The sea as the English metaphor, the forest as the German metaphor

The sea as the English metaphor, the forest as the German metaphor is a contrast between two landscapes treated as cultural images: the sea mirrors the English, while the forest is the metaphor inhabited by the Germans. Its decisive significance lies in the exception it establishes. Born in Germany, Hans Reiter belongs to neither image as ordinarily understood; he is drawn instead to the seabed, a submerged world beneath the familiar symbols.

The Cultural Contrast

The passage attributes the contrast tentatively to Canetti and Borges, two very different thinkers: the sea, it says, is the English symbol or mirror, and the forest the metaphor inhabited by the Germans. This is presented as a rule of cultural imagination, not as a description of Reiter’s own preferences. The sentence’s balance makes the landscapes seem to divide symbolic territory between two national identities.

Reiter’s Refusal of the Assigned Images

Hans Reiter, born in 1920, defies the rule from birth. He dislikes the earth and especially forests, but the sea does not attract him either—not the sea that ordinary people call the sea. That surface, whipped into waves by the wind, has itself become a metaphor for defeat and madness. The distinction matters: Reiter rejects not only the German forest but also the familiar, surface-bound sea that might appear to offer an alternative.

The Seabed as an Alternative World

What Reiter likes is the seabed, described as another earth, with plains that are not plains, valleys that are not valleys, and cliffs that are not cliffs. This submerged terrain is neither a straightforward version of land nor the public image of the sea. Its shifting, negated geography places Reiter outside the neat symbolic opposition that the passage has just proposed. The seabed becomes a private counter-image: a world beneath the surface, where the inherited metaphors lose their authority.

Meaning and Image

The sea and forest acquire meaning through their contrast, while Reiter’s attachment to the seabed unsettles the contrast rather than simply reversing it. The novel therefore makes the cultural scheme visible and, in the same movement, refuses to let it define the individual. Reiter’s preference for what lies below the waves anticipates the passage’s intimate image of him sinking into the dark water of a washtub, eyes open, rather than attending to the ordinary world above.