Arlo said:
Or they read LILA and saw Lila as the hero and Phaedrus as the enemy, rather
than the dialogue between them, and are stuck in Lila's assessment of
Phaedrus-as-intellect as "A big phony smokestack. That's exactly what he is. He
thinks he's so smart. It's all over his face. And he's not smart. He's stupid.
He doesn't know anything. He doesn't even know what a hustler is. He doesn't
even know how stupid he is." (LILA).
Dave Thomas replied:
Why would Pirsig, the author, put this kind of line in there? Could it just be
that he was a little more aware of his biases. That he was a "left brained
kind of guy" with little direct experience with the Zen, holistic, context,
right side. Maybe as caution to others with the same bias to be aware of that
condition.
dmb says:
I think you have it backwards, Dave. Lila, the character, is obviously not
giving us an accurate report about Phaedrus. Her contemptuous attitude toward
him is only consistent with HER character and personality. She's a wash-up
prostitute with very little social quality and no intellectual quality at all.
She's not capable of understanding him or his world. She's a woman a very low
self-esteem and she's lashing out in anger. She's calling him stupid (170 I.Q.)
is a projection of sorts. His intelligence makes her feel stupid and she hates
him for that. "He doesn't even know what a hustler is," she says, as if
intelligence were about familiarity with crime, vice, and sin in the dirty
piss-soaked streets of New York. Her perspective is very limited by her
ignorance and distorted by her mental illness. That's what these lines of
dialogue show. She's the title character but she's nobody's hero.
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