Confronting the Medusa: Similes in The Golden Apples

"The soul never thinks without a mental image."

—Aristotle, De Anima III.7.431a

In reading any writer's works, I am always influenced by my main activity and passion as a translator. This means that, even as a mere reader, my first contact with any kind of literary text (novel, short story, or poem) instinctively leads me to observe the distinguishing features of that particular writing, and instead of trying to explain them, I am concerned only with imagining how I could recreate them in my own language.

I did not know Eudora Welty at all when I started to read her works from the collection she said was most meaningful to her, The Golden Apples. I was moved by her stories in a way that I usually associate with the reading of poetry. Soon, I was to discover why: Welty's writing is a continual apprenticeship in seeing; her first impulse is "exposure," a term, of course, related to photography that, in her own words, "begins in intuition; and the intuition comes to its end in showing the heart that has expected, while it dreads, that exposure" ("Writing" 778). Neither the characters nor the writer herself know beforehand what such an exposure will lead to, as this is part of the mystery of living, and Welty in her writing seeks not to explain it but just to explore it. Relationships are mysteries, place is a mystery, and in the end the mystery lies in the human mind, which—again in Welty's words—is "a mass of associations—associations more poetic even than actual" ("Place" 782). To represent these associations, the writer, like the photographer, needs to focus, "the act that, continued in, turns into meditation, into poetry" ("Place" 787). It is as if Welty, to penetrate reality, had to put reality through the same process as photography. Even though in One Writer's Beginnings Welty declared that she had felt from the start the need to put life into words and not into pictures,¹ in her essays, she analyzes and explains her own or other writers' work in terms of exposing, framing, and focusing.

As she wrote in One Writer's Beginnings, Welty had always been shy, and while to take photographs one needs to be ready to capture life in the "click of the moment" (OTOP 12), writing gave her the chance to draw near slowly, protracting her role as a "privileged observer" (OWB 862). Photography certainly taught her how to attain the right "distance of the observing eye," but it seems that, as she grew more aware of the techniques which allowed her to obtain a final product as close as possible to her intentions, she eventually became more interested in developing, in making images emerge not so much from reality as from the invisible (862). If photography can only hint at what is invisible, or hidden, or out-of-frame, a linear use of language cannot give voice to the invisible. The writer needs to search for a break, a shift, a hole in the narration which takes the reader straight away to another layer of enunciation.

And here I come to the recurrent stylistic device I immediately noticed in her writing that is usually a distinctive feature of poetry and less so of prose: an extensive use of similes, either when Welty is portraying a character or when she is describing a landscape, a situation, or a mood. Once again, such a stylistic device seems more properly defined by photographic terminology. In Welty's writing, similes in fact provide a sort of double frame within one image, connecting the outside world she is describing with her inner one. In "Place in Fiction," Welty explains point of view in her fiction:

Point of view is a sort of burning-glass, a product of personal experience and time; it is burnished with feelings and sensibilities, charged from moment to moment with the sun-points of imagination. It is an instrument—one of intensification; it acts, it behaves, it is temperamental. We have seen that the writer must accurately choose, combine, superimpose...