Clive James – Tenor and Vehicle in Level Metaphor
You can make a case that Clive James was one of the best strong language writers of his time, and was never better than in his television criticism of the 70s and early 80s:
On David Attenborough's Life on Earth:
By the time you get to the invertebrates, you practically need a seat-belt, the aesthetic effect is so stunning. Here comes a flatworm rippling through the sea, like a rainbow- edged omelette in a hurry. A transparent prawn looking as if Durer had drawn it in liquid silver suddenly alters its position, as if he had drawn it twice.[1]
Extreme rock climbers:
They're evolving. Their fingers are long and sensitive, like those of Vladimir Horowitz or certain species of climbing frog. Crouching in space, with fluttering fingertips they search the smooth rock for irregularities, like a blind man reading Keats.[2]
The 1981 Royal Wedding:
With fine young ladies poised beneath them, big hats were floating into the cathedral like pastel Frisbees flying in slow motion.[3]
Some terminology:
The 'tenor' of a metaphor is what it's about, the entity (or action or whatever) being described or depicted; the 'vehicle' is what the tenor is likened to. I use 'metaphor' in a broad sense, taking in simile (explicit comparison – 'Mary is like a nightingale') and metonym (part standing in for whole, or vice-versa – 'Mary the voice') as well as strict-sense metaphor (implicit comparison – 'nightingale Mary'). Level metaphor (my term) is when both tenor and vehicle are 'concrete' – roughly, 'directly available to the senses'. Where the tenor is 'transcendent', 'higher-order', not directly sensed, I call the metaphor upward.
The seven broad-sense metaphors in the passages are all strictly similes – here they are, split into tenor and vehicle, the vehicles on the right:
a flatworm ... like a rainbow-edged omelette in a hurry
a transparent prawn ... as if Durer had drawn it in liquid silver
... alters its position ... as if he had drawn it twice
climbers’ fingers ... like those of Vladimir Horowitz
‘’ ‘’ ... like those of tree frogs
searching the rock ... like a blind man reading Keats
big hats ... like pastel Frisbees flying in slow motion
All have that throwaway Jamesian strength – they say what it’s like. A concrete vehicle makes present, brings to life, puts you in touch with a tenor – which in these examples is also concrete. The metaphors are all 'level'.
There are other metaphors in the passages, implicit and not fully formed[4]:
... you practically need a seat belt
– sudden deceleration is the tacit vehicle for aesthetic impact;
... with fluttering fingertips they search the rock
– ‘fluttering’ hints at any (perhaps all) of several possible unstated vehicles – butterflies, birds, daffodils in the breeze. Here metaphor merges into a neighbouring source of strength, which I’ll call ‘connotation’[5]. Take, say:
... floating into the cathedral like pastel Frisbees flying in slow motion .
The phrase itself floats, shadowing the big hats, on its alliterated f's and l's and its long vowels. Such sound-based linguistic miming can be thought of as a subtle form of onomatopoeia. It has a semantic equivalent:
With fine young ladies poised beneath them
– the adjectives 'fine' and 'poised' assign the young ladies to a particular social stratum, and the carriage and demeanour that go with it ('young ladies' itself does the same); the air of refinement then wafts on into the rest of the sentence. But it’s the Frisbee metaphor that hits the spot, and around which the connotations cluster.[6]
[1] The Crystal Bucket 164-5 (entry for 28.1.79)
[2] Glued to the Box 90 (entry for 25.5.80)
[3] op. cit. 212 (entry for 2.8.81)
[4] Such ‘implicit tenor’ metaphors were called hypocatastasis by the 19th century biblical analyst David N. Lord. The term seems not to have outlasted its author, and doesn’t make the OED.
[5] Connotation, looked at in Chapter 12, might be seen as just an indefinitely broad extension of metaphor. But concepts need boundaries, even or especially where everything blurs together.
[6] The quotes are pervaded with Jamesian humour. He wrote that ‘common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing’. (The Crystal Bucket 168, entry for 4.2.79).