It was interesting to read three different Marvel books this week and find three literary references in quick succession. The problem was only two of them were correct. In Dark Reign: The Hood, writer Jeff Parker has the Controller correctly use an allusion to Jack London's White Fang. Even better, in Dark Reign: The Sinister Spider-Man, writer Brian Reed has Max Gargan use the pseudonym "Kilgore Trout" and then in VO narration say, "What? I went to college."
Sadly, Mark Millar swings and misses in Fantastic Four when he has three...three...heroes miss the meaning of a Tenneyson quote.
SPOILERS FOR THIS MONTH'S FANTASTIC FOUR
Debbie, the Thing's fiance is trying to get Ben's friends to console him after he breaks up with her at the alter. She says for them to tell him "Better to have loved and lost, right?" Namor, Daredevil and (I'm assuming) Bruce Banner all fidget and tell her that Tennyson was talking about breaking up, not (again I'm assuming) the death of a loved one that Ben fears if he marries her.
WRONG.
The quote is from Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H." which is Tennyson's elegy to his best friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Hallam's tragic, early death all but destroyed Tennyson, and this poem was his way of working through his grief. In other words, he was not writing about breaking up with a bloody girl.
This irritates the crap out of me. Criminy, this is an extremely well known poem, and Millar obviously wants people to think he has some familiarity with it because he even points out who wrote it in story. If he knew Tennyson, one would assume he read the poem as it's considered his masterpiece. If he just wanted to use the reference, a quick perusal of Wikipedia would have told him what it was about. The superficiality of his writing continues to be consistent.
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I always think back to Neil Gaiman's episode of Babylon 5, "Day of the Dead" (and I believe I've mentioned this tory before). In it, a character tells Garibaldi how "any Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of 'Yellow Rose of Texas'." This is, of course, not true, and afterwards, Gaiman says he got many people writing him to tell him this. His response (which, I suppose, you don't have to believe) was that yes, he knew that, but the character saying so wouldn't have, and it was illustrative of her character to have her think it to be true.
And I'll tell ya true: I'm familiar with that line, but before today I couldn't have told you what Tennyson was referring to. (Honestly, I'm not sure I could've told you for sure I knew that was Tennyson before today.)
That's like people playing 'Every breath you take' at wedding receptions. Creepy!
I thought of that myself, but if there is a point being made it's lost on me. He had Banner(?), Namor, and Daredevil all muttering and fumbling with a way to correct her. He even had Namor start to say it was a quote of Shakespeare's, only to have Banner correct him. To me it seemed he was definitely trying to say these guys knew the point of the quote correctly, and that they were agreeing with Ben's decision because the true meaning of the quote was not applicable to this situation.
All well and good, but there's a difference between not knowing and not knowing but still correcting somebody else inaccurately.
True. Not that it's entirely uncommon for people (especially people who see themselves as brilliant or imperious, i.e. Banner and Namor) to correct somebody inaccurately. Hell, there are certain people in television and radio who have made entire careers out of just that. :P
I was more responding to you "extremely well known poem" bit, there. Extremely well-known line I'll grant...
Yeah, that would have irked me too. It's one thing to get it wrong. We've probably all misattributed a quote at some point in our lives. But to make such a point of it- and be wrong about it- is a pretty telling stamp of ignorance.