Simile and Cormac McCarthy Similes with You
On emotional imagery.
Read on the Literary Salon site.
The Prose Style Series:
Simile and Cormac McCarthy Similes with You
…in his sleep he struggled and muttered like a dreaming dog…
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian carries similes like the plague.
My imagery of a plague offers a basic description in that the book is riddled with similes, but the emotional impact of the image isn’t pleasant. There’s a hint of judgment there, and that’s strange for a classic—one I’ve read more than once—but it’s there and it’s real. In the audio book, the similes come so frequently and so thick, it’s distracting and a bit absurd, and I love the book, and I will always love the book, and yet the feeling remains. When it came time to make my own simile to illustrate his, that emotion came out, and as Brooks Landon has taught us, a simile is an emotional connection between unalike things. The simile is emotional imagery.
(What about the metaphor? you ask. As Brooks Landon also teaches, the simile is a type of metaphor.)
Emotional imagery is a powerful and yet intimidating concept. It’s freeing to know I’m not trying to mechanically describe an outward connection between two things so much as I’m tapping into emotional heart of the comparison. I’m a literary vampire, and similes are my fangs.
The intimidation comes in thinking that every simile has to be this emotional powerhouse, but if we look at Cormac McCarthy, that just isn’t true. There are moments that linger in the memory, but for every remembered simile there are a score more, forgotten, whose work was humble and small.
There’s a website that attempted to list all the similes in the book,1 and I’ll borrow from it to share a cluster copied at random:
a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise
Then he waded out into the river like some wholly wretched baptismal candidate.
the barman labored over the floor toward him like a man on his way to some chore
He looked like a great clay voodoo doll made animate and the kid looked like another.
the burnt tree stood vertically in the still dawn like a slender stylus marking the hour
he looks like a raggedyman wandered from some garden where he’d used to frighten birds
the bloody stump of the shaft jutted from his thigh like a peg for hanging implements upon
The first two illustrate the emotional charge a smile can carry, depending on the reader’s connection to imagery, but look at that third line: “like a man on his way to some chore.” Is that even a simile or is the barman literally a man on his way to some chore?
The fourth one made me laugh, which is probably not the impact in context.
A slender stylus is a fine physical image but the emotion is in the burnt tree.
The raggedyman is a cute description of a scarecrow. Yes, it could be shortened, but not without a loss.
The final one I remember from the book, probably as feeling anticlimactic, but I think that’s its purpose. This horrible moment in which the man’s leg is impaled is made commonplace by shock.
This random grouping proved to be strikingly illustrative of the emotional connection similes make. Let me pick another:
his voice passed from him like a gift that was also needed
the old man sitting in the shrubbery solitary as a gnome
the parasol dipping in the wind like a great black flower
in his sleep he struggled and muttered like a dreaming dog
dragging themselves across the lot like seals or other things
an old anchorite nested away in the sod like a groundsloth
blackened and shriveled in the mud like an enormous spider
the kid behind him on the mule like something he’d captured
These are fine, and I won’t go through them one by one, but I think you’ll feel like I do that many of them are fairly common, nothing special on their own. The first list comes from later in the book, and looking over the list I thought maybe his similes took on more power as he wrote, after he’d prepared us to handle the onslaught—once we’d graduated from the basics.
Yet, I was soon to be proven wrong as I selected one of my least favorite similes from the brief list.
“dragging themselves across the lot like seals or other things”
[Content warning: animal cruelty and death and a reference to sex work]
By midnight there were fires in the street and dancing and drunkenness and the house rang with the shrill cries of the whores and rival packs of dogs had infiltrated the now partly darkened and smoking yard in the back where a vicious dogfight broke out over the charred racks of goatbones and where the first gunfire of the night erupted and wounded dogs howled and dragged themselves about until Glanton himself went out and killed them with his knife, a lurid scene in the flickering light, the wounded dogs silent save for the pop of their teeth, dragging themselves across the lot like seals or other things and crouching under the walls while Glanton walked them down and clove their skulls with the huge copperbacked beltknife.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Again, the emotion is in the scene. The seal comparison is physical, bringing to mind paralyzed hindquarters. It’s a visually powerful simile but not because of the emotion tied up in the image selected but in what it conveys, in what that comparison tells us.
