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What does Northrop Frye mean by "a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind"?
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Northrop Frye's concept of "a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind" refers to the imaginative transformation of reality through literature. Unlike science, which describes reality objectively, literature uses similes and metaphors to create worlds shaped by human emotions and thoughts. This literary process erases distinctions between subject and object, allowing humans to understand and interpret the world in deeply personal, metaphorical terms, reflecting the human mind's perceptions and associations.
Frye constrasts his notion of the world absorbed by the human mind with the idea of description, or “describing nature” or the real world. He writes:
At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there's a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape, fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.
The purpose of literature or literary language is to help humans construct imaginary worlds, where “the primary realities are not atoms or electrons but bodies, and the primary forces not energy or gravitation but love and death and passion and joy.“ Literature is both a rendering of reality and an transformation of it. This transformation into the “fully human” is accomplished through simile and metaphor , literary devices which (in the...
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case of metaphor) mean “turning your back on logic and reason completely.” This transformation seeks to erase the difference between subject and object, us and them; Fry’s idea of a world “absorbed” and “possessed” by the human mind means understanding the world in human (or metaphorical) terms, not as a science experiment. As he says, quoting poet Wallace Stevens, the “motive for metaphor...is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it.”
In his book The Educated Imagination, the great literary theorist Northrop Frye wrote that the poet employs
two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
In this passage, Frye defends and even celebrates the use of simile and metaphor, although in the passage immediately preceding this one he had wisely cautioned that any declaring of similarities must be done with caution if one wants to be purely rational and logical. Indeed, he argues in that earlier passage that metaphor, almost by definition, is irrational and illogical because it declares that two different things are the same thing – a logical contradiction, pure and simple.
In the passage quoted above, however, Frye argues that in poetry (by which he means literature in general), simile and metaphor are important and crucial instruments of writing. The poet’s purpose, he says, is not simply to describe what really exists but is instead to show how reality and existence are understood and depicted by the human mind. We do not go to literature for completely accurate descriptions of reality (we go to science for that). Instead, we go to literature to see all the various ways in which human beings are capable of thinking and feeling about reality. Literature, then, is a presentation not of reality per se but of human responses to reality, including the ways humans have tried to make sense of reality by seeing likeness between different things. Similes and metaphors are important instruments that imaginative writers use to express their feelings about reality and their perceptions of it.
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