NUCLEAR WEAPONS: The terrible beauty of metaphors and similes

Metaphors and similes are the tactical nuclear weapons of writing.

“In midafternoon. . . a curious darkening of the sky, and a lull in everything that had made life tick; and then the way the boats suddenly swung the other way at their moorings with the coming of a breeze out of the new quarter, and the premonitory rumble. Then the kettle drum, then the snare, then the bass drum and cymbals, then crackling light against the dark, and the gods grinning and licking their chops in the hills.”— E.B. White describing a thunderstorm, from the essay “Once More to the Lake”

“She then blew a note on her pitch pipe, and the children, like so many underage weight-lifters, raised their hymn-books.”— J.D. Salinger describing a children’s choir, from “For Esme with Love and Squalor”

“It was like saying good-bye to a statue.”— Ernest Hemingway describing a man in a room with the corpse of the woman he had loved, from A Farewell to Arms

“[In the hospital] people didn't stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.”— Joseph Heller on why being in a hospital is healthier than being outside one, from Catch-22

“She often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.”— Virginia Woolf describing a housewife and mother, from To the Lighthouse

“It was as though he had fallen into a sewer.”— William Faulkner describing a man beginning a complicated relationship with a woman, from Light in August

“Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”— Mark Twain, from his Autobiography

“[T]he second baseman turned every grounder into a juggling act, while the shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open window.”—John Updike, describing a baseball game, from “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”

    I have written in previous posts about what I consider to be “The 5 Rules of Good Writing.” (See, for example, this link.) It is more difficult—probably impossible—to say what makes great writing. Nevertheless, I think I’m safe in saying this: Great writers give us great metaphors and similes.

    Metaphors and similes are the tactical nuclear weapons of writing: their power is so great that, in general, they should be used only sparingly.

"She often felt she was nothing but a sponge. . . "

    A metaphor, of course, is a direct claim that two apparently different things are the same. “Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man.” Here, obviously, Twain is equating biographies with clothes and buttons. He doesn’t say that biographies are like clothes and buttons. He says they are clothes and buttons. This is, when you think about it, a bizarre and ridiculous claim. At first, our (literal and logical) left brain tells us, “Wait, that’s just not true!” Then a small explosion occurs in our more imaginative and open-minded right brain, and his point seems absolutely true—indeed, more true than what we thought was true before we read his words: biographies really don’t get down to the real person; they deal only with a person’s superficial trappings. The metaphor has changed the very geography of our thinking, like mountaintop removal by explosive.

    Likewise, when Virginia Woolf says the housewife in To the Lighthouse felt she “was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions,” the woman’s identification with a kitchen cleaning object is written as absolute. This is jarring at first, then eye-opening, then (especially in the context of the novel) downright tragic.

    This is that. That’s what a metaphor claims. One thing that makes metaphors so powerful is that the metaphor is a literal lie: This really isn’t that. Biographies are not clothes. The housewife is not a sponge. There really aren’t any snare drums or cymbals in a thunderstorm, and there are not really gods up there licking their chops. And yet, thanks to the flexibility of the human mind, the lie of the metaphor transforms instantly into a truth so powerful that, after a good metaphor, how we experience the world is changed forever.

". . . like so many underage weightlifters."

    A simile is a more modest metaphor. A simile doesn’t say the two things apparently different are the same, just that they are like each other. Similes often use the word “like”: “Like so many underage weight-lifters.” Salinger doesn’t say the children in the choir are weightlifters, only that they are similar to them. The effect isn’t quite as dramatic and intense as a metaphor; rather than blowing up the mountain, a good simile more or less re-landscapes the yard. A good simile can still bring a smile—or goosebumps. Updike’s comparison of a poor-fielding shortstop to an open window is outright funny (and it’s done without the word “like”; there are other ways to make a simile). Heller’s description of a human body that has just plummeted to the sidewalk—“like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream”—and Hemingway’s “like saying goodbye to a statue” bring goosebumps of two different kinds.

    I’ve talked here about “good” and “great” metaphors and similes. I’m not smart enough to fully explain what makes metaphors and similes great, but I can say a few things with some certainty:

"Dead as a doornail" is a simile that is as dead as . . . what?

