Like buttah

[malsperanza]

A well-crafted simile is a pleasing thing, and not at all easy to write. The presence of the word "like" is an almost sure-fire recipe for cliche.

Her eyes were like twin pools of midnight.

Feh.



Instinctively, we prefer metaphors--they are meatier, more muscular creatures. The fey little simile seems like a weaker thing altogether, more hesitant, more diffident.

But when it works, a good simile is like a sock in the jaw. The best ones have an element of surprise: the thing that is like the other thing is not really like it; the comparison is odd, quirky, unexpected, jarring. And even humorous.

"The friar smiled. It was like a rat diving into a hedge." (Dorothy Dunnett, Race of Scorpions, chapter 2)

"He smiled at her like a light going out." Cassandra Claire, Draco Veritas, chapter 15)

"Like a bird on a wire, like a drunken midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free." (Leonard Cohen)

"Arkady said nothing. Over the field were the triumphant screams of small birds mobbing a crow; they looked like a bar of music moving through the air." (Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park)

By some alchemy of prose, a simile may be transformed into a metaphor:

"As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste" (Song of Songs, 2:3)

Or a metaphor into a simile and then back into a metaphor and then back into a simile:

"Weak mortals, chained to the earth, creatures of clay as frail as the foliage of the woods, you unfortunate race, whose life is but darkness, as unreal as a shadow, the illusion of a dream, hearken to us, who are immortal beings, ethereal, ever young and occupied with eternal thoughts.." (Aristophanes, The Birds)

A simile has a punchline:

"As countless swarms of flies buzz around a herdsman's homestead in the time of spring when the pails are drenched with milk, even so did the Achaeans swarm on to the plain to charge the Trojans and destroy them." (Iliad, Bk II)

"But when he raised his voice, and the words came driving from his deep chest like winter snow before the wind, then there was none to touch him, and no man thought further of what he looked like." (Iliad, Bk. III)

It can be extended beyond all reason, and still work (as the Simile Master shows):

"Thus high in hope they sat through the livelong night by the highways of war, and many a watchfire did they kindle. As when the stars shine clear, and the moon is bright--there is not a breath of air, not a peak nor glade nor jutting headland but it stands out in the ineffable radiance that breaks from the serene of heaven; the stars can all of them be told and the heart of the shepherd is glad--even thus shone the watchfires of the Trojans" (Iliad, Bk. VIII)

OK, sometimes a simile can go off the rails:

"Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them." (Song of Songs, 4:2)

But sometimes even that works:

"Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men." (Song of Songs, 4:4)


I really like a good simile.

On a separate subject: Will the LJ community please learn to spell "definitely"? Please?

Comments

definitlie!

[thegraybook.livejournal.com]

Aw, I have been included among exalted company!

Aslo, I had to delete one of my doubled announcements off my LJ but I am glad you liked the rewritten 'letter' scene. My appreciation of the gestalt beta is great.

Re: definitlie!

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Exalted, yes I suppose so, but why not? That's one hell of a simile.

gestalt beta

Heh.

My pleasure. Didn't feel like I did much, but it was fun. Will send you the other comments one of these days, definately.

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

Similes in metaphors are the same in my head, just that metaphors are sneakier. And similes are always taught as 'lesser' and are subjected to abuse by people who don't get metaphors. (When I was little I was told that a metaphor had to be like this: "The dog is a banana," and thought the whole concept very silly indeed.) But good similes are not always hard, because usually, no matter how odd the two things compared, it's easy to see the connection. And the comparison adds a much greater depth than a simple description, even if it isn't forced between two very unusual objects.

Ha, as I was reading this I was thinking, "What about Homer?" and then when you got to the Iliad bits I was thinking, "Homer is truly the Simile Master! I should comment this!" ALAS, you are always two steps ahead! :D

Anyway, he really is the Simile Master. His similes are just wonderful. Even though they seem to follow a relatively simple idea of relating things to the Common Tasks of Ordinary Folk, or the Forces of Nature - yet they always work so well! The flies on milk one always struck me as just quirky; I like the one about the Myrmidons being like a bunch of bees that boys annoy on the roadside; and the stones thrown being like snowflakes (oh the juxtaposition of calmness and snow with the crazy slaughter!).

"As when in heaven
principal stars shine out around the moon
when the night sky is limpid, with no wind,
and all the lookout points, headlands, and mountain
clearings are distinctly seen, as though
pure space had broken through, downward from heaven,
and all the stars are out, and in his heart
the shepherd sings."

