A Personal Appreciation: How John Miles Foley Laid the Foundation for My Life in an Ashram

It is an honor and a pleasure to offer this personal tribute to John Miles Foley, in whom I have found not only an outstanding scholar—one of the great scholars of his generation—but a dear personal friend. In response to the kind invitation of this volume’s editors I would like to devote these pages not to scholarly inquiry in a strict sense but to a personal narrative about a significant impact that he has had on my life—one that few people would have anticipated in the days of my academic association with him. For while I began my career as a scholar, and indeed occupied a tenured professorial position in one of our state universities, I left that post and have spent the last two decades in an ashram in India. And though I never expected it, much of what John taught me has played a key role in the work that I have done in this new, very non-academic setting. I have immersed myself in this new life for so long now that I no longer find myself in a position to write a conventional scholarly article as my contribution to this volume. For the world of assumptions in which I now live and operate—the world of an ashram—differs so radically from academe that, were I to write directly out of the research interests that I am now pursuing, I would have to impose too much on the tolerance and forbearance of my readers here. Instead, as my own personal appreciation for an old and dear friend, I wanted to chronicle how what I learned from John Foley transformed itself through the course of my life into a crucial foundation for a very different kind of intellectual and spiritual enterprise.

Meeting John during the early years of his professorial career, I was the first graduate student to get a master’s and subsequently a doctoral degree under his tutelage. When I joined the graduate program in English literature at Emory University in 1977, he was still an assistant professor—though clearly one of the department’s rising stars. I was much drawn to him and his methodological approach, which recognized the oral dimensions of literatures that conventionally had been regarded exclusively as written texts. When he left Emory for a new job at the University of Missouri-Columbia, I followed him there, earning my Ph.D. in 1983. Happily I found for myself an academic post at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and over the next decade I maintained a close association with my former mentor, contributing essays to various collections and joining him at academic conferences.

Naturally the training that John gave me included a mastery of skills that any medievalist needs. Most medieval literature arose in linguistically and culturally complex milieus; one studying this literature needs to know languages and linguistics—and has to be able to find his or her way around in an intellectual landscape in large measure contoured by manuscripts. Beyond this, since John is a comparatist, I wound up cultivating expertise not only in the heroic literature of Anglo-Saxon England but also that of Homeric Greece. Comparative work demands that one affirm the cultural and historical specificity of particular literary acts while discovering fundamental patterns that bring the artifacts of different eras and cultural environments into significant relationship with each other. My having cultivated this facility and these habits of mind proved most useful when I subsequently shifted my seat of operations (as it were) from ancient and medieval Europe to modern Asia.

Yet what I found especially appealing in John’s approach was that it called into question the presumption that “literature” is inexorably and primarily textual, that its inscription, its written-ness, belongs to its root nature, to its very core identity. Instead, it opened the possibility of a literature that resonates within the active present of speech—spoken utterance—within human interactional settings. But in fact that very “present,” in the context of traditional society, is vitally linked with past and future...