SOURCE: "The Gorgon's Head and the Mirror: Fact versus Metaphor in Lanterns on the Levee" in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XIV, No. 1, Fall, 1981, pp. 36-45.

In the following essay, Holdsworth examines the interplay of metaphors in Lanterns on the Levee.

Thirty years ago Mark Schorer published an article emphasizing the importance of metaphor in the novel: "Yet a novel, like a poem, is not life, it is an image of life; and the critical problem is first of all to analyze the structure of the image."¹ Recently critics have expanded the bounds of metaphor study to include the analysis of autobiographies, for although the composition of an autobiography is an enumeration of facts, it is also an artistic process. This process does not necessarily distort the facts but rather weaves them together and gives them a unity lacking in a bare chronology. The nature of man, and...