The Metaphor of Reptile in Writing – Part One

Evelyn de Morgan - The Angel with the Serpent, 1870-1875

 

If there is a writer who scratches like few others, it is Emil Cioran, a Romanian philosopher, essayist, and aphorist, one of the most influential of the twentieth century, even if not very well known.

His aphorisms are a pure distillation of anger, misanthropy, and pessimism, so much so that his nihilism is often combined with that of the great pessimists of the history of thought, from Schopenhauer (which was the name I had given to my black cat) to Leopardi.

What makes the collections of his aphorisms “tolerable” is his acute irony and profound culture and intelligence.

I remember when, at university, I went to visit one of my dearest friends in Tuscany; her father was a teacher and a fine intellectual, and I slept for a few nights in the downstairs tavern where his bookcase was, right next to the bed. So it was that I took some random books to leaf through, including Cioran.

Leafing through those pages I realized that they were collections of aphorisms and I love them because they are short, essential, and full of thoughts. Of course, as soon as I started reading, I remember feeling like I was being slapped, page after page. Heavy, dark; nevertheless absolutely intriguing.

Since then I have collected collections of his aphorisms, which bear titles such as “The inconvenience of being born”, “The syllogisms of bitterness”, “The fall in time”, “Torn apart”, “At the height of despair”, and so on.

But it is not my intention here to list his aphorisms or analyze his writing. Anyone who wants can go and look for his books, with the advice to go there cautious, because if you are sucked into his black vortex it's difficult to get out of it, and in any case, it comes out as when we go back to earth after having sunk into a puddle of dense mud.

But I want to mention one, absolutely among my favorites.

Many times, in these two years of blogging, I have been asked for advice on writing or how I conceive the act of writing.

Obviously, I'm not Dostoevsky and I know my limits well; however, writing sometimes gives me profound pleasure, and I know many people like my style.

Here, it's Cioran's aphorism that for me holds the secret of good writing, from my very personal point of view. It's in the 1973 collection “The inconvenience of being born”. He says: 

“Maybe you could go back beyond the concept, write directly with the senses, record the infinite variations of what you touch, do what a reptile would do if it got to work.” (E. Cioran)

Sublime.

I believe that not a few people have heard these words, spoken in my own way when asked about my vision of writing. There is no better way to describe how one should write and how I try to do it.

The first time I read it, I was thunderstruck; the idea of a reptile getting to work is perfect. There is no distance, no abstraction, no idealization of concepts, no mental and cold writing.

No, the writing I love to read and put on the page is the physical one of a reptile crawling on rough ground, bumping into stones, and getting dirty with earth. Writing with the senses, recording the infinite variations of what you touch.

For the same reason I love strong and often overwhelming colors in photographs; it gives me the idea of being able to touch what I see, to get my hands dirty: it gives me back the physicality of what I have seen and photographed, where black and white makes it more cerebral and distant.

This is not always the case; the black of the photographs of Koudelka, Giacomelli, or Sobol is physical and dirty the fingers of the eyes. But color is more in keeping with my vision of reality, existence, and photography. So it is with writing.

 

I try, every time, to write with my senses, each one of them. Nothing excluded. And it's the advice I always give to those who love to write or have just started. 

Doubt the mind, be wary.

The Cartesian axiom cogito, ergo sum, I think therefore I am, has long been overturned, but as the philosophers of Phenomenology have profoundly explained, I am therefore I think, my body comes before everything, before even thought, if I am to the world it's thanks to my senses. The mind likes to play clean, it likes mirrors, smooth surfaces.

The reptile, on the other hand, crawls, rubs itself against the ground, is the flesh of the same flesh as that ground, as those philosophers would say.

I have found that Asia has an edge in this. I began to notice the style of Asian writers, both because I was struck by some passages I read and to pique a curiosity that came to me thinking about the way of life I saw in Asian countries, which was very different from the Western one.

I wanted to ascertain whether the attachment to the earth, to the horizontal dimension of existence, typical of the kampung, of the villages in the Far East, the physicality, the preference for the carnal aspect rather than the mental one – prevalent in our West which is modeled on Plato and Descartes – had a confirmation also in literature.

In recent years I have intensified research on Asian literature, with novels by Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Indo-Malay writers. To try to make a parallel, a comparison with the literature I know best, the one I studied and loved since I was a boy.

I must say that I have had confirmation of my intuition.

Of course, it's not my intention to bore you with a classic analysis of comparative literature. It is more a suggestion to which everyone gives the weight he wants.

 

However, I focused on the use of metaphors in novels, especially those relating to the adjective and description of people, because about places, it's relatively easy. And I did not consider poetry because it is an area in which the use of metaphors is a vital part and therefore it's more common to encounter a wide creative use of metaphors.

In novels, it's more difficult, and there are many writers who do not use metaphors at all, preferring a dry, rough style of writing – I am thinking of the short stories of Raymond Carver.

Let's start with a premise.

