I would like to know what are your points of view on Bradbury's metaphors. He says he writes metaphors, not stories or novels. Share your opinions on this with me

All I can say is the more you read of his works, the more you recognize the magic of his metaphors. They jump out at you from his pages, sometimes they sneak up on you, and then you start to see them coming to life in what you have done and are doing!!

He is a wizard, a magician, a composer, an architect of the past and future, a healer of sorts, a musician, an artist, a poet, .... a benevolent human being who shares his craft and zen-like phrasings freely with anyone who ventures to open to that very first page!

[This message has been edited by fjpalumbo (edited 12-13-2002).]

I share your point of view, his metaphors are alive and timeless, as they are always actual. Have you read his short story 'A Piece of Wood'?

To my utter embarrassment, I'm always a bit unclear on metaphors. Sometimes I know when I'm seeing one, but other times I just can't quite put my finger on it. When in doubt, look it up . . .

Metaphor = "A figure of speech in which the writer describes something in a way normally reserved for something else, thus presenting it in a new light." (The New Century Handbook, 2nd Ed. Christine Hult and Thomas Huckin. glossary.)

Metaphor = "A figure of speech in which a term is tranferred from the object it ordinarily designates to an object it may designate only by implicit comparison or analogy, as in the phrase, 'evening of life'" (The American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd Ed.)

Because metaphors often involve subjective analysis, part of the fun of Bradbury is to seek them out and define them.

In "Bradbury, An Illustrated Life: A Journey to Far Metaphor" Bradbury writes an introduction called, "Journey to Far Metaphor". In this, he talks about his use of metaphor and says it was unconscious for years. It took him 20 years of writing to realize he was writing them. He says he was producing "The Martian Chronicles" on stage, and suddenly realized the martians had on the golden masks of Tutankhamen. He said he realized he had been saving Tutankhaman metaphors for years. In this case, the metaphor is not verbal, really, but visual. It is not a word applied differently, but an image in one place representing an image in another. So is this really a metaphor? It seems more like imagery where one image evokes another, rather than the case of a metaphor based on a figure of speech as defined above.

He uses the same sense of metaphor in his afterward to the book, "One More for the Road". In this he writes of his metaphors of allowing his books/stories to be taken out of the text and "stuffed" into film. They are so visual, it is implied, they suit themselves readily to film.

"For years metaphors bombarded me, but I never knew what they were, never having learned the word. The recognition of metaphors came late when I found that ninety-nine percent of my stories were pure image, impacted by movies, the Sunday funnies, poetry, essays, and the detonations of Oz, Tarzan, Jules Verne, Pharoah Tutankhamen and their attendant illustrations."

The definitions of Metaphor seem to focus on figures of speech, on verbal terms being applied in different ways than ordinary usage would dictate. But Bradbury's metaphors are images that evoke other images.

I'm open for some enlightened soul to help me understand the relationship between the definition and the description of metaphor in these examples.

Help me!

All I can say is--YIKES! You struck a nerve here. I always thought a simile was when a writer said something was like something else, and a metaphor was when they said something was something else. That's the way Joseph Campbell defined it in "The Power of Myth," and he seemed to think it pretty sad that an educated person wouldn't know that. Fine, so, when Bradbury says the Electrical Grandmother was "like a hive of intellectual bees swarming" it's a simile, when the pamphlet describing her says she "has a complete knowledge of the religious, artistic, and sociopolitical histories of the world seeded in her master hive" it's a metaphor--saying her brain IS a hive and her stored facts ARE bees--which are, by the way, one of his favorite images; both literal and metaphorical. But if you take it a step further and say the STORY is itself a metaphor, for instance for some aspect of the human condition--yer gettin' in too deep for me, but a person could make a good topic of it. Which is beside the point of what bothers me. I could sit and write metaphors, dialogue, description, and suchlike all day, and if I were lucky, maybe even characters (of which Bradbury has a raft of memorable ones) but what does this tell us about PLOT? Action, reaction, and resolution? Bradbury has been remarkably unhelpful in this respect. The only remark of his which stuck in my mind was from "Zen in the Art of Writing," that he would take a character who really wanted something and let him run, then follow after him. The resulting "plot" was the "footprints in the snow" discovered in following the character (and there's another metaphor right there for ya.) Phyllis A. Whitney at least addressed this in one of her books on writing, saying a plot is like a puzzle--any piece that doesn't fit the puzzle, doesn't belong in the book. Robert Newton Peck has said conflict is "pig simple"--"two dogs and one bone." Yet Bradbury sails along going on about the poetry of passion, or whatnot, with little of practical use regarding plot. (Correct me if I've missed certain examples of practical advice along the way somewhere.) In high school I had a friend who loved Larry Niven. I wrote him a letter asking him to write my friend as a surprise for Christmas, and mentioned my favorite writer was Ray Bradbury. He wrote my friend, and also a letter which I felt was praising of me but faintly critical of Bradbury. I wrote back asking what he meant, and he said (nearly word-for-word) that Bradbury discovered a way to tell a story "by simply implying a crucial part of it, and he makes it look so easy that many young writers break their hearts trying to imitate him." (Donn Albright disagreed--said you don't finish "The Small Assassin" believing the doctor was going to take the baby to someone who could find him a good home, being a poor orphan! "The Next in Line" and "And the Rock Cried Out" leave slightly more room for interpretation--it's strongly implied that main characters die--yet you never SEE the bodies!) Years later I related these remarks to another friend, who said, "When the story starts, a window opens, and at the end, it closes, but the story is still going on." Okay, can I start ranting and raving here? Tough, I'm going to anyway. Bradbury has had tremendous success making novels of short stories. "The Martian Chronicles," "Dandelion Wine," and most of his other novels started out as individual short stories. "Something Wicked This Way Comes" and "Fahrenheit 451" were expanded short stories. Well, guess what! Not every novel can be expanded out of a short story or broken down into a series of short stories! I can certainly write a series of scenes from a novel, and a summary of what's missing between scenes, but that doesn't mean individual parts of the novel are going to stand alone as stories in themselves, or be connected by "bridge-passages." This is a little off the topic of metaphor, which of course can be used in different types of fiction and non-fiction, but I think Bradbury takes not so much the act of writing, as the act of finishing and completing a writing project, a little too much for granted in terms of supposed ease. DO take his advice, BUT, it is counter-productive for one writer to beat up on themselves for not being able to write in the same manner and method as another writer, even a great favorite. Just remind yourself that Ray learned, as he says, "That by doing things, things get done."

