“you use too many metaphors” - something I missed in The Portrait of a Lady

Sometimes I wonder about the point of writing at any length about as complex a work as The Portrait of a Lady given that I have read it once and cannot possibly have caught much more than the central movement of the story.

One thing I missed and then missed some more was James’s use of metaphors. 

He expressed this view, somewhat after this fashion, to his mother, who looked at him as if he had been dancing a jig.  He had such a fanciful, pictorial way of saying things that he might as well address her in the deaf-mute’s alphabet.

“I don’t think I know what you mean,” she said; “you use too many metaphors; I could never understand allegories.”  (Ch. 26)

I was misreading so badly that I thought James was at this point making a joke about his lack of metaphors, when in fact he was directly telling me – well, indirectly – that he used them all the time.  There are two in the first two lines I quote!  I enjoyed them for their humor without registering their frequency.

Di at The little white attic has been reading The Portrait of a Lady, too – in fact she invited me to read it now instead of (vague gesture) some other time – and she saw the metaphors.  Look at all of those metaphors.  But I now see how I did not see them.  Look at the journalist Henrietta Stackpole, “strongly identified as a newspaper-woman,” as Di says, meaning as a woman made of newspaper:

She rustled, she shimmered, in fresh, dove-coloured draperies, and Ralph saw at a glance that she was as crisp and new and comprehensive as a first issue before the folding.  From top to toe she had probably no misprint.  (Ch. 10, the bold will be used in a minute)

And there’s more like that.  My first problem was that these clever comparisons are not actually visual, not meant to help me see what James is imagining, but rather to quickly get a sense of what Henrietta is like, or perhaps what Ralph is like, since the comparisons are his.  If I am looking for sensual precision, the way Zola or Nabokov or Bellow use metaphors, well, forget it. They want me to imagine the thing they are seeing, against the limitations of language.  James wants me to meet the person he has imagined.

Di has many more examples just as good, but I picked this one because of the second reason I missed it – it’s not in the book I read.  James made huge changes to the passage for the 1908 New York edition.  The original 1881 edition, which I read, has:

She was very well dressed, in fresh, dove-coloured draperies, and Ralph saw at a glance that she was scrupulously, fastidiously neat.  From top to toe she carried not an ink-stain.

I could go either way on the last example, but the first two, no contest, right?  1908 James came up with some good ones.  Eh, even “no misprint” is funnier.

So, maybe I missed less than I think, and, without denigrating the book I read, next time I am reading the New York edition.

I should point to more of Di’s posts.  The one on silence is the perfect counter to my complaint that Portrait talks too much.  She calls her wrap-up “The greatness of Henry James,” which is a good place me to stop.

Herman Bang's fragments and similes - like the stabs of a knife

Yesterday I emphasized interesting and rare subject of Herman Bang’s 1889 Tina; today I want to look at unusual prose.

Bang had been keeping up on his French writers.  Flaubert, Maupassant, the Goncourts.  That is clear enough.  “Realism” and “objectivity.”  The former meaning, if it means anything here, a focus on material surfaces, the latter, if it means anything here, a near-complete absence of narrator identifiable as a character.  Thus the metaphor of the camera, with the author as cameraman.  In a film we never see the camera even though we both know it is there and know that someone is operating it.  The personality of the operator is expressed through the choice of exactly what to film and the way the pieces are edited together.

But of course the author is not operating a camera.  If he were, we could in some sense see everything within the frame, no matter how trivial, while a fiction writer works with fragments.  Bang’s fragments are especially fragmented in a way that puts me in mind of certain 20th century authors, and no one at all from Bang’s time or earlier.  Short sentences, short paragraphs, short divisions within short chapters.

“Puff – Christmas is over,” he said proudly as he blew out each candle, as if he was grandly closing the door on Christmas; the others stood watching attentively while candle after candle was blown out.

“The last one,” cried Mrs Berg.  “The last one.”

