Comparisons are one of the great tricks at connecting something unfamiliar to something familiar. From the simplicity of a metaphor to the complexity of an analogy, comparisons allow us to convey something new to a reader by tapping into their extant schema.
The problem with references is that the object we use as our familiar touchstone might not be universal. Shakespeare could write, “All the world’s a stage” because his audience of theater goers obviously recognized the stage and actors. But that reference is lost on anybody who has never seen a stage play. In Iyer’s “Where Worlds Collide,” he spends lots of time with comparisons and allusions: Oscar Wilde, Robert Redford, hostages and hijackings, and Sigmund Freud. Allusions and comparisons can make us look smart and cultured, but they can also reveal our assumptions about the audience. We expect them to know everything we know. If you know your venue and audience well, like Shakespeare, that can work. If not, then you can have some trouble. I’m going to let John McPhee explain it in more detail from his piece in The New Yorker simply entitled “Frame of Reference”:
To sense the composite nature of frames of reference, think of their incidental aftermath, think of some old ones as they have moved through time, eventually forming distinct strata in history. At the University of Cambridge, academic supervisors in English literature would hand you a photocopy of an unidentified swatch of prose or poetry and ask you to say in what decade of what century it was written. This custom is called dating and is not as difficult as you might imagine. A useful comparison is to the science of geochronology, which I once tried to explain with this description:
Imagine an E. L. Doctorow novel in which Alfred Tennyson, William Tweed, Abner Doubleday, Jim Bridger, and Martha Jane Canary sit down to a dinner cooked by Rutherford B. Hayes. Geologists would call that a fossil assemblage. And, without further assistance from Doctorow, a geologist could quickly decide—as could anyone else—that the dinner must have occurred in the middle eighteen-seventies, because Canary was eighteen when the decade began, Tweed became extinct in 1878, and the biographies of the others do not argue with these limits.
Fossils were the isotopes of their time, and that is how, in the nineteenth century, the science developed the story it was telling. All this is only to show how frames of reference operate, how quickly they evolve from currency to obsolescence. The last thing I would ever suggest to young writers is that they consciously try to write for the ages. Oh, yik, disgusting. Nobody should ever be trying that. We should just be hoping that our pieces aren’t obsolete before the editor sees them. If you look for allusions and images that have some durability, your choices will stabilize your piece of writing. Don’t assume that everyone on earth has seen every movie you have seen. In the archives of ersatz references, that one is among the fattest folders. “This recalled the climb-out scene in ‘Deliverance.’ ” “That was like the ending of ‘Birdman of Alcatraz.’ ”
Here is a lively group pieced together by Sarah Boxer, writing in 2010 in The New York Review of Books about the artists Hedda Sterne and Saul Steinberg, who “knew all the New Yorker people, the writers and cartoonists and movie people—Charlie Addams, Cobean, William Steig, Peter Arno, Ian Frazier, Dwight Macdonald, Harold Rosenberg, E. B. White, Katharine White—and they all came to dinner.” That’s a fossil assemblage with a virus in it. Ian Frazier, in Hudson, Ohio, in the era of those dinners, was nine years old and younger.
Frames of reference are like the constellation of lights, some of them blinking, on an airliner descending toward an airport at night. You see the lights. They imply a structure you can’t see. Inside that frame of reference—those descending lights—is a big airplane with its flaps down expecting a runway.
You will never land smoothly on borrowed vividness. If you say someone looks like Tom Cruise—and you let it go at that—you are asking Tom Cruise to do your writing for you. Your description will fail when your reader doesn’t know who Tom Cruise is.
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Frames of reference are grossly abused by writers and broadcasters of the punch-line school. We’re approaching the third decade of the twenty-first century and someone on Fox refers coyly to “a band called the Beatles and another called the Rolling Stones.” Y2kute. And NPR is reviewing the life of the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee: “He became close to a Georgetown neighbor—a young senator named John F. Kennedy.” Doesn’t that give you a shiver in the bones? Pure pallesthesia. Ta-da!
The columnist Frank Bruni, writing in the Times in 2014, said, “If you . . . want to feel much, much older, teach a college course. I’m doing that now . . . and hardly a class goes by when I don’t make an allusion that prompts my students to stare at me as if I just dropped in from the Paleozoic era. . . . I once brought up Vanessa Redgrave. Blank stares. Greta Garbo. Ditto. We were a few minutes into a discussion of an essay that repeatedly invoked Proust’s madeleine when I realized that almost none of the students understood what the madeleine signified or, for that matter, who this Proust fellow was.”
As it happened, Frank Bruni was at Princeton teaching in the same program I teach in—same classroom, same semester, different course, different day—and if I had felt “much, much older” I would have been back in the Archean Eon. Frank wrote that he was wondering if all of us are losing what he felicitously called our “collective vocabulary.” He asked, “Are common points of reference dwindling? Has the personal niche supplanted the public square?”
My answer would be that the collective vocabulary and common points of reference are not only dwindling now but have been for centuries. The dwindling may have become speedier, but it is an old and continuous condition. I am forever testing my students to see what works and does not work in pieces of varying vintage.
“Y2K—what does that mean?”
No one knew before the late nineties, and how long will the term last, if it isn’t gone already?
Y2K, QE2, P-38, B-36, Enola Gay, NFL, NBA, CBS, NBC, Fox? Do you watch comets?
A couple of weeks before that spring semester began, I had been in Massachusetts collecting impressions for this project by testing the frame of reference in a piece of mine called “Elicitation,” which was soon to run in The New Yorker. Why Massachusetts? Because that’s where Brookline High School is and where Mary Burchenal’s senior English classes meet, and where Isobel McPhee, daughter of my daughter Laura, was one of her students. The “Elicitation” frame of reference consisted of about five dozen items running along the edges of seven thousand words.
“I would like to try that list on you. Raise your hand if you recognize these names and places: Woody Allen.”
Nineteen hands went up. Everybody present in the class that day was aware of Woody Allen. As we went through my list, nineteen hands went up also for Muhammad Ali, Time magazine, Hallmark cards, Denver, Mexico, Princeton University, Winston Churchill, “Hamlet,” and Toronto. So those perfect scores reached around about fifteen per cent of the frame.
Sarah Palin, Omaha, Barbra Streisand, Rolls-Royce—eighteen.
Paul Newman—seventeen.
Heathrow—sixteen.
Fort Knox—fifteen.
Elizabeth Taylor, “My Fair Lady”—eleven.
Cassius Clay—eight.
Waterloo Bridge, Maggie Smith—six.
Norman Rockwell, Truman Capote, Joan Baez—five.
Rupert Murdoch—three.
Hampstead, Mickey Rooney—two.
Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh—one.
“In England, would you know what a bobby is?”—one.
Calabria, St. John’s Wood, Peckham Rye, Churchill Downs, the Old Vic, News of the World, Jackie Gleason, David Brower, Ralph Nelson, David Susskind, Jack Dempsey, Stephen Harper, Thomas P. F. Hoving, George Plimpton, J. Anthony Lukas, Bob Woodward, Norman Maclean, Henry Luce, Sophia Loren, Mort Sahl, Jean Kerr, James Boswell, Samuel Johnson—zero.