It occurred to me yesterday, as I sat listening to roof ribs sliding down slick tiles and smashing through asbestos garages, that such a moment, were it sold to us in fiction, would almost definitely represent the part of the story arc known as ‘the point of no return’.
You know the moment. The heroine is alone in the dark house, the power dies as the storm rages, and the masked killer slants towards us from a conveniently shocking flash of lightning. Or the love letter read on the lone park bench while the rain falls, like tears, upon the fluttering page. Or the grey skies gathering above the battlefield as the realisation of a call to go over the top is issued. Fast forward half an hour and the heavens will be blue as the tale comes to its happy conclusion but, right now, your characters are up to their necks in it.
That’s what it felt like yesterday. We’re up to our necks in it: war on Europe’s back doorstep; a climate crisis of our own making; a mental health pandemic borne from a respiratory health one. This almost goes beyond pathetic fallacy in that it’s not even symbolic, not really. It’s literal in the sense that we’ve reached a point in our evolution where we’re influencing our own freaking weather. A metaphorical tide of raw sewage and microplastics would be bad enough but - oh look - our governments have actually been pumping this stuff into our waters for decades. And now the skies themselves have had enough.
Okay, it might not be anything to do with climate change - and I’m almost definitely being hyperbolic when I say the skies have had enough - but all of this is a roundabout excuse for a blog entry on figurative language devices and their uses and, most of all, how infuriating they can sometimes be.
Feel free to stop reading at this point.
Oh, you already have.
Look, I’ve used a few such devices in those first few paragraphs - and mentioned by name several others - but the truth is that techniques don’t always need a name (unless you’re an English student, in which case they’re fundamental). Sometimes it’s just raining. Most writers write by instinct, having swaddled themselves in books for years, and don’t think twice about the building blocks or grammar of their trade because - let’s be honest - it’s boring to do so and somehow snuffs the spark of creativity and inspiration to throw semantics at a practice you enjoy. When a writer talks about sentried trees standing to attention, they do so because they know it helps complete a picture in the reader’s mind - a short-cut, if you will - they don’t think to themselves ‘I must make sure the tenor and vehicle of my metaphor share a sufficiently parabolic ground’ because you’d never stop analysing what you were doing, and your work would suffer as a result. Perhaps you can be too knowledgeable about what you're trying to create. After all, some of the longest-lasting (I hesitate to use ‘best’) music was made when bands were still raw and learning their trade, before they got too twiddly and steeped in attempts to impress with complicated chord changes and reverse arpeggio.
And, anyway, it melts your mind. A simile is a type of metaphor but a metaphor is certainly not a type of simile. And, before, when I was wittering unwittily on about pathetic fallacy, I was using the media definition of an empathic universe, not the strictly literary one which states that pathetic fallacy (fake pathos, in other words) is a device wherein an author attributes human emotions and traits to nature or inanimate objects. But, wait a moment. Isn’t that personification? Well, kind of, yes. Pathetic fallacy is more about the atmosphere created to mirror a character’s mood, a veritable emotional projection via nature, whereas personification adds human characteristics to something non-human. So, like the pigs in Animal Farm, right? No, that’s anthropomorphism. Trees standing like sentries, that was an example of personification. But I thought they had to be inanimate objects? Trees are alive. Shut up, it doesn’t matter. Anthropomorphism bestows animals or non-human objects human characteristics, but zoomorphism gives humans animalistic tendencies, like when Lenny drinks from the stream in Of Mice and Men or groups of males congregate to watch football. Spider-Man uses zoomorphic techniques, but not Gregor Samsa, that’s metamorphism.
So Storm Eunice tore the roof off of the O2 thunderdome (personification, since you ask, because it didn’t use its fingers did it? When Hemingway wrote about ‘a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket’ I assume he wasn’t visualising a giant water penis) but the pathetic fallacy was only in my mind, like every other label we use to differentiate one trick from another. Unless we really have reached, story-wise, the part of the plot where the environmental, meteorological ‘point of no return’ has been attained and nature is avenging herself upon us for our primitivistic folly.
I’d like to think that’s the case, because the implication would therefore be that clear, bright skies will surely follow before our story closes.
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