Laid out in a list, there is nothing special about the simile, but its an illustrative part in an emotional whole.
Let’s go back to that simile I called out earlier:
The barman waved the pistol toward the door.
The old man spoke to the room in Spanish. Then he spoke to the barman. Then he put on his hat and went out.
The barman's face drained. When he came around the end of the bar he had laid down the pistol and he was carrying a bung-starter in one hand.
The kid backed to the center of the room and the barman labored over the floor toward him like a man on his way to some chore. He swung twice at the kid and the kid stepped twice to the right. Then he stepped backward. The barman froze. The kid boosted himself lightly over the bar and picked up the pistol. No one moved.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
There are a couple lessons that McCarthy teaches me here. One is reminiscent of something I’d heard about using adverbs effectively and which I believe I’ve mentioned before: use the adverb in contrast to the verb, not redundant to it. I see McCarthy doing something similar with his similes. He doesn’t make a heightened scene melodramatic with an emotionally wrought simile. Instead, he shows us how the barman treats violence like a chore. This is his normal existence.
The second lesson becomes a bone I’d like to pick with Brooks Landon who addresses style by focusing on the sentence,2 specifically by learning to make sentences longer because (he says) there’s not much one can do with a short sentence. Except, that there is. Literature is not a single sentence, but a connection of them.
This isn’t a simile we understand in an isolated sentence, we need context.
For Landon, the simile is a tool for artfully extending the sentence, but sentences become paragraphs. Paragraphs become passages. Style needs space to show itself, but the period doesn’t place a full stop on authorial style.
Full stop. Now, let’s get back to Cormac McCarthy.
Revisiting our lists, I chose a powerful simile, one connected to a wellspring of emotion, and my guess was that he’d use it to describe something lacking an intrinsically emotionally-laden context, unlike the violence of the previous examples. What I found was a sunrise:
They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Even in a sunrise, we get sex and violence—but that’s my point. When I chose the mundane-seeming imagery, I found them connected to the most lurid details. (That barman dies horribly.) The imagery of blood and a phallus is used to describe the morning.
This is an instructive technique.
I’m going to repeat something I said in The Secret of Literary Style. Writing in a literary style doesn’t mean you write better than others, for one can write bad literary fiction, but in fantasy, for example, there are many factors that determine quality. The writing style can be lacking or mundane and a book still get published if the other factors are strong. In literary fiction, there’s nothing more important that the writing itself. The literary fiction you find on the shelves has to contain writing the editors thought was fantastic (or that was written by an established name).
The subject matter of a pure literary piece is secondary and, ideally, mundane. The reader is meant to be driven to ecstasy, reading about mundane events and people, by the quality of the writing alone. (Mind you, that’s pure literary fiction I’m describing, but the style has entered the genres. I describe myself as a literary fantasy writer, after all.)
When we say the simile is emotional imagery, I think we have something in mind akin to pure literary fiction. The subject being described is assumed to be mundane—not the murderous Glanton gang—and the contrasting role that the simile plays is lost.
A simile works through the power of similarity found between contrasting images, and that contrast continues as the simile plays against the intrinsic emotion of the passage.
— Thaddeus Thomas
I’m not being fair. Landon’s course was on sentences, and that’s the only way he can approach style within that context.
"The subject matter of a pure literary piece is secondary and, ideally, mundane."
This is an interesting, albeit unsurprising, designation. I say that because I feel like the absolute mundanity or complete lack of plot in literary fiction is a relatively recent determination. For one thing, the literary classics that literary style is derived from was almost always extremely plot-based. I'd go even further to say that the divorce of literary style from plot in "pure" literary fiction was likely a large factor in why readership declined so greatly towards the end of the last century and continues to do so.
Write beautifully about interesting things. Otherwise you're just an author trying to flex on mundanity.
very interesting. it was enlightening to see the similes taken out of their context and then put back in. alone some of them were frankly ridiculous.