I’m under the impression that if you compare a color to something else of that same color it’s literal language. So, the dress was sky blue would be literal language. But does “the dress was as blue as the sky” suddenly become figurative language? If so, why? If not, why not?
Is it only figurative if it also cannot literally be true, or is it enough to be figurative if the sentence is richly evocative/descriptive?
Here’s the passage I’m working with a student on, and it’s the last sentence that’s giving me pause:
“They stopped running and stood in the great jungle that covered Venus, that grew and never stopped growing, even as you watched it. It was a nest of octopi, clustering up great arms of flesh-like weed, wavering, flowering this brief spring. It was the color of rubber and ash, this jungle, from the many years without sun. It was the color of stones and white cheeses and ink, and it was the color of the moon.”
He identified this last sentence as an instance of figurative language, my gut says this is literal language but I’m trying to explain the general principles that would allow him to make this conclusion on his own in other instances. This is maybe also complicated by the fact that it’s a science fiction story so the imaginative is bleeding into realistic.
Any help, particularly from English professors, creative writing instructors, and literary experts would be much appreciated!
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I don’t know that Id call myself an expert, but I taught high school English for years and taught this this way:
Simile (and metaphor) are figurative because they compare things that are essentially unlike each other. “A hawk is like an eagle” is a comparison. “Love is like a rose” is a simile. If you made a Venn diagram with hawks and eagles; the circles would almost entirely overlap (I don’t even know how they’re different!) But with love and a rose, the overlap would be small, and you’d need to give some thought to what they have in common.
So the simile acts as a sort of lens focusing on something about love (it’s beautiful but delicate, perhaps fleeting, has thorns. . .). Alternatively you can see it as a filter that removes our attention from certain aspects of love. I used the Venn diagram image to show this.
The image “the dress was a blue as the sky” could have other non-literal values, like a symbolic association or connection to other parts of the text as so have a “ literary feeling” without being metaphorical in any way.
I hope there’s something useful here for you.
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