On the Enigma of Metaphor

Why it’s central to the creative process

I am fishing. Trying to lure an idea, hook it, pull it to the surface. I want to cut it open and see what’s inside. I want to show what I know about this slippery, incandescent, underwater creature.

In writing this, I use the very thing I want to write about as my way of writing about it. Metaphor.

Defined as “a figure of speech in which one thing is identified with another”, the word metaphor originates from the Greek word metapherein, meaning “to transfer” or “carry across”. Where metaphor is present, the narrative will sing, rather than speak, appealing to the emotions and imagination: igniting the visual parts of our brain. Powerful metaphors in prose create possibilities of magic and alchemy through meaning, enriching the reader’s experience.

Of course, some functions of words, sentences and descriptions in narrative are by necessity practical, remaining firmly in the realm of the mundane; to get a character out of a room and into a forest, to indicate where the gun is kept, or how the dress is unzipped.

I want to talk discuss the other use for words, sentences, and narrative. When they transcend their form and boundaries, becoming more than what they appear at first glance, one can be almost certain metaphors are at work. Although I know more than a little about how to weave metaphor into writing, I want to extract it out of the writing process — hold it up to the light and reveal something of its nature.

Genesis of a Writer: The Siren Call of Metaphor

I’ve been a voracious reader all my life. Feasted on words, savoured sentences on my tongue, swallowed stories whole. My bookshelf, a well-stocked pantry for a diverse and curious palette.

Although always writing in some form, my dominant artistic passion was theatre for the earlier part of my adult life. It’s only in the last decade that I’ve shifted my creative passion to focus on writing — however I’ve always cared that I was reading widely and deeply. A core element of my incessant hunger for words, ideas and my own creative expression is a fascination with the power of metaphor.

Reflecting on why (and when) my writing urges shifted from journaling and the occasional poem to the desire to become a published writer, I blame Jeanette Winterson and her stunning wielding of metaphors.

Synchronicity often manifests in small everyday moments. A spontaneous conversation in a cafe with a woman at a nearby table becomes, in retrospect, a moment where my life narrative unspools into a new thread. I was journal-writing, she was reading. When I asked what her book was about, she surprised me by reading a passage aloud. All I remember was it was about darkness. That, and the swooning sensation, as the words washed over me.

It was from Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, so off I stumbled to find myself a copy. Bliss. Intoxication. Then I re-read Written on the Body, (realizing I’d read it, less attentively, some years before via a gender studies subject in my Arts degree) seduced into my own new beginning by images like this:

This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world. The world is bundled up in this room.

A room becomes a world, because what takes place in that room is so momentous for that character. A book becomes a path, because what is read causes me to walk towards certain experiences, and to leave other parts of my life behind. A book is a magic mirror: in its reflection I begin to see myself differently.

Here I am again, using the very thing I want to write about as my way of writing about it.

Something about the richness of imagery and metaphor; the poetic elements in the prose of Winterson’s novels resonated with my own aesthetic, giving me permission to silence the half-doubts and worries in the critical part of my brain about why I didn’t sound like writer x or y (often male voices) — and start trusting the development of my own voice.

And so I began, in earnest, to find myself, find my voice through metaphors, through writing.

Depth, Density & Multiplicity: The Gifts of Metaphor

Let’s examine Winterson’s quoted paragraph above more closely. If this writer didn’t possess incredible dexterity and creativity with language and imagery; if she expressed everything in literal language, the effect would be far less captivating — or engaging. To illustrate, I’ve attempted to express the same ideas (after the introductory sentence) in literal syntax — with the occasional addition of that simpler literary device, the simile:

This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The room will not hold the immensity of this story. It is so powerful that if I were to tell it here, it would cause the walls to explode, like a bomb or a supernova. Incredible views onto the world can be seen from its windows — somehow I can see for hundreds, even thousands of miles through the glass, as if the windows were really lenses in a telescope. So much happens inside this room — it is like its own galaxy, where I can see larger versions of the moon and stars. It’s as if the galaxy has entered the room.

