The True Value of Figurative Language
Maddox Gifford on The White Book by Han Kang
The White Book is difficult to categorise. It is listed as fiction in some online sources, as nonfiction in my local library, yet it reads as bordering on poetry, even including short poems at some points. A contributing factor to its poetic nature is the abundance of figurative language to be found in its pages. These range from ‘basic’ visual comparisons to more complex usage.
Slip on those clothes that the fire has borne to you, like slipping on a pair of wings. Drink it like medicine or tea, our silence, dissolving into smoke in place of words.
And looser, more subtle instances.
Your sleep is clean, and the fact of your living is nothing to be ashamed of.
A dense concentration of metaphors could become tedious, but in Han’s sure hands, it does not. Each use of figurative language is different, none are superfluous, and none are boring. There is also the extended metaphor that is constructed and elaborated throughout the book — the colour white as purity, as something ethereal and dreamlike. For me, having never thought much about white beyond finding its intangible perfection unsettling, it provides completely new insight. This, of course, is the point of metaphor.
In A Poetry Handbook, the late, great, Mary Oliver writes:
In figurative language, a familiar thing is linked to an unknown thing, as a key, to unlock the mystery, or some part of the mystery, of the thing that is unknown.
Han finds meaning within the colour white and in the small, unnoticed details of everyday existence. This is the unknown. She must translate it to me — the clueless uninitiated — through the use of the familiar.
Stale pain has not yet withered quite away, fresh pain has not yet burst into bloom.
The imagery and emotional implications of something withering away or bursting into bloom are simple and universal, as are the concepts of freshness and staleness. The language, too, is plain enough. Yet such metaphors rarely fail to engage our sentiments, or at least our attention. Why is that?
The true value of figurative language lies in its originality.
Writing in the modern era, an issue that I wrestle with is that, well, everything has already been written. There is no such thing as a truly original piece of writing when we cannot help but draw on the tales that surround us; every premise and theme and plot twist we dream up has been done in some way, possibly better, by our predecessors. It is difficult to surprise a reader when they, too, are immersed in these stories and accustomed to their conventions.
But when a metaphor grabs hold of something we know well and stretches a connection to some other understandable thing, we are able to create meaning in the space between them, just as oppressions are theorised to create something entirely new where they intersect with one another.
Oliver articulates that the metaphor “captures some essence of a known thing” and applies it to another, and thus the heart of a concept which may otherwise have taken pages to communicate is conveyed in a single sentence.
At times my body feels like a prison, a solid, shifting island threading through the crowd.
This image is heavy in figurative language and sparse on true detail, but we do not need the latter — because of metaphor, we understand it on some baser level. So too can we feel in our guts what it means when Han writes:
My mother… lived with those shattered memories inside her, running her fingers carefully over their sharp edges.
