Made up of Parmesan cheese.... (10cc, 1975)
Metaphors, similes, allegories....
All the world’s a stage, says Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Of course, all the world is not a stage, but this is Jaques’ metaphor for helping us to understand life’s progression from infancy to old age.
Jaques extends the metaphor, and describes the seven stages of human life, each one, he says, being a part that we might play, as an actor does on the stage. An extended metaphor is sometimes referred to as a ‘conceit’.
The 17th century poet, John Donne, in his poem The Flea, uses an ingenious, though unpleasant conceit in trying to seduce his lady before they are married. The two of them have been bitten by the same flea….
Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is….
Some authors use the complete story as a metaphor – a representation of something else. George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm tells the story of animals expelling their cruel farmer and running the farm on their own. Many see this story as depicting the events before and after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The story as metaphor is sometimes referred to as an allegory.
Franz Kafka’s unsettling story Metamorphosis begins when the protagonist realises that he has been changed, overnight, into an insect. The story can be seen as an allegory of social alienation and ostracism.
American playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, a story set in 17th century America, in which a panic-stricken community falsely accused some of its members of practising witchcraft. The Crucible is seen by many as an allegory representing political events in Miller’s own time, when some American politicians, notably Senator Eugene McCarthy, were trying to root out socialism and communism from post-war American society. The McCarthyite witch-hunts of the late 1940s and through the 50s saw thousands of Americans lose their jobs, with hundreds being imprisoned.