1) Good metaphors and similes are original. This is the most important thing about them. When we see a metaphor or simile that we’ve read or heard before—an unoriginal one—it undermines our respect for the writer; we think of him as having stolen another’s idea and trying, like a shady car dealer, to sell it to us as new.

     Besides, clichéd metaphors and similes simply do nothing for us. “Dead as a doornail” was a brilliant simile the first time it was used. The second writer to use it was a clever thief who knew a good thing when he stole it. All the writers who’ve used it since simply lack imagination or are too lazy to engage their imaginations at all. “Dead as a doornail” is such a dead simile that it doesn’t even spark an image in our mind. Who even knows what a “doornail” is anymore? Here are some other once-alive, now-dead similes and metaphors: “don’t sit there like a bump on a log,” “she’s as big as a house,” “he’s a bear of a man,” and “she’s a peach.” Dead language.

     On the other hand, Faulkner’s simile for a man beginning a difficult relationship with a woman—“It was as though he had fallen into a sewer”—is spectacularly and terrifyingly fresh. It raises in our imaginations all the emotional muck and darkness and stench of a bad relationship that is hard to climb out of. The fresh simile takes our imaginations beyond the plain language itself into the poor man’s future life.

2) Good metaphors and similes compare things that really are alike somehow, in ways we have never noticed ourselves. Part of the joy they bring is our having the similarity pointed out. Young choir members lifting hymnals really do look like “underage weightlifters.” The build-up to a thunderstorm really is a series of different drum sounds. A dead person really is like a statue, though it takes a courageous writer to say so.

     A curious phenomenon is this: Almost any two things are alike, if you turn them into a metaphor or simile and then let the reader’s imagination go to work. I tried to come up with some bad similes and metaphors here, comparing things that were incomparable, and they all turned out to be kind of interesting: “John is asparagus.” “My living room is a sewing kit.” “English Composition is a stick of TNT.” “Life is like a toadstool.” But for such out-of-a-grab-bag similes and metaphors to work, they would probably need some explanation—and having to explain them can be as deadly to metaphors and similes as to jokes. (Teachers: It can be an enjoyable and illuminating exercise to play a kind of "MadLibs" game with metaphors and similes. Have two students write down nouns without showing them to each other. Then make a metaphor or simile of them. Thus "cricket" and "thermometer" become the metaphor "A cricket is a thermometer." This seems silly until you remember that the rate a cricket chirps is affected by the temperature! You and your students will be surprised by the effectiveness of even random comparisons like this.)

3) Good metaphors and similes usually anchor an idea—often an abstract idea—in the concrete. That is, they give us something to see, taste, touch, smell or hear in our imaginations. Instead of the abstract "bad weather," we hear E.B. White's concrete drums; instead of the abstract "shortstop incompetence," we see Updike's open window; instead of an abstract "bad relationship," we smell Faulkner's sewer and feel its muck. (For more on the importance of concrete writing, see this link.)
     It is possible, though rare, to reverse this approach to metaphor and compare the concrete to the abstract: "The paper boy's old bicycle sat on the driveway like red reliability." "The carrots he left uneaten were guilt on porcelain." "Her wrinkled face was his wealth." This comparison of the concrete to the abstract is actually rather enjoyable to pull off once in a while. (The foregoing examples are my own.)

4) Good metaphors and similes resonate throughout the whole piece of writing. It turns out as Salinger’s great short story "For Esme, With Love and Squalor' goes on, for example, that one of the young choir members—Esme herself—really is lifting a rather large amount of emotional weight in her life; she is an underage weightlifter in more ways than one. And the wife and mother who is the main character of To the Lighthouse finds herself surrounded by the mundane appurtenances of household life—things like sponges—and is, at times, taken for granted by her family and friends, as if she were nothing but a piece of kitchen equipment herself, good mainly for cleaning up their messes.

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer."

     All the examples of good metaphors and similes I’ve mentioned till now are from fine prose. It’s the poets, however, who are the great masters of metaphor and simile. The opening stanza of one of the most important poems of the 20^th Century will serve as an example:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

    This is the beginning of “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats. To understand the metaphor at work here, you need to know that a “gyre” is a spiral that gets wider and wider as it goes upward, and that in the sport of falconry, the falcon leaves its handler and flies in wider and wider circles, higher and higher, until it locates a prey, which it seizes and brings back to its handler, who calls to it. Yeats is describing a world that he sees as falling into chaos and violence. The metaphor that begins the poem is of a falcon that has flown so high, in circles so wide that it has lost contact with the voice of its master—its “centre.” The falcon is now lost. This is Yeats’s metaphor for a world that has lost its bearings, that is spinning out of control, that has nothing—no “centre”—to give it meaning and order, no words to console or control it. The world Yeats describes is as lost as a falcon, wild and confused, without a voice of reason to return to.

