Metaphor

An Element of Fiction

To my reading mind, nothing is quite as magical as the perfect metaphor, for it can spring not only the sentence, or paragraph, or page, or book into life but it can change the day for you, and mostly for the better.

I take it that you are quite comfortable with the difference between the metaphor and the simile, so I’m not going to expound on that, instead, I am going to let writers a lot more qualified than I have their say on metaphor and its rightful place in fiction (as well as in poetry, and even non-fiction, for that matter).

The great John Fowles does not hold back when he says, “The metaphor is the miracle of higher civilization.”

What a beautiful (and so true in my opinion) statement.

William Zinsser observes that “If you look long enough you can usually find a proper name or a metaphor that will bring those dull but necessary facts to life.”

Jorge Luis Borges, who does know of what he speaks, says, “Any metaphor, as beguiling as it may be, is a possible experience, and the difficulty lies not in its invention (a simple thing, attained by the mere shuffling of fancy words) but in achieving it in a way that astonishes the reader.”

In Lu Chi’s Wen Fu, we learn that “Bright winds lift each metaphor; clouds lift from a forest of writing brushes.”

The always brilliant John Gardner suggests (and more than suggests — proclaims perhaps) that “Every metaphor conjures an inexpressible but felt background, ties the imagined to the fully experienced.”

Philip Gerard is being a little more analytical when he says, “Metaphor — expressing one thing in terms of something else. Usually, the ‘one thing’ is a complex idea and abstraction, and the ‘something else’ is a concrete expression of the abstraction in analogous terms.”

And back to Borges, “We came upon the metaphor, the invocation by which we disordered the rigid universe… linking distant things.”

And a word of warning from E.B. White, “When you use a metaphor, do not mix it up. That is, don’t start by calling something a swordfish and end by calling it an hourglass.”

And another suggestion from John Gardner, “The writer sensitive to language finds his own metaphors, not simply because he has been taught to avoid clichés but because he enjoys finding an exact and vivid metaphor, one never before thought of, so far as he knows.

“The understanding that comes through the discovery of right metaphors can lead the writer to much deeper discoveries, discoveries of the kind made by interpreters of dreams — discoveries, that is, of how one dark metaphor relates to another, giving clues to the landscape of the writer’s unconscious and, through these clues, hypotheses on the structure of reality.”

The even practical Ayn Rand advises, “Avoid two metaphors to describe the same thing. Sometimes, two clever images might occur to you to describe an object. You have to be ruthless and select the one you think is better. Repetition is always a weakening; it has the effect of projecting the author’s doubt, his uncertainty that the first description is good enough.”

And here’s Jacques Barzun with the definition, “A metaphor is a comparison embedded in a word or phrase without the addition of like or as.”

And then he elaborates, “The greater part of the vocabulary of any complex language is a mass of forgotten metaphors. For language grows in response to needs, and the readiest way to name new conceptions is to adapt concrete words to abstract purposes. To do this is to speak by metaphor — as when Socrates is called the gadfly of Athens.

“The interplay between live and dead metaphors, and live and live, and live and resuscitated, constitutes the subject of most discussions of metaphorical writing.

“The injunction ordinarily is: do not join to live metaphors that raise conflicting images.”

And then he rounds things off with, “For the fully conscious writer, it may be useful to distinguish among three kinds of metaphor: (a) the ready-made single-word expression that spreads suddenly in some professional group or other — the jargon of people who do paperwork; (b) those produced ad hoc for headlines, captions, and the like, and usually not repeated elsewhere; and © the latent metaphors in good ordinary words, which misuse galvanizes into fresh life.” Jacques Barzun

John Gardner adds, “The visual power of metaphor, it should be noticed, is as available to novelists as to poets. Often an important gesture or complex of gestures (the man who walks through a hostile crowd like a tired plow horse, the man who jerks up and looks at his alarm clock like a startled chicken) cannot be captured so efficiently by any other means.

“Rhodes, like many good writers, depends at least as heavily on metaphor as on the naming of significant details. The main point to be noticed here, however, is that nothing in Rhode’s vision is secondhand: what he offers he has taken from life experience, not from Faulkner or, say, Kojak.”

And having come this far, we’ll give Aristotle the final word, “The most important thing is to be good at using metaphor. This is the one thing that cannot be learned from someone else, and is a sign of natural talent; for the most successful use of metaphor is a matter of perceiving similarities.”

Amen.

© Wolfstuff