The Metaphor of Reptile in Writing–Part Two

Karawang, Indonesia. 2010

 

We parted in Part One with examples of metaphors in some of the great writers of the West.

The idea is to combine these examples with those extrapolated from the novels of oriental writers, to highlight the difference in their conception and the reference system.

Where the metaphor in the great Western novelists, especially relating to the description of the characters, is very often focused on intellectual, psychological, or merely descriptive aspects with classic adjectives, the completely different style in the novels of writers from the other side of the world immediately catches the eye.

 

First of all, the use of metaphor is much more frequent. There are writers, such as Soth Polin, a famous Cambodian writer who uses almost one per page in his novels. I want to start from him, if only he is the last one I'm reading.

Soth Polin is one of the very few Cambodian writers who survived the Khmer Rouge period, whose cult novel “The Anarchist”, from 1980, was recently reprinted by the publishing house ObarraO Edizioni, which has become my point of reference precisely in this research by Asian authors.

The style of the writers of this area immediately appears aggressive, impetuous, with a strong physical impact, which is the point from which we started by citing the splendid Cioran's metaphor of the reptile at work.

Already the incipit recalls the corrosive and flammable style of Agota Kristof, Thomas Bernhard, Cioran himself.

“My life flowed like a slow hemorrhage”; and a few lines later: “In a sense I was skinned from my shell.”

We are on the first page, but so far nothing that has not already been said, I quote one of all, which was then in the previous part, for example by Dostoevsky in the “Memories of the subsoil”.

Then, he begins with his carom of metaphors in this style:

“We quickly resumed our path. Big drops of sweat similar to corn kernels wet my face.”

“Through the transparent water, I could indistinctly perceive the clouds that looked like spaghetti in Cambodian sauce.”

Or like a French girl's hair that is “auburn-blond like corn”; “The sight of her of her shapely legs, browned and firm like banana flowers.”

In the second part of the novel, the author has a car accident with his taxi causing the death of his client, described as follows:

“The young woman thrown to the ground in a fraction of a second rolling on herself, crumpled up, writhing like a reptile on the embers.”

Not to mention how the sexual attributes are called, the female one, for example, is called “the pie”, “Nom Kom”, the rice pie, which dates back to the Brahmanic tradition of Cambodian marriage; in another point, referring to the female genital organ called yoni, he writes, “she had thin and fresh hair like champou pollen”, which is a tree cultivated in gardens for its fruits to be eaten as soon as they are picked, with an obvious metaphor in the metaphor.

He also cites idioms that give a good idea of the carnality of his culture, one is related to a certain type of character of Cambodian man, who has “hands of fire that burn, chicken claws that hurt”, the other even more morbidly physical it refers to the ability to excite a woman: “it makes her wet like a snail on the bark of a banana tree”.

Not least is the Chinese writer Ma Jian, whose most famous and censored novel in China, “Stick Out Your Tongue – Stories from Tibet”, from 1987, was reprinted last year.

His prose is also very aggressive and carnal, with constant references to the physical sphere, as when he describes a girl who “had recently grown a lot and was now as beautiful as a wild raspberry. 'Anyone who sees her would like to take a bite'.” Still of the same girl he remembers her “smell of sour milk on her skin.”

We must not forget that in his stories the protagonists are the wide arid valleys of the Himalayas, those poor and agricultural villages, for which his metaphors follow that state of mind, and then: “The visitors crowded on the threshold and stood there still as if a flock of black sheep.”

 

This last argument suggests a parenthesis to me. I said in the first part of how metaphors are of different kinds in the West because of the environment in which writers have grown up shapes their way of seeing and feeling. A philosophical and psychological substratum has led most of the great writers to use metaphors and rhetorical figures totally different from the ones I am quoting. It must be said, however, that, as a dear friend of mine and a professor at the university specializing in Latin American literature confirmed to me, it is not exclusive to Asian writers, in Latin American novels the use of metaphors is almost the same. I would add that in Italy itself, the style of Sardinian writers is paradigmatic, among the most powerful and evocative precisely by virtue of the peculiarity of the island.

It came to mind when I talked about the sheep metaphor in Tibet tales as that is the environment in which its characters move.

With the obligation to mention Grazia Deledda, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926, who despite being still in the wake of nineteenth-century literature, did not fail to use metaphors such as: “an old man swollen and black like a wineskin”, and “opened the arms, and fell to the ground like an unsupported climbing plant.” (“The ivy”)

But it is with contemporary writers that this style intensifies and reaches powerful images, from the novel “Sonetàula” of 2000 by Giuseppe Fiori, which tells the story of a young Sardinian shepherd, who is described at the beginning just like this: “More than man, he was raised the son of woods and sheep, in the long silences of Monte Entu.” Up to parts in which the symbiosis between the protagonist and the sheep becomes almost hallucinatory: “The memory of the drops of lard left burning on the meat to make it well browned and tasty put the fire in his head.”

In my opinion, however, Salvatore Niffoi is absolutely worth reading, whose prose is a fervent and material swarming of adjectives and metaphors. It's enough to quote the opening words of the 2010 novel “The Baton of Miracles”.

“Lycurgus Caminera stood motionless like a lizard in the room full of books... His head, sunk on the pillow, continued to milk a greasy sweat that his daughter Penelope wiped every now and then with a kitchen cloth. […] He sought her daughter's gaze and, hooking her index finger that resembled a hawthorn stick, invited her to come closer. […] Lycurgus's nails were as hard as goshawk claws and had the color of earth and tobacco juice.”

Sardinia is my mother's land and, even though I have only been there three times as a child, I know well those landscapes and the character of the people from her stories, so it was not difficult to imagine the type of literature that could have come out of that island, and I don't think it's very different even for another island like Sicily, which is also close to Africa with all that that entails.