Yes, of course, similes clearly "like" and "as" us! Metaphors, I think, sneak up on us. In a well-told tale they may start out subtly but then become suddenly profound.

How many of us have commented over the past months on this site on instances in his writings that seem to cut to the bone of what we have always thought or even experienced at some time in our lives. "Metaphor" may be simply a literary technique crafted onto the page. However, when done so as uniquely as expressed by RB, it does seem to (Dandy) "strike a nerve!"

Someone posted a statement recently about passing on the word about Ray Bradbury's works by making a gift of one of his books to someone else (in "Ageism"?). Passing it on is a metaphor of sorts, is it not? Right out of Dandelion Wine!!

You exchange ideas about his writing only to find, sooner or later, there was a link (nerve) already in place that was shared between the giver and the receiver. Is this then an extended metaphor? The gift of a book idea suddenly grew into "letters" to CBS and PBS. Why would we want to do this for a person few of us have spoken to and even fewer have met?

I think it is not mere coincidence. It has somehow to do with our conscious and subconscious knowledge. With Mr. Bradbury's works, metaphors seem to carry through, revealing a more personal meaning to his readers (immediately or over time).

Consider one of the most quoted metaphors (and possibly reflective of what I have so inadequately tried to capture in these remarks):
"No man is an island, entire to itself; everyman is a piece of the continent, a part of the main..." J. Donne, Meditation XVII

Ray Bradbury has revealed, unintentionally in the earlier years and Zen-like after he recognized his gift, that we are all a part of a grander scheme. Somehow we fit into it or, at least, witness it - to degrees we freely choose to admit.

Or not - as in, "We grasp at the phantom of happiness, only to have the bubble burst and leave but ashes in our empty hands."

Zen in Writing; Yestermorrow; Green Shadows, White Whale; Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine all offer enough food for thought for even the most ravenous appetite in search of metaphors to feast upon!



[This message has been edited by fjpalumbo (edited 12-17-2002).]

Okay, I'll try a story-as-metaphor analysis. I believe "The Thing at the Top of the Stairs" is a metaphor for death and many people's attitudes towards it. The small child has an instinctive fear of death, which in his mind has taken the form of a monster. The fear is as real as a physical being, and an authority figure, in this case his father, telling him NOT to be afraid, does not the least to budge it. It's an instinctive and almost inborn fear to which almost everyone can relate, making the reader identify with the main character. This is done so skillfully you don't, at least in my case, recognize the story as a metaphor until the second reading. It just seems like an action story. (I went through the same experience with my father, only in my case it was the bottom of the stairs--basement--and I found I was, at least for the time being, more scared of my father than of the bottom of the stairs.) The boy grows into an older man and realizes HA!--didn't die young--feels "it didn't get me," and forgets to worry about it. (A typical response.) At the end, he discovers death to be a patient monster which waits for each individual, which no one escapes (making it a universal experience) but which each must face alone. Compare this ending to that in "Something Wicked This Way Comes"--they are two sides of a coin. It's great!

I've found this definition of metaphor by George Lakoff 'Metaphors are mappings, that is, sets of conceptual correspondences.'
For me metaphors stand for a concept we have of something by giving it the characteristics that usualy belong to something else. We look at something and inspite of not being described as we would describe it we identify it because the image is so clear. I don't know if i've made myself clear!! As I am Portuguese and I live in Portugal sometimes my English betrays me.

Ana, sounds good to me. The more we ponder this one, the more elusive it remains.

It makes you wonder if life is the metaphor just waiting to be realized!?

[This message has been edited by fjpalumbo (edited 12-17-2002).]

That is the way I read B's stories as pieces of a puzzle and the puzzle is life!

Mr. Dark said
"But Bradbury's metaphors are images that evoke other images".

I think I can add another point here, but on a different level. Bradbury's metaphors / images are for me often an inspiration for a painting. But not only for me...
I gave my friend a copy of "The Foghorn" because she wanted to paint a coastal scene but s.th. in her picture was missing. Reading the text gave her the idea to put a prehistoric Nessy-like animal in it... Isn't it wonderful to see that Bradbury's metaphors are not just in itself something really intriguing, but also serve for other purposes?