Kevin's Watch

Started my second read of LFB... (wonder when I'll ever finish that!) Well, this time around, it hit me that Donaldson mixes his metaphors like crazy... often choosing words more for their sound and "feel" than for their literal meaning.

So what are some metaphors you really noticed or that really "got to you"?

I really "click" with the whole "wings beating just behind [something]" motif. (vulture wings, right?)

Behind her words, there were wings beating like violence.

These days, that sort of tangible metaphor helps me to put a finger on things that cause my anxiety to rise... like "huh, my reaction to that topic/possibility/statement-someone-made is like there are dark wings beating somewhere in the background..."

There's a bazillion instances (or maybe two bazillion, depending on how you count!) of that one metaphor, aren't there?

EDIT: Seriously, why did I restrict it to "favorite"? That's so self-centric... Besides, what interests me and changes my thinking may not be what I 'like'.

Well...to be amusingly pedantic, that sentence is a simile...not that it matters cuz a simile is just a particular kind of metaphor.

But...the think I like about SRD's style of metaphor-gistics is, I think, at least related to what you said about choosing for "feel" instead of "literal." [though I don't think he mixes...unless you mean something different than the technical meaning of "mixed metaphor."]
There are other people who do what he does, though not a lot I've run across. But it's the difference, which would take a lot of words for me to explain, between [as you quoted]
"...wings beating like violence..." and
"...heart beating like a drum....." [that's a cliche nowadays, but that's not what I'm talking about...once upon a time it wasn't.]

For more examples of the kind of thing I mean [and a lot of ones I really love] look at the several descriptions of Infelice under stress...[which I kept general, cuz this is not a Last Chron's thread].

I know what you mean Vraith, let me see if I can summarise concisely: the symbol goes in the front of the metaphor. I immediately thought of a line from the Second Chrons about "malice pounding down like rain." It's not actually malice pounding down, unlike heart beating like a drum in which the heart is actually beating. Same with "wings beating like violence." It's entirely possible to hear violence- or the potential for it- in someone's voice, but hearing wings is purely symbolic.

Cambo wrote:I know what you mean Vraith, let me see if I can summarise concisely: the symbol goes in the front of the metaphor. I immediately thought of a line from the Second Chrons about "malice pounding down like rain." It's not actually malice pounding down, unlike heart beating like a drum in which the heart is actually beating. Same with "wings beating like violence." It's entirely possible to hear violence- or the potential for it- in someone's voice, but hearing wings is purely symbolic.

Yea, that's definitely part of it...it's a layering, [greatly simplifying, cuz writers are complicated]..."usual form" is thing+thing=symbol, his varies in a number of ways....thing+symbol=2nd order symbol, and/or emotive thingness+experiential thingness=metaphysical connectedness. [there are other variations I could struggle to describe...
realizing, of course, I'm making up those formulae/redefining terms...cuz the exact language to describe what I'm getting at doesn't exist.
Famous peeps who do this that I'm aware of are Yeats sometimes, and, believe it or not, Nietzsche...not in precisely the same way...but with a similar feel/implication. [actually, maybe it's my own idiosyncracies...but it isn't even implication so much as an implication of implications.]

Vraith- Yeah, good point; I was being pretty lazy about my syntax. I saw metaphors in which SRD took two "pieces" that didn't normally fit together, but -made- one or the other take on a new meaning... and then I slapped it into the category of (intentional) "mixed metaphor." (with the assumption that just as poets can use "poetic license" to get away with things that the usual "rules" and forms don't normally allow, SRD was pulling something that reaaally good authors can do with their "literary license")

Vraith wrote:Yea, that's definitely part of it...it's a layering, [greatly simplifying, cuz writers are complicated]..."usual form" is thing+thing=symbol, his varies in a number of ways....thing+symbol=2nd order symbol, and/or emotive thingness+experiential thingness=metaphysical connectedness. [there are other variations I could struggle to describe...
realizing, of course, I'm making up those formulae/redefining terms...cuz the exact language to describe what I'm getting at doesn't exist.

