The Metaphor Edition

On slivers, figurative language, and the “f-word”

Stephanie Balzer (SB) is a writer, coach, and founder of Mission. She recently wrote the Why  Is McLuhan Interesting? edition, among others.

Steph here. When I taught poetry and composition to university students as an adjunct—with middling success because teaching people to write is, wow, really tough—I often selected Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel” as part of the curriculum. “The Colonel” had everything I’d come to love in literature: a prose poem of keen observation and reportage, its word choice and rhythm spare and unadorned; syntax that seems to slow time down and speed it up at once, also underscoring the reliability of the speaker, who is a poet and a guest in the home of a San Salvadorian dictator. The poem's images begin to reveal layers of tension and emotion at the dinner table. It reads like the jittering lid of a stove pot on the cusp of boiling over.

I taught this poem because I wanted people to fall in love with it—and I want that for you, too. But it also contains some powerful metaphors, including one I often cite as a key example: “He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this.”

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Metaphors—I’m using this as a general term to denote comparing and contrasting one thing to another—can be funny, insightful, wistful, dark, stark, grotesque, etc. It’s shocking that severed ears could resemble dried peaches—that leathery, bucolic treat, tart, chewy, and sweet at once. It stirs feelings of disgust because we instantly grasp how the two look alike, yet one is delicious, and the other is horrifying, and we don’t like it. 

Forché reading “The Colonel” at the College of Southern Maryland, 1992

Why is this interesting? 

Sharp pivot here. Colin previously wrote about the tennis rivalry between Andre Agassi and Boris Becker, in which Agassi had discovered a “sliver of an edge” to defeat his competitor. I dubbed this a “sliver WITI” (though, in a way, aren’t they all?) and set out to compose one myself.

Here it is. An interdisciplinary, functional, and nuanced understanding of metaphor is a sliver of an edge not only for writers but also for use in everyday communication. 

I want to provide a bit of baseline context for this assertion. There’s hardly consensus on how metaphors work, and perhaps that’s why they endlessly fascinate. And while I introduced this topic in the context of literature, metaphors are also the province of science, politics, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, among other academic disciplines. (If you want to study further, I recommend this essay in Aeon, which is a collage on metaphor’s imaginative power, this BBC podcast on their history, and Metaphors We Live By, published in 1980 by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and this lecturer from cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter or his book.)

But how could understanding metaphor give you an edge? For starters, it can serve as a way to inquire about feelings—the dreaded “f word”—without coming off as annoyingly empathetic or signaling a tenuous grasp on the latest management trend. Many people reserve talking about feelings for their most intimate, private relationships, so metaphor is a way to keep it playful and light. For others, feelings are just unfamiliar territory: ask what they feel, and they will tell you what they think.

And yet, we’ve all likely been in situations in which feelings may be impeding decision-making or progress, or are so obviously present that to step over them seems impolite or unkind. In instances like this, invoking metaphor may be your middle out.

Here’s a suggested approach. Two options: pick your poison, or use both. First, in conversation, you can reply to someone’s narrative or story with a metaphor you’ve composed, drawing on your own emotional insight on their behalf: “It’s like you’re facing a raging river and wondering how to get across.” Then allow them the chance to respond to or revise it. (They will practically do this automatically, or you can prompt them with, “Is that right?”) Or, you can invite someone to come up with their own: “Is there a metaphor for that?”  

I imagine that this is going to feel awkward at first, but remain cool. Once you realize no one balks at the bananapants words that have just spilled out of your mouth, it’s easy to do it again, and again, and I hope you will be as astonished as I have been at the range and insight of responses.

One last note, and this is important: In the context of a conversation, your job isn’t to judge metaphors—your own or someone else’s—for their literary merit. It will go very poorly if you capitalize on this as an opportunity to criticize or split hairs, no matter how tempting it may be! (Trust me.) Instead, channel your curiosity and consider collaborating to extend the metaphors for even more context. Think with your senses. These comparisons may be brilliant, but more likely, they will be fuzzy and half-baked or hackneyed or melodramatic. The point is to articulate a first draft, how a thing is like another thing, to reveal deeper qualitative, emotional, or intuitive truths. (SB) 

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Steph (SB)

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