Book Returns
Wheelin’ Grace
Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
by Franklin Freeman
Rejected by 121 publishers, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance appeared in April 1974 to a chorus of praise that included such eminent critics as Erich Hoffer and George Steiner. “The analogies with Moby Dick are patent,” the latter wrote, breathlessly, in The New Yorker. “Robert Pirsig invites the prodigious comparison. . . . What more can one say?”
Nineteen seventy-four was the year President Nixon resigned, the energy crisis sent fuel prices soaring, and the Dow Jones declined to a low of 663. Enter Pirsig’s book, a meditation on life’s meaning and a call to an inward reform of the soul through the union of Western technological advances and Eastern mystical thought, that is, motorcycles and zen.
The word zen derives from the Japanese word for “sit and meditate.” According to Pirsig, “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.” Hence the cover illustration of a wrench growing up from the midst of an arrangement of leaves, the wrench taking the place of blossoms.
Two Stories
Pirsig’s book tells two stories, one told in the present time of the book, the other told through flashbacks. The first is about a man (the narrator) and his twelve-year-old son Chris motorcycling one summer from Minnesota to San Francisco, accompanied for the first part of the trip by John and Sylvia, a married couple, friends of the family.
The second is about the life and ideas of a figure called Phaedrus—meaning, according to the text, “wolf” in Greek, a mistaken definition, as Pirsig admitted in a foreword to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of the book, for Phaedrus means “brilliant” or “radiant.” Phaedrus, it turns out, is Pirsig long ago, before something bad happened and he ended up in the hospital and got enough electroshock therapy to erase most of his memory, which returns to him in glimpses.
In the first story, Chris periodically rebels against his father, but we don’t know why, while the narrator and John do not always get along. Pirsig likes to repair his own motorcycle, even tear the engine down if he has to; John hates working on his and refuses to learn how or to take advice from Pirsig.
Pirsig doesn’t understand why John loses his temper whenever he tries to help him with his cycle, but as the miles go by, he slowly begins to feel the problem is not just a difference between two people, but something that points to a big cultural and philosophical divide. This difference in attitude becomes the key idea of the book and also eventually explains the rift between father and son.
This rift, personal and societal, the narrator explains in different ways. One way is in terms of the Classic/Romantic divide. Pirsig says his way of thinking is a variety of classical thinking, which has to do with “underlying scientific explanation” and which “proceeds by reason and by laws.” Romantic thinking has to do with “immediate artistic experience” and “is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive.” “Although motorcycling is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.”
Now, why do we have this rift between these two “visions of reality”? Pirsig says we create, with our dualistic Western reason, hierarchic systems, to which we then become enslaved by the apparent objectivity of the system because no one wants to do the hard work of restructuring. The problem is dualistic rationality itself.
Franklin Freeman is a freelance writer living in Saco, Maine, with his wife and four children.
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