A Moment’s Hesitation: The Indirect Language of Similes

The simile—the comparison of two things using the words “like” or “as”—is a shorthand of description that is used at all levels of linguistic expression, making it as useful as it may be clichéd. Literary manuals tend to warn against overusing it, its practicality not always mixing well with the poetic imagination.[1] The association is bad writing—effectively demonstrated in the film Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) where ridiculous similes are used to parody the popular crime novel: “Has anyone ever told you that your lips are like two succulent Brussels sprouts…?”

Yet it is one of the oldest identifiable poetic devices in literature, stretching back through Homer and Mycenaean epic poetry to ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit, and Chinese writings. Like the metaphor, the simile is a trope, a figure; it “happens” in language. Unlike the metaphor, the simile signals its own happening. It deals in images and concepts, setting these next to each other while retaining their separate identities.

“Like a dragon you have deposited venom on the land / when you roar at the earth like Thunder, no vegetation can stand up to you.” The goddess of The Exaltation of Inanna (Sumerian, 23rd century BC) is not a dragon, but the images are traded for dramatic effect. Writing about the Iliad in 1958, Cedric Whitman described the simile “rising like a prismatic inverted pyramid upon its one point of contact with the action.” Something is wedged in, demanding attention while ascertaining its difference.

The simile’s bad reputation stems partly from Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric of the 4th century BC which saw it as rhetorical embellishment, stressing the need to meter it appropriately vis-à-vis the subject-matter at hand. This idea of “appropriateness” returned in force during the 16th century, paralleling the modern construction of literary language as preferably naturalistic, a mimetic prism for the world of a character (or narrator). More recently, however, critics have found that the simile cannot so easily be reduced to embellishment. It’s prevalence across time and languages indicate a connection to cognitive processing, to the way humans make sense of the unknown by drawing on things already heard and seen.

In its rhetorical capacity, it is, in this sense, an essential part of providing a shared perspective. When George Eliot writes in Middlemarch (1871) that Dorothea “had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective,” she lets the subjective be tempered by an objective, general phenomenon. The use is poetic, but the aim quite direct. Things such as feelings or abstract notions cannot, by default, be described mimetically. Figures, like the simile in this example, fill the space and give the reader something to work with.

But this does not do full justice to what happens in the simile. Rarely are they as analogous or illuminating as might be assumed, even if a perspective is shared. Their “meaning” often takes us beyond narrative, into the very structures of texts.

In William Wordsworth’s line “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (1804–07), the cloud induces a sense of floating, drifting, a moment’s hesitation before we return to the wandering man. Yes, but there is more—once introduced the image of the cloud does not simply disappear. Not only does it open externally, to the boundlessness of nature so appreciated by Wordsworth. It also points internally, to his poetics themselves as a way of connecting to this realm. The initial simile creates a link between self and nature that will reverberate throughout the poem—in the end, famously, this “self” goes off “dancing with the daffodils” in a euphoric version of Freud’s death drive.

Unlike the metaphor, the simile signals its own happening. It deals in images and concepts, setting these next to each other while retaining their separate identities.

Part of the simile’s nature (and history) is to disregard natural connections between things, to show itself exactly as deliberately constructed. For the first “Romantic” generation of poets—grouped for their tendency toward freeform association and commonplace language—an important aspect of their work was “wit,” a concept derived from “knowing” (Wissen), meaning the sudden idea, the authorial act of finding similarities where others might not. The contemporaneous philosopher Friedrich Schlegel described Romantic poetry as constantly coming into being, staging oscillations between the represented and the act of representing.

The simile does this perfectly. It halts the text to conspicuously give a comparison, one which is meant to appear belaboured, created for this very purpose. A moment of dissonance, it sets in motion reflections between things that reach across the larger textual world. These can, of course, be reduced to the logic of comparison and incorporated into the realistic order of narration. But this negates other things that happen.

It is through obviousness that the simile appears trite, like an overeager finger pointing at the elephant in the room, as if no one else had noticed. “The sunshine was as empty as a head waiter’s smile,” writes Raymond Chandler in The Big Sleep (1939), sowing the seeds of cliché by articulating his character’s thoughts in a way that makes them not seem like thoughts at all, but like the premeditated statements they are. There is nothing casual about the simile, and Chandler knows this: “Then she laughed… I thought there was puzzlement in it, not exactly surprise, but as if a new idea had been added to something already known and it didn’t fit. Then I thought that was too much to get out of a laugh.”

Part of the “golden age” of detective fiction, Chandler operated within a style which took plot to new levels—his peer Agatha Christie’s novels, for example, skilfully release details only if and when they pertain to the mystery at hand. But in Chandler’s work, and The Big Sleep in particular, plot continually falters, does not keep up with the number of details given. The detective Philip Marlowe floats in between encounters that give him small clues. Resolutions remain vague, and the final two confrontations are almost coincidental. The language of The Big Sleep luxuriates in this wavering, plot becomes a coat hanger for atmosphere and characterisation.

