" The reason for producing the literary structure is apparently taht the inward meaning, the self-contained verbal pattern, is the field of the responses connected with pleasure, beauty, and interest. The contemplation of a detached pattern, whether of words or not, is clearly a major source of the sense of the beautiful, and of the pleasure that accompanies it. The fact that interest is most easily aroused by such a pattern is familiar to every handler of words, from the poet to the after-dinner speaker who digresses from an assertive harangue to present the self-contained structure of verbal interrelationships known as a joke. It often happens that an originally descriptive piece of writing, such as the histories of Fuller and Gibbon, survives by virtue of its 'style', or interesting verbal pattern, after its value as a representation of facts has faded." (p. 74-75)
In a previous class the question arose "what does make something last?", which clearly for Frye is a hallmark of authentic literary merit. Well, what does make something last? From the above passage I glean(rightly or wrongly) that style is a major factor. If by style we mean the way the words are arranged and ordered(there's that pesky word again!) and employed to convey the writer's subject or story. Which is why Frye thinks Gibbon and Fuller survive, rather than for their historical merits.
Which also deals with something we mentioned last class: how facts and art aren't wedded together, at least not essentially. In At first Looking into Chapman's Homer Keats has a line about Cortez looking out on the Pacific, but Cortez didn't discover the Pacific. Its still a good poem, but it has an inaccurate fact. But the perceptions of facts themselves can date and change, at least if we are to believe Frye that Gibbon and Fuller matter now because of their style rather than their content. Part of me wonders if this grants some kind of leg-up to fiction over non-fiction, but I think I'll continue to examine this topic later.
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