Sources, Inspirations, and Allusions
Inspiration for the film came from several sources, and it contains allusions to many different people and events. At one point in the picnic scene, as Mayhew wanders drunkenly away from Barton and Audrey, he calls out: "Silent upon a peak in Darien!" This is the last line from John Keats's 1816 sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer". The literary reference not only demonstrates the character's knowledge of classic texts, but the poem's reference to the Pacific Ocean matches Mayhew's announcement that he will "jus' walk on down to the Pacific, and from there I'll ... improvise".
The title of Barton's play, Bare Ruined Choirs, comes from line four of Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare. The poem's focus on aging and death connects to the movie's exploration of artistic difficulty. Other academic allusions are presented elsewhere, often with extreme subtlety. For example, a brief shot of the title page in a Mayhew novel indicates the publishing house of "Swain and Pappas". This is likely a reference to Marshall Swain and George Pappas, philosophers whose work focuses on themes explored in the movie, including the limitations of knowledge and nature of being. One critic notes that Barton's fixation on the stain across the ceiling of his hotel room matches the protagonist's behavior in the short story "The Enduring Chill" by author Flannery O'Connor.
Critics have suggested that the movie indirectly references the work of writers Dante Alighieri (through the use of Divine Comedy imagery) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (through the presence of Faustian bargains). Confounding bureaucratic structures and irrational characters, like those in the novels of Franz Kafka, appear in the film, but the Coens insist the connection was not intended. "I have not read him since college," admitted Joel in 1991, "when I devoured works like The Metamorphosis. Others have mentioned The Castle and "In the Penal Colony", but I've never read them."
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