Metaphors

"Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor." -Milan Kundera

I did not fall in love with Amy Tan when I came across this metaphor yesterday in an article in last year's China issue from National Geographic:

"I viewed it with the awe of a child who has just seen a fairy-tale place jump out of a book."

According to Orwell, a metaphor is supposed to add depth to our understanding of a person's feelings, to "assist thoughts by evoking a visual image." This can also be done by comparing the person's experience or feelings to a situation that would have resonance with most readers. How many people have seen a fairy-tale place jump out of a book?

Yesterday, I was reading a powerful and concise short story by Stuart Dybek, Flames. To describe standing in line to wait for a lice inspection in grade school, Dybek produced this simile: "It felt like a cross between an air-raid drill and going to Confession." You don't have to have experienced either of those things to immediately know that Dybek's talking about a situation characterized by nervousness, fear, slight guilt, embarrassment, a little humiliation and ultimately a feeling of not wanting to be doing what one is doing.

Dybek elicited four or five feelings while Amy Tan just left me wondering what a child feels like when an imaginary world suddenly springs to life. I haven't read anything else by Amy Tan, although after reading this article, I'm not inclined to seek her fiction out. If her other works are not riddled with similarly impotent metaphors, I'd be interested to know.