Given the choice to accept or reject Frye's work entirely, unlike Frank Lentricchia, I have chosen to accept. Still I find it quite interesting when popular works offer a different view. The Oprah Winfrey Bookclub The New Earth by Eckhart Tolle advises a life based on non-identification, on *no* motive for metaphor or *non*-existential metaphor. E.T. does agree with Frye, although not quite as eloquently, that time is the big illusion, and to *be here now*. And it seems both are well steeped in the works of mystics, visionaries and even"the kook books", in Frye's phrase. Unlike Frye's ideas, E.T. comments on time but not space as Frye does, with his 4 cosmic levels.
A great essay is waiting for someone to compare and contrast Robert Pirsig's Zen Bikes book with Frye's The Educated Imagination. One loves Aristotle, the other does not. One sees the constructive power of rhetoric and mythos, the other does not.
Both, however, are united in their use of the form of the anatomy to reach the masses.
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Tolle comes from an anti-tradition tradition. My understanding is that he was most influenced by Krishnamurti who was supposedly an enlightened sage, but in his anti-myth, and anti-concept, and anti-community teachings, Krishnamurti spent much of his life reacting bitterly against the Theosophists who had raised him as an experiment in manufacturing a world teacher.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to dismiss these people lightly, but I hold to the Buddhist view that the struggle for non-attachment requires a tradition and a communal environment just like every other significant human endeavour.
Frye was attracted to Mahayana Buddhism and I think that is because he recognized the necessity of non-attachment but in the service of vision, not extinction. I find Frye very hard to pin down sometimes and I think that is the result of Frye's deliberate pedagogical aim of not saying anything his student's could cling to as an ultimate answer. He wanted his students to enter a stream of better and better answers, more and more vivid visions.
Non-attachment was a neccesary part of Frye's method, but it wasn't an end.