notes on metaphor

or simile as the case may be

The big literary gossip item right now is that a short story published in Granta, “The Serpent in the Grove” by Jamir Nazir, seems to be written by an LLM. (The story is in Granta because it won a contest which I don’t think Granta itself administers, but the magazine is definitely taking most of the heat for its existence.)

“The Serpent in the Grove” is about a man who is unhappily married. He is ogling local beauty Zoongie when his wife sees him. She doesn’t say anything but he decides to murder her by making it easy for her to fall into a well. She divines his purpose but then falls into the well anyway. However, she is rescued by her neighbor and also her husband since he knows he’s been caught out. Their marriage gets better. Their child solemnly says, to nobody in particular: “People does change.… But grove does remember.” That’s the story.

I’m not super invested in whether or not this story is AI because it is bad. So whether it’s pure human badness, AI-composed badness, or AI-assisted badness, I mean, I don’t really care that much. People consider it to be LLM-composed because of passages like the following, as LLMs rely on metaphors that do not make a lot of sense when closely examined and this story is full of them:

Marsha was shelling pigeon peas and thinking about a letter she’d promised to write for a mother whose son had been held for cussing a policeman. She heard nothing. That was the thing. Midday should hold pot noise and scolding and a child’s quarrel. Silence in a village is smoke; it sneaks from something burning. She put down the pan and stood. She didn’t hurry, not at first. The hush had a tilt – a room shifted half an inch.

I do think the use of metaphor in this story is bad in a way that is like a blown-up, enlarged version of bad uses of metaphor more generally, and for that reason I would like to opine. Still, for the sake of this post, we will assume that this piece is pure human badness. Also, before I get started—I’m just talking about prose here. I think poetry’s relationship to metaphor and simile is different.¹ Anyway.…

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Back when I was an editor I would say cleaning up mixed metaphors was about a third of what I did. That was not because I was working with incompetent writers (they were great!) and certainly not because they were using AI. It was because you get used to certain figures of speech and lose sight of what they mean. Or, in short:

Words mean things.

Even words which have become so familiar that you forget they are metaphors—such as, for instance, “lose sight of,” above. One common way in which metaphors end up mixed is that you have something like “lose sight of” paired with something that you perceive through a different sense entirely, like a sound, a smell, a taste.

Crucially, you also are not doing that on purpose. For instance, a lot of perfume writing has to work through simile and metaphor because the vocabulary of smell is limited. So you might say, “this perfume smells green.” However, in the kinds of cases I was often cleaning up, the writer had usually just forgotten what “lose sight of” literally means.

In other cases a figure of speech refers to something the meaning of which is often forgotten—i.e. a “petard” is a kind of bomb, and so being hoist by your own petard means blowing yourself up with your own bomb. But, until I learned this fact, I assumed a petard was some sort of jacket and was imagining a kind of Looney Tunes scenario where a guy was lifted up into the air by a giant hook catching his jacket. So while I (correctly) assumed a kind of poetic justice was at play I thought it had more to do with an unanticipated weak spot instead of careless stupidity.²

Now, again, I’m not very interested in whether or not this story is AI generated, but I do think physicality, or the lack thereof, is why AI metaphors tend to be bizarre. To pick one line from “The Serpent in the Grove” that’s been singled out for derision:

Doing is a treacherous bridge: you step on and it carries you to a side you didn’t plan to reach.

The only scenario in which a bridge takes you to a side you didn’t plan to reach is if it breaks, i.e., fails to carry you, in which case you reach the third side, the bottom of whatever the bridge is spanning. Otherwise a bridge, however treacherous, can only carry you to one out of two sides.³ Unlike some of the other weird lines in this piece, it’s not too hard to parse what this line is meant to convey, but it does read as if written by somebody who doesn’t really know what a bridge is or even what sides are.

But then you have something like this line:

She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.

What does that mean? The hell if I know.⁴ Like yeah it’s saying she’s sexy and in that sense I know what it means. But actually I don’t. I have no idea what makes benches into men here.⁵

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Certainly, I don’t wish for writing to be less lyrical or less weird or even less deliberately awkward. Yesterday I was reading Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton and hit this passage, which is describing what a person looking up at the actual night sky for the first time in his life sees:

Neptune, visibly spherical, mottled, milky, and much duller than the striated turquoise extravaganza on the sensory shield, was fairly high. The sun, low and perhaps half a dozen times brighter than Sirius, looked about the size of the bottom of the vlet’s dice cup. (On the sensory shield it would be a pinkish glow which, though its vermilion center was tiny, sent out pulsing waves across the entire sky.) The atmosphere above Tethys was only twenty-five hundred feet thick; a highly ionized, cold-plasma field cut it off sharply, just below the shield; with the shield extinguished, the stars were as ice-bright as from some naturally airless moon.