The last candle was out, and the room was in darkness when Berg put Herluf down on the floor.  Mrs Berg took her husband’s arm, and they all left the room in silence.  (39)

I have quoted two other passages from Tina, the sudden beginning of the novel and a bit about refugees from the artillery bombardment, noisy and active scenes compared to Christmas winding down.  I did not mention that each one managed to slip in some metaphorical language.  A carriage, as it rolls away in the dark, is “likea great shadow,” and a man welcomes refugees into a house “like an officiousundertaker at a funeral,” which is excellent, if almost too portentous for those poor refugees.  Bang works in similes.  We cannot actually see what the imaginary camera sees, so we are given a little help seeing it.  It is like a shadow, he is like an undertaker, the boy’s movement is like – well that’s a funny one, isn’t it, because the simile does not appear to be visual at all, yet now I imaginatively give the boy some dramatic flourishes.

Through the storm and the pounding of the guns, which made the square tremble, came the screams of the wounded like the stabs of a knife, whenever the congestion on the road halted the strawless wagons into which they had been thrown, without compassion, by worn-out ambulance men at the end of their tether because of all the misery around them.  (118)

Now I am making Bang’s similes seem more common than they really are.  but I like the way he sneaks them in when he wants just a little bit more precision.

As though by lecherous women in high-necked long robes - Musil's metaphors, or revisiting the limits of language

This has been my third time through The Confusions of Young Törless.  I have read it at ten year intervals.  The book is rich, so of course I make new discoveries every time, although I am not sure if that is because I read it better or because I have just read more – more relevant texts, more Goethe or philosophy or German novellas.

I have certainly not solved the puzzle of the novel, which is how its different pieces work together, how the political parable meshes with the philosophical novel and the Bildungsroman and the homosexuality.  This week I have deliberately fragmented the pieces, in part because I am not sure that they all fit together so well.

But they do work to form a novel, because they are all pulled together by Robert Musil’s style.  He is not, at this point, a first-rate stylist – I mean, he is not Flaubert or Proust – but he has some good tricks.

Musil’s physical world in Törless is plain and functional.  He is good with space.  That tradition of 19th century novellas was always good at placing its characters in space.  But the main feature of the novel is a constant swing between the outside world and Törless’s jumbled interior.   Similarly the narrator sometimes shares that interior with the character and sometimes is commenting on it like a trained analyst:

Törless’s taste for certain moods was the first hint of a psychological development that was later to manifest itself as a strong sense of wonder…  Indeed, the more accurately he circumscribed his feelings with thoughts, and the more familiar they became to him, the stranger and more incomprehensible did they seem to become, in equal measure…  (etc. etc., 28-9, ellipses mine)

The narrator is more confident in his judgment than Törless but has as much trouble describing the state and process of the boy’s thoughts.  Which is, let’s face it, a challenging task.  The narrator might actually be Törless (as an adult).  Never mind that.

The tool that moves Musil from the analytic to the artistic is his use of metaphor:

And Törless felt that under that immovable, dumb vault he was quite alone, a tiny speck of life under that vast, transparent corpse. (i.e., the sky, 92)

It [T.’s “sense of urgency”] was something that was encircled by a whirling throng of emotions, as though by lecherous women in high-necked long robes, with masks over their faces.  (168)

One phase of development was at an end; the soul had formed another annual ring, as a young tree does.  (202)

Metaphorical language of this sort is not common in the novel but is reserved for moments of unusual tension, whether Törless is at an impasse or making a breakthrough.  Musil, like Törless, finds language inadequate to directly describe how Törless feels, but as an artist he has another path: he can show what the feelings are like.  By moving away from the thing itself, the writer moves his reader closer to it.  Language is inherently imperfect; the writer makes art out of the imperfections.

Muir reads the grand mountain manuscript, and writes his own books

John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) is three books in one.  The base of the book is the 1869 journal of Muir’s trip into the Sierra Nevadas as a shepherd, a succession of incidents and adventures – the night the bears discovered his sheep, for example.  The incidents are not especially exciting, although they have their moments.