“The path took us along to the side of the greenhouse and the butler opened a door for me and stood aside… The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish colour, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.”

“He was a very small man, not more than five feet three and would hardly weigh as much as a butcher’s thumb. He had tight brilliant eyes that wanted to look hard, and looked as hard as oysters on the half-shell.”

Similes cluster around the environments, people, and situations that Marlowe encounter. Like so many epithets and analogies, they help convey Marlow’s attitude towards things, originating in his internal banter. A personal quirk of the detective, perhaps, who has already suggested that he reads too much into things. But directed at the reader, the similes become part of a diffuse mood which spreads over each encounter, infusing it with discordant and jaunty images that, at first, felt wholly separate from the main action of the narrative.

After the visit to the greenhouse, there will be many dead men’s fingers, often newly washed. The sunken corpse of Owen, the neatly laid out body of Geiger… And then there is Harry Jones of the second quote, whose hands Chandler describe carefully during Marlow’s meeting with him. Of course, he ends up dead too, an easy target as spelt out by the similes that are used to define him.

We could say that the similes anticipate events in the plot, but that does not quite capture the tense they operate in. They make scenes heavy with implication. They fold things around other things, giving their entanglement a presence, omnipotence even. Marlowe’s world is not one where objects and people, time and motive eventually fall in line—it is one where ambiguity is inherent in all actions. In this abstraction of plot, similes (and other figurations) act as guides, settling on the elements which help Marlowe navigate.

According to its own popular mythology, surrealism was birthed in the form of a simile in the late 1860s: “as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” In a Baudelairean gothic tone, Les Chants de Maldoror was written as a rejection of God and mankind by Lucien Ducasse, under the name Comte de Lautréamont.

Quickly forgotten in his own century, Ducasse was rediscovered by André Breton and Louis Aragon in the late 1910s who saw in him a precursor for their attempts at abandoning logic and reason as modes of “being” in the world. The new life Maldoror found during the 20^th century—which included being illustrated by René Magritte and Salvador Dalí—set much in store for the possibilities it offered for representing the drives and desires lurking in the dark corners of consciousness. But written in a pre-Freudian world, language in Maldoror is much less a link between the unconscious and reality than a formal tool used to infiltrate conventional literary language.

Maldoror is built up of short stanzas compiled into six cantos. It follows the eponymous Maldoror, who shifts between being an undead, blood-lusting creature, and a misunderstood, misanthropic young man. Time and space are not represented consequentially, likewise, the perspective changes between a narrator, Maldoror, and beyond. The book is full of figurative language, and hardly a page passes in Maldoror without multiple similes. Ducasse makes particular use of an accumulative mode, where one subject causes multiple comparisons. The aforementioned chance meeting comes at the end of such a cluster. The object is Mervyn, an adolescent boy coveted by Maldoror, who is beautiful as

“the retractability of the claws of bird and prey; or again, as the uncertainty of the muscular movements in wounds in the soft parts of the lower cervical region; or rather, as that perpetual rattrap always reset by the trapped animal, which by itself can catch rodents indefinitely and work even hidden under straw; and above all, as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella!”

As Mervyn’s visage rages through Maldoror’s mind it starts spinning increasingly untenable images. The things that he finds the boy is beautiful as are worlds unto themselves. But they are not random—birds of prey are common characters in previous stanzas, often as majestic combatants, and wounds populate the book’s pages, as delicate objects of fascination.

Ducasse’s comparisons become like machines that produce subjects, quickly moving from poetic proposition to textual reality, or vice versa. In one stanza, Maldoror is angered by a lamp, whose light he feels hinders his passing of a church undisturbed. He compares it to a guardian, it’s flame “as if prey to a holy wrath.” Such similes, alongside metaphors and analogies, imbue the lamp with consciousness and a mission. Suddenly it is no longer a lamp, but an angel, with whom Maldoror has a fateful struggle.

In this way, similes are repeatedly used to enact movements from a human domain to something stranger. Like the metaphor in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 8 AD), the simile becomes a site of transformation. Or perhaps incantation—it offers the possibility of change without the necessity of cause. Without narrative reliability, the simile becomes a tool with which Ducasse organizes the world of Maldoror. And this mode of organization signifies perhaps the real rejection at stake, a refusal to adhere to the appropriate figurations of “naturalistic” language. Instead, the excesses of the simile allow the author to explore a different kind of world-building.

“Alas! I would like to develop my arguments and my similes slowly and with much magnificence so that everyone may better understand, if not the shock at least my amazement when, one summer evening as the sun seemed to be sinking below the horizon, I saw swimming in the sea—with big webbed feet replacing the extremities…”

The narrator suggests that certain realities (like that of the creature hinted at) may be favourably accessed via simile or other formal conceits. What I have alternately called “narrative” and “naturalistic language” in this essay presumes a logical progression of elements, put together through a chain of events. Ducasse maximises the capabilities of the simile to disrupt this baseline, but goes on to show that the descriptions engendered might have a greater reality, and, above all, a reality of their own.

Part of surrealism’s rebellion was pointing to language as something malleable, and that this malleability could produce not only the unexpected but also work towards representing the abstract spaces of the unconscious. But figurative language is not always fantastical. It occupies the spaces of everyday life and is anchored in a multitude of contexts.

Audre Lorde’s Coal (1976), for example, grapples with the volatility of words while staying grounded in quite known, concrete markers.

Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun
Seeking like gypsies
over my tongue
To explode through my lips
Like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
Bedevil me.

As elsewhere, the simile is deployed to grasp at something which does not (and cannot) appear readily, mimetically. Something has been recognized, something that needs to be put into expression, and the simile helps by circling it, making suggestions, making language take a leap of faith. The simile retains this searching in its very structure. It is an example of how language is not only about understanding and representing things, but also about signaling the unknown. The simile creates a space in which something can be sensed, without the necessity of grasping it completely. Lorde uses this capacity to illustrate the uncanniness of words, which, as language, come from an abstract, social sphere, yet take root in our bodies where they cause deeply felt effects.

In the 1950s and 60s, the philosopher Merleau-Ponty wrote several texts dealing with the nature and experience of language. He found that modern thought, scientific in nature, considered language as something objective held and ultimately functioning to describe, truthfully, relationships between objects and thoughts. This outlook, for Merleau-Ponty, discounted language as a communal and historical field: everyday speech on the one hand, and literary and poetic expression on the other.

It is today recognised that both are very capable of signifying certain truths about a historical era. However, Merleau-Ponty’s point is that this language also addresses the reader on an intuitive level, in terms of words written down and then processed again in a way that has very little to do with strict communication and grammar. This capacity, which I think relates to the figurative capacity of language, sits in between the deep folds of history and the uncertain spaces of individual consciousness.

There is always a side of ourselves inaccessible to logical thought but which nonetheless is lived. It exists, and language capitalizes on this is-ness.

Figurative language is notoriously hard to define while at the same time being obvious and all around us—it relates to expression, which is subjective, but also to the symbolic, which operates on a collective level. According to Merleau-Ponty it is the “alleged chaos” of this distance that “makes it both necessary and possible to introduce [something] new.”

In Signe Gjessing’s Ideal Contingencies (2017) the simile is set to disrupt the infinities given to us by science while nesting itself in banal circumstances of feeling, memory, and tactile associations. These comparisons move in the opposite direction of those in Maldoror, from that which is beyond the human to that which is very human; the small scales of the corporeal and personal.

 “darkness does not sink, it spreads—hurriedly, like the moving arms keeping you above the surface”

“the suns shine like when a knife, instead of scissors, is used to open something; the suns are raised high, high, like the knife when the string breaks”

“we walk / among the worlds and make sure they are »upright« like a yoga teacher correcting their student’s positions”

“the end of the world is always in the middle of air; it is impractical—like two sisters sleeping in the same bed, one of them lying across”

The semantic domains of these similes are extremely far apart; like the distance between us and those stars that, by the time their light reaches earth, are long dead. Yet, as Gjessing’s poem says, the universe is not just out there, it is all around us. This is, of course, factually true—we are made of the same stuff as those faraway stars, just as surely as they now sit in our consciousness, alerted by looking up at the night sky.

There is a void here, something that slips beyond understanding. This is the same void opened up by Merleau-Ponty when he states that language is the starting point for every human endeavour of knowing—this process cannot be reversed; language can never be objectively held. But while it might not be possible to objectively understand the measures of the universe, it certainly exists in one form or another (the diversity of its forms apparent through history). Similarly, there is always a side of ourselves inaccessible to logical thought but which nonetheless is lived. It exists, and language capitalizes on this is-ness.

Figuration occurs where reality falters. In Deborah Eisenberg’s short story Merge, one of the characters (long-lost on a quest to discover the origins of language) believes that language is the source of human evil, “an extremely plastic faculty, amenable to many uses, but developed to serve the pressing demands of malice, vengefulness and greed.” Her conclusion appears lodged in our current political circumstances but states well the point that language is a world of its own which, like fractal geometries, bend and repeat according to internal mechanisms and external forces only dimly perceived.

In this world, figures precede the birth of new meanings. Drawing on the sensory and intuitive, as well as inherited symbols and received meanings, the simile creates an arrested moment which has little to do with likeness. It is an imaginative gesture that reaches towards the unspoken infinity that surrounds us, and returns with a portion of its dissonance—even at its most hackneyed.

[1] Dan Piepenbring’s article ‘Striking Similes’ makes a case in point, The Paris Review, Jan 2016, theparisreview.org/blog /2016/01/21/striking-similes/.