mrb said to David Thomas:
... Think ZAMM tries to reconcile Aristotle and Plato? Coleridge said that
every man's born either Aristotelian or Platonist. So the Z-narrator and
Phaedrus had to be different men to bring them together with a thunderclap!
dmb says:
Well, yes, bringing the classic and romantic together into an integrated whole
is one of the central aims BUT Phaedrus is described as a romantic who, unlike
most romantics, had a classically trained mind. And don't forget that we are
talking about a slightly fictionalized version of Pirsig's actual biography. I
mean, he was studying science as a very young undergraduate student but then
joined the army and spent some time in Korea. On the way back he read
Northrop's Meeting of East and West, at which point he decided to study
philosophy instead of science. After studying Oriental philosophy in India, he
got a journalism degree, wrote some fiction and worked as a technical writer.
All this, I think, is evidence that Phaedrus was quite capable as both a
romantic (Plato) thinker and a classic (Aristotle) thinker.
The narrator, on the other hand, is a cowardly thinker. He is patterned after
the UNRELIABLE narrator in Henry James's "Turn of the Screw", as Pirsig
explains in the intro to the 25th anniversary addition of ZAMM. (Henry is the
younger brother of William James.) In Henry's novel the narrator is a governess
who thinks the children in her charge are being threatened by an evil ghost and
the entire story is told from her perspective. But if you realize that the
story is being told by a crazy woman then you see that there is no ghost and
the only danger to the children is the governess herself. It is her delusion
that poses the danger, not any ghosts. And so it is the the unreliable narrator
in ZAMM. The narrator's central motive is to stay out of the mental hospital.
He knows what happened to Phaedrus and so everything he says is calculated to
sound as normal and sane as possible because he does not want any more shock
treatments. The narrator thinks he is being pursued by a gho
st but the only real danger to Chris, his son, is this fraudulent personality.
On some level Chris knows his real father is missing and has been replaced by a
platitude-spewing bullshitter who will say anything to make people like him.
And so I think of the final scene, the final climax of the story, is when Chris
asks him if he really was insane. For the first time we hear from Phaedrus
INSTEAD of the narrator. "No", he answers. He wasn't insane. "I knew it!",
Chris says. That's the moment that Chris got his real dad back. That's the
moment when we realize that all of the narrator's criticism of Phaedrus was
bogus, was motivated by cowardice. We realize that the narrator isn't really
interested in the truth. He's only interested in saving his skin and poor
little Chris can smell the bullshit. That's what's making Chris kinda crazy.
The source of his trouble is not some evil ghost but the narrator's fear. He
can't handle Phaedrus's truth. Chris had spent the whole trip with a helmut on,
staring at the back of the narrator's head but after the narrator sort of steps
aside Chris takes the helmut off and stands up on the foot pegs as the roll
through winding roads and redwoods. They're headed toward San Franci
sco, one of the most dynamic places on earth. It's open to the ocean and the
East and literally sits on shaky ground. It's the site of the silicon valley
and the summer of love. It's where James introduced Pragmatism and Alan Watts
popularized Zen Buddhism. If Phaedrus is going to bring his truth into the
world, this is the spot.
"If anyone orders merlot, I'm leaving!"
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