“My soul is a room”
The first person narrator of “An Unposted Love Letter” is the vehicle through Lessing presents with great flair her talent for extending metaphor. A paragraph opens with the philosophical assertion that “My soul is a room, a great room, a hall—it is empty, waiting.” From there the entire paragraph expands upon that theme with analysis and observation before ending with a stunningly unexpected departure:
“I feel what you are as if I stood near a tree and put my hand on its breathing trunk.”
In case you are wondering; that is what great writing looks like.
Opening Lines
The narrator of “How I Finally Lost My Heart” reveals to just what extent Lessing learned and applied the lesson that a great metaphor is one of the most effective means of kicking off a story and drawing a reader in. Consider this opening gambit:
“It would be easy to say that I picked up a knife, slit open my side, took my heart out, and threw it away, but unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as that. Not that I, like everyone else, had not often wanted to do it. No, it happened differently, and not as I expected.”
The title seems to promise little; a romantic tale almost announcing it is going to be trite. Those opening lines quickly dispel any such misconceptions with metaphorical bait sure to reel the discerning reader right into its vividly composed narrative.
Say What Now?
Lessing’s mastery of manipulating metaphor extends even to a kind of magic act in which she draws a reader in without the reader necessarily understanding—yet—exactly what she’s getting at. The opening of “Side Benefits of an Honourable Profession” starts with the phrase “Or rather, perhaps, a condition of the mud which nurtures.” So that gives an idea of just how removed things have gotten from the relative straightforwardness of the opening to the story mentioned above. And then, just a few lines later, this masterpiece of ambiguity that is nevertheless rich in potential for exporation:
“Accurate as well as charitable to see it all as a kind of compost, the rich mad muck which feeds those disciplined performances”
The Modern Valkyrie
In “The Day that Stalin Died” the narrator stops to give a description of cousin Jessie which manages to combined the legend of myth with the reality of contemporary life in a simile of deceptively profound insight:
“She is altogether like the daughter of a Viking, particularly when battling with conductors, taximen and porters.”
For what, after all, are the modern day comparisons to the monsters and villains of Norse mythology, but the things which bring headaches to our lives the way those monsters and villains made the lives of Vikings less tolerable?
“A kind of gifted insect”
The metaphorical imagery quoted above is found in the story “The Eye of God in Paradise.” It is a story about a handsome, urbane doctor named Kroll who just so happens to be the administrator of a madhouse in Germany in the years after World War II. Whether it is a case of the chicken or egg coming first, Kroll’s actual appearance is at odds with the way most people picture the artist responsible for a series of paintings which bring to vivid life some sort of madness. Before meeting him, most tend to wonder if the artist is a madman or monster, maniac or some “kind of gifted insect.”
