Influence Over Innovation. 2

"The moral of all this is that every form in literature has a pedigree, and we can trace its descent back to the earliest times. A writer's desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing."

Frye's point here is relatively self-explanatory. I cannot agree with him entirely however, because he seems to believe that there is no innovation in literature. The only time I would find his point to be untrue is when the first writers began to create. Obviously there had to be a beginning to literature, and at this beginning there would be no prior experiences of literature to draw upon. Even in this case however, literature is always going to draw on something, whether it is previous literary experiences or experiences in life. This is where I believe the first writers drew their inspiration from.

Apart from that one minor exception, I believe that Frye's argument is completely valid. The one thing that really stuck out to me was that he appears to have a very scientific mind, in that he brings everything down to blunt truths. This is evident in how he does not like to leave us with the idea that certain brilliant minds progressed literature more than others, rather that no human does anything more than draw from previous literature.

Whether or not Frye's scientific inference is entirely correct still is not determined within my mind. All of the evidence appears valid, but I personally like the idea that our minds are not all so similar.