January 21 2026
I have been reading Dead Souls by Gogol and I noticed his very liberal use of metaphors. He likes to extend them to the point of entirely losing the reader, but in an endearing and silly way. Some of his metaphors become so convoluted with comparisons that they will turn into some abstract sense of plurality. I think this fulfills the spirit of the question one or several wolves.
"Petrushka … emitt[ed] his own personal air, and his own personal smell, which had something of a crowded room about it, so that he had only to put up his bed somewhere, even in a room that had never been lived in before, and drag in his greatcoat and possessions, and it would seem that people had been living there for ten years."
Except, in Gogol’s case, it’s an insult to be described as a multitude. Another example is the character Sobakevich. The narrator introduces him by insisting on his bear-like qualities. Suddenly, it's noticed that there is a "a cage housing a dark colored white-spotted thrush, which also resembled Sobakevich."
"Yet again Chichikov looked around the room and everything in it: everything was solid, ungainly in the highest degree, and bore an uncanny resemblance to the owner of the house. In the corner of the drawing stood a potbellied walnut bureau with four very absurd-looking legs, just like a bear. The table, the armchair, the chairs, everything had the same heavy disturbing quality—every object, in fact, every chair seemed to say, 'I’m Sobakevich, too!' or 'And I’m very like Sobakevich!'"
A woman at Sobakevich’s is described a little less significantly:
"here are people who exist in this world not as objects in themselves but as background dots or spots on an object. They sit in the same place, they hold their head the same way, they can almost be taken to be part of the furniture, and you would think that no word had ever passed their lips …"
In my mind I saw this happy sleepy illustration:
"Freud says that hysterics or obsessives are people capable of making a global comparison between a sock and a vagina, a scar and castration, etc … Yet it would never occur to a neurotic to grasp the skin erotically as a multiplicity of pores, little spots, little scars or black holes, or to grasp the sock erotically as a multiplicity of stitches. The psychotic can." (A Thousand Plateaus)