Dead Souls

Nabokov says of Gogol:

“The peripheral characters of his novel are engendered by the subordinate clauses of its various metaphors, comparisons and lyrical outbursts. We are faced by the remarkable phenomenon of mere forms of speech directly giving rise to live creatures."

'A drowning man, it is said, will catch at the smallest chip of wood because at the moment he has not the presence of mind to reflect that hardly even a fly could hope to ride astride that chip, whereas he weighs almost a hundred and fifty pounds if not a good two hundred.'

“Who is that unfortunate bather, steadily and uncannily growing, fattening himself on the marrow of a metaphor? We shall never know – but he almost managed to gain a footing.”

Gogol had the Russian panorama to paint – following Chichikov on his mysterious journey (an awesome premise) to buy up all the “dead souls” he can find – and so moved on.

I stood at a bar day after day and let one subordinate clause after another outgrow the metaphor and wreck the narrative, which begs two questions: were the subordinate clauses, one after another, cumulative only like so many fireworks, all there was of metaphor?; and what the hell was that story, anyway?