3 More for the Road: Figuration

This is the tenth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favorite travel books – Anthony Bailey's Along the Edge of the Forest (1983), Robert Sullivan’s Cross Country (2006), and Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia (2010) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their use of figuration.

In Cross Country, Sullivan writes, “Saw a ribbon of sunshine-sparkled cassette tape flutter across the road like the spine of an invisible snake.” It’s part of a passage so good, I can’t resist quoting it in full:

The next morning, I woke in the dark, took my one small bag (clothes, a tooth brush, my journal) to the trunk of the cab, pulled away; made the gradual turn onto the interstate; convinced a Texaco gas station owner a few exits away to allow me to park on the side of his lot for a second while I jogged into downtown Hood River for pancakes to go; ran back to the truck; thought, What was I thinking getting pancakes?; got maple syrup all over the truck’s steering wheel; drove into the high desert of eastern Oregon and then the high desert of eastern Washington; saw a ribbon of sunshine-sparkled cassette tape flutter across the road like the spine of an invisible snake; drove up into the Bitterroots via Idaho and Interstate 90; drove through winding steep-edged turns that gave views of darkening valleys full of pine trees; and then, late in the day, approached Fourth of July Pass, a summit. I was three thousand feet up, on the road built by Captain John Mullan, the great western road builder, the road later followed by interstate builders. 

God, I wish I’d written that. It’s got everything I relish – action, specificity, detail, humor, and, at its heart, that brilliant creative simile: “saw a ribbon of sunshine-sparkled cassette tape flutter across the road like the spine of an invisible snake.”

Figurative speech doesn’t get much better than that. Can Frazier top it? Yes! In one of Travels in Siberia’s most sublime passages, he describes leaving the Marinsky Theatre after watching a ballet:

Afterward, Luda and I jostled through the remarkably long and slow line of people returning their rented opera glasses, and the equally full line at the coat check, and then we were outside in the cold among the dissipating perfumes and faint cigarette smoke, and snow was falling steadily straight down. It was billowing in the streetlights overhead and making cones of the lights of the waiting taxicabs, and as we stood deciding whether to walk or take a cab, snowflakes came to rest among the fibres of fur in her hat. Each flake was small but unbroken, and detailed as a cutout snowflake made in school.

That passage gets to me every time I read it. It conjoins such a variety of delectable, fascinating elements: the “slow line of people returning their rented opera glasses”; the “equally full line at the coat check”; the “outside in the cold among the dissipating perfumes and faint cigarette smoke”; the “snow was falling steadily straight down,” “billowing in the streetlights overhead and making cones of the lights of the waiting taxicabs”; the snowflakes coming to rest “among the fibres of fur in her hat,” and then that exquisite, finely observed, clinching detail: “Each flake was small but unbroken, and detailed as a cutout snowflake made in school.” That’s pretty damn heady stuff. What more can I say? I love it. 

Bailey isn’t in this contest. Or is he? In one of Along the Edge of the Forest’s most memorable uses of figuration, he compares the border fence (die Grenze) between East and West Germany to a chemistry experiment:

In one way, the border was something that made everything artificially clear: it divided everything into one side or another, between us and them, right and wrong, with no middle ground. Die Grenze was an emblem of institutionalized conflict – the visible manifestation of the entire apparatus of political, industrial, scientific and military machinery on both sides, confronting one another. In another way, the division was like that of substances in a chemistry experiment – substances that should not mix, that create a barrier between one another so as to avoid combustion or explosion – or was this to look at it from a peace-and-quiet-at-all-cost point of view?

Bailey’s chemistry analogy is an example of figuration as meaning-making. It helps make sense of a seemingly irrational, grotesque phenomenon. 

In my next post in this series, I’ll consider another literary tool, of which all three of these writers are masters – use of detail.