The Clock
One reads a story titled “When the Clock Strikes” with certain built-in preconceived expectations. First among them, perhaps, is the not-exactly-offbeat expectation that imagery may be engaged for the purpose of describing that clock in the title. Those expectations are met by the second paragraph:
“The pedestal is ebony and the face fine porcelain. And the figures, which are of silver, would pass slowly about the circlet of the face. Each figure represents, you understand, an hour. And as the appropriate hours came level with this golden bell, they would strike it the correct number of times. All the figures are unique, you see. Beginning at the first hour, they are, in this order, a girl-child, a dwarf, a maiden, a youth, a lady and a knight.”
The Storm
In the story titled “The Sea was in Her Eyes” Lee creates unusual imagery from the perspective of personifying a storm. Many of personified storms, of course, but mostly from the limited concept of Mother Nature narcissistically exhibiting the reach of her wrath. Few have done so with the eccentricity of Lee’s grasp of what imagery can do when the imagination is unleashed to explore the possible:
“That night a storm came up out of the sea, boiling and black. It put out the stars and smashed the plate of the moon. That done, it scanned about for something to harm, but though the land was not far off, it did not want the land. Then, it saw a ship dancing along, rigged with clouds, and with lights shining from the port-holes and in the lanterns, and under the howl of the wind fluttered the notes of a piano.”
People and Other Creatures
Some might argue—and vociferously—that the best that Lee can do when she puts her mind to imagery is the creation and delineation of her characters. Settings are invaluable to her stories, but those settings really come to life as a result of the characters that inhabit them. Pick a work story by Lee at random, flip through the pages, and eventually—and perhaps several times—the reader will come to a demonstration of her flair for making even the strangest of her characters spring vividly to life:
“The inside of his mouth, which he had also contrived to let her see, was a dark golden cave, in which conversely the humanness of the white teeth was in fact itself a shock. While at his loins the velvet flowed into a bearded blackness, long hair like unraveled silk; the same process occurred on the skull, a raying mane of hair, very black, very silken, its edges burning out through amber, ochre, into blondness—the sunburst of a black sun.”
Prodigy
Perhaps Lee is an exception; some sort of savant when it comes to a talent for imagery. How else to explain the capability for a young writer barely into her twenties writing a first novel intended for adult readers that actually creates memorable imagery to describe a book as a metaphorical symbol of an abstract idea like truth? So many levels working in unison together to create a poetry far beyond the author’s years:
“It came to me, as I walked, how bitter the irony of the Book had been which had said: Herein the Truth. For it had a truth of its own in its bleached barrenness. What was truth except something which faded, lost its shape, grew unreadable and indistinguishable, at last a blank page for men to write on what they wished.”
