On Metaphors and Similes

The first thing to know about the things we call metaphors is that they usually are similes. Why we mislabel them is somewhat puzzling. Perhaps metaphors just have a better P.R. firm. Most everyone knows what a metaphor is, or thinks they do, whereas most Americans could define similes about as well as they could find Iran on a map. Google reports that there are over a billion references to metaphor on the Internet, but only a hundred million for simile. And yet simile does so much more work than metaphor in most writing. Like Rodney Dangerfield, similes can’t get no respect (itself an example of litosis, a double negative).

The difference, of course, is simple: a metaphor says that one thing is another thing: the moon is a wheel of cheese. How often do we say something that? That is confusing, if not totally ridiculous. You almost have to wear flouncy Elizabethan shirts to go around spouting metaphors, and who wants to hang out with that guy? On the other hand, a simile says that one thing is like another thing using “like” or “as”: “your lips were like a red and ruby chalice…the clouds were like an alabaster palace,” as Johnny Mercer wrote in perhaps the most elegant lyric in all of jazz, so perfectly tuned to a slow glissando from high to low. Similes are like gusts of wind hitting a sail: they delight the reader while getting them to the shore of comprehension more quickly (ok, so that was a metaphor—shore—nested inside a simile; metaphors are not entirely useless). You can’t see an idea, but metaphors and similes are often visual, and hence much more memorable.

Now, the thing about metaphors, by which I mean similes, is that you don’t want to use too many of them in quick succession. That is called a “mixed metaphor,” I guess because the repetition of the “m” sound, known as alliteration, sounds better than a “mixed simile.” But by the same token, if you want to keep readers’ interest, similes and metaphors are a great way to hook them while explaining your topic in a memorable and elegant manner. Unfortunately, most academic writers write for their dissertation committee or fellow specialists only, with little thought of reaching a wider audience with figures of speech.

I learned to use metaphors in academic writing from an article praising the literary merit of C. Vann Woodward’s writing.  Woodward (1908-1999) was a professor at Yale and the dean of Southern historians, author of various seminal works, including 1951’s very academic tome Origins of the New South and 1954’s slenderer and more popular The Strange Career of Jim Crow. In the very first paragraph of that book, Woodward hits you with an elegant metaphor, and a simile as well: “The stream of national history, flowing down from seventeenth century sources, reaches a fairly level plain in the eighteenth century. There it gathers mightly in volume and span from its tributaries, but it continued to flow like the Mississippi over an even bed between relatively level banks.”

That passage is so effective because it not only uses the image of a stream, which is such a descriptive, if not original, metaphor for the passage of time, but it communicates the rapidity and volume of change and population, albeit from an extremely Eurocentric perspective. The author is saying that America grew from small pioneer European societies on the coast of the Atlantic (the stream) to the larger but less dramatic spread of many more Europeans throughout the North American continent in the following century (the more languorous but far larger current of a mighty river like the Mississippi). Woodward’s metaphor-simile is notable in part because it makes a bold announcement in the very first paragraph: this was a book that was meant to be read by ordinary folks, not just scholars. It was a short book written to educate the American public about the recency and unnatural—“strange”—evolution of the segregation system. In light of the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case of the same year, the point of the book was that segregation was the result of capricious historical conditions, and so it could be undone.

Not to brag (an example of paralipsis, emphasizing something by pretending not to talk about it), but my writing has been called “beautiful” by the American Historical Review, which is like being called “well behaved” by a kindergarten teacher: it’s a low bar. But I am convinced that one reason readers have responded positively to my writing is that I strategically deploy similes at opportune times to explain otherwise abstruse topics. For example, when I wanted to describe how blues singers graduated from Southern tented variety shows to Northern recording studios, but few of their colleagues did, I thought of the image of a crown jewel. I wrote:

The tented shows’ aesthetics were unruly and undisciplined, loosely governed if they were governed at all by rules of flimflam, sequined Eros, death-driving and Thanatos-defying spectacle, over-the-top ballyhoo, outrageous humor, and plain old countrified silliness. Those aspects, like the Blues, whose aesthetics were so stylized and compact that they could travel from the backcountry South to the uptown North and from the Victorian age to this strange, sleek new motorized thing called modernity, survived the voyage; they were often mislabeled as relics of the “authentic” folk and not as the rather recent innovations of commercialized popular entertainment. But in the new location they were shorn of all their performative contexts, like crystalline blue jewels hacked out of a heavily ornamented Gilded Age crown.

That passage is perhaps a tad rococo and overwrought. If my editor had been following the austere WASPy dictates of British writer and critic Arthur Quiller-Couch to “murder your darlings,” this would have been the first darling on the chopping block. But I think it works because it accurately and visually describes a process that could otherwise be boring or unnotable: some Southern Black performers became stars in the North, while others belonged to an earlier age only and were entirely forgotten. The simile of a gilded golden crown works because the point of the term the Gilded Age was that the era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a time of great wealth that was unevenly distributed, just like the dazzling but shabby grandeur of tented variety shows.

 When I was writing that passage, I was thinking of one long article in particular, written by a Black entertainment veteran, particularly his wistful note that “some of our best performers” had departed for the North. If I had simply quoted that sentence, or even worse quoted that article in detail, readers would have forgotten it ten pages later. But I was also thinking of a much larger corpus of artifacts that I had encountered in my research about the strange career of the variety shows themselves, which had such varied and goofy aesthetics and upended assumptions about what Black culture was in the period before jazz: if you heard a Black band play in 1900, you would have heard Sousa marches and opera, and possibly some ragtime. I was purposefully leaving things out (see my earlier post) in order to draw the reader in.

So that’s the thing about similes and metaphors: they are often visual images that delight and communicate at the same time. And you don’t have to wear a flouncy shirt or be a novelist to use them.

Illustration credit: “Jake on a Phone Line” by Michael Sokolis, 2005. That’s me, drawn by my friend.