Fitzgerald I feel is a mighty t00b. :/

It's also really fun to see where he (Homer) reuses the similes, and where he reuses them but changes them slightly. I think the milk-flies things is used again in Book XVI, but I'm not sure. Oh, and:

"And as when from the towering height of a great mountain Zeus
who gathers the thunderflash stirs the cloud dense upon it,
and all the high places of the hills are clear and the shoulders out-jutting
and the deep ravines, as endless bright air spills from the heavens,
so when the Danaans had beaten from their ships the ravening
fire, they got breath for a little, but there was no check in the fighting..."

(Fagles calls it "no real halt to the buck-and-rush of battle". sigh.)

So much love for that bit! The only thing better than the Book 8 watchfire/stars simile is reusing it as a stormcloud/battle/Achaean victory simile! It's so...masterful. *pushes copies of the Iliad fondly around desk*

I also really like how Christopher Logue plays on the abundant water similes, er, in Kings:

"Hearing these things, the soldiers slowed...
re-turned, and turned again,
Chopping and changing like a cliff-stopped sea
Whose front waves back into the one behind
That slaps the next, that slaps."

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Metaphor is a larger idea, and encompasses greater leaps of meaning. A metaphor is a little world, made cunningly of elements and an angelic sprite, as John Donne says. Words themselves are metaphors for things, are little worlds of perfect imitation, mimesis, representation. I say "apple" and you think: round, red, sweet, fruit.

A simile is not a world; it is a device for weighing and measuring things, one against the other, a system of values: six copper coins equals one apple; an apple is like sixpence, is worth sixpence. An apple is as like a sixpense as chalk is to cheese.

That doesn't mean a simile is uncomplicated; some of Homer's most interesting (or weird) ones are anything but "a relatively simple idea of relating things," because they are radical mismatches, disguised as simple folkloric yeomanry. Ah, the milk pail, the bees, the snowflakes, the shuttle clutched close to the weaver's bosom, how quaint.

But it is nothing short of bizarre to compare the watchfires of the besieged and desperate Trojans with the serene glittering of the firmament, no? It's the radical mismatch that is so jarring and unnerving, and that leads to a reversal of assumptions, an insight. The body of the dead Hector, beaten and abused, likened to fresh dew. The army of the Achaeans likened to a field full of flowers. The son of Priam, mortally stricken, whose head nods on his neck like a poppy blossom, so slender and sunny and delicate, as he falls.

Or Matthew Arnold's great likening of the recession of waves to the withdrawal of faith from the world, in "Dover Beach." The whispering of the most serene tide becomes the clashing sound of armies.

When I was little I was told that a metaphor had to be like this: "The dog is a banana,"

Whereas a simile is "The dog is like a banana." Yeah, I had one of those teachers too, in sixth grade. A moron.

But good similes are not always hard, because usually, no matter how odd the two things compared, it's easy to see the connection. And the comparison adds a much greater depth than a simple description, even if it isn't forced between two very unusual objects.

Of course, the reverse is also true: simple similes are not always good, as your friend Keats has unfortunately demonstrated all too clearly:

These lures I straight forget--e'en ere I dine,
Or thrice my palate moisten: but when I mark
Such charms with mild intelligences shine,
My ear is open like a greedy shark,
To catch the tunings of a voice divine.

Possibly the worst simile ever written, except maybe those sheep-teeth from the Bible.

True, not all good similes are baroque or distorted or perverse. But when they are made from two unlike things, two incommensurable ideas (apples and oranges), the mind is forced into a leap of imagination, or even of ... well, faith. For in what way can a smile be said to be like a rat diving into a hedge? It is not sensible; it is not logical, it is not possible.

And how can a smile be like a light going out? It is, prima faciae, incoherent, and yet, we know that it is absolutely true. The image is terrifying, and funny (a poke at every cliche-ridden "dazzling" or "incandescent" smile that "lights up the room" of bad prose). That is one seriously blinding smile, and one may be forgiven for wondering whether, after all, it is so charming to be blinded by a smile.

[anjali-organna.livejournal.com]

Do you think that similes as the "bastard brother" of the metaphor is accurate? I distinctly remember my English teacher lecturing us that using "like" was, well, like taking the easy route, or something.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

No, I think similes and metaphors are completely different beasts--well, actually, one is a beast and the other is *like* a beast. ;-)

I distinctly remember my English teacher lecturing us that using "like" was, well, like taking the easy route, or something.

Yeah, we all got that line from some mechanistic English teacher or other. Dead wrong, but grade-school English teachers have a tough row to hoe: They have to get kids to start thinking consciously about their writing, and it ain't easy. One way to do it is to set some good habits: Start every paragraph with a topic sentence; never use the word "thing"; don't let your participles dangle or your infinitives split; avoid using "like."

Once you're a grown-up, though, you can free yourself of these classroom hierarchies. If similes were the preferred medium of Homer and Dante, it's hard to see how they can be the bastard brother of metaphors.

Still, a bad simile is probably easier to write than most other figures of speech. Cf. Keats's greedy shark, cited above.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Interesting as always, and this made me wonder about when to use similes and when to use metaphors, or at least why the effect differs. I wonder if the very diffidence and modesty of using the word "like" heightens the impact of the extravagant comparison. Whereas a metaphor is more solemn, announces its intention up front, so that it's more deliberately, even ponderously riddle-like and less light and playful. Hmmm.

I liked that you quoted CC's "smile like a light going out" as an example. It's funny, because having just read DV14 it was exactly the example that first came to mind when I saw the title of your post. Some very cool language, there. I saw the chapter tribute to you, and wondered if you had input in some of the almost!dead!Ginny stuff, where I thought I heard echoes of your reader theories.

I am sorry I have neglected our debate lately, but have been hammered by RL professionally and am preoccupied with that at the moment. Hope to clear things up shortly and pick up where we left off!

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

the almost!dead!Ginny stuff, where I thought I heard echoes of your reader theories

It would please me to think so, because I'm as egoistic as the next person, but no: that is 100% CC, doing her ever-fabulous thang. Shoe's on the other foot: I had never thought of the reader entering the book in quite that literal way & it blew me away.

Well, there are those lite novels by Jasper fforde, Lost in a Good Book and The Eyre Affair, which are fun, but never quite deliver the goods as much as I wish they would. It ain't Nabokov. fforde has a fun website, though: http://www.jasperfforde.com/.

Sorry about RL, but these things do happen. No rush, no worries. Am enjoying the bizarre and artificially goliardic world of Oxford 1923. And anyway, since you have reread Brideshead recently, I should reread Howard's End too, to be au courant, so I've a ways to go.

Whenevah.

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

The term for that thing where Homer goes on line after line and takes you to a different place and then it's all just a simile is "epic simile." Milton is a master of it also.

Interestingly, IIRC, that line about the teeth being like a flock of sheep is one of the principle examples Augustine gives of beauty, and how it resides in the relationship between the image and its divine meaning. What he thought the divine meaning of Song of Songs was I dunna know--a thousand years before Bernard of Clairvaux, and a hell of a lot less batty!

My favorite from your fine list:

"But when he raised his voice, and the words came driving from his deep chest like winter snow before the wind, then there was none to touch him, and no man thought further of what he looked like." (Iliad, Bk. III)

Just fantastic. Whose trans?

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

It's not bad, is it? It's the old Samuel Butler translation that is available all over the web because it's out of copyright, and I was too lazy to get up and go in the other room and get Lattimore. I love that image of words like a storm of snow.

Yeah, Augustine... well, his views on sex are mighty odd, at the best of times. I love watching how Christian commentators have struggled to assert that the Song of Songs belongs within the biblical canon because it's all, see, a Metaphor for the love of Christ for the Church. Or vice versa. Or something.

The teeth-white-as-sheep image works fine up to the point where they all have twins. Then it goes off the deep end and one gets the image of a Beloved with a mouth full of double rows of teeth, rather like poor Keats's toothful Greedy Shark Ear. Really, when poets are in lurve, their judgment is sometimes unsound.

Those overwrought epic similes turn up in some other ancient literature too--Egyptian and Assyrian epic poetry, IIRC. Your beauty is like an orchard of apples that in the spring is perfumed and sweet and in the fall yields good harvest, yea, many apples and each one glossy and beloved of the bees and small boys who vye together to outwit the farmer and steal away his bushels before he can get them to market.

I made that one up, but it renders the idea.

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

rather like poor Keats's toothful Greedy Shark Ear

Ahahaha. Don't know that one. And ha ha to your epic simile also. :)

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

The Greedy Shark Ear is here: http://mytwyyearbook.tripod.com/woman.html


Mmm. Milton! Though they go on so long that I lose track of them.

Also Dante:

As turtle-doves, called onward by desire,
With open and steady wings to the sweet nest
Fly through the air by their volition borne,
So came they from the band where Dido is,
Approaching us athwart the air malign,
So strong was the affectionate appeal. (Inferno, V, Paolo and Francesca, Longfellow's pretty good translation)


And Isaiah:

The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters: but
God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall
be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and
like a rolling thing before the whirlwind. (17:13)

My God, there is a whole website devoted to similes. The world is a very strange place.