Metaphor school
METAPHOR, n. Well, it’s week three and I’m already breaking the rules. This word isn’t from Romance roots, since it’s Greek, and much like last week’s choice “ambiguous,” “metaphor” is highfalutin enough that it didn’t undergo much sound change. It was imported directly from Greek into Latin, then into French, then into English. (No more of this literary shit. I gotta start picking regular-ass words. They have more interesting lives.)
“Metaphor” is itself a metaphor, or it used to be, since it comes from the verb meaning “to transfer.” But even in Ancient Greek, the word indicated the rhetorical device that highlights a resemblance between two otherwise unrelated things. A comparison on the down low, none of this “like” or “as” stuff.
We get it poets: things are like other things
September 8th 2014
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Sometimes a line of prose or verse gets stuck in my head the same way a song might. A long time ago in internet-years, I used to frequent a now-defunct blog called Videogum, which was written by a few different people but mostly Gabe Delahaye, whose writing was wry and self-deprecating. If one of Gabe’s sentences went off the rails, he’d finish with “I didn’t go to metaphor school.” “I didn’t go to [something] school” was an all-purpose joke-excuse in Videogum posts, and I still think it to myself all the time.
(Granted, not quite as frequently as I think of another Videogum-ism, “We should all be so lucky as to find something in this world that makes us happy.” That one would be appended to something like YouTube videos of a man doing everyday household tasks while wearing a latex horse mask, or someone fitting 800 straws into their mouth. Now every time I see a person out in the world behaving strangely—please keep in mind that I live in crunchy, free-spirited western Massachusetts and I socialize with a no-audition choir of several hundred lovable weirdos—I think we should all be so lucky…)
Anyway. Metaphors.
The problem with thinking “I didn’t go to metaphor school” every time one of my sentences goes off the rails—as they frequently do—is that I literally did go to metaphor school. I no longer work in academia, but I am the perplexed owner of a doctorate in French literature. My apologies for bringing this up. It always feels like a violation of etiquette: Actually, I have a PhD. I avoid mentioning the degree when I meet new people at writing conventions, the same way I wouldn’t bring up a rash on my ass, but you know how it is. Sometimes you get itchy and you have to explain yourself. It’s embarrassing for everyone involved.
If people ask how I learned French, I tell them I used to be a French teacher, or that I used to live in France. That’s what I said to everyone two years ago, when I was in France as a second chaperone for a three-week college trip. I was there to speak French, which I did, and to help out in case of emergencies, which I didn’t, because thankfully there weren’t any. It was a great time with a great group of students. One night we took them to a tourist trap in Montmartre for dinner, because even if the food is forgettable, sometimes you eat at a place because Van Gogh once made a painting of it.
Vincent van Gogh, La Guinguette à Montmartre, 1886
Being a tourist trap, this place had a piano player, Danny, with the slick cheer of a hustler. He remembered the professor from previous years’ trips and he launched into some tiresome sexist patter (“Do you choose these students for their looks? You must!”) that I elected not to translate in the moment. If you’re a professional interpreter, you can’t mute people like this, but nobody was paying me, so I was free to be petty. Perhaps Danny assumed I didn’t know what he was saying.
He talked a lot. He tutoie’d (used the informal “you” with) the professor. He tutoie’d me, even though it was the first time we’d ever spoken. He played for us, and had us sing along, which I made the mistake of enjoying.
Danny took note of my enjoyment. Then he made me get up from my place at the long table where we were all seated so he could sing a song to me, specifically. There was no graceful way to refuse this, so I sat on the piano bench next to him. I wish I remembered the title of the song, or its melody, but 90% of my brain was occupied by inching away from Danny. Some of the lyrics were about how your love is like the sun, or something, I think.
Because I was paying insufficient attention to being serenaded, or because he wanted to show off further, Danny decided to offer me his expertise on this complicated matter of love and sunshine.
“C’est une métaphore,” Danny said. It’s a metaphor. “Tu sais ce que c’est, une métaphore?” Do you know what a metaphor is?
I did not roll my eyes or laugh. All I could think was I went to metaphor school.
“Yeah,” I said, because if telling people you have a PhD is embarrassing, sometimes not telling people you have a PhD is a real pleasure. “I know what a metaphor is.”
Here is a second word of the week, far more linguistically exciting than unchanging “metaphor.” In French, if you want to say “to mansplain,” the verb is mecspliquer. It’s a calque (loan translation) of “mansplain,” but it’s a far more satisfying portmanteau (callback!). It combines expliquer (to explain) with mec (guy) but also sounds identical to m’expliquer (to explain to me), which makes it pretty much perfect.
ENNUI SPIDERS, OPIUM, AMERICA, MAGIC, or, WHAT I READ THIS WEEK
In Capital-R Romance, it’s the same old book: Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. I’m at IV, 3, ii, or 59% finished.
Metaphors are not, for me, one of the dominant aspects of Hugo’s style. Instead, I think of a teetering pile of adjectives, chosen just as much for their descriptive denotation as their sound: “Elle était sèche, rêche, revêche, pointue, épineuse, presque venimeuse” (I, 5, viii). I gave up on the rhyme, but with an attempt at preserving some consonance, that’s “She was curt, coarse, surly, sharp, spiny, almost venomous”.
And this: “Il y a un spectacle plus grand que la mer, c’est le ciel ; il y a un spectacle plus grand que le ciel, c’est l’intérieur de l’âme” (I, 7, iii). There is one spectacle greater than the sea, the sky; there is one spectacle greater than the sky, the interior of the soul. That kind of direct address from the narrator that borders on an essay (let’s be real, a huge chunk of Les Mis is essays), plus parallel sentence structure, plus sublime images of natural grandeur, plus a really particular kind of humanist Christian spirituality? Hugo af.
Another aspect of style particular to Hugo is how his work is the single most useful thing you could read if you were, say, writing a work of fiction set in nineteenth-century Paris. (Cough.) Want to know if there were gas street lamps in Paris in the 1820s? Not yet. If you were an impoverished young student renting a sad little apartment in 1832, where exactly would it be? 25 rue Rubens, formerly 50-52 boulevard de l’Hôpital. What kind of food does a lovelorn dope buy after he spends all day in the Jardin du Luxembourg mooning after a girl and forgets to eat? Bread, 2 sous. Victor Hugo has got your back.
But—and here we enter a Hugo-esque digression—when I think of metaphors in French literature, everything else is eclipsed by Proust and Flaubert, primarily because Marcel Proust, that little shit, once said “Il n’y a peut-être pas dans tout Flaubert une seule belle métaphore.” There is perhaps not a single beautiful metaphor in all Flaubert.
Now we all love a little bit of writerly cattiness, but also: what the hell, Marcel. How are you so bad at this. The metaphors in Flaubert are not meant to be beautiful. They are meant to fit. When the narrator situates us in Emma Bovary’s head, we see the world through Emma’s metaphors: “Sa vie était froide comme un grenier dont la lucarne est au nord, et l’ennui, araignée silencieuse, filait sa toile dans l’ombre à tous les coins de son cœur.” Her life was cold like an attic where the dormer window faces north, and ennui, that silent spider, was spinning its webs in the shadows in every corner of her heart. Proust might have found the ennui spider webs distasteful, but they fit. Emma feels trapped in her house and in her life, and her metaphor is not only a forgotten, empty space, but one filled with spider webs—traps—in every corner. It is beautiful because it fits.
I have been thinking about Emma, archetypal daydreamer, and the recurrent question of “How Much Idleness Is Too Much Idleness” that obsesses so many nineteenth-century French writers, and also twenty-first century American writers i.e. me, because of a metaphor-stuffed passage I just read in Les Mis. Our boy Marius—sweet, dim Marius—loses track of Cosette (he’s in love with her and he doesn’t even know her name, get it together Marius) and stops his work as a writer and translator (you see why this is close to home) in order to have a lot of feelings (don’t @ me). Victor Hugo offers up a metaphor:
Une certaine quantité de rêverie est bonne, comme un narcotique à dose discrète. Cela endort les fièvres, quelquefois dures, de l’intelligence en travail, et fait naître dans l’esprit une vapeur molle et fraîche qui corrige les contours trop âpres de la pensée pure, comble çà et là des lacunes et des intervalles, lie les ensembles et estompe les angles des idées. Mais trop de rêverie submerge et noie. Malheur au travailleur par l’esprit qui se laisse tomber tout entier de la pensée dans la rêverie ! Il croit qu’il remontera aisément, et il se dit qu’après tout c’est la même chose. Erreur ! La pensée est le labeur de l’intelligence, la rêverie en est la volupté. Remplacer la pensée par la rêverie, c’est confondre un poison avec une nourriture.
A certain amount of daydreaming is good, like a small dose of a sedative. It lulls the fevers of the mind at work, which are sometimes hard, and it ushers into the mind a soft, cool vapor that corrects the harsh contours of pure thought, fills in gaps and intervals here and there, links the whole together and shades the angles of the ideas. But too much daydreaming floods and drowns. Woe to the worker who relies on his mind who lets himself fall entirely from thinking to daydreaming! He believes he will easily get back up, and he tells himself that after all it’s the same thing. Wrong! Thinking is the toil of intelligence, and daydreaming is its self-indulgence. To replace thinking with daydreaming is to confuse poison with food. [Apologies for this quick and clunky translation.]
In this passage, a daydream is opium smoke, and just as addictive. A little bit is useful and even medicinal, but too much will poison you. Daydreaming is only acceptable if you’re maintaining other habits—thinking, here, is inextricable from writing and translating. (There’s also, I think, a little bit of a sexual or masturbatory connotation in the French because of the word volupté, which I translated as “self-indulgence.” The more obvious translation is “pleasure,” but I think “pleasure,” in English, is bled of its power by being used in common phrases like “it’s my pleasure,” a problem that doesn’t trouble volupté, a word far too luxurious for such everyday use.)
Unlike Emma’s cold attic full of ennui spiders, this opium-daydream metaphor has no pretensions of coming to us from Marius. Marius is stupid in love with Cosette and we’ve just been told he’s too out of it to think, so obviously this one’s on our opinionated narrator, Victor Hugo. And sure, technically it’s about Marius the writer, but it’s about Hugo the writer, too.
And doesn’t it feel like just the sort of thing a guy who wrote a 650,000-word novel would do, telling Marius, and us, and himself, to put down the pipe and get the fuck back to work? I want to pat Victor Hugo on the shoulder and tell him it’s okay to take a break and feel your feelings sometimes. Writing novels is hard.
In small-R romance, while I was indulging my opium-daydream-not-writing habit, this week I read Casey McQuiston’s RED, WHITE, AND ROYAL BLUE (m/m, contemporary-ish), which… whew. This is complicated. I raced through the beginning of this book, a fun, fanfiction-y (you all know I mean this as high praise) romance about the president’s son falling in love with the Prince of England.
Red, White, and Royal Blue is set in an alternate-universe America, one where a woman won the 2016 election. (Not that woman. But still, you see where this is going.) AU America is both too AU and not enough AU; as my partner said, it’s the uncanny valley of settings. I saw lots of content warnings on the internet for the fact that this book features characters getting outed without their consent, and none for the fact that it mentions Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and made me relive the 2016 election and dread 2020. I wish I had known these things going in. Although it might not have stopped me, because I didn’t think this book was going to upset me until it did.
I would have loved this book—naively, not knowing what was coming—in 2015. In 2019, there are concentration camps in the news. I am unable to contemplate a glossy, hopeful version of this nightmare country. It hurts too much.
It’s a shame, because—extracted from jarring reminders of our horrific present—the romance is a ton of fun and this book did make me laugh out loud a couple of times. None of my bad feelings are Casey McQuiston’s fault. She started this book before the 2016 election. She didn’t know, and neither did I. She is not personally responsible for my loss of faith in our political institutions.
If you’ve got the iron constitution to deal with AU America, then go for it. I like Casey McQuiston’s writing and will check out her future work, but this book gets a big ol’ “it’s not you, it’s me.” Except it’s the United States of America that’s the problem, and I don’t know what to do about that. Give some more money to RAICES, I guess.
I read another romance that dealt with US politics and history this week, Alyssa Cole’s* LET IT SHINE (m/f, historical), a novella set during the Civil Rights movement in 1961, starring a Black woman who gets involved in non-violent protests and the Jewish boxer who teaches her how to take a punch. This novella was originally published in an anthology of stories all having something to do with Juneteenth, a US holiday celebrating the end of slavery that I had to learn about from twitter because no one in my public school system ever mentioned it. Our country has never really reckoned with its own atrocities. White Americans don’t celebrate the end of slavery because that would mean acknowledging that it happened, and that it was bad, and that we all still benefit from its evils. Shit, this country is appalling.
Is it strange that I found Let It Shine—which contains racism and police brutality, including a briefly mentioned incident where a pregnant woman is beaten and loses her baby**—less upsetting than Red, White, and Royal Blue, decidedly the “fluffier” read? Maybe because it’s the past instead of the present, but I think it’s because Let It Shine stares down the ugliness of US history and doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t pretend the world is better than it is, but it doesn’t get mired in despair. In the cruelest moments of our history, people have fought for what’s right, and sometimes they’ve won. And even in the midst of acute suffering, people find ways to be tender with each other.
*I said I was gonna read Alyssa Cole’s entire backlist. I don’t joke about these things.
**Let It Shine also has death in it, including both protagonists’ moms prior to the story (an aneurysm and cancer), and grief plays a role in their character development, in case that’s something that might catch you off-guard.
In books that are neither Romance nor romance, this week I read Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars, a noir detective story set at a school for magic in California. If you ever wondered why characters in Harry Potter insist on writing with fucking quills even though ballpoint pens have existed for a century and are objectively better tools, this novel—which tackles the practical applications of magic to medicine, note-passing, and high-school-locker graffiti—will satisfy you. Fantasy novels with contemporary, recognizable settings require just as much careful worldbuilding as secondary worlds, and I think we often don’t give their authors enough credit for all the work that goes into them. This setting is delicious in its details and in its description (“Honeyed sun poured through two tall windows onto rows of empty study tables”).
All the characters with magic describe it to the non-magical characters through impenetrable, instructional metaphors: “Imagine you’re a candle, and your wick is made of glass”; “Imagine if your heartbeat was a cloud and you could make it rain whenever you had a nightmare.” The teachers at Osthorne Academy talk to each other about their methods in their own peculiar version of academic jargon: is this spell more “clouds-in-water” or “fists-of-sand”?
These phrases both allure and frustrate Ivy Gamble, non-magic private investigator hired to solve a murder at the Academy. Her estranged twin sister Tabitha got all the magic, and Ivy struggles with her feelings of affection and resentment and yearning all throughout the book. Every time she asks Tabitha a question—about magic, about the case—she gets an answer as opaque as one of these metaphors for magic.
Or maybe they’re not metaphors. What do I know? I didn’t go to magic school.
