What is an homage?
An homage is a piece of literature that incorporates elements of another work with the intention of honouring or paying respect to the author or their work.
Wait, isn’t referencing another work called an allusion?
Sort of. The homage belongs to a collection of narrative and literary devices within the idea of intertextuality, or the investigation of the relationships between texts. Intertextuality encompasses the spectrum of references to authors and their works, from entire storylines down to single words, phrases and images. Homage is one of many intertextuality siblings, including allusion, appropriation, calque, parody, pastiche (fan fiction), plagiarism, reference, retelling, and translation.
Both the homage and the allusion are covert or indirect references to another author or work (meaning they typically don’t name the referent), but the homage takes it one step further in its affection for the author or work.
Okay, continue . . .
Sure. Another difference between the allusion and the homage is that the homage typically uses a narrative-level element from the original, like the story’s structure, rather than just a single line or image.
A famous literary homage is James Joyce’s Ulysses, an homage to Homer’s The Odyssey. The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus, King of Ithaca, on his long journey home from the Trojan War. Ulysses takes the same structure, spreads it over three main characters, and squeezes it into a single day. Then, Joyce riddles the story with easter eggs for the reader to marvel over. The homage is so entwined with the original that James Joyce is even said to have told his aunt to read The Odyssey before tackling his book.
Another interesting quality of homages is that they are particularly common within genres like mystery, sci-fi, and horror. Modern writers often pay homage to their progenitors, either directly or through the use of elements or tropes invented by them. In our short story example, we’ll closely examine an homage within the mystery genre.
Now, for a short story example
When we’re talking about classic literature, it is unusual to make an analysis that hasn’t already been published. This would happen to me constantly in my undergrad, and while it was reassuring to know that I wasn’t reaching too far with an idea, it was frustrating to never think of something new. So, this month, when I reread Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” and recognized the latter as an homage to Doyle’s predecessor, I was surprised to find no one on the interwebs had published the same! So, I present to you . . .
The Theory of the Livid Spots
A treatise on why “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” is an homage to ” The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
The affection
Before we discuss narrative devices, we need to establish Doyle’s affection for Poe, and to do that, we need to go further back than “The Speckled Band.”
If you aren’t a little bit obsessed with Holmes, you might think that Doyle didn’t care for Poe, or was at least jealous of him. But if you’ve taken to reading the stories and Doyle’s commentary multiple times then the reference to Poe’s Dupin in the first Sherlock mystery, A Study in Scarlet, immediately foreshadows an ongoing homage. In the scene, Dr Watson compares Sherlock to the fictional character of Dupin, to which Sherlock replies:
“No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin,” he observed. “Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his breaking in on his friend’s thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.”
from A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
This could have been merely a reference to fiction to make the writing seem more realistic if it weren’t for Sherlock playing Dupin’s exact trick in the opening of “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” and then again in “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” where Sherlock actually contradicts his statement from A Study in Scarlet:
He laughed heartily at my perplexity. “You remember,” he said, “that some little time ago when I read you the passage in one of Poe’s sketches in which a close reasoner follows the unspoken thoughts of his companion, you were inclined to treat the matter as a mere tour-de-force of the author. On my remarking that I was constantly in the habit of doing the same thing you expressed incredulity.”
from “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” by Arthur Conan Doyle
Based on this back-and-forth between Sherlock and Dupin through one novel and two of his collections, it looks to me like Doyle wanted us to know that he knows that we know that some of Sherlock’s best qualities are lifted directly from Poe’s work.
And in case that’s not proof enough of Doyle’s affection for Poe, Doyle says it himself in a speech about his inspiration for Sherlock. He tells of how it bothers him that detective stories always seem to require a good dose of chance, but he makes an exception for Poe’s mysteries, calling them “splendid” and “a model for all time.”
The proof
So, assuming that I’m correct that Sherlock’s comparison with Dupin is out of affection for the work, then perhaps there is room for an homage to “The Rue Morgue” in “The Speckled Band.” Allow me to present my reasoning (see what I did there?).
Recall that the homage uses foundational elements from another work to express respect or admiration for the work or the artist. But also, to be done well, an homage needs to transform these elements into something that honours the referent. Here are the elements that are the same:
- Both stories are locked-room mysteries.
- Both stories are about the murders (and attempted murder) of two women who are related to each other.
- A dominant clue to both murders is a much debated unfamiliar sound.
- Both detectives deduce that the murders could not have been perpetrated by a human leading to . . .
- Both detectives pin the deed on a wild animal.
- Both murderous animals were under the care of purveyors of wild beasts.
Doyle doesn’t just retell the same story though. The contemporary reader, he knows, is familiar with the detective story, so he doesn’t need to explain rationalization. Instead, he jumps into creating a very similar situation of an unsolved murder that took place in a locked room, and adds the potential of another murder if the clues play out in the same way. This creates a degree of emotion and urgency that is missing from “The Rue Morgue.” Then Doyle uses the clue of the sound and the inhuman killing to lead the detective toward the wild animal and, this time, a human that wielded the animal like a weapon, all just in time to save the potential victim’s life and her inheritance.
And if these similarities don’t convince you that Doyle was doing his best to take what the master taught him as far as he could, I have one final detail to bring to your attention.
The livid spots
There is one line in both stories that draws an undeniable connection between them. In the newspaper’s and, later, Dupin’s description of the daughter’s corpse in “The Rue Morgue” Poe repeats this phrase twice, “a series of livid spots which were evidently the impression of fingers.” Curiously, in Watson’s description of Miss Roylott, he notes, “Five little livid spots, the marks of four fingers and a thumb, were printed upon the white wrist.” Coincidence? I think not!
Final notes on paying our respects
Homage, allusion and other forms of intertextuality pop up everywhere in literature, especially in short stories, because of how much meaning they are able to convey in such few words. The cool thing about “The Speckled Band” is if you have never read “The Rue Morgue,” you would still enjoy the cleverness of Sherlock’s deductions. But by having read it, there is an underlying sense that Doyle was using all the tricks he learned from Poe, and then showing everything he’s learned in carrying the mantle himself. And that is the point of the homage.
