Not the Simile At All

Yesterday in the Guardian Weekend, Antony Gormley compared winning the Turner Prize to being a Holocaust survivor. In this comparison, Gormley refers to the guilt of having 'won' the 'prize' to the guilt of the Holocaust survivor. [Note how 'won' and 'prize' already signal massive problems for the terms of his simile.] 'In the moment of winning there is a sense the others have been diminished', he says. In this, Gormley's simile makes sense in terms of Holocaust survivors, since survivor guilt is predicated above all else on the complicated feelings of survivors towards those who were murdered; 'diminished' insofar as in everyday terms, the harrowing split between those who survive and those were murdered can be expressed in the binary of 'strong' and 'weak'. But Gormley is wrong to see his own situation in just these analogical terms. First, the obvious case of the Turner prize losers' literal survival after the competition; second, the totally redundant correspondence that is drawn between the competitive terms of the Turner Prize and the utterly non-competitive situation of the Holocaust, which necessitated certain survival strategies that most of humanity never have to put into practice. This is not to say, though, that such survival strategies ended in 1945.

Other problems with Gormley's simile are centred around the phrase 'in the moment of winning', in which an absurd correspondence is made between the moment of winning the art prize and the moment experienced by Holocaust survivors when the camps were liberated by the Allied Forces. Gormley is saying that winning the Turner Prize is anything but the moment of triumph you would expect from being given such an accolade; but he is quite wrong to draw a comparison between this bittersweet melancholy of his and the inexpressibly complex few moments, days, months, and years that followed the liberation of the survivors from the hell they experienced in the death camps.

It is of course reasonable to feel a certain level of sorrow for your losing art colleagues, and it is understandable that this might colour the triumphant moment of the winner; but can you rightly suggest that there is a correspondence between the sense in which those who lose the art prize are 'diminished' and that of those who were murdered in the Holocaust? It is an indisputable fact that the way in which one group is 'diminished' differs in the extreme from the other group, since those were murdered in the Holocaust were diminished literally by losing their lives. Gormley's bittersweet observations exist on a completely different psychological level to that of guilt of Holocaust survivors. Gormley should in no way have suggested any level of correspondence between his situation and theirs.

Gormley has his comments published in a daily newspaper of international importance, and neither he nor the Guardian Weekend's editor saw fit to discuss this abuse of simile. Why should they bother? It's what he said, and that's that. It's an inadequate use of simile, though, and for a newspaper that publishes a reference work teaching acceptable and standard uses of style, this is strange! Gormley is an artist; words are not his thing. But artists hold such store by how they present themselves and their work, and so you would think they would care about how they use language. The simile, as a form of figural speech, exists to facilitate communication, not muddy it; Gormley has muddied it somewhat. Rather than articulating what he means, he has abused historical memory by melodramatising his own situation and dipped ever so infelicitously for a totally inexact form of expression whose terms just do not correspond. In other words, it is not the simile at all.