Word: metaphoric
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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White Noise features a cloud of toxic industrial waste, although the author's larger concern is with death as metaphor. As usual, DeLillo mixes black comedy with a ceremonious tone: "The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings." The whirly appendages belong to helicopters tracking the monster smudge over Iron City, a small industrial town and home of the College-on-the-Hill...
Nobody mentions it, but this funny and harrowing play takes place in a Dallas suburb on the tenth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. The coincidence of dates sends Home Front aloft toward political metaphor. Dad may be every "reasonable" statesman who led the U.S. deeper into Viet Nam; Mom and Sis could be every uncommitted American woman, worried sick about her boy or her beau, but hoping against all evidence for the best. And Jeremy may not be kidding when he says that in Viet Nam "I died." Alive or dead, he is the twisted ghost of every...
...Shoes is the lesser of the two books in every way; fewer pages, less expensive, and less ambitious. Duncan has not so much created a metaphor as unleashed a myth from the collective subconscious of the American moviegoer. The post-Jungian archetype of Red Shoes is featured prominently on its cover: Dorothy's Ruby Slippers from the Wizard of Oz. As you will recall, the Ruby Slippers were both Dorothy's validation sticker into Oz and her ticket out, the tangible insignia of an intangible fantasy. Capitalizing on this inspiration, Duncan's are symbolically restricted to role-playing and fantasy...
Wackerbarth and Clarke take the different tack of tacky. Since symbolic red sofas are not a literary or cinematic commonplace, they started right off with a metaphor in search of a meaning. Least Heat Moon's informative but overly journalistic commentary describes the origin of the sofa project in an unused college swimming pool, revealing in a reverent tone that the photographers initially envisioned suing the Red Couch "to disturb the commonplace into something new, and then photograph the results." The presence of the sofa in every picture imposes self-consciousness on the photos, becoming a big red photographic...
...modesty is no virtue in conceptual art. Duncan's mediocre ambition appears in every picture, while the overreaching bravado of hauling two red couches in a van for four years is captured in nearly every shot. Inevitably, the quality comes from the men and not the metaphor...