I really liked that part! VERY NICE... it hadn't occurred to me to look for structures like that. (and wow, I thought only my brother-in-law used "thingness")

Lina Heartlistener wrote:

Vraith wrote:Yea, that's definitely part of it...it's a layering, [greatly simplifying, cuz writers are complicated]..."usual form" is thing+thing=symbol, his varies in a number of ways....thing+symbol=2nd order symbol, and/or emotive thingness+experiential thingness=metaphysical connectedness. [there are other variations I could struggle to describe...
realizing, of course, I'm making up those formulae/redefining terms...cuz the exact language to describe what I'm getting at doesn't exist.

I really liked that part! VERY NICE... it hadn't occurred to me to look for structures like that. (and wow, I thought only my brother-in-law used "thingness")

Heh! and I bet now, just like when someone say "Don't look now but..." and you look, you won't be able to stop seeing them! Not that that means I'm right in my conclusions, but the structures are there. [and not only in Chron's.]
Weird thing [I've been told...I never thought it was weird till told it was, sure I'm not the only one] I don't LOOK for these kinds of things...I don't even notice I've noticed them till someone...like you...cues me into talking about it.
My wife hates it. [maybe other people too, how do I know?] I start telling her a story/talking about something...eventually she'll be "Would you just get to the POINT?" And I'm all:
"I CAN'T, I haven't finished talking yet, so I don't know what the damn point IS!"

I don't think that's weird Vraith. I often have the experience of discovering I've got lots to say about things I haven't consciously thought about. And my mother does exactly the same thing when telling stories, it drivesus all up the wall too

Reminds me of a Dave Chappell sketch, talking about how men and women tell stories differently. Women give you all the emotional background, while men stick to bare bones descriptions:

"It was me and my n***** John, we was in the store, and John said something bout my sister, so punched that n***** and I got outta there!"

Not to imply you're womanly or anything Vraith, just thought the idea applied. Also, I love Dave Chappell.

Behind her words, there were wings beating like violence.

Vraith, I'm not so sure we can rule out metaphor here, in favor of simile. Sure, there is the simile, "wings beating like violence," but that's only part of the symbol. The larger frame of reference is that quality "behind" her words which is being directly equated with wings, without the benefit of a "like." So perhaps it's a simile wrapped up in a metaphor?

You're right that it's not a mixed metaphor. But Lina is correct to note a complexity here, a mixture of two different levels of symbol. In fact, I think it's actually kind of a sloppy sentence, something written by a younger, less experienced Donaldson. I'm frankly glad he doesn't write as much like this anymore. Don't get me wrong, I loved many of his similes in the first Chronicles, but many were over the top. He's much better now (even though I think his latest book is his worst).

One of the things that SRD also often does (it seems to me) is cross the sensory divides - so something that is visual is often described by referance maybe to an aural sensation (for example) or something that is tangible is described by reference to something visual...etc etc

I don't have any examples in front of me, but I really noticed it in AATE.

I'm sure that it would be easy to get this type of metaphor badly wrong, but SRD seems to pull it off.

Vraith wrote:I don't LOOK for these kinds of things...I don't even notice I've noticed them till someone...like you...cues me into talking about it.
My wife hates it. [maybe other people too, how do I know?] I start telling her a story/talking about something...eventually she'll be "Would you just get to the POINT?" And I'm all:
"I CAN'T, I haven't finished talking yet, so I don't know what the damn point IS!"

So, in short, you're an extrovert? You figure things out as you talk them out to an actual human being? Me too. I've got whole theories about that.

And yeah, it is often the guy who is in the position of saying "get to the point," so it amuses me... (Here's one guy who identifies with what we women go through when we want to tell a story or explain something to a guy!)

Hey Malik, good to see you... same ole' Malik.

Zarathustra wrote:

Behind her words, there were wings beating like violence.

Vraith, I'm not so sure we can rule out metaphor here, in favor of simile. Sure, there is the simile, "wings beating like violence," but that's only part of the symbol. The larger frame of reference is that quality "behind" her words which is being directly equated with wings, without the benefit of a "like." So perhaps it's a simile wrapped up in a metaphor?

You're right that it's not a mixed metaphor. But Lina is correct to note a complexity here, a mixture of two different levels of symbol. In fact, I think it's actually kind of a sloppy sentence, something written by a younger, less experienced Donaldson. I'm frankly glad he doesn't write as much like this anymore. Don't get me wrong, I loved many of his similes in the first Chronicles, but many were over the top. He's much better now (even though I think his latest book is his worst).

