Roxor's Torment stuff touches upon a particular bugaboo of mine, which is writing that has only implicit meaning. (I realize that some of those literature-degreed university types could lecture me about semiotics and so forth, but please don't, I was too dumb then and I'm dumber now, you'll never be able to help me.)
Roxor shoots at an easy target, which is metaphorical language where the subject of the metaphor (or is it the object?) is
equally outside the reader's experience. (The best use of a metaphor is X, which you might not fully be able to appreciate, is like Y, which you are fully able to appreciate. It's even better when this reveals some connection between X and Y that spawns Y.1, Y.2, Y.3 illuminating qualities X.1, X.2, X.3, etc.) "He grinned like a bragathac before it oviposits its brood" or whatever is not really a metaphor at all because the reader has no idea what Y is. But Y has implicit meaning; you get what the writer is trying to say but that's because the metaphor is so trite and sign-posted. It is also totally non-concrete. It really reads as two separate thoughts: "He grinned like [something that grins sadistically]. In this setting, bragathacs grin sadistically and lay eggs in people (probably?)." The metaphor is doing work, but not metaphorical work.
Anyway, the thing that has struck me in reading a lot of pastoral writing, a lot of Westerns (which might be a subset of pastoral writing), and generally in reading older books is that this issue arises outside of metaphorical language.
Here's an MRY attempt at such a pasage:
On a hillock above the salt pan was a stand of live oak in whose shade the windswept rushes could be more heard than seen. The rider ceased from stropping his razor and regarded the scene with bemusement in his eyes.
The thing is, I'm not quite sure how big a hillock is, or what a salt pan is, or a live oak, or even a "stand" of trees, or what sound rushes actually make when they're blowing, or what it means to "strop" a razor, and 9/10 readers will take "bemusement" to mean "ironical amusement" as opposed to perplexity or preoccupation, and anyway I'm not actually what it means for that to be "in his eyes" -- like, I can't actually picture what eyes look like when they are ironically amused (maybe twinkling?) or perplexity (maybe narrowed?). The entire paragraph could just read, "The cowboy saw typical western stuff, while doing typical western stuff, and had a cowboyish reaction." Like the fake metaphor, this kind of writing purports to be conveying concrete information to the reader, but I have to imagine I'm not alone among readers in having no idea what is actually being described.
Incidentally, the inspiration for it is the line from Shutter Island: "No way she could get there. The bases of those cliffs are covered in poison ivy, live oak, sumac, a thousand plants with thorns as big as my dick."
While I think Cormac McCarthy is probably describing things he knows when he writes about them in, say, Blood Meridian, I am suspicious of such descriptions in most contemporary literature because I strongly suspect they are just guess work: "Here are some words I've seen associated with the thing I'm talking about, so now I'm going to use those words to show that I know about the thing I'm talking about, even though I don't."
While the fake metaphor is
necessarily devoid of primary meaning, the concrete description can be authentic. And where it's authentic, it is hard to fault it -- such details are the only connection we have to the vast storehouse of human knowledge that we've thrown away by becoming urbanized and mechanized and packaged to such a degree that people are hard pressed to identify five different kinds of trees, or a cut of meat, or five constellations, etc. But the ersatz stuff is the worst because unlike the fake metaphor which is just empty, the ersatz concrete writing actually misinforms the reader. In my passage above, I could've substituted "jacaranda" for "live oak" and probably no one would've noticed, though I'm not sure jacarandas could even grow near a salt pan (hillock or otherwise).
