Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

Robert Pirsig (1974)

 
         I recently inquired of my social media friends what impression they had of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a strange sort of novel published by Robert Pirsig in 1974. Was it A) a life-changing classic; B) a period piece; C) a hipster cliche; or D), an impenetrable mess? "All of the above" was a popular answer, and some people said that their views might have changed over time.

    I belong to the first group. My adolescent life was lit up by the book's approach to certain burning questions of the day: What's the right balance between living in your head and in the world? Why is originality both praised and feared? Do we need anyone to tell us what is Good? Pirsig has some humane answers, albeit delivered by the sort of mad genius uncle that the adults tend to write off as a flake.

   Of those who remember throwing it across the room in frustration, one complaint was that they could not find the plot. Is it even a novel, in the first place? The author's note says it's all true, so you could call it a lightly fictionalized memoir. The surface plot goes like this: A man rides a motorcycle, with his son on the back, from Minnesota to California, talking to himself the whole way.

    But, mercy, such talk! The narrator describes it as a Chautauqua, which is to say, the long-winded nineteenth-century equivalent of today's TED talks. The subject matter is summed up in the subtitle, 'an inquiry into values.' That lends credence to the 'pretentious hipster cliche' theory, especially considering that he is undertaking to talk about not only Zen Buddhism, but Poincaré, Kant, and Plato.

    At the same time, though, he is talking about the reality all around him: the weather, the terrain, how his motorcycle is running. On this reading, I noticed how neatly the metaphysical journey is mapped onto the geographical journey, attaining a majestic altitude over the Continental Divide. No matter how lofty his thoughts, sunshine is still hot and rain is still wet.

    The narrator's personal history is emerging, too, involving mental illness and an episode of electroshock treatment. When he's told “You have a new personality now,” that raises more questions than it answers. The old personality, dubbed 'Phaedrus', is a ghost worthy of the German Romantics, or Henry James. This is ironic, because the man we meet is Classic all the way, a passionate devotee of the Church of Reason. That's why he's so good at the naming of parts, conceptually dissecting his motorcycle into parts and systems. In the Chautauqua, he turns these tools of analysis on logic itself. What he