Although it would not really fit, imagine the sun, hanging over the mantelpiece. I feel expansive inside this room, as if, standing in one place, I could be so large that my hands could reach the edges of the world and I would understand everything. I would possess omnipotent powers, like a god. And all to be known and understood and experienced about life and humanity could be contained in this room.

In comparing the metaphorical with the literal approach, it can be seen how incredibly hard metaphors work within fiction. I imagine that felt awkward and wordy to read — and that you were far less engaged than when reading Winterson’s version. Employing metaphors conveys depth as well as scope of information — so much more eloquently and elegantly than if we try to describe the same ideas literally. Now, we see the power of metaphor.

Writers may not often consider that employing well-crafted metaphor also brings about a certain economy, tightness and density to the prose that literal language does not. Winterson’s passage of seven short sentences encompasses so many ideas, communicating far more than my clumsy literal version.

Metaphor’s multiplicity of significations, associations, and connotations — evoked firstly in the actual ideas, and secondly in their varied interpretation by individual readers, enable the expression of more with less.

In fact, in its plurality of meaning and multiple possibilities of interpretation, metaphorical writing can be said to have always already embodied qualities of the postmodern — from its earliest uses in language and art.

Metaphors as Doorways to Deeper Perceptions

In an interview in 1981 for ADE Bulletin, author William Gass spoke of his “hunch” that “the core of creativity is located in metaphor”. I think he’s right. Powerful metaphor confers multi-dimensional aspects to a story, conjuring imagery in the mind’s eye, facilitating the art of showing, rather than telling, so integral to more sophisticated story-telling. Metaphors are doorways of and to deeper perception.

A metaphor is never a clear–cut thing, never just black or white, good or evil. The mind, taking in a metaphor, can’t comprehend it through the dividing lens of dichotomy. A metaphor collapses boundaries, obliterates and nullifies them. One could even say that a metaphor is inherently anarchic.

Perhaps that’s why metaphors have always been the tool of artists.

Sylphs and Shape-shifters of Meaning

When metaphors are present, there’s a kind of creative doublethink — to borrow an Orwellian term. The words mean one thing and another. What is explicit and what is implied. Text and subtext. Unlike the solid bones of plot and action, the swirl and drift of metaphors through story seems more ethereal. Ephemeral. Fluid.

The enigmatic nature of metaphor hovers, sylph-like, above and among the more linear aspects of the narrative, slipping sleight-of-hand through images in a sentence, paragraph or chapter to materialize again in another.

Like shape-shifting messengers, metaphors appear in subtle variations of disguise — in a dream or crucial line of dialogue or in the name of a vital character — transferring and building meaning between and through different elements of the story, just as the etymological meaning of the word suggests.

In antithesis to the beat-by-beat of plot and narrative, the function of metaphor is a non-linear way of making meaning. It communicates through repetition and emphasis, like music, or patterns, like mosaics.

The Weave and Thread of Metaphors in Narrative

Like Ariadne, metaphor glides through the textual labyrinth of story, gathering up not just one, but multiple thematic threads of differing colours. If you ask her what the story is about, she speaks not of the straightforward plot, but instead throws up an image, motif or an evocative theme to catch the light of your comprehension.

Like certain vivid threads, metaphors are woven through the tapestry of story; through settings and scenes, the dreams and drives of the characters, through a song they return to, or a book they refer to. The stories within a story.

Australian poet and author Mark Treddinick says this of metaphor:

But make sure nothing you do just decorates your writing. It should serve your subject matter (by getting at its nature and it soul); it should help your readers (by pleasing them in itself and by making the reading more than a merely literal experience); it should animate your sentences (by giving them colour and attitude and music). The Little Red Writing Book

As Tredinnick says, metaphor is not mere decoration to a story. It is integral thread to its fabric; part of the warp and the weft. Its patterns and intricate design provide both beauty and strength to the story.

Unpick it and the story itself would unravel.

© Melissa Coffey, September 2021

Melissa Coffey is an Australian writer, editor & poet. She is fascinated with creative process. Her short stories, creative essays and poetry are published in numerous international and Australian anthologies (sometimes incognito).

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