      The rest of the poem is equally powerful, with equally powerful metaphors: the “blood-dimmed tide,” for example, and, at the end, a “rough beast” that “slouches toward Bethlehem” to begin a “second coming” that is not glorious, but horrific. This poem has been said to define the entire 20^th century, with its world wars, its holocaust, its many civil wars, its atomic terrors. When I went to last fall’s “Rally for Sanity” on the Washington Mall, among the thousands of people there, I saw at least half a dozen signs quoting this poem, signs saying, “The centre cannot hold,” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” The lost-falcon metaphor has, for millions of readers, defined a century. “The Second Coming” was, amazingly, written in 1919.

". . . like a patient etherised upon a table."

      Another poem that transformed the way the world saw itself in the early 20^th Century begins, not with a metaphor, but with a simile:

Let us go then, you and I,           

When the evening is spread out against the sky           

Like a patient etherised upon a table. . . .

     This, of course, is the beginning of “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” written by T.S. Eliot in 1917. It is a poem that describes a man looking for meaning and direction in his life, frightened and bored and both oversensitized and desensitized by crippling self-consciousness. He is not your traditional grand hero of poetry; he is, in fact, one of poetry’s great anti-heroes. The simile “like a patient etherized upon a table” is a stark, unpretty, modern simile like none other that had ever appeared in literature before (at least not in great literature that I know of). The entire atmosphere of the world Eliot invites us into is like an anesthetic ("etherized"), and the time and place—by extension, the age and the world—are rendered numb, helpless, vulnerable, inert, deeply sick and in need of a cure, “like a patient etherized upon a table.” Like Yeats, Eliot was describing an entire generation that was struggling (especially given the horrors of World War I) with emotional deadening, self-questioning, and sickness of heart. This is simile at its most powerful.

"Out, out, brief candle!"

     Perhaps the greatest giver of metaphors and similes in English is, yes, our friend Shakespeare. From “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” to “it is the east, and Juliet is the sun,” Shakespeare was such a fountain of phenomenal metaphors and similes that it’s difficult to know where to begin praising him. I’ll settle here for looking in astonishment at these ten famous lines from Macbeth:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

     My god. The passage starts with the metaphor that the future days of our lives (“tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”) will be nothing but a creature that “creeps.” Shakespeare reduces time itself to mere “syllables”—sounds without meaning. Any one life is but a “brief candle,” while existence itself is a kind of darkness—a “walking shadow.” “Shadow” could also mean a ghostly figure, and the ghost itself is just an actor (a bad one, at that) who shows up briefly on stage and then is seen no more—a terrifyingly accurate depiction of a person’s life and perhaps of human life itself. Finally, life is a “tale told by an idiot,” loud and passionate and irrational, “signifying nothing.” Our life is nothing but a meaningless story, told in furious jibberish. Yipes. It’s hard to make yourself brush your teeth or eat your spinach on a day you read such writing.

     Some might accuse Shakespeare of piling on the metaphors and, indeed, mixing them here. (To call John an asparagus in one sentence and a cauliflower in the next would be to mix your metaphors.) But Shakespeare’s many metaphors here echo and resonate with each other: meaningless syllables foreshadow “a tale told by an idiot” and the “light” from our yesterdays is reflected later in the candle and countered by the walking shadow. The meaningless syllables even echo the witches' weird incantations ("Double, double, toil and trouble") in Act IV of the play, and the candle reflects that seen earlier, when Lady Macbeth wanders the castle at midnight with one in her hand.

     This is metaphor-making at the highest level. We are not the same after hearing "it is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing." Shakespeare has cast one of our deepest fears—that life is absurd, meaningless—in the eternal bronze of metaphor.
     If I might mix my own metaphors, let me put it this way: Great metaphors and similes remap the world and offer us new candles by which to navigate it.

Shakespeare—the great maker of metaphors.