Allusion Confusion

It is my self-imposed duty to publicly and obsessively record every occasion when I happen to read a book with an owl in it, which takes up a lot of my time, as every book has an owl in it. Usually, the task is mildly embarrassing, due to its obvious pointlessness. In today's case, the shame is multiplied by my nearly complete bafflement by the owl in question, which appears in the Harry Mathews novel CIGARETTES, as "the ground owl of childhood fame." Is that an allusion to something? Well, the phrase is spoken by a hallucination, a grandmotherly figure, which later becomes a white "owlish raven," if that clears anything up for you. In most cases, I would breeze over cryptic phrases uttered by a hallucination, but when you stick an owl in there, you've got my attention, pal! I was going to end this with "Well played, dead author," then I thought to check whether Harry Mathews is dead. He is. In his New York Times obituary, there is a paragraph addressing (sort of) the very concern stated above! "For readers groping to unravel the convoluted structure of his satire 'Cigarettes,' he cautioned, 'There’s no point in looking for it now because no one will ever figure it out, including me.'"