Metaphor of Science
The most important metaphor in Anatomy of Criticism is the description, in the “Polemical Introduction,” of literary criticism as a kind of science. Here is Frye’s discussion:
Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows that the mental process involved is as coherent and progressive as the study of science. A precisely similar training of the mind takes place, and a similar sense of the unity of the subject is built up. If this unity comes from literature itself, then literature itself must be shaped like a science, which contradicts our experience of it; or it must derive some informing power from an ineffable mystery at the heart of being, which seems vague; or the mental benefits alleged to be derived from it are imaginary, and are really derived from other subjects studied incidentally in connection with it. (11)
The passage works metaphorically: it says that studying literature is the same as studying science, because both build up to a system. The systems are different: a system of literature instead of a system of the natural world and its phenomena. But we can study literature scientifically because of the aims, goals, and general style of inquiry we adopt.
Simile of Art and Nature
In continuing his discussion of literary criticism as a science, Frye makes a comparison between what literary critics study and what more traditional scientists study. He then makes a simile comparing the object of criticism, which is art, with the object of traditional science, which is nature:
Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism. It is therefore impossible to "learn literature": one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature. (11)
Here, the comparison that art is like nature is not intended to say that nature is artistic or art is natural. Rather, the point is that both art and nature can be studied in a similar way. Physicists study nature by observing it and deriving general principles from it. Similarly, literary critics should study art, or in this case literature, by reading works of literature and figuring out the general categories of literature. This is a unique use of simile, because it is not so much comparing two things as it was comparing two ways of studying things.
