[MD] MD and thee

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Marsha,

Marsha said:
I seem to remember you writing that your main interest in 
ZMM and LILA was more from the point-of-view that they 
are novels.  I was wondering what was your present area 
of study, and does it relate to your experience on the 
MD list?

Matt:
Maybe now I would clarify that it's not that my main 
interest in them is that they were novels, but that if one 
is going to develop an overall picture of Pirsig, one needs 
to deal with the fact that they are novels.  _My_ horse in 
the race is that it is instrumental to an overall picture of 
Pirsig that they be read with a special eye on their "literary 
attributes," which is still a misleading way of putting it.  
And, on the other hand, I don't know what my main 
interest is in Pirsig anymore.  I think it has to do with 
philosophy as a kind of autobiography, Romanticism's 
transmogrification of Descartes' picture of philosophy as 
having to begin from the first-person point of view 
(Wordsworth's Prelude, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, 
Emerson's essays, Thoreau's Walden).  Pirsig fits in an 
interesting way into a number of developing traditions, kind 
of like a node in the middle of a number of arcs 
(romanticism, the memoir, the travelogue, the confession, 
philosophical pragmatism, the American importation of 
Eastern philosophy, individualism: the list can go on).

I'm not sure what you mean by "does it relate to my 
experience on the MD list," and I hesitate to say that I 
have a "present area of study" outside of the seminars I 
happen to be taking right now.  (Solidifying an area of 
study--something I can tell employers that I "know," like 
genre and time period--will occur over the next several 
years.)  But I can tell you that I've been reading 18th 
century English novels, romantic poetry, post-Harlem 
Renaissance writers (Wright, Baldwin, Ellison), Antebellum 
sentimental and sensational literature (Stowe, Poe, 
Brockden Brown), cultural studies theorists, and a s
mattering of other things (ecocriticism theory and 
philosophy of emotions).

The most interesting thing by far was Ellison's Invisible Man, 
which is at least as philosophical as ZMM.  Just a 
fascinating book.  It helped solidify the overarching thought 
that I want to study the Emerson/Thoreau tradition and 
particularly as it transforms itself in the African-American 
tradition that goes from Douglass' Autobiography to Wright's 
Black Boy to Ellison.  The fact of the matter is that the 
autobiographical nature of writing generally is far more 
explicitly tied to what African-Americans have perceived as 
the goal of writing.  This has directly, I think, to do with 
them being forced to this country and enslaved, and that at 
first the only writing they did was in direct service to (what 
we might call) the "work of freedom"--aside from practical 
writing, its almost all slave narratives for awhile.  And then 
afterwards, the task of articulating (and negotiating, if you 
think of Booker T) the black experience in America is 
conceived as the primary, if not only, task of the black 
writer.  This has been a powerful force of antagonism for 
black writers themselves ("Why do I need to write about 
black people or blackness?"), but it has marked the best of 
their writing with a spiritual intensity relative to their 
refocusing of the peculiar materials of their own lives.  And, 
too, I think of comparing the particular ways that 
African-Americans negotiate their experience in their writing 
with the way another oppressed group in the US has: 
Native Americans.  Both oppressed, but very different 
experiences, though, I think, no less productive of an 
intense process of reconstitution of individual experience 
(I'm thinking of Sherman Alexie, whom I've already written 
a little about).

So, basically, I have big ideas at this point.  And where 
does Pirsig fit?  In an interesting nexus between many of 
these ideas, though not all of them.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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