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

But, for this discussion, the most interesting feature of Arnold's simile is that it is sufficiently digressive to offer a secondary, embedded narrative, one apparently independent of the poem's primary narrative. In Narrative Discourse, Gerard Genette touches on the use of embedded narrative for purposes of analogy" (233), but he, like many narratologists, focuses mainly on prose and fails to extend this insight to epic simile. Although Irene J. F. De Jong in her narrative study of the Iliad does focus on a poetic text, she does not consider most of the similes there to be examples of embedding, since they are narrated and focalized by the primary narrator (123-27). This is, of course, the case with Arnold's simile, too, for the hunter-eagles story is told by the poem's narrator, not by a character. Nearly all extended similes are of this type, those in the traditional epics being spoken not in the ambiguous tones of a fallible or contingent narrator, but in the authoritative voice of the epic poet himself ( see Kirk 6; G. Williams 166; Ferry 69).

De Jong's exclusion of most epic similes from the category of embedding is in line with Mieke Bal's system and also with that of her mentor, Genette. In both systems, embedding is regarded as a matter of narration: a character within the primary story ("diegesis") narrates his or her own story, but it is then embedded in the primary narration, divided from it by boundaries, and said to exist at a higher narrative level (see Bal 41-44). But boundaries, marked clearly by the tags "As" and "So," certainly divide the vehicle of Arnold's simile from the main discourse, even though no change of narrator occurs. The model that seems to fit this situation best is again one of Ryan's, for she makes a distinction between two types of boundary, "illocutionary boundaries," which "mediate between speech acts," and "ontological boundaries," which "delimit domains within the semantic universe of the story" (874). The boundaries that are virtually or actually crossed in the narrative of similes are ontological but not illocu tionary. The narrator himself embeds into the frame of his main story another story belonging to a different fictional world or, as Ryan puts it, "a new system of reality, centered in a new actual world" (874).

A major concern of the rest of this essay will be the degree to which the embedded vehicle's "new system of reality" and "new actual world" is "new"--or "foreign"--to the framing discourse in which it is embedded. An "ontological boundary" may divide worlds that are very different, one mundane and one weirdly magical, for example. But it may divide worlds that are not noticeably different or that may be potentially co-extensive. Just as I regarded "figurativeness" as a continuously variable quality in my previous essay, "fictionality" will be similarly regarded here, depending as it does on an observer's perspective. In simile, both "figurativeness" and "fictionality" oppose "literalness," another variable quality. A simile is more "literal" if its terms share similar categories and worlds. It is more "figurative" if the categories to which its terms belong are "distant" and also if the worlds of these terms are foreign to each other. In longer similes, "foreignness" is akin to fictionality, and both are rela tive measures. The world across a simile's boundary may be very fictional if it is totally foreign to the main narrative or discourse in which it is embedded, even if it is not very foreign (or fictional) in relation to the reader's own world. Thus, a spectrum of possibilities exists not only for the degree of "reality" and "virtuality" of crossings themselves, but also for the degree of "fictionality" possessed by the world within the boundary in relation to the main world of the literary work.