Metaphor is analogous to fiction, because it floats a rival reality. It is the entire imaginative process in one move. If I compare the slates on a roof to an armadillo’s back, or—as I did earlier—the bald patch on the top of my head to a crop circle (or on very bad days, to the kind of flattened ring of grass that a helicopter’s blades make when it lands in a field), I am asking you to do what Conrad said fiction should make you do—see. I am asking you to imagine another dimension, to picture a likeness. Every metaphor or simile is a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story. Near the end of The Rainbow, Ursula looks out at London from her hotel balcony. It is dawn, and “the lamps of Picadilly, stringing away beside the trees of the park, were becoming pale and moth-like.” Pale and moth-like! We know, in a flash, exactly what Lawrence means, but we had not seen those lights like moths until this moment.
And of course this explosion of fiction-within-fiction is not exclusively visual, any more than detail in fiction is exclusively visual. “As he spoke he stroked both sides of his mutton-chop whiskers as if he wished to caress simultaneously both halves of the monarchy.” That is from Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetsky March, which chronicles the decline of a family in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The two haves of the monarchy, then, are the Austrian side and the Hungarian side. It is a fantastical image, excitingly surreal and strange, but you could not say that the simile brings the two halves of the whiskers to our eye, any more than Shakespeare (or his cowriter) intends us to visualize something when a fisherman in Pericles exclaims: “Here’s a fish hangs in the net, like a poor man’s right in the law.” Instead Roth’s is the kind of hypothetical or analogical—“as if”—metaphor that Shakespeare is very fond of. It wittily tells us something about the devotion of this Hapsburg bureaucrat; it arrests him in an outlandishly symbolic gesture.
Transcribed by me from pages 202–203 of How Fiction Works, ©2008 Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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