Muir reworked the journal for publication forty years later, creating books two and three.  My First Summer is a genuine work of scientific description, but I suspect much of the scientific matter was added or polished later.  Here Muir is describing “a typical glacier meadow”:

The showy flowers are mostly three species of gentian, a purple and yellow orthocarpus, a golden-rod or two, a small blue pentstemon almost like a gentian, potentilla, ivesia, pedicularis, white violet, kalmia, and bryanthus.  There are no coarse weedy plants.  Through this flowery lawn flows a stream silently gliding, swirling, slipping as if careful not to make the slightest noise.  (288)

I included the last line to undermine the impression that Muir’s scientific prose is merely technical.  Metaphor are necessary tools for science writers.  That list of flowers, though, is daunting; useful, presumably, but not without additional assistance.  The passage suggests a hypothetical edition of the book, one filled with color photos of each species mentioned, and multiple photos of each tree.  Muir spends a lot of space describing trees – silver firs, Sierra junipers, and so on.  He gives the trees a lot of personality, actually – the juniper is:

A thickset, sturdy, picturesque highlander, seemingly content to live for more than a score of centuries on sunshine and snow; a truly wonderful fellow, dogged endurance expressed in every feature, lasting about as long as the granite he stands on. (248-9)

Muir is a fine science writer.  The question is just how much information a reader wants on heights and diameters, soil conditions, and percentage of cloud cover.  It’s all easy enough to skim if too tedious, I guess.

And the details about tree bark and insects and glacial activity provide the necessary foundation for the third book, the extended metaphor of the Church of Nature.  Muir alternates his thick description of nature with wild religious effusions.  Nature, or something more specific – a meadow or mountain or sky – is an altar or “the grandest holiest temple” (he’s writing about frost crystals) or a “grand mountain manuscript.”  Muir repeats that idea incessantly.  He is always reading nature.  All of this is a form of worship:

Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion.  I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built; and rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again. (309, last sentence)

Long before this point, I had understood that Muir was only employing the religious metaphors as a piece of his attempt to do something difficult, to accurately describe his genuine spiritual response to the wild, and to give some idea of how his reader can experience the same feeling.  Or (now I have thought of book #4) why even a spiritually blighted reader should want to preserve the wilderness, perhaps as a National Park, for those who do have that sort of response.

A little more of Adam Bede's harvest party

Just a little piece of the Harvest Party chapter of Adam Bede, since the day seems to have slipped away from me:

"A grin of delight broke over Tom's face as the plate was set down before him, between his knife and fork, which he held erect, as if they had been sacred tapers. But the delight was too strong to continue smouldering in a grin--it burst out the next instant in a long-drawn"haw, haw!" followed by a sudden collapse into utter gravity, as the knife and fork darted down on the prey."

Let's be tough on this passage. The first clause is pretty ordinary, and "a grin of delight" is weak, a cliché. But I can't argue with the second half. The "sacred tapers" are not meant seriously, but are sort of "mock sacred." The roast beef is a holy thing for Tom. The simile aids precision, as well. I picture the scene more accurately, just how the knife and fork are held, just where the plate is set.

The next sentence is even better. The delight is smoldering, not the tapers, but the tapers create the association, make it seem almost logical. The delight smolders, then bursts, then collapses. Into "utter gravity," which sounds like a black hole. I don't know what this character looks like, but I can see his face in a way - the grin, the laugh, and then the serious business of eating. The great comedy, of course, is in the word "utter."

Have I crushed these sentences sufficiently? Should I mention that this character is a new one, here in chapter 53, invented just to eat this plate of roast beef, and never seen again?*

I have great sympathy for any man who really enjoys his food, so I may be prejudiced. But this little passage is worthy of Dickens. Worthy of Flaubert.

* This is Tom Tholer. In Chapter 4, five hundred pages ago, we heard of the death of a Bob Tholer. Eliot's keeping track of the details.

Dead Souls - let us harness a scoundrel

Lest I make Dead Souls sound more humanistic than it really is, I'll turn to the flies. They're everywhere in Dead Souls, as part of the scenery, and in comparisons, beginning with serfs dying like flies. The first extended simile in the novel goes like this (we're at a ball):

"Everywhere one looked black frock coats flitted and darted by, singly and in clusters, as flies dart over a white, gleaming loaf of refined sugar in the summer season on a sultry July day, as an aged housekeeper standing at an open window cleaves and divides the loaf into glittering irregular lumps..." (Ch. 1, p. 8) The lumps are then distributed to children. Doesn't that sound nice. But still, the people at the party are like flies.

