Allusion in the age of hyperlinks

I'm not sure what Nicholas Carr's essay "The quality of allusion is not google" is getting at. (By the way, "Google" is spelled lower-case in Carr's title.) His point seems to be that mere hyperlinking, the functionality that makes the World Wide Web what it is, is not the same as "alluding," but I can't tease out what he thinks "allusion" is.

Here's his first stab at a definition:

An allusion is a hint, a suggestion, a tease, a wink. The reference it contains is implicit rather than explicit. Its essential quality is playfulness; the word allusion derives from the Latin verb alludere, meaning "to play with" or "to joke around with."

That didn't clear things up for me. Care to try again?

An allusion, when well made, is a profound act of generosity through which an artist shares with the audience a deep emotional attachment with an earlier work or influence.

That makes a bit more sense to me. However, it raises another question: if the audience is unaware of the earlier work or influence, was the artist's deep emotional attachment to the latter conveyed to that audience?

That's a silly question, because an artist would have to be a fool to make his or her work's impact depend too heavily on a familiarity with another. A work of art stands on its own. Those who miss an allusion in that work will still feel something of what the artist meant to convey.

So what's Carr's gripe with hyperlinks as they relate to allusions? He cites the inclusion of footnotes in certain editions of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" to make his point:

By turning his allusions into mere citations, the notes led readers to see his poem as an intricate intellectual puzzle rather than a profound expression of personal emotion - a confusion that continues to haunt, and hamper, readings of the poem to this day. The beauty of "The Waste Land" lies not in its sources but in its music, which is in large measure the music of allusion, of fragments of distant melodies woven into something new.

Hyperlinks, of course, are nearly invisible inline citations. You can choose to ignore them, or you can follow them. Carr seems to be arguing that including them diminishes the artistic creation.

If you see an allusion merely as something to be tracked down, to be Googled, you miss its point and its power. An allusion doesn't become more generous when it's "democratized"; it simply becomes less of an allusion.

He has lost perspective. Hyperlinks don't change the nature of allusions. The presence of hyperlinks doesn't transform a poem into "an intricate intellectual puzzle." Only the audience can do that.

You can certainly argue that not including hyperlinks in the online text of a poem (or novella, or image of a sculpture, or ...) would prevent some people from treating the work as a puzzle rather than as an expression of emotion by the artist. However, isn't that overkill? Are we not banning sharp objects from the house because children might find them?

The culture has changed markedly since Yeats or Eliot (not to mention Shelley or Shakespeare) wrote their allusive works. We are educated differently, we have different baselines of shared experiences, shared cultural touchstones. We undoubtedly perceive poetry of a century ago differently than our great-grandparents did. Should we disallow even the possibility of recapturing something of their understanding of those poems by foregoing a technology as innocuous as hyperlinking?

In the end, Carr makes a good point that most of us overlook (I know I did):

My intent here is not to knock Google, which has unlocked great stores of valuable information to many, many people. My intent is simply to point out that there are many ways to view the world, and that Google offers only one view, and a limited one at that.

The flip side, though, is that Internet search engines represent merely a high-powered extension of one organizing principle -- the indexing of key words -- humanity has attempted to impose on its great stores of information ever since the invention of the printing press. If search engines are reductive, it's because that organizing principle is reductive. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our search engines, but in ourselves.