But let's get back to our Asian writers.

Not that this style is the prerogative of male writers.

We take for example Journal-Gyaw Ma Ma Lay, the most famous Burmese writer with her masterpiece “The Burmese Bride”, from 1994.

I quote this beautiful passage in which the first interest of the protagonist Wai Wai in the one who will become her husband is described:

“Eyes cast down, Wai Wai was happy. She greedily received the affectionate interest of that man, whom she considered cold and proud, just as the cracked earth of Kason is impregnated with the first wave of the monsoons”, where Kason is the time of year from April to May.

At another time, Wai Wai is described by her husband as “that fragile lotus flower that managed to rise from the mud of the swamps”; and as in Soth Polin also in Ma Ma Lay's novel idioms of Burmese culture are cited, such as: “She was like a monkey sitting on a brazier”, to indicate the maximum agitation. I close with her by quoting how the now sick body of the protagonist is described: “Her body had that tormented aspect that trees take at the beginning of the dry season, with the tangles of branches stripped of withered leaves.”

 

In this tour, we now go to the Philippines of Mia Alvar, one of the most gifted contemporary writers, with her collection of short stories “Shadow Families” of 2015. Her style is also figurative with references to the plant world, as when she describes in the first story the protagonist's father: “He had a belly as big as a watermelon, and almost as green because of the veins stretched against the skin.”

In another story a man is described as follows: “He had a broad nose, a bit bovine to the nostrils”; or a woman: “Her hair, the unlikely color of a Sunkist orange, followed the curve of her jaw, longer in front and shorter at the nape, with locks dangling in front of her face like stiff feathers.” Or a “dark complexion like cinnamon”, or a voice that “was flat and powerful like a wooden spoon against a table.”

Just to cite a few examples, although in my opinion one of the most beautiful and profound metaphors is the one in the story that gives the collection its title, and says: “We lived as farmers at the foot of a volcano, afraid of offending the gods who govern our crops and our wealth,” referring to Filipino families who emigrated to Bahrain to work.

Metaphors like these are also not lacking in Malay literature, capable of using the plant world to describe destinies or conceptions of existences, as in the splendid metaphor of Fatimah Busu in “Salam Maria”, of 2004:

“Women are like the cucumber and the life around them is like the durian.

Whether women approach life or avoid it, they will still be crushed, just like the durian crushes the cucumber.”

Where it's essential to know the durian fruit, which is one of the main fruits in Malaysia, and in much of Asia, characteristic precisely for its hardness and for the skin covered with stiff and pointed thorns.

 

This use of wide-ranging metaphors is also used by an Indonesian writer, Ayu Utami, in her 2001 novel “Saman”:

“Here in this park I'm a bird that flown thousands of miles from a county that knows no seasons, a bird that's migrated in search of spring; spring, where you can smell the grass and the trees; trees, whose name or ages we can never know.”

Not even a best-selling author such as the Indonesian Andrea Hirata, perhaps the most famous contemporary author in the Indo-Malay area, escapes this style. The example taken from the 2007 novel “Edensor” applies:

“At the Sorbonne every day I am poisoned by knowledge even if I am like a quail chick that stumbles after a mother partridge.”

 

I think my thoughts are now easily understood.

I underline the fact that this absolutely wants to be just a literary suggestion and not a critical essay, a game of comparisons and sensations. As I mentioned earlier, citing the case of Sardinian writers, there are also here examples of more material and carnal metaphors, but in the corners of the world where life is more linked to survival, to work in the fields, to strong sensuality I would also add, the writing tends to resemble that reptile at work of Cioran, from which I started.

I quote at the end a classic of ancient Tamil literature, that Shilappadikaram,  “TheGolden Anklet” of which I have already written, and we are talking about the third and seventh centuries AD. Even then, the main character Kannaki was described with her shoulders “like curved reeds”, or “her undone hair looked like a dark forest”; or she is able to embrace her husband “like a vine”.

Just to give an idea of how everything started from far more remote times.

Meanwhile, in 8 AD, Ovid finished his “Metamorphoses”, the poem in which the myths and transformations of the gods, loves and human passions intertwined with those of the natural world are narrated.

All this long ranting of mine, in reality, is meant to be just a slightly convoluted way to answer those who ask me about the writing that I love to read and write. Obviously, I love Dostoevsky's psychological analyzes and excavations or the sublime intellectual descriptions of Musil or Joyce. However, perhaps precisely because I lived on my skin, I smelled, touched, and saw those places, now I feel that type of writing much more like me; photography was no small factor in this predilection. Going from devoured books in the enclosure of a room or library to walking kilometers, being stunned by the strong smells of the markets as much as blinded by the intense green of the rice fields, also changes our way of writing, as well as of living.

 

So get dirty with your senses, don't be ashamed of your impulses and passions, peel your ideas of the sophisticated part, the pulp is what counts.

Write forcing the reader to use all the senses, make them sweat, shake, dirty and to make enjoy pleasure like a snail on the bark of a banana tree.

After all, one of the classic questions that is asked in photography courses is: why should someone stop to see our photographs? Wasting two minutes of their time on us? The same goes for those who read us.

We must give this to those who dedicate their time to our novels, short stories or poems. The pleasure of reading, pleasure intended precisely in the physical and carnal sense, not just mental. Idea and flash. Emotion and passion. Reminding us that psychology also passes through our fluids and desires, by touch and by blood.

I close by quoting Cioran's last aphorism, precisely on this topic and whoever wants to understand, intend…
“A thousand years of war have consolidated the West;
a century of “psychology” has reduced him to his limit.”
(E. Cioran, "Syllogisms of bitterness")

Italian version