It's not that Western writers lack examples of metaphors linked to the natural world in the description of characters, but in Asian literature, they are predominant and sometimes bizarre, with references to fruits, vegetables, or animals. While in our literature I believe that metaphors are more, as it were, intellectual, introspective, or self-referential to the person himself or to his psychological dimension.

Let me explain.

I was saying, it is not uncommon to find a certain type of metaphors in Western writers too. Let's take Anton Chekhov for example – I think Russian writers are very skilled in using metaphors.

In the famous collection of short stories “The lady with the dog”, in the one entitled “The daughter of Albion”, he writes: “Beside him stood a tall, slender Englishman with shrimp-like convex eyes and a large bird's nose, more like a hook than a nose.”

But the metaphors in his stories are always of another tenor, more usual, of an intellectual or psychological type.

As in “The Steppe”, where he writes that “the splashing of water and the noisy breathing of a person getting wet act on hearing like beautiful music.”

But let's come to the one who is perhaps one of the greatest writers of all time, Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Russian writer is unanimously recognized for his ability to describe, the accuracy in the choice of adjectives, and how he is able to show what he describes.

Take the masterpiece “Crime and Punishment” for example. As in Chekhov, also in Dostoevsky, we happen to encounter metaphors relating to the natural world, like when he describes the old woman in the tavern whose “long and thin neck” is “similar to a chicken's foot”. Then he is able to use 116 words to describe the landowner Svidrigjlov, one of the main figures in the novel.

“It was a strange face, almost like a mask”. This phrase is typical of his style and is often cited as an example of his ability to delve into the psychological side of his characters, digging word after word.

Precisely, they are very accurate descriptions always aimed at highlighting the inner world of the characters, or with intellectual, artistic metaphorical references, 

I quote the description that the protagonist Raskòlnikov makes of his wife: “You know, he has a little face on the type of the Madonna by Raphael.”

Or, like the description of Alesa in “The Karamazov Brothers”, where the goodness and inner nobility of the young man is chiseled:

“Alesa was then a handsome nineteen-year-old young man who sparkled health from all pores, with red cheeks and clear eyes. Indeed, at that time he was really handsome: quite tall in stature, slender, he had brown hair, a face with a regular oval, albeit a bit elongated, large wide open and shining dark gray eyes, a thoughtful and serene expression.”

 

The use of metaphors that Dostoevsky makes is inscribed in the circle of the human, as if to add visual elements to the inner excavation he does with words, as when he makes the protagonist of the “Memories of the subsoil” say, in his self-description, to being “wary and touchy like a hunchback or a dwarf.” 

And where he has to give the idea of a felt sensation, he still remains in the psychological field: “A dark thought arose in my head and ran all over my body with a certain unpleasant sensation, like when you enter a damp underground and feels like it's locked up.” (“Memories of the subsoil”)

The great Russian writer is so ingenious and skilled in telling the crevices of the human soul, before Freud who coined the term “unconscious” years later, also influenced by Dostoevsky's novels, that even when he describes an old clock he does so in human terms and behavioral: “Somewhere beyond the partition, as if under violent pressure, as if someone was strangling it, a clock began to wheeze.”

I conclude this first part with two other examples, beyond the Russian borders and also different over time.

Another great storyteller skilled in descriptions is James Joyce. The “Dubliners” short tales of 1914 are among the heritages of world literature. To be clear, this splendid metaphor in the story “An Encounter” applies: “My body was like a harp, and her words, her gestures were like fingers running over the strings.”

Or this in the story “A pitiful case”: “His life passed smoothly, like a tale without adventures.”

The intellectual rate of metaphors here reaches very high peaks.

 

I want to end this first part with a completely different writer, much rougher and more aggressive. I'm talking about the famous “Journey to the End of the Night” by the French writer Céline. In his often visionary, obscene, and violent prose, I report this touching physical description of Madame Puta:

“Not that she was ugly, Madame Puta, no, she could even have been pretty, like so many others, except that she was so cautious, so suspicious, that she stopped at the edges of beauty, as at the edges of life, with her hair a little too neat, the smile too easy and sudden, the gestures a little too quick or a little too stealthy.”

Few words but perfect.

Last but not least, I want to mention an Italian writer who has made the psychological description one of his pillars, so much so that he has dedicated an entire novel to it, the beautiful “Zeno's Conscience” by Italo Svevo. 

Here is how the protagonist describes his own life: “My life could only provide a single note without any variation, high enough and that some envied me, but horribly tedious.”

 

I realize that it's not easy to tackle this topic, which is too vast, and many more authors should be cited. 

But, as I anticipated at the beginning, this was not my intention. Mine is more a suggestion than anything else. I think anyone reading these examples will be able to understand what I mean. And I think that in the second part this comes out in a more overwhelming way.

For now, I leave you to decant the style of these masters of the pen who were also my teachers, before flying to Asia; and I do it with a last gift from dear Cioran, another aphorism among my favorites.

“Wisdom masks our wounds:
teaches us how to bleed secretly.”
(Emil Cioran)

 

Italian version