Matt said:
But the rhetoric of heroism--which Pirsig's scene quite effectively
deflates....
DMB said:
And I don't understand how Pirsig deflates the hero's journey. I
think
he embodies it. His biography is a fresh, non-legendary case
of what a
hero looks like.
Matt:
Being "non-legendary" is kind of what I meant by "deflation." Heroes
are legendary, and don't really have effectively acknowledged warts.
(This is part of the evolutionary story you get in tracing the
transformation of epic into romance into the novel into various
realisms and naturalisms, like from Dickens, Hardy, and James to
Richard Wright, Frank Norris, and Dreiser.) Pirsig, in that single
scene, puts the body back into romantic archetypes (which too often
slip into the allegorical ether). And a reason to do that, I think, is to
punch up the social problem of the heroic quest, by which I mean
the problem others face while the hero is on their quest.
Matt
p.s. I picked out just this single strand of your post because I took it
to be the only place you were disagreeing with me about something.
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