On metaphor

I generally steer clear of metaphors unless they're thoroughly dead. It's best that way because you wouldn't want one to rear up and bite you. I admire the American mode of writing. I write tight, allowing the reader to create their own picture and keeping the pace up. But I do know how to use a metaphor and I will carefully deploy a clever image if I feel the urge.

The key to imagery in writing is plausibility. If I write "the tree, like the spreading arms of a father", the reader thinks "yes, that sounds right", because a tree's trunk can remind you of a father's chest and the big branches spread wide as his arms do. If I write "dog barked as though it had been kicked in the throat", you can hear the tone of the bark, scratchy and high I would have thought. One imagines that the writer has seen a tree and thought "spreading arms", heard a dog and so on. Either the writer has a notebook or has its mental equivalent.

I read a particularly fawning review of Zadie Smith's new book, On Beauty, in the Guardian Weekly. I often take exception to reviews of English writers, because they forget to mention that the writers are all too often shit. Smith is no exception. She pushes stereotypes around in comedies of manners of the kind Malcolm Bradbury used to knock out, but without Bradbury's wry humour and careful prose. In the review, Merritt praises Smith's "imagery". I consider it one of the greatest failings of English authors that they indulge in "imagery" and think they would be greatly improved if they eschewed it.

Merritt quotes this image in particular: "Tom turned away to gulp his laugh down like an aspirin". Recalling what I said, I ask myself whether Smith had ever seen anyone swallow a laugh and thought "that's just like eating an aspirin", and I thought, well no, she couldn't have. Because they are nothing alike. The reader is pulled up short. Instead of thinking "what a clever image", they think, if they think at all, which I am not sure Merritt bothers doing, "that is wrong". I realise that Merritt thinks Smith is clever for having used an image at all! She doesn't care that it's nonsense.

But it gets worse because Smith did not, as you might suppose, write "Tom turned away to gulp his laugh down as though it was an aspirin", which would, even if it is a poor metaphor, at least be correctly expressed in English. No. She didn't even say "like it was an aspirin", an illiteracy in any formal writing (which includes novels unless they are written in a very colloquial style) but so common these days as almost to pass.

It is primary school stuff. The elements either side of "like" are being directly compared and must be similar in nature (and generally in grammatical form as a consequence; one must take care to understand "feel like", "look like" are not misanalysed -- each elides the copula in their second element: "you look like a dog" says "you look like you are a dog" or "you look like you would if you were a dog"): this is why we call these things "similes". "He had hair like corkscrews" says his hair was just like corkscrews, it physically resembled them. You can separate the elements and compare them directly: hair/corkscrews. The idea can be extended, so that it's not impossible to say "I love you like crazy": love you/(I am) crazy, but a careful writer will prefer "as though" (it is the formal illiteracy I mentioned and see below where I discuss this further, or not, because I realised that I had forgotten, but you will find a little note). So what could Smith be comparing?

Is she saying the laugh resembles an aspirin? No. She would have had to write "gulp down his laugh like an aspirin" and then we would be laughing at how infelicitous to compare a laugh to an aspirin given that they are entirely unalike. "Like" can only compare like things, not things that are not alike at all.

Is she saying Tom is gulping down his laugh in the same way an aspirin would? This would be the sort of structure we see in "He beat his wife like a Tartar". Again, this is a solecism, although not a terrible one, and should be rewritten "He beat his wife as a Tartar does/would". We could just about forgive it in the name of nippy writing (if Smith made any attempt in her laboured prose to be "nippy"). However, aspirins do not gulp things down, so we can discount that.

Is she saying Tom's turning away is like an aspirin? This is how the sentence appears formally: turned away to gulp down his laugh/ an aspirin. This would be a horrendous error in English, because the two elements combined are not only not alike but are not even the same parts of speech! We would be begging for the gerund, and you can't often say that.

No, she is meaning to say that the gulping down of the laugh is like the gulping down of an aspirin. It would be clumsy to write this (although it is grammatically correct): "Tom turned away to gulp down his laugh like he gulps down an aspirin" because when we are describing actions, we more often do it by comparison to things they do not resemble; in other words, we say that what someone is doing is like something they are not doing but if they were, would look the same. We say "Tom turned away to gulp down his laugh as though it was an aspirin".

We are taught this as children. Use "like" to compare a thing to another thing it actually does resemble. Use "as" to compare things to another thing that it does not resemble but is in some way like. The laugh is like an aspirin in that each is gulped down in the same manner. How easy is that to understand? (The note I meant to add in connection with "love you like crazy" is this: one can say "He laughed as though mad" but one cannot say "he gulped it as though an aspirin".)

Why didn't an editor pick this up? I would have corrected it without a second thought. I would have told the author to lose the stupid metaphor too, of course. I'm a good editor but I'm not the only one. Surely a writer such as Smith would have the best her publisher can offer.

Even Merritt noticed that the book had been poorly edited: "Again, as with White Teeth, there is a sense that the book could have benefited from more stringent editing purely in terms of length and narrative movement."

(Of course, Merritt's "purely" is a sign of her unwillingness to be critical of a writer who is so feted. The most she is prepared to say is that the book is far too long and far too slow (that's what Merritt is saying, albeit in the strangled prose that smothers her review).)

Well, the truth is, one supposes, that when you are longlisted for awards for books no one has actually read, as Smith was for the Booker, it doesn't really matter whether you're actually any good and you are certainly saleable enough to get your way with your editor, or even not to bother having one. Anyone who reads this blog and has a long memory will remember my deconstruction of the opening paragraphs of The Autograph Hunter, which were spectacularly badly written. I find it hard to believe Smith even is edited. Perhaps some poor soul does try to turn this shit into sugar, fighting valiantly with Smith, who, if you ever have the misfortune to read an interview with her you will soon realise, is arrogance personified, horrified by the writer's insistence on grammatical failures that most of us -- the literate among us, I mean -- have learned to put right by grade six. I write this blog more tightly than Smith does her prose. I'm not quite as hot as she is though.

People wonder why books don't sell any more. They think it's because litfic is too dry and doesn't have the nip of genre work. They suspect that litfic is all about showing off and not enough about telling stories. That's all true, of course. Our literary heroes wrote stories that rocked and, although they showed off, they did so by spinning webs of words that drag you in, caress you and make you believe. (Smith is compared with EM Forster and you can't help thinking if only!) But the biggest reason, I think, is that the quality of writing is pisspoor in every way. The worst of it is that books no longer resemble life. The characters are lazily put together and are not credible (because in the main writers such as Smith write about themselves and because they lack any capacity for self-criticism, they lack insight), the writing is purposely difficult (and all too often poorly constructed) and the reader is left with the feeling that the book was not for them but for the writer, who lives in a world that the reader has never seen and cannot understand. Surely, the reader must be transported, you are saying. Yes, they must, but it is the similarities between the place you are taken and home that make a work illuminating. Seeing yourself and your world reflected that makes a piece of art compelling. And if a book is not compelling, why would you read it?

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:42 am