In chapter 26 of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Miss Cathy was finally approved to have a meeting with Linton Heathcliff, only to find him weaker in his body, while he expressed his fear towards his father Mr.Heathcliff:
‘And be here again next Thursday,’ continued he, shunning her puzzled
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In readingx, I recently came across a description of a modern poet as "the finest lyric poet of his generation". This was an unfamiliar term to me, so I looked it up: Wikipedia has it as:
formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person
I...
Reading humpa Lahiri's novel Whereabouts, one of the things that I noticed is the way that the natural world reflects the narrator's state of mind. For example, when she's making a trip to a castle with a married man and his children (because his wife is sick), when they are driving home she thinks "I feel a panic starting to rise, not trusting that low cement barrier between us and the abyss."
I suspect that this fear reflects her fear of starting an affair with him (not that there's any real chance of that). There are lots of other instances of this kind of thing, and I now wish I'd been paying attention to things like this at the beginning of the book, as noticing them would probably have enhanced my enjoyment of this novel.
I'd ask a question about this, but I can't think of a reasonable one offhand.
Some possible questions: 'Is she really doing this?" I have no doubt about it. "Does she do this in her other novels?" I don't think this is a very interesting question, and it's easy enough to answer. "What is this technique called?" I might call these things "objective correlatives," although I'm not sure that they're exactly what T.S. Eliot was talking about when he coined the term.
So maybe a good question would be "is the best name for this technique "objective correlatives", or is there a better term for this?
I don't know that there's a widely used term, but when I need to talk about this device, I coined "displacement of description" (one, two, three) as the essence is the displacement of a description from one thing to another.
In your example, precarity gets displaced from the narrator to the road. Other cases include adjectives getting displaced from one noun to another (transferred epithets), or emotions getting displaced from a person to the weather (pathetic fallacies).
One reason I posted this in Meta was so that people who read Whereabouts — I assume there will be a few of them — will start looking for this technique earlier, as opposed to me, who read through half the novel before I noticed Lahiri was doing this.
Probably inattentive reading on my part, but I assume I can't be the only inattentive reader.
In readingx, I recently came across a description of a modern poet as "the finest lyric poet of his generation". This was an unfamiliar term to me, so I looked it up: Wikipedia has it as:
formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person
I...
