In the past week, I have tried to read Words with Power by Northrop Frye several different times. However, each time I would not get very far without getting completely confounded by what I was reading. After two or three tries, I decided to change my reading strategy. I have always been of the mentality to read through everything and then go back and reread the parts that I do not understand. This way of thinking does not work with Northrop Frye! You cannot read one part of the book without first understanding the parts that were written before it. I have now started rereading it again for the third or fourth time. However, this time I am actually understanding what Frye is talking about. This I believe is an accomplishment within itself because of how dense and full of references Frye's work is. As I sit here reading Words with Power, I keep my dictionary, highlighter, notepad, and computer search engine on hand. I am making a list and looking up every word I do not recognize and every reference I do not know. This may take me longer to get through Frye but I will get through it understanding exactly what I read. Upon my close perusal of Words with Power I found a few definitions that I did not previously know and was able to see how they related to the Bible as a literary work and then how they go on to relate to modern culture.
The first new definition that I found intriguing was displacement. There are multiple definitions of displacement. The first being "the state of being displace or the amount or degree to which something is displaced". However, this is not the type of displacement that Frye refers to. He says that displacement in a literary context is "the alteration of a mythical structure in the direction of greater plausibility and accommodation to ordinary experience" (Word with Power page 149 if anyone wants to read it for themselves). This is often thought of in context with the Bible as I have heard people change stories as to make them more believable. One such example is how people were able to live to such great ages. Instead of believing that Abraham really did live to be 175 years old, I have heard people say that years were not measured correctly, global warming has changed the yearly cycle, and etc... This is an example of how people displace literature. This type of displacement takes place today as well. When people hear amazing stories instead of believing the unbelievable with faith, they make up "scientific" reasons, which just a few hundreds years ago would have been unbelievable. This leads me to question why does something have to have greater plausibility and be an ordinary experience to be believed? I do not expect anyone to be able to answer this question. It is just something that I have been pondering since reading this new definition of displacement.
The second definition that Frye discusses is the literary definition of Condensations which "means the opposite movement, where the similarities and association of ordinary experience become metaphorical identities" (149). This idea was harder for me to grasp than displacement. However, once I was able to fully comprehend the definition and its implications, I was able to think of many many examples of condensation. I think that Frye gave a wonderful example of showing how Blake condensed "Sick Rose". All of aspects of this poem became somehow mythical and had metaphorical identities. A rose was able to represent and the worm represented Genesis Serpent that corrupted the world. The idea of condensation is very intriguing because often I do not look for how ordinary things represent mythological or abstract ideas such as love or Genesis' serpent, unless I am prompted to look for such metaphors or they are obnoxiously obvious. Which according to Frye is the purpose of condensation. "It regularly has the function of reminding us that we are still within a literary orbit" and thus need to be aware of how the orbit of one thing always affects the orbit of another piece of literature, which leads back again to intertextuality.
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