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

In Arnold's simile, for example, the comparison of the animal with the human world does involve a shift in categories and thus some "distance." But because the animals are not impossibly anthropomorphized by the analogy, they remain consistent with the poem's general realism and so are not "foreign." The landscape of their existence is fairly compatible with that of the main narrative, whose central action takes place on the Persian "low land" (219; 1.876) but whose world includes as well the "high mountain cradle of Pamere" (219; 1.887). Likewise consistent with the ancient story of battle between Tartars and Persians is the hunter and his weapon: he is no gun-toting nineteenth-century hunter from Arnold's own world. Indeed, this simile and others in Sohrab and Rustum, just like those in the Iliad and the Odyssey, are among the main identifying marks of the poem's narrator. Though he remains somewhat shadowy, he is partially revealed as an inhabitant of the lands of the River Oxus, during or soon after the e vents of which he tells. He draws the vehicles of all his similes from roughly the same geographical and temporal world as he draws his story--except that he has a somewhat wider perspective that his similes, like panning shots in a film, make evident to the reader.

Thus, we do not feel that the vehicles of these similes are very foreign to the main discourse. They are close to what Genette would call "intradiegetic" (228), for they introduce a different story line without straying into a new universe, Even though they have the effect of expanding the outer limits, they seem to represent a point of view originating within the story's world. Even more obviously intradiegetic in this way are the similes of Browning's "The Flight of the Duchess," though they perhaps fall short of epic length. They are spoken by an overt character-narrator and they all reveal aspects of his experience within the limited bounds of the Duke's domain. In these as in most similes, however, the vehicle is not a structural element of the story being told: it has different "characters" and is not connected causally with the story.

In Arnold's simile, the reader's slightly vertiginous passage from the vehicle to the tenor and main narrative is thus a return more from a digression than a transgression. She has wandered into a distant part of the same world rather than trespassed into another universe. In other words, the vehicle of Arnold's simile is not very "fictional" in relation to its tenor, since the eagles and their hunter exist in more-or-less the same world--or fictional space-time--as Rustum and Sohrab. Looked at this way, as a comparison between two "similar" entities actually present to each other, the comparison between Rustum and the male eagle becomes more literal, less figurative (Addison 413).

But the degree to which a reader become naturalized to a simile's vehicle and estranged from its tenor does not depend only on the distance separating tenor and vehicle, though a sense of the "strangeness" of reentry may do so (see Furedy 748-49). In extended similes, the vehicle leads the reader gradually astray from the main narrative or discourse, undermining the parenthetic effect of the "as . . . so" structure by allowing her to forget it. The crucial point of the relationship between vehicle and tenor is felt only at the conclusion. At this end point, the reader may become aware of a huge gap between the elements compared or of a merely minor division. The number of irrelevant contextual details included in the vehicle, however, is also likely to affect her sense of "jolt" in re-entering the tenor. She may be led down the garden path into a different world, or just led down the garden path; either way she finds herself for a moment lost. Her degree of lostness may be a measure of ordinary distance trave led or of a magical quantum-leap. The way back home from the Land of Faerie is not necessarily more difficult than the way back from Timbuktu.