Arlo said:
It just struck me as coming close to the height of absurdity to declare that
the man who's ideas we are here (ostensibly) to discuss is the "least"
authority on what those ideas are. It would be like me saying, "Let's talk
about what John's ideas are, but the person who we can ignore the most in that
discussion is John".
Mary replied:
You see, the person with the original inspiration no longer exists. Robert
Pirsig the author is not the person who experienced the original insight. He
has no direct memory of it. No 'arloian' absurdity exists, and if there is any
'bullshit', it is in the 'DuMB' complaints.
dmb brushes an old post:
I guess that sort of interpretation is forgivable because people do tend to see
what they want to see. In a recent study, conservatives saw Steven Colbert as a
conservative. That's hilariously wrong. Anyway, on top of that natural
tendency, the narrator in Zen and the Art sees things differently. He and
Phaedrus often disagree with each other. It's probably important to realize
that Pirsig describes him as an UNRELIABLE narrator. The story is told from his
perspective, mostly, but he's the character who said whatever it took to get
out of the hospital. He's the bullshitter, the charmer, the people-pleaser. And
it's his words and ideas that the conservatives will find most appealing and he
or she will take that for the substance of the MOQ. In some cases this means
ignoring what Phaedrus says. Pirsig says he got the idea of an unreliable
narrator from Henry James' novel, "The Turn of the Screw". That story is told
from the narrator's point of view. She is psychotic and paranoid but the reader
doesn't necessarily see that fact. It's a neat trick, especially since Phaedrus
is supposedly the one who went insane. Anyway, it's easy to notice the shift in
perspective in the following passage, although there are many other examples as
well...
"We've had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural
resource without knowing it, and now it's just about depleted. Everyone's just
about out of gumption. And I think it's about time to return to the rebuilding
of this American resource...individual worth. There are political reactionaries
who've been saying something close to this for years. I'm not one of them, but
to the extent they're talking about real individual worth and not just an
excuse for giving more money to the rich, they're right. We do need a return to
individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do. I
hope that in this Chautauqua some directions have been pointed to.Phædrus went
a different path from the idea of individual, personal Quality decisions. I
think it was a wrong one, but perhaps if I were in his circumstances I would go
his way too. He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw
it as even broader than that...a new spiritual rationality...in which the
ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic
technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to be "value
free." Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he
would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose
mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our
technology, the tendency to do what is "reasonable" even when it isn't any
good. That was the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago
that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and
Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had
been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then".
dmb continues:Notice how the narrator's speech is full of cliches and
platitudes while Phaedrus is philosophical and far more interesting? It's hard
to miss, unless one wants to miss it that is. I mean, quoting the narrator is
risky business at best. He's the kinda the villain of the story, you know?
Chris knows he's a phony and a pale shadow of his former self and that's what's
killing him. The narrator is whoever you want him to be. He's spineless and
everything he says is calculated to please. Unlike Phaedrus, he's dominated by
social level values. Check out Pirsig's introduction to 25th anniversary
edition (1999). That's how Pirsig characterizes him there and he does so in
order to prevent misinterpretations of the book.
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