Praise God, From Whom All Ball Bearings Flow
Once, in adolescence, a bookish friend of mine said, “Of course there’s a God. Otherwise, how would machines work?” I thought this was a witty remark, witty at the expense of machines, their dull mysteries, the people who cared too much about them. Now I am not sure that my friend didn’t mean something more dense. As it happened he became a wanderer, a mystic of sorts, a man of drugs and a communard, and—anomalously—a passionate mechanic. Perhaps, though, his interest in machines is not anomalous at all, and perhaps he was feeling in his teens intimations of the sort of technological theology that is explored in Robert M. Pirsig’s strange, strong book, ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE (Morrow, $7.95).
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published earlier this year, has already been much praised: overpraised, I fear, though even aware of the danger, I may overpraise it too. George Steiner in The New Yorker likened it to Moby Dick, apologizing for the “prodigious comparison” but insisting that it was often appropriate. In its themes and methods the book does connect with that and with other monuments of American literature, without seeming to be derivative of them. It is, on the other hand, roughly made, ill proportioned: inspired and banal by turns. And moving. Why that last word should apply, as it does, with such force is a question to pursue.
Certain rudimentary questions come first, and they are uncustomarily hard to answer. What is this book? It specifically disclaims being a novel, calling itself instead “An Inquiry Into Values.” If judged by fictional standards it would suffer for most of the way, but by the end no other word but “novel” is large enough to encompass what occurs. Yet I can’t follow the proper convention of referring to the “narrator”—it will have to be “Pirsig”: “I” in this book generally means “I.”
What happens? That’s easier to say, at least on one level. A father and his eleven-year-old son travel west from Minneapolis to the Pacific by motorcycle. They are accompanied partway by two friends, a man and his wife. The couple never achieves much identity, but that’s all right with Pirsig, who reminds you that he’s no novelist: “I suppose if I were a novelist rather than a Chautauqua orator I’d try to ‘develop the characters’ of John and Sylvia and Chris with action-packed scenes that would also reveal ‘inner meanings’ of Zen and maybe Art and maybe even Motorcycle Maintenance. That would be quite a novel, but for some reason I don’t feel quite up to it.”
And what’s this about “Chautauqua orator”? Much of the book consists of set-piece lectures on philosophical topics, which the author wryly styles “Chautauquas.” The boy and man ride wordlessly across the West, and beneath the cycle’s noise the man inwardly drones; speculates; and instructs, amuses, and perplexes the reader.
The first lesson of the book, and a theme that persists, has to do with investing technology with a spiritual dimension, what I called a moment ago technological theology. Pirsig insists that if you are to look for universal meaning, you can’t look solely, or even primarily, at what is called the natural world. Sparkplugs no less than seeds are repositories of divinity. “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.” Pirsig preaches the need for reverence toward our machines as a route to reverence itself. The book contains odd, small evocations of the delicacy of machined metal and the priestliness of the mechanic’s craft. Pirsig mocks those who take an attitude of reflexive disdain toward the mechanical world. In an interlude away from the cycle at an elegant Montana retreat, Pirsig takes off on his host’s disgruntlement over a set of instructions for assembling a rotisserie. Pirsig quotes a line from instructions that accompanied an imported bicycle: “Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.” That’s only half a joke, for Pirsig: a sense of connection, the de-objectification of the machine, care and sentience in seemingly “mechanical” tasks can ally art and technology. “This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous.”
And who is this fellow who would hold the world together? Over the course of 400 pages we learn about some aspects of his life no more than we would from a résumé. He has lived in Nevada, Montana, Mexico; traveled in Asia. Trained in science, took a degree in journalism. Has worked at various jobs, industrial advertising, for one. Is now a technical writer. Marital status: married. (His unnamed wife never appears.) In manner: gentle, calm, and in a rural way both long-winded and laconic. He may be in the midst of writing a great novel, but he is determinedly, persuasively, an unliterary man. The book’s title, of course, is a “literary allusion” but a highly nonchalant one. (Unlike its namesake, Pirsig’s book has little to do with Zen.) Although Pirsig reports extensively on his reading, fiction seems to have meant nothing to him. He uses the word “arty” as a pejorative, and will speak of others with tolerant disapproval as “those characters.”
A folksy man on vacation with his son, a man who just happens to have a head full of ideas. The impression persists for only a short time. After a few pages we learn that he is a man in flight from a desperate past. He has been obsessed, and he threatens to be obsessed again. Once in his life he has ended up catatonic, in a pool of his own urine, a cigarette burning into his fingers, his self drifting away: “Then even ‘he’ disappears, and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it.” What follows is hospitalization: electroshock therapy that obliterates much of his former personality.
The Pirsig we meet—though full of energy, able to ride all day, alert to the fleeting landscape, and eager to pursue his didactic theories—is in some ways a convalescent man. He proceeds through life with a secret gingerliness, just as he proceeds up a mountain when he and his son pause in their trip for some backpacking. He takes each step as it comes, not daring to think of the top. He is horrified by the thought of succumbing to the questing activity that carried him once before into madness. His fear and his powers of control emerge quietly but resonantly: “Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.” Considerable terror hides in that casual sentence.
It was once desire — a driven, Faustian compulsion to know all, a hunger for absolutism—that drove him insane. Fragments of memory, attenuated by electroshock, are triggered by parts of the countryside which Pirsig has traveled before, and gradually, chillingly, the ghastly autobiographical tale takes over the book.
The man who formerly used his name was, Pirsig suggests, a wholly different person. They say at the mental hospital after treatment that you have a “new personality”; Pirsig reasonably argues that you cannot “have” a new personality without being a new person. To his old self Pirsig gives the name “Phaedrus,” after the figure in the Platonic dialogue. Phaedrus has been buried, but his ghost (a recurrent image) inhabits the book and chases Pirsig and his son, Chris, who himself is showing signs of stress.
The story of Phaedrus’ mental collapse is the story of a man who took the Western world too seriously. Rationality is the engine of Western civilization, and Phaedrus was determined to become its mechanic, to disassemble reason and put it back together again, to see how it worked. He was a young man of measurable brilliance—an IQ of 170—and boundless naïveté, and an eerie detachment from the social contexts in which he found himself, from the world of human feeling.
His education was a series of disillusionments. Science promised truth but delivered ambiguity, relativeness. In any experimental situation, not one but an infinite number of hypotheses might explain the data. He sought after the source, the authority for reason, but he was chasing a chimera. “The ghost he pursued was the ghost that underlies all of technology, all of modern science, all of Western thought. It was the ghost of rationality itself.”
Phaedrus intuits the limits of rationality, but lacks a language to describe what territory might lie beyond. Instead he seizes on a single word, which is charged with the burden of embodying all that he seeks: wholeness, form, the object of the religious impulse, and (though he seems not to realize it) the ordinary passion that is absent from his life. He chooses his word and gives it a capital letter: Quality. And what a word: debased by American usage (“Shop at the Sign of the Big Q”), it is itself an emblem of Phaedrus’ detachment from social reality.
The rest is a descent into madness. He is compelled to awaken others to the truth he feels he can contain within his word. He becomes a student of philosophy at the University of Chicago, but he is Ahab in graduate school, devouring and destroying texts in search of what he already knows too well. This section of the book is murky and troubling, depending as it does on misreadings of books which Pirsig fails to correct, and on heated personal quarrels that almost surely existed only in Phaedrus’ mind but are reported as though they had occurred in fact. However, his final slipping-away into darkness and solitary ecstasy is scarifyingly described.
On the other side of the asylum’s devastating electricity, Pirsig becomes a different sort of philosopher. If Phaedrus had been a romantic Platonist, Pirsig becomes a level-headed Aristotelian: “Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the ‘many’ [to the ‘one’]. I myself am pretty much Aristotelian in this sense, preferring to find the Buddha in the quality of facts around me.” His method now is inductive and restrained. Tuning his motorcycle is like going to church. Watching a skilled and careful welder, or solving a complex analytical problem, opens up his mind to a controlled apprehension of the “Quality” Phaedrus had monomaniacally sought.
But as Pirsig talks on, one feels a certain ominous hollowness to his arguments. The technological optimism, for instance, that is crucial to his world view is not persuasive. At bad moments Pirsig can lapse into chamber of commerce talk, reminding the reader that life in an industrial society is superior to that in a primitive one, and that “a technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset.” Well, maybe, but it is not obvious that because technology has brought us to someplace better it might not lead us further, to someplace worse.
Even when he is at his most telling on the subject of technology, Pirsig seems to forget some essential truths. He misses, for example, the fact that individual salvation may spell collective doom: the now familiar “tragedy of the commons.” He misses, too, the gratuitous, wanton symbolic power a man with a machine may wield, his ability to influence the world around him beyond his natural powers of articulation and apart from his social and political affiliations. Should all the residents of my town become devoted motorcyclists, no matter with what epiphanous love we replace our points and plugs, we will shatter the peace of Sunday afternoon, annoy one another, and each will hate the place that all have created.
What is absent from Pirsig’s arguments is what is absent from the life he describes: a developed sense of the inevitable mutuality of experience. It is with true dismay that the reader realizes that the battle he describes in the past is being reenacted in the present, and that the outcome is by no means certain.
Its locus becomes the boy, Chris, who has stared for miles at his father’s back, and walked behind him up mountain trails. They have not had an easy time. Chris is moody and withdrawn, his father desperately unable to engage him. Pirsig has a rich vocabulary for the innards of a motorcycle but can find few words for the interior of his son’s mind. He portrays their miscommunications affectingly. Outside a California motel one morning Pirsig sees some slugs on the ground, they interest him, and he picks one up and shows it to Chris. “It moves slowly like a snail across a leaf. He has no comment.” The sad formality of that phrase. The boy throughout is seen in terms of externalities.
Achingly you follow the struggle. They sit in hostile silence on a hillside in California. Pirsig cannot manage the boy, and it becomes clear that he cannot much longer manage himself. He tries to send the boy away. “Chris, you’re looking at a father who was insane for a long time, and is close to it again.” To the reader he adds, “And not just close anymore. It’s here. The bottom of the ocean.” As the boy himself wails, a noise like a siren is heard approaching; it comes from the gears of a truck: even the technological world that has been his solace is coming apart.
He cannot save himself, but astonishingly, the boy can. The child blurts out the curiosity he has repressed for years about his father’s illness, and he at length asks if his father was truly insane. To this the father instinctively says, No. An instinctive and a wise lie, since what both need is not more “truth” but some faith, which Chris now provides by saying “I knew it,” a phrase that reverberates in the man’s head and buoys up both of them: it is the first moment in which we see Pirsig successfully inventing a shared life. The permanence of this achievement is a problem for Pirsig and the reader, but its momentary importance is undeniable.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a bold book. Its author disregards the risks of humiliation and speaks without the aid of a social support system (without a professorial chair or a title, not even the title “novelist”) about the largest issues. The issues are ones that have inhabited our culture and which now consume more and more of our conscious life: how to think about the hated and beloved machines . . . how to blunt the force of onrushing linear thought . . . how to escape the traps of “individuality” without obliterating the self. And in his own confessional story he dares to render more than he fully understands. High intelligence, high intention, and deeply flawed selfknowledge: ingredients of tragedy, and so they have been in the life this book recounts, but they have also produced a self-sacrificial document of a strength that is not commonly found in works of more deliberate art.