The dusty splatter of the Milky Way misted across the black. (On the shield, it was a band of green-shot silver.)

There are three separate metaphors in one sentence there (dust, splatter, mist). I found it to be a very awkward sentence and I actually stopped on that line for a bit. However, it’s not inappropriately awkward for two reasons—one being the precision of the descriptions of the paragraph above it, the other being that it would be a genuinely bewildering experience to see real stars in the sky for the first time and that you would pick up and discard different images in an attempt to convey what you’re seeing. So the awkwardness of the line is conveying meaning. Again.…

thank you textstudio dot com

Awkwardness is a tool that is fine to use as long as you’re using it on purpose. In general, what matters more than any particular rule is that you’re doing what you’re doing on purpose. If you’re doing it on purpose it can be good or bad. When it’s not on purpose, it can only be bad.

Another book I thought of while writing this newsletter was D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and its beautiful descriptions of nature.⁶ So I went to look at my bookmarks from when I read it a couple years ago. An example from early in the book:

In convalescence everything was wonderful. The snowflakes, suddenly arriving on the window-pane, clung there a moment like swallows, then were gone, and a drop of water was crawling down the glass. The snowflakes whirled round the corner of the house, like pigeons dashing by. Away across the valley the little black train crawled doubtfully over the great whiteness.

While they were so poor, the children were delighted if they could do anything to help economically. Annie and Paul and Arthur went out early in the morning, in summer, looking for mushrooms, hunting through the wet grass, from which the larks were rising, for the white-skinned, wonderful naked bodies crouched secretly in the green. And if they got half a pound they felt exceedingly happy: there was the joy of finding something, the joy of accepting something straight from the hand of Nature, and the joy of contributing to the family exchequer.

I find myself, re-reading this passage, a little obsessed with the distinction between the snowflakes being like swallows on the glass and like pigeons in the air. It feels meaningful and yet my personal experience of pigeons in particular is that they are very fat, sometimes missing a foot, and they’re always scrounging around on the ground—I am not sure I have ever seen a pigeon “dash.” That is probably partly because I’m not English and partly because modern society has brought the pigeon to a sad state.⁷

In any case, I’m quoting these passages more as a way of saying that rejecting the meaningless metaphor does not mean one has to rely on one to one descriptive language. Knowing what your words literally mean is what allows you to get crazier and weirder, including working in moments of intentional dissonance—much as Ulysses (is it Ulysses month here? maybe) is very much rooted in things like the actual streets of Dublin and the exact amount of change in Bloom’s pockets.

The more writing relies on boilerplate language or prefabricated lines, the more attempts to build on top of those premade materials, to riff on them, or to play around with them, or even to diverge from them, will become meaningless if examined closely. You have to go back to the thing you’re trying to describe and the words you’re using and ask the kind of basic questions of “what am I saying” and “what does this actually mean.” As long as you know the answers to those questions, though, you can probably get away with whatever you want to do.

1. That said one of my favorite bits of writing in praise of precision comes from a letter by Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell (August 27, 1964):

My passion for accuracy may strike you as old-maidish—but since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully; who knows what might depend on it? So I’m enclosing a clipping about raccoons. But perhaps you prefer mythology. I have a whole batch of new poems on hand here by you, several I hadn’t seen before. The Dante translation was much admired in London, I know—and here two Brazilians who get ENCOUNTER have spoken to me about it. The “Washington” poem is certainly Washington in the summer with a vengeance. It brings back all my feelings of misery and horrid anxiety there—only I could never put it into words like that. The image of the eyelids is lovely—and the “delectable mountains”—but the first two stanzas really hit the target. Maybe it’s because I feel it so strongly that I want to pick on it—(but I know you are not morbid about these things)—but couldn’t it be “rings in a tree?” The on gave me an unfortunate deck-quoits picture before I realized what you meant. If it were on it would have to be a stump—no, that would still be in, really. I know the two ons are nicer, however. But in suggests the un-knowingness of the line before. Oh, I’m a fussbudget.

She has many passages like this in their letters (Robert Lowell was not a very precise man).

2. In my own writing I think I am most vulnerable to doing this kind of thing when it comes to metaphors that are taken from sports and which I often don’t even realize are from sports, such as “end run” or “lay up.”

3. Something that does have the potential to take you to a place you didn’t plan to go is a river, one of the various things over which bridges are built to prevent such an outcome.

4. Is this an idiom that was rendered literally into English? That was honestly all I could come up with as an explanation here.

5. ETA: The answer, courtesy of Kevin Jared Hosein.

6. That lyrical descriptions of nature such as Lawrence’s have fallen out of fashion in narrative prose “feels” true, though I’m not sure it’s actually true.

7. If somebody is a pigeon fan and can send me a video of what he means please do so.