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"So stretched out huge in length": reading the extended simile

Style, Fall, 2001 by Catherine Addison

One of the distinctive features of simile is that it can be extended beyond the dimensions of trope into the relatively autonomous mini-genre of its Homeric form. Thus, a study of the extended simile may offer some insights into the relationship between trope and genre. Homeric similes often interrupt a story quite significantly, representing a type of narrative embedding that has not so far been examined as such. Following on an earlier study, which examined the simile in relation to the literal-figurative dichotomy, this essay is an attempt to investigate the narrative implications of extending the simile, mainly from a reader's point of view. It also examines some of the narrative variations possible in extended simile by means of a brief survey of the Homeric tradition.

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In the earlier essay on simile, I pointed out that, whereas metaphor depends on a distinction between the literal and figurative in order to exist, simile transcends this antithesis by including not only figurative examples, which may be converted or abbreviated into metaphors, but also literal examples, which do not relate to metaphors at all. In fact, a sliding scale of "literalness" and "figurativeness" can be used to classify different simile types on a continuum. Simile is so versatile because, as Christine Brooke-Rose notes in A Grammar of Metaphor (14, 64-65), it is mainly defined by grammar. Brooke-Rose shows that its grammatical nature is what makes simile, and not metaphor, extensible. Unlike metaphors, which may be represented by any part of speech and which often, to adopt I. A. Richards's terminology (96), state only the vehicle, leaving the tenor a matter of implication, similes appear in a limited number of fixed grammatical forms and always state both of their terms; they also label their ter ms clearly by means of comparative tags.

These comparative tags have the effect of marking a boundary between the vehicle's material and the main discourse. When we are told that "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold" (Byron 82), the word "like" disconnects the wolf-sheep image (or mini-story) from the Assyrian-Israelite scene and story unfolding as the main topic of the poem. The tenor, "The Assyrian," is, in contrast, an important element of this topic. In longer similes, the single vehicular tags, "like" or "as," usually give way to the double markers, "just as" and "so" (and their cognates), to label and connect tenor with vehicle over significant textual distance.

Occurring in many languages and often matching each other as in the Italian "quale ... tale," these tags are powerful framing devices, strong enough to hold in abeyance the main discourse even at moments of great tension or gravity. Within their framework, the vehicle is able to flesh out a world that is not the world of the main discourse, or tell a story that is not connected to the main narrative, more-or-less for its own sake.

In an article on narrative framing, Marie-Laure Ryan distinguishes between "actually" and "virtually" crossed boundaries: "The narrative can cross a boundary, by selecting the "here" and "now" of the other side as points of reference, or can simply look through boundaries, by revealing what is beyond the line from the perspective of this side of the line. In this second case, the crossing of the boundary is only virtual" (874). This distinction is helpful in indicating what happens to the reader's central focus as similes are extended. Whereas many short similes invite only a "virtual" crossing of their boundaries, longer, especially Homeric-type, similes attempt to seduce the reader into a "real" crossing, one that reorientates her into a different universe from that of the main story or discourse. Just as "literalness and "figurativeness" are variable qualities, so some crossings may be "more real" or "more virtual" in comparison with others.

In all the following similes, brevity is an important factor in the reader's experience: "Oh, my luve is like a red, red rose," "The holy time is quiet as a Nun," "As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend," "these who die as cattle," "Like a patient etherised upon a table" (Burns 562, Wordsworth 205, Hopkins 30, Owen 80, Eliot 13). The extraneousness of their vehicles does not distract the reader's attention from the poems' main thread of discourse for more than a moment. Encountering some of the more surprising vehicles, such as Eliot's "patient," the reader may seem to experience a brief excursion or jump, a flashing leap in and out of the image-world. But with most of them she is more likely to appear simply as someone recognizing what is pointed to. As Ryan suggests, a narrative may "look" over a boundary without actually crossing it. This "looking" permits the dual consciousness characteristic of short similes: the reader is aware of both the place where she is standing and the field she can see ov er the fence. The two are unequally valorized spatially, however, since one is experienced as "here" and the other as "over there."

"So stretched out huge in length": reading the extended simile

Style, Fall, 2001 by Catherine Addison

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