Turner’s late masterpiece, the painting “Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway”.) A locomotive dynamo of wheels, rods and gears - its huff and puff, the blasting screech of its whistle - and smoke pouring in black plumes behind it. But what is it about this metaphor that impresses itself so deeply on our imagination? Firstly, it is the reduction of social forces to a single mechanism: a small black box in which pistons propel steam to drive a huge iron horse. Trotsky’s choice of metaphor assumes our knowledge that the steam engine was the crucial source of power for the industrial revolution, and the railroads were the most important form of transportation that spread it across vast continents. It is the masses who provide the real source of power but they require a party to concentrate and leaders to focus that force. the working class and petit-bourgeoisie) to the steam that drives the engine of a locomotive and the party to the piston box, which focuses that steam to propel the pistons. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam (p. Without a guiding organization, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam in a piston box. The fundamental political process of the revolution thus consists in the general comprehension by a class of the problems arising from the social crisis…Only by a study of political processes in the masses themselves can we understand the role of parties and leaders.They constitute not an independent, but nevertheless a very important, element in the process. A major theme of the History is the psychology of classes: I will concentrate on one virtue of that work, its imagery.Īlready, in the Preface, the author introduces his boldest and most original image. It is guided by the most advanced social theory, Marxism written by one of history’s supreme masters of that theory and practice and inspired by his gift for incandescent prose.
Not only is it the greatest history with which I am familiar, but it is also a major work of literature, and for numerous reasons. In this essay I will apply Spurgeon’s method to Trotsky’s, History of the Russian Revolution. The author explains: “…I believe we can draw from the material of a poet’s images definite information about his personality…a poet will…naturally tend to draw the large proportion of his images from the objects he knows best, or thinks most about…each writer has a certain range of images which are characteristic of him…with Shakespeare, nature…animals …and what we may call (the)every day and domestic…easily come first…(p. 74 ).”Īnother classic of literary criticism, Katherine Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery, examines this command of metaphor in Shakespeare’s plays. It is the mark of genius for to coin good metaphors involves an insight into the resemblances between objects…(p. This is the one thing the poet cannot learn from others. In The Poetics, Aristotle’s treatise on the art of literature, he says: “…most important by far is it to have a command of metaphor.
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