Topical Guide 777
Mark Dorset
Metaphors and Similes: Clam Chowder
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 64:
[A] chowder is about chunks, individual chunks of unlike things, and it’s the complements and contrasts that make the chowder work: tomatoes and potatoes, onions and celery, clams and carrots—just think of all the permutations and combinations, and that’s what makes each bite interesting. As it is with a chowder, so it is with a self and a life: the complements and contrasts make it interesting: laughter and tears, the profound and the ridiculous, the real and the not, the frivolous and the grave. I see from what I’ve written that my letters to you are likely to resemble clam chowder, too, but maybe they only seem disorganized, because there’s order in chowder, even if it isn’t apparent. (If you think there isn’t order in clam chowder, just imagine running a bowl through the blender, then you’ll realize just how much order there is.)
You can fault me for over-interpreting, if you like, but I’m going to assert that I hear in this a rejection of the melting-pot metaphor for American society. A melting-pot society would be like what would result after running a bowl of chowder through a blender. You will have homogenized the dish. You will have lost the chunks and with them the complements and contrasts. A chowder-pot might be a better metaphor.
Books: Real and Fictional
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 64:
Later, I think, I might make a book out of these letters, go back and find all the bits of clam and gather them together in one chapter, all the chunks of potato in another, the tomatoes in another. You get the idea. Impose a rational organization on it. If I ever do that, I think I’ll call the book Making Your Self, and so this version, these letters that I’m going to write to you, this chowder pot of advice to myself, could be called Making My Self.
(Years later, she did write that book, and now it is in its sixth edition. It has been greatly revised and enlarged, and it now has a subtitle. It is called Making Your Self … and Dinner.)
[to be continued]
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