[MD] [Bulk] Compassion

[david buchanan]

mrb said to David Thomas:
... Think ZAMM tries to reconcile Aristotle and Plato? Coleridge said that every man's born either Aristotelian or Platonist. So the Z-narrator and Phaedrus had to be different men to bring them together with a thunderclap!

dmb says:
Well, yes, bringing the classic and romantic together into an integrated whole is one of the central aims BUT Phaedrus is described as a romantic who, unlike most romantics, had a classically trained mind. And don't forget that we are talking about a slightly fictionalized version of Pirsig's actual biography. I mean, he was studying science as a very young undergraduate student but then joined the army and spent some time in Korea. On the way back he read Northrop's Meeting of East and West, at which point he decided to study philosophy instead of science. After studying Oriental philosophy in India, he got a journalism degree, wrote some fiction and worked as a technical writer. All this, I think, is evidence that Phaedrus was quite capable as both a romantic (Plato) thinker and a classic (Aristotle) thinker.

The narrator, on the other hand, is a cowardly thinker. He is patterned after the UNRELIABLE narrator in Henry James's "Turn of the Screw", as Pirsig explains in the intro to the 25th anniversary addition of ZAMM. (Henry is the younger brother of William James.) In Henry's novel the narrator is a governess who thinks the children in her charge are being threatened by an evil ghost and the entire story is told from her perspective. But if you realize that the story is being told by a crazy woman then you see that there is no ghost and the only danger to the children is the governess herself. It is her delusion that poses the danger, not any ghosts. And so it is the the unreliable narrator in ZAMM. The narrator's central motive is to stay out of the mental hospital. He knows what happened to Phaedrus and so everything he says is calculated to sound as normal and sane as possible because he does not want any more shock treatments. The narrator thinks he is being pursued by a ghost but the only real danger to Chris, his son, is this fraudulent personality. On some level Chris knows his real father is missing and has been replaced by a platitude-spewing bullshitter who will say anything to make people like him. 

And so I think of the final scene, the final climax of the story, is when Chris asks him if he really was insane. For the first time we hear from Phaedrus INSTEAD of the narrator. "No", he answers. He wasn't insane. "I knew it!", Chris says. That's the moment that Chris got his real dad back. That's the moment when we realize that all of the narrator's criticism of Phaedrus was bogus, was motivated by cowardice. We realize that the narrator isn't really interested in the truth. He's only interested in saving his skin and poor little Chris can smell the bullshit. That's what's making Chris kinda crazy. The source of his trouble is not some evil ghost but the narrator's fear. He can't handle Phaedrus's truth. Chris had spent the whole trip with a helmut on, staring at the back of the narrator's head but after the narrator sort of steps aside Chris takes the helmut off and stands up on the foot pegs as the roll through winding roads and redwoods. They're headed toward San Francisco, one of the most dynamic places on earth. It's open to the ocean and the East and literally sits on shaky ground. It's the site of the silicon valley and the summer of love. It's where James introduced Pragmatism and Alan Watts popularized Zen Buddhism. If Phaedrus is going to bring his truth into the world, this is the spot.


"If anyone orders merlot, I'm leaving!"