This is aside from all of the other places where people are compared to animals, or animals are compared to people. There's generosity here, though. Everyone is ridiculous. We're all in it together. Not a hint of nihilism, but just the way people are. That's the great source of comedy in the novel - go ahead, laugh at everyone. They'll laugh at you, too.

I was complaining a while ago about Scott and Dickens and their dullish virtuous heroes. Gogol (or "Gogol") is entirely on my side:

"There is a turn, and a place, and a time for everything! But, just the same, we have not taken a man of virtue for our hero, after all. And one may even explain why he hasn't been taken. Because it's high time to give a rest to the poor man of virtue; because the phrase 'man of virtue' is formed all too glibly and idly by all lips; because the man of virtue has been turned into a hack and there isn't a writer who doesn't ride him hard, urging him on with a whip or whatever else comes to his hand; because they have overworked the man of virtue to such an extent that now there isn't even a shadow of virtue about him, and there is nothing but skin and bones left of him instead of flesh and blood; because it is only through hypocrisy that they trot out the man of virtue; because the man of virtue isn't held in much respect. No, it's high time, at last, to put an actual scoundrel in harness! And so let us harness a scoundrel." (Ch. 11 , p. 224).

Ho ho! Dickens has to figure out how to make the "man of virtue" real in his world, which has its resemblance to Gogol's. Gogol knows he doesn't belong, and instead gives us Nozdrev, who wants to bet on everything, for example, that he once drank seventeen bottles of champagne; or cultivated Manilov, who names his children Themistoclius and Alcides; or the lieutenant who loves his boots so much that he stays up late "lifting now this foot and now the other and inspecting the deftly and wondrously turned heel of each boot." (Ch. 7, p. 149)

Greatest Novel of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.

The ethics of Dead Souls - how many of you are crowded in here?

A corrupt minor official and con man, Chichikov, wants to buy the legal rights to serfs who are deceased but still on the tax rolls (one set of “dead souls” in Dead Souls). He enters a provincial town and visits local landowners, buying their recently deceased serfs. People grow suspicious, and Chichikov flees. That’s the story of Dead Souls.

Dead Souls is overpopulated. A short novel (250 pages or so), it is stuffed with incidental characters. The first page, for example, introduces not just Chichikov, but four other people, only one of whom is ever seen again. There’s a fellow, for example, who wears a bronze pin, shaped like a pistol. Two others have this conversation as Chichikov rolls by:

"'Look at that, will you?' said one muzhik to the other. 'What a wheel! What do you think, would that wheel make it to Moscow, if need be, or wouldn't it?'

'It would,' answered the other.

'But it wouldn't make it to Kazan, I'm thinking - or would it?'

'Not to Kazan, it wouldn't,' the other answered.

And with that the discussion ended."

The novel is so full of people that they spill over into the metaphors Gogol uses to describe anything and everything – see the examples from the last two days. The parody of the epic simile, this abundance of humanity, is directly tied to the ethics of the novel.

Dead Souls is a novel about slavery (other things, too, sure). A later generation of Russian radicals saw it as a realistic attack on the social conditions of serfs, suggesting that they did not actually read the novel. Nevertheless. The plot is about the buying and selling of people, even if the particular people are dead. Chichikov’s attempts to buy dead serfs deeply confuse most of the other characters. The Public Prosecutor and other officials spend most of Chapters 9 and 10 trying to figure out what Chichikov is up to. Some conclude that he is a famous bandit, others that he is Napoleon in disguise, while the women all understand that the “dead souls” business is just a trick to distract the men while Chichikov elopes with the Governor’s daughter.

This confusion is the ethical heart of the book. If Chichikov were buying live serfs – actual people, slaves – to be resettled in a wilderness a thousand miles away, there would be no confusion. Everything would be perfectly legal, and everyone would approve, and even celebrate. They actually do celebrate, in the great scene where the bear-like Sobekevich eats an entire sturgeon (except for the “inedible tail”).

The “reality” of the characters who emerge from the metaphors is just as strong as the reality of most of the characters who exist in the world of the book. In exactly the same way, the dead souls have as much reality as anyone else. They’re not just legal fictions, but actual (“actual”) people.* At the beginning of Chapter 7, Chichikov looks over the list of his purchases:

“All these details imparted a certain air of freshness: it seemed as if these muzhiks had been alive only yesterday. As he gazed long at the names, Chichikov’s spirit was touched and, with a sigh, he uttered: ‘Good heavens, how many of you are crowded in here! What my hearties, have you done in your time? How did you get along?’” (p. 131)

Is this passage about dead souls, or about Dead Souls?

* One could also take this in an entirely different direction. The "actual" characters are no more real than the metaphorical ones. What is a novel if not a long, complicated metaphor?

Dead Souls and life within a metaphor - he may just have dropped in on Schiller for a chat

At the risk of incoherence, I am going to discuss, with interruptions, a long passage from Dead Souls. It worked for Nabokov. Ha ha! The number of writers whose last words were “It worked for Nabokov” – oh well, let’s try it.

We’re exactly halfway through the novel, at the end of Chapter 6. Our hero Chichikov is returning to town from his excursion to the countryside. This is all one paragraph.

“It was already dusk when they drove up to town. Light and shadow had become thoroughly intermingled and, it seemed, all objects had also become intermingled among themselves. The striped tollgate had taken on some indeterminate hue; the mustachios of the soldier on duty seemed to be up on his forehead and considerably above his eyes, and as for his nose, why, he seemed to have none at all.”

[This is what I was getting at yesterday. Gogol is really looking at the world, and here describes the sort of light effect we might see in a Turner painting. As for the missing nose, see Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Nose”, and also the drawing of him to the right, in About Me. He was obsessed with noses.]

“The thunderous rattling of the carriage and its bouncing made the occupant notice that it had reached a cobbled way. The street lamps had not been lit yet; only here and there were lights beginning to appear in the windows of the houses, while in the lanes and blind alleys scenes and conversations were taking place inseparable from this time of day in all towns where there are many soldiers, cabbies, workmen, and beings of a peculiar species who look like ladies, wearing red shawls and shoes without stockings and who dart like bats over the street crossings at nightfall.”

[Gogol commonly begins his descriptions with this disclaimer – this is what you see in “all towns” of a certain type. But he immediately starts picking out details – the red shawls, the darting, like bats.]

“Chichikov did not notice them, nor did he notice even the exceedingly slim petty officials with little canes who, probably after taking a stroll beyond the town, were now returning to their homes. At rare intervals there would come floating to Chichikov’s ears such exclamations, apparently feminine, as ‘You lie, you drunkard, I never let him take no such liberties as that with me!’ or: ‘Don’t you be fighting, you ignoramus, but come along to the station house and I’ll show you what’s what!’ In brief, such words as”

[Ah ha, we’re beginning a simile, which for some reason is describing the exclamations Chichikov barely hears.]

“such words as will suddenly scald, like [simile # 2] so much boiling water, some youth of twenty [who is this?] as, lost in reveries, he is on his way home from the theater, his head filled with visions of a Spanish street, night, a wondrous feminine image with a guitar and ringlets. What doesn’t he have in that head of his and what dreams do not come to him?”

[Already, it is easy to forget that the Spanish street and the “image” with the guitar are just theater-inspired fantasies in the mind of a character who exists entirely within the metaphor, which was supposed to tell us what some overheard phrases were like.]

“He is soaring in the clouds, and he may just have dropped in on Schiller [!] for a chat [so the metaphorical man has been to the metaphorical theater to see a metaphorical Don Carlos], when suddenly, like thunder, the fatal words [back to the words] peal out over his head, and he perceives that he has come back to earth once more, but actually to Haymarket Square, and right by a tavern, at that; and once more life has begun strutting its stuff before him in its workaday fashion.”

At this point Chichikov himself, thundering along, also dreaming, although probably not about Schiller, arrives at his own inn, so we leave the simile.

This is the characteristic of Dead Souls, the metaphors that not only describe the “real” world of the novel, but intrude on it, or exist alongside it. The “fictional” young man in a post-theater reverie, or the twenty-year-old fellow with a guitar in yesterday’s pumpkin-head metaphor, has just as much existence as many of the “actual” characters.

Gogol spins out these metaphor-inhabiting characters a dozen times or more, although not always at this length. It’s a virtuoso performance, with only a hint of precedent in his own work, and less in anyone else’s. I don’t think there’s much in the way of successors either. Dead Souls is a unique book.

Does this device mean anything? I’ll take a shot at that tomorrow. This was plenty long.

Dead Souls - crayfish, straw-stemmed cheroots, and that kind of pumpkin

So what’s in Dead Souls that one could not have found elsewhere in 1842? There’s this simile, for example:

“Without the little wench it would have been difficult to accomplish even this, inasmuch as the roads crept off in every direction, like a catch of crayfish when you dump them out of a sack...” (Ch. 3, p. 55)

Everything is like an animal in Dead Souls. Geese, bats, bears, ants, and flies, flies, flies.* Or almost everything – not this fellow:

“The corner shop – or to put it better, it’s windows – was occupied by a vendor of hot mead, with a samovar of ruddy copper and a face as ruddy as his samovar, so that from afar one might think that there were two samovars standing in the window, if only one of them were not sporting a beard as black as pitch.” (Ch. 1, p. 2)

Or this happy couple:

“And quite often as they sat on the divan, suddenly, for no known reason on earth, he abandoning his pipe and she whatever she may have been working on (if it happened to be in her hands at the time, of course), they would impress so languishing and prolonged a kiss upon each other’s lips that one could, while it lasted, smoke a straw-stemmed cheroot to the end.” (Ch. 2, p. 21)**

One could, eh? One more:

“After a brief after-dinner snooze he ordered water and a washbasin to be brought and for an exceedingly long time scrubbed both his cheeks with soap, making them bulge out with his tongue...” (Ch. 1, p. 8)

That’s it, right there, the literal tongue in cheek. Last week I went on a bit about the attention to detail of Walter Scott, and his possible effect on Dickens, Balzac, and others, including Gogol. These writers were bringing the physical world into prose fiction in an unprecedented way. But nobody was looking as carefully at the world around him as Gogol. No one else had seen the bulging cheeks, or at least thought they were worth putting on paper.

Now we’re used to this sort of quotidian precision, here in the year 151 AMB (Anno Madame Bovary). But this novel, full of sneezing, snoring, nose-blowing, and digestion, is a first step on the path to Leopold Bloom on the toilet in Ulysses.***

But are we used to this:

“As Chichikov drove up to the front entrance he noticed two faces that had peered almost simultaneously through the window – one feminine in a house cap, narrow and elongated like a cucumber, and a masculine one, round, broad, like those Moldavian pumpkins called gorliankas, out of which they make, in Russia, balalaikas, the pride and joy of some frolicsome, twenty-year-old country lad, a fellow who knows how to wink and is a dandy and who not only winks at but whistles after the snowy-breasted and snowy-necked maidens who gather around to listen to his soft-stringed strumming.” (Ch. 5, p. 89)

Oh, I see, that kind of pumpkin, the kind that – wait, what is going on here? Who is that winking fellow? Tomorrow, a crack at this.

* Since the people are animals, it’s no surprise when, in Chapter 4, Gogol tells us what some horses are thinking.

** Nota Bene has identified this admirable passage as his favorite. The fussy parenthetical insert is hilarious.

*** I'm not saying there are no precedents. Rabelais, Swift, maybe Sterne. Right. But how about this, describing Russian provincial ladies: "Never did they say: 'I blew my nose; I sweated; I spat'; instead they said: 'I relieved my nose; I had to use my handkerchief.'" (Ch. 8, p. 155) Gogol knows this is new. Gogol nose - this is new.

Visual Emerson

I wondered earlier if Emerson's reliance on visual metaphors was idiosyncratic, or if he got it from his intellectual sources. From his journals:

"Musical Eyes. I think sometimes that my lack of Musical ear, is made good to me through my eyes. That which others hear, I see. All the soothing plaintive brisk or romantic moods which corresponding melodies waken in them, I find in the carpet of the wood, in the margin of the pond, in the shade of the hemlock grove, or in the infinite variety & rapid dance of the treetops as I hurry along."

Signet Classics Selected Writings of RWE, p. 83