you Podkayne,"Heart of Darkness"is a great book.I’m thirtyeight,and I still feel that way.I think Conrad really had something to say about the breakdown of our civilized ways when in the wilderness
Like Knead says,it is likely that Sting has alluded to it.His most obvious allusion to my mind was the reference to Nabakov from,“Don’t Stand So Close To Me”.
You might enjoy a Werner Herzog film called,“Fitzgeraldo”.It stars Klaus Kinski in the title role.It too has been compared to HOD.It takes place in the early twentieth century in South America.I won’t spoil it for you,but it does have the same “river trip” theme.
Incidentally,many people feel that Herzog himself went over the edge making this film.Apparently,he was monomaniacal and rose up against great obstacles to get it(the film)shot.A movie was made about this,just like "Hearts of Fire"was made about “Apocalypse Now”.
I don’t know if it qualifies as a literary allusion, but in The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947) by Fredric Brown, there’s a ** Dutch Reagan** listed in the Cast of Characters. Brown describes him as a “common everyday hood.”
Now I suppose it could have been an accident, but I prefer to think it was deliberate. I haven’t been able to find anything indicating that the two mixed it up, but it seems at least possible.
Oops. I’m sorry. I just re-read the OP, and you weren’t looking for other literary allusions, you were asking about this specific one. Sorry for the sort of hijack.
No, no, not at all AuntiePam . . . feel free to share. You’re going to have to help me out with who Dutch Reagan was. . . was that one of the Gipper’s nicknames?
I guess it could have been a coincidence, but it would be so typical of someone with Brown’s sense of humor to do it on purpose.
I tried to find some connections between Brown and Reagan (as SAC president) during that whole blacklisting thing, but it’d take more than a superficial google search, I guess.
I usually miss literary allusions (even if it’s more of a snipe than an allusion), so I tickled myself catching this one.
Sting and the other Police boys also nicked an Arthur Koestler book for one of their album titles: “Ghosts in the Machine”
To quote from Ingram book distributor’s review at Amazon: “Koestler examines the notion that the parts of the human brain-structure which account for reason and emotion are not fully coordinated. This kind of deficiency may explain the paranoia, violence, and insanity that are central parts of human history, according to Koestler’s challenging analysis of the human predicament.”
Not Sting, but one of my favorite literary allusions is in the song Airplane by **Pizzicato Five **. I don’t have the lyrics with me, but it was approximately “I’d compare you to Holden Caufield, but you’re the type who would take that as a compliment.”
You’ll have to look further than that. It’s from one of those Dead White Male philosophers (Pascal, I’m thinking?), who speculated whether a human being could be a consequence of the clockwork laws of physics, or whether there was a “ghost in the machine”, i.e., a soul in the body, guiding and animating it.
One passage that took my breath away when I first read it was in “The Fountainhead”. Dominique is vacationing at her wealthy family home while Howard Roark is busting his hump cutting out Vermont marble in a nearby quarry. As Roarke toils in the quarry (the equivalent of using a scalpel for a box knife), Dominique decides to subjugate Roark by hammering the marble hearthstone of her fireplace into smithereens so he can toil to replace it.
The dichotomous juxtaposition of Roark’s honest and constructive labor contrasted with Dominique’s malicious destructive act was truly outstanding.
Hmmm. I doubt that’s what Sting is talking about. I went here for the lyrics and the song seems more about religion, with a backdrop of time inexorably flowing. Also, the difference between ‘foreign’ and ‘falling’ seems significant.
It could be a direct allusion to Conrad, but there are probably a lot of references like that regarding the Thames, and most allusions are a bit more specific and include a memorable phrase. Shakespeare probably wrote something that both read regarding the Thames, and many others as well.
Now, it DOES fit the theory that Sting is just showing off with his allusions, being in the first chapter and all…
