Not literally, of course. What I mean to say is that I use and think in metaphors about as often as clouds cover Goshen. So, when Nomi Nickel, the narrator and main character of Miriam Toews' novel A Complicated Kindness, brought up how she saw her sister's use of metaphors to be a negative thing, she really caught my attention.
Nomi's sister Tash starts to explore more and more intellectually, questioning the views that she has been handed on topics like religion, government, and culture. This makes Nomi extremely uncomfortable. Nomi tells us that "Tash had learned the meaning of the work metaphor, and had started applying it to almost every aspect of her life, and ours. I heard my dad say to her: Tash, some things are real. Some things are nothing but what they are...And some things are more than they appear to be." Tash's metaphor usage is not only frightening her sister, but also her father.
Why is this? What is it about the metaphor that is frightening? I've always thought that the metaphor is a beneficial use of language, as it can help us make connections between important things in life, or help us describe something to another person in a way that helps that person to relate. I still believe that this is true, but thinking more about the metaphor makes me see another side, one that Nomi was referencing. Metaphors can be dangerous and uncomfortable, as they blur the lines between the real and the imagined, or the known and the unknown. To some extent, saying that something is like something else takes away a bit of the uniqueness of whatever it is you are talking about -- a scary prospect in a society that so values singularity and distinctiveness. Metaphors have the power to take away what we think we are sure of and replace it with something we are unfamiliar with or have not considered before. When the world is seen in metaphors, it loses its stability, and nothing is "only" what it is. Metaphors have great potential to make language, and consequently, the ideas portrayed in language, slippery and vague. In a world that's already uncertain, taking away more convictions can leave one feeling vulnerable and afraid. I think this is the case for Nomi. If her beliefs about her world are not real, or only metaphors, what more is she left with? She has been faced with so much abandonment that it's just too much to be forced to abandon her comfortable ideas about heaven and hell or other established beliefs, understandably so. I think this is why she reacts negatively against Tash's struggles to find the truth through metaphor usage. Nomi needs structure, safety, and consistency, and metaphors can offer none of that.
I doubt the answer to the problem is to speak literally all the time, as that would also eliminate a great amount of creativity, art, and fun from spoken and written language. Rather, in life and in language, I think it takes a certain balance and blend of the real and the imagined to create a world that is both stable and mysterious.
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This is a great post, Kate, and a nice focus on an important aspect of the novel.
ReplyDeleteI agree completely with what you write about Nomi's wariness of metaphor being due to the instability of the rest of her life. This struggle with instability manifests itself in many ways in the characters in the novel, as Sara W pointed out in her post on the novel.
"What I mean to say is that I use and think in metaphors about as often as clouds cover Goshen."
ReplyDeleteThat's great. :)
On to your post, I hadn't really thought of metaphors as negative, either, until now. I think that's definitely a valid point in the novel that metaphors can be a defense mechanism to deny reality. I think it's interesting that Nomi was actually the one that realized the negativity associated with metaphors, when I would argue that she herself uses a lot. A lot of her made up games, sayings, imaginations and actions are metaphors that separate her from reality and her pain. Though this is definitely a way of coping, there is some danger to it if she never touches back into reality every now and then. When always living in a metaphor, the result can be a half-lived life that is seen as a joke and not too seriously. I see some of that in Nomi's case.
Really interesting topic and discussion. Nomi is in some ways very child-like. She fears metaphors because she wants things to be real. She's afraid if something is a metaphor, then it's not real any more. Of course, metaphor is just a habit of language--that's with us far more than we might expect. Acknowledging that something you thought was real is actually a metaphor is something like learning that Santa Claus doesn't really bring you presents, your parents do.
ReplyDeleteWe see this struggle between literal belief and the use of metaphor to gesture towards something we can't name all the time in politics these days. But truth be told, you can't really get away from metaphor, even if you are a literalist.