Henry James uses metaphors

This will be something of a What Maisie Knew note dump.  I have said what I have to say and now just have questions.  The big one is how James uses metaphors.  I don’t understand it yet.  I ended my run on The Portrait of a Lady with the same question.

It’s the central question of style, which is the same as saying it is central to how the artist sees the world, “sees” being itself a metaphor.  For some writers – Saul Bellow – the metaphor is strongly visual, sensual.  To see the one thing – to see it in my imagination – he says, imagine this other thing.  Right, now you’ve got it.  Metaphor is a form of precision.

Gustave Flaubert’s metaphors are prosaic, useful but plain, but they are used to create an elaborate pattern of reference that is a thing of beauty, a glimpse of the reality behind reality.

Then there are writers in the plain style who think metaphors are dishonest, just rhetoric.  Sometimes they are right.  Say what it is, not what it is like.

Then there is James, who uses five hundred words to avoid the word “fat.”  Or uses a series of metaphors as a substitute for setting, movement and dialogue – for the usual components of a scene.  For characterization, too.  Maisie’s mother didn’t wear but “carried” clothes – she “carried them as a train carries passengers” (Preface)  That is not meant to be something I see, is it, but rather a description of the mother’s attitude, of her cool.  Or of her promiscuity.  Honestly not sure which.

Sometimes the metaphorical language feels like it must be visual, even if I have trouble seeing it.  Maisie’s mother’s “huge painted eyes… were like Japanese lanterns swung under festive arches”  (Ch. 25).  A “huge frosted cake” is “a wonderful delectable mountain with geological strata of jam” (Ch. 12).  For me, the vividness of the metaphor overwhelms what it describes.  I enjoy the grotesqueness James creates, but I think I need to learn to work my way back into the book.

I noticed one deliberate pattern.  In Chapter 4, I find “a lady with eyebrows arched like skipping-ropes and thick black stitching, like ruled ‘lines,’ on beautiful white gloves,” two reasonably visual similes that are both plausibly the perceptions of a child.  They are within her imaginative and linguistic world.  Eighty pages later the gloves return as “a pearl-grey glove ornamented with the thick black lines that, at her mother’s, always used to strike her as connected with the way the bestitched fists of the long ladies carried, with the elbows well out, their umbrellas upside down” (Ch. 15).  Then a few pages later ,the eyebrows from up above.

Vladimir Nabokov would omit “at her mother’s,” the direct reminder of the earlier scene.  That’s my job, to work that out, not his.  But I wonder what would happen if I followed James’s hint and rubbed these two scenes together.

I could then follow the umbrella theme, which is there, really, I think.  I began my posts on What Maisie Knew with an elbow metaphor, one I did not understand, from fourteen chapters after this one.  Hmm.

The only way to see how this all fits together, to figure out what kind of argument James is making with his language, is to reread the novel.  Maybe it doesn’t.  One time through What Maisie Knew, through Henry James, how would I know.