The kind of metaphor I most delight in … estranges and then instantly connects, and in doing the latter so well, hides the former. The result is a tiny shock of surprise, followed by a feeling of inevitability. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay says goodnight to her children, and carefully closes the bedroom door, and lets “the tongue of the door slowly lengthen in the lock.” The metaphor in that sentence lies not so much in “tongue,” which is fairly conventional (since people do talk about locks having tongues) but is secretly buried in the verb, “lengthen.” That verb lengthens the whole procedure: Isn’t this the best description you have ever read of someone very sl-o-w-ly turning a handle of a door so as not to waken children? (Tongue is good, too, because tongues make noise, while this particular tongue has to stay silent. And the now blissfully silent children have of course been using their noisy tongues all day.) … [Katherine] Mansfield is very good at simile; in [her story] “The Voyage,” a girl on a boat listens to her grandmother, lying in a bed above her saying her prayers, “a long, soft whispering, as though someone was gently, gently rustling among tissue paper to find something.”
—James Woods, How Fiction Works (2008), pgs 209–10
James Wood is a literary critic, essayist, and novelist. He is a visiting lecturer in English and American literature at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.
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