another rhetorical resource: comedy.
Exaggerated comparisons may be further divided into those that elevate their subjects and those that diminish them – the difference between caricaturing a person by comparison to Atlas or to a reptile. The latter category is especially handy, as metaphor is a potent instrument for the delivery of insult and invective. These applications require care. The victim’s complete recovery is by no means assured; when the results are clever they may enjoy a longevity out of all proportion to their accuracy, if any, as in Johnson’s unjust but well-remembered case:
| Next day, Sunday, July 31, I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach. Johnson. “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” | Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791) |
Let us be mindful of Beerbohm’s appreciative sensibility:
| After an encounter with him they never again were quite the same men in the eyes of their fellows. Whistler’s insults always stuck – stuck and spread round the insulted, who found themselves at length encased in them, like flies in amber. You may shed a tear over the flies, if you will. For myself, I am content to laud the amber. | Beerbohm, Whistler’s Writing (1909) |
e. Comparison to simplify. A comparison can give simpler form to a subject that is complicated. In theory a comparison might also do the opposite, but in practice that is rare; simplifying a complex idea has advantages that do not arise from giving complexity to an idea that is simple. Simplification may have pedagogical value, as it can bring clarity to a point that is hard to understand. Another frequent rhetorical consequence of simplicity is to make a claim more persuasive. Complexity begets confusion and resistance. A simplifying comparison soothes the mind and makes an idea easier to accept; the listener’s judgment about the merits of a claim may be favorably influenced by the relief and pleasure of having a satisfying way to think about it. Pleasure may be had, too, and sometimes good humor, in seeing an inflated subject summed up in a humble way. Johnson had a gift for such usages.
| A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone. Government there cannot be so firm, as when it rests upon a broad basis gradually contracted, as the government of Great Britain, which is founded on the parliament, then is in the privy council, then in the King. | Johnson, in Boswell’s Life (1791) |
| We talked of the education of children; and I asked him what he thought was best to teach them first. Johnson. “Sir, it is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your breech is bare. Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learnt them both.” | Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791) |
| We talked of the numbers of people that sometimes have composed the household of great families. I mentioned that there were a hundred in the family of the present Earl of Eglintoune’s father. Dr. Johnson seeming to doubt it, I began to enumerate. “Let us see: my Lord and my Lady two.” Johnson. “Nay, Sir, if you are to count by twos, you may be long enough.” Boswell. “Well, but now I add two sons and seven daughters, and a servant for each, that will make twenty; so we have the fifth part already.” Johnson. “Very true. You get at twenty pretty readily; but you will not so easily get further on. We grow to five feet pretty readily; but it is not so easy to grow to seven.” | Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791) |
Comparisons that simplify almost always also serve other purposes, too, such as making their subjects visible or exaggerating some feature of them. In a sense all of the examples just shown may be said to involve caricature, as they compare their subjects to sources that might be considered more extreme. But the sources also are simpler than their subjects. An increase in simplicity can be hard to define when comparing pictures of two things that are different in kind, as always is the case with a metaphor. In general, however, we may regard a comparison as simplifying its subject when the source has fewer variables and can be understood more easily or immediately. The examples just shown fit that description. (Granted, references to an inverted cone have become less accessible since the advent of the ice-cream cone, experience with which calls the natural position of a cone into question.)
2. Sources of comparisons. The source material from which metaphors and similes may be drawn is limitless in detail but can be reduced without much violence to the five categories mentioned at the start of the chapter and set out below. While any of these categories can be used to advance any of the goals just considered, some serve certain purposes more readily than others.
a. Comparisons to animals. A first great tradition uses animals to describe people for the sake of caricature, usually with unflattering results. The bird of ill-omen offered by Dickens a moment ago was an example.
| He reminded one of everything that is unsavoury. His slow laborious walk resembled the creeping of a repulsive beetle, the legs alone moving with horrid industry while the body glided evenly. | Conrad, Lord Jim (1900) |
| Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude. | Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791) |
As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 2, animals lend themselves to these uses because they look and act like grotesque versions of people. Most features of human appearance and behavior have rough but exaggerated analogues in the animal kingdom; animals are structurally like humans but with different proportions in all ways. These similarities also make animals an apt source of material for putting humans into a surprising perspective, as shown in the comparison Holmes drew earlier between humanity and an ant heap. Animals occasionally but less often give visible form to abstractions, as we shall see from time to time.
Comparisons to animals are good practice for the student of metaphor and simile. The appearances and doings of most of the people one encounters in daily life can be made the subject of such silent comparisons, as is the author’s own habit.
b. Comparisons to nature. By “nature” we mean here to exclude animals, for the rest of nature tends to serve different comparative purposes. Nature is less frequently used to caricature human appearances but is immensely helpful for giving visible form to abstractions and other invisibilities. The most frequent advantage of animals, in the making of metaphors, is their structural resemblance to humans. Nature has other comparative virtues: properties of growth, intricacy of action, and images of force that are simple and evocative. Abstractions and inner states often are complex in ways that make those features of nature ideal for illustration.
| Waverley had, indeed, as he looked closer into the state of the Chevalier’s court, less reason to be satisfied with it. It contained, as they say an acorn includes all the ramifications of the future oak, as many seeds of tracasserie and intrigue as might have done honour to the court of a large empire. | Scott, Waverley (1814) |
| Under the whole heavens there is no relation more unfavorable to the development of honorable character, than that sustained by the slaveholder to the slave. Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild. Like the fires of the prairie, once lighted, they are at the mercy of every wind, and must burn, till they have consumed all that is combustible within their remorseless grasp. | Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) |
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