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Literary Devices
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
Part 1: Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—The Garden of Eden:
David alludes to the Garden of Eden in the beginning of Part 1: Chapter 2. As Jacques speculates about Giovanni’s murder motives over dinner one night, David drifts into a reflection about Eden:
Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence.
David takes a cornerstone of the Christian creation narrative to explain the pain of homosexual desire. The Garden of Eden is the idyllic paradise where God initially places the newly created Adam and Eve. It is also the site of original sin, in which Eve takes the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and tragically pays for her newfound knowledge with earthly mortality. In this story from Genesis, humanity’s first moment of discovery is punctured by shame and death.
The setting of this forbidden knowledge supplies an apt parallel to the novel’s own subject matter. In the context of David’s sexual misgivings, the garden references an easier, simpler state to which he has no chance to return. The awareness of his own homosexual attraction—the knowledge that “this could have happened in me”—snags against his dreams of being “with the light and safety, with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman put my children to bed.” Self-knowledge comes at the sacrifice of happiness.
David elaborates upon this by pointing out an additional dilemma. As he suggests, those who possess such knowledge must either relive the loss of their innocence or deny that innocence ever existed. Those who do the latter—those like Jacques and Guillaume—take pleasure in spoiling youth. David chooses the former. He spends the entire story resisting his desires in search of simpler, more comforting narratives. By denying them he condemns himself to relive the painful loss of his innocence, over and over again.
Related Themes:
