The study of patterns and traditions might seem dangerous if they are thought to invite the formulaic creation of metaphors, or repetition of what has been seen and said before. They don’t. The skilled practitioner works in them with originality and spontaneity, just as when working within traditions of architecture or music or any other art. The chapters that follow supply the proof; we will see outstanding makers of comparisons borrowing similar material for broadly similar purposes, but with each producing their own singular effects. The relationship between the study of examples and the avoidance of cliché might best be captured by considering, as if they were part of a conversation, three passages from writers who understood the issue well:
| Wit, you know, is the unexpected copulation of ideas, the discovery of some occult relation between images in appearance remote from each other; an effusion of wit, therefore, presupposes an accumulation of knowledge; a memory stored with notions, which the imagination may cull out to compose new assemblages. | Johnson, The Rambler no. 194 (1752) |
| He who loves music will know what the best men have done, and hence will have numberless passages from older writers floating at all times in his mind, like germs in the air, ready to hook themselves on to anything of an associated character. Some of these he will reject at once, as already too strongly wedded to associations of their own; some are tried and found not so suitable as was thought; some one, however, will probably soon assert itself as either suitable, or easily altered so as to become exactly what is wanted; if, indeed, it is the right passage in the right man’s mind, it will have modified itself unbidden already. | Note Books of Samuel Butler (1912) |
| Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. | Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946) |
Chapter Two
The Use of Animals to Describe Humans
Animals provide a marvelous basis for comparison to human appearances and other traits. They occasionally are used in other ways as well, but these applications are sufficiently important to merit a chapter to themselves. The reasons may be stated briefly.
a. Animals frequently can be viewed as caricatures of people. They usually have the same physical structure but in different proportions – eyes and ears and arms and legs, but arranged in ways that would seem freakish on a human. And the same might be said for many of their other qualities: like people, animals may be fat or loud or fearsome, but the fattest animal is fatter than a fat man, and so on with most traits, making animals a natural source of comparison when one wants to exaggerate a human quality or suggest its extreme form.
b. Humans generally wish to view themselves as higher or better than (other) animals, and go to much trouble in their habits and manners and laws to reinforce the difference. Thus comparison to an animal tends predictably to make its human subject ridiculous or contemptible, and is a mighty device for the achievement of insult and abuse.
c. The appearances and behaviors of most animals are familiar, and this makes them efficient helps to description. They can be invoked in very few words to produce a strong connotation or image.
Few of the comparisons to follow require the reader to know any of the relevant facts about the animals named. They include enough explanation, or are vivid enough in themselves, to permit enjoyment by anyone. But they do require the author to know some animal facts, which is one reason why comparisons of the kind displayed in this chapter have become less common. Literate people, readers and writers both, live at a farther remove from animal life than they once did, or read less about it, and so know less of it.
Readers of the predecessor volume to this one will recall that most rhetorical schemes – that is, patterns for the arrangement of words – can be named with old terms from Greek or Latin. We have not inherited similar terms for the various families or uses of metaphor. I have mostly decided not to burden the reader with new nominees, but the aficionado of classical languages may find it diverting to devise them. This chapter, for example, might be regarded as presenting a technique called theriosis – literally, beastification. (The word theriomorphosis already exists and conveys the same idea, but is too cumbersome to put forward with a straight face.) The Greek word for nature is physis, so comparisons to nature would be cases of physiosis, etc.
1. Physical resemblances. The faces of most animals roughly resemble the faces of humans, but with features that are arranged and proportioned differently. They are like faces seen in a curved mirror at a carnival; the eyes are larger, or farther apart. They make fine sources of caricature.
| Another of Master Simon’s counselors is the apothecary, a short and rather fat man, with a pair of prominent eyes, that diverge like those of a lobster. | Irving, Bracebridge Hall (1822) |
| The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for a moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot. | Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades (1905) |
| For the first time in our long connection I observed Jeeves almost smile. The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish’s. | Wodehouse, My Man, Jeeves (1919) |
The mouths of animals have more range than ours do in size and elasticity, and so likewise provide fodder for caricature.
| Presently there were nods and winks in the direction of the bell-rope; and, as these produced no effect, uncouth visages were made, like those of monkeys when enraged; teeth were gnashed, tongues thrust out, and even fists were bent at me. | Borrow, Lavengro (1851) |
| These regions passed, we came to savage islands, where the glittering coral seemed bones imbedded, bleaching in the sun. Savage men stood naked on the strand, and brandished uncouth clubs, and gnashed their teeth like boars. | Melville, Mardi (1849) |
| The old man gaped helplessly like some monstrous fish. | Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades (1905) |
Or motion: a tendency merely suggested or half-visible in human movement is invariably presented in more exaggerated form by some member of the animal kingdom.
| To complete the whole, he had a stateliness in his gait, when he walked, not unlike that of a goose, only he stalked slower. | Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742) |
| Be smooth-tongued, and the Englishman will withdraw from you as quickly as may be, walking sideways like a crab, and looking askance at you with panic in his eyes. But stammer and blurt to him, and he will fall straight under the spell of your transparent honesty. | Beerbohm, The House of Commons Manner (1909) |
| Sometimes he would tickle the nose of his eldest child (he had two children); sometimes he would hook the rake on to the branch of a tree, and hoist himself up with horrible gymnastic jerks, like those of a giant frog in its final agony. | Chesterton, Manalive (1912) |
These comparisons tend to be unflattering to their subjects. They force the reader to create a mental picture of a hybrid, and sometimes to attribute more of the animal to the human subject than the author explicitly invited. The theater