You could well be correct, and I neglected the first part.
But if you don't like that sort of thing, I can see why you found AATE less than satisfying [among things you said elsewhere]. And it can be either sloppy/tenuous or excessive, but most of his, for me at least, carry a precision that avoids those problems [though certain parts of AATE did, I think, simply have too many of them.]

And, you're right, Barnetto, he does use that synaesthetic thing pretty regularly.

I think it's a more efficient, concise way of writing. Instead of saying, "Malice flowed from his eyes like venom dripping from the fangs of a deadly serpent", which is unwieldy, we can say "The eyes ululated venom". In less words, he's able to describe the eyes, the shape, what they convey, and what that means to TC. That's brilliance there. Of course, people get caught up in the "eyes don't ululate"...miss the whole point.

Vraith wrote:... if you don't like that sort of thing, I can see why you found AATE less than satisfying [among things you said elsewhere]. And it can be either sloppy/tenuous or excessive, but most of his, for me at least, carry a precision that avoids those problems [though certain parts of AATE did, I think, simply have too many of them.]

Actually, I don't think overuse of simile is as much of a problem in his later writing, including AATE. For a couple decades now, he has used much more subtle writing, depending less and less upon individual sentences of clever metaphors/similes. His later writing is characterized more by a slow build of symbols and language across the entire novel. I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with examples from AATE like the one above. [My problems with that novel were much larger, not even close to the level of individual sentences. But we don't have to talk about that here.]

Donaldson is a much better writer than he used to be. But I like his earlier stories better. For instance, I think The Gap series is the best example of his mastery as a writer, but I connect with the Chronicles much more, and I have a lot more to say about it.

Lina Heartlistener wrote:Hey Malik, good to see you... same ole' Malik.

Not quite the same. Changing one's "name" is not an insignificant alteration. Often, it's a choice that connects one with his deepest convictions.

Good to see you, too.

hmmm...that's interesting, Z. If I get the ambition, I might have to do some side by side text comparing, because my impression was of a shift over the years of less metaphor/simile in the setting/environment parts, countered by more of it directly connected to char's. [whether we're from their POV, or looking at them from outside.]

I do think there's been a transition over the years in subtle accumulation...a greater feeling of the text carrying its own weight, if that makes any sense at all.

Interesting discussion.

Metaphor..a figure of speech where some " thing" is representative of something else..a symbol for something else.

Simile,,a figure of speech where some thing is compared to something else ,,to add dimension or make it more emphatic

The basketball is round like the sun.
The Phoenix Suns.

With that in mind..the whole of the Land can be seen as metaphoric. Posters have the Land experience as ..a dream..interior landscape..etc. So..it can be observed that the " language" used in the Land,,the archaic words, the layering of simile, etc..as Metaphor. TC as a Writer, as a creation by the author Donaldson, becomes a mirror in the realm of metaphor. This juxtaposed realities works great in containing the reading experience between the ears. Very little of the presented , in the Chrons, translates to the real world. Yet very much of the" feelings" we are brought to in the Chrons..do translate to the real world. The function of the Metaphor, is complete.

The Gap series was brought up and thats a good example. Some readers pointed out problematic issues with the scientific feasibility of the author's " gap drive" and some of the time/space conundrums when dealing with those consequences of time space warpage. The readers attempted to take the authors words,,and apply them to known reality,,and then point out the " mistakes". Well,,thats the difference between The Chrons and The Gap series. The Chrons do not even give the reader that chance to externalize what is being presented. Only the internal feel that we are brought to, can we apply to our real world. Yet, in the Gap series,,Angus Thermopyles beginnings,,the characters environment and upbringing, that which formed and shaped the character..did not seem to bother many readers , as negative and disgusting as it was,,and of course, as Angus as a product of all that was. Point being..when the authors lays it in our laps, all clear and to the point,,it doesn't have as much lasting hold on the reader as when the author gets the reader to find the point thru connections to nerves and sensibilities,,thru connections to ourselves. Sure, The Gap Series, connected, but as an expression in Science Fiction, it was thru more direct routes, those of matter of fact description...perhaps as cold and sparse as Space itself.

So, to me..The Chrons , metaphoric value..if you will, is the Impact and of course, is how it is that I have so enjoyed the authors work in the Chrons thru the years and look forward to the last installment.