Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: The Fusion of Form and Content

R O N A L D J. L E E St. Olaf College Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: The Fusion of Form and Content Robert Pirsig’s story of the summer-time motorcycle journey of a father and a son has become one of the publishing successes of recent years. It is above all a very well told story: exciting, suspenseful, a little sentimental, tasting a bit of the old counter-culture fondness for debating the merits of man and his machines and for scrutinizing the different levels of consciousness by which we live. But many people put the novel aside in exasperation, refusing to trudge through the lengthy philosophical “digressions” or to accept the conventions of the romance quest narra­ tive with which the novel operates. Those who do trudge through the philosophy often despair of finding a single, adequate definition of the idea of “quality” which is so central to the narrator’s story. Herein lies the need for explication and clarification. Pirsig’s thesis is that “quality” is too ambiguous to be defined in the philosophy, even though the philosophizing is important in an experiential way to the narrator, and that the definition or statement of what he means can finally emerge only in the story itself. The story is the myth which is, all at the same time, more profound, more ambiguous, and closer to life itself, than the logos, the mere words. In a wry disclaimer at the beginning of the book, Pirsig says that what follows “should in no way be associated with that great body of 222 Western American Literature factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either.” Indeed, the story is rather loose on both counts, but a central insight to the notion of quality does lie in his allusions to notions of Zen and specifically in a reference he makes to the Tao. The casual way in which “quality,” Zen, and the Tao are linked indeed is typical of Pirsig’s imprecise and suggestive way of proceeding, and the novel can be faulted for that. But in a rather bold and ingenuous way the novel stands formally as an assertion of its particularly con­ temporary, romantic content. Pirsig’s heavily autobiographical story is presented as an argument for an alternative to the mere conceptualiza­ tion of one’s problems: the discovery of meaning through the somewhat mystical (and certainly romantic) notion of immersion in experience itself. Thus, although one cannot altogether excuse or condone the fuzziness of the philosophy, it is important to recognize the aesthetic “spine” to which the formal elements of the novel relate. For the nar­ rator “quality” is something mystical, encountered and understood in experience itself, and likewise the meaning of the novel lies simply in the story. It is the story, the thing itself, in both its form and content which reveals the meaning. The several strands of the plot (the narrator’s relationship to his travelling companions, his conflict with his son, his painful reminiscence about his own past, and his journey to his old haunts) are carefully woven together with the philosophical digressions by means of establishing allegorical parallels to the physical journey and psychological parallels to the inward search of the protagonist. And at the end of all this it is his particular experience of wholeness and integra­ tion that defines the meaning of quality. In general terms one might say that what this novel is about is the divided self, and that, if one accepts its success, it takes its place in a line of twentieth century works which might include Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Peter Shaffer’s Equus. In works of this sort we have the presence of the romance narrative of the quest, an archetypal narrative pattern of action focusing on a central figure or hero whose journey consists of search, struggle, and discovery. In these contemporary works, however, the ancient pattern of romance is laced with irony, and the pleasure and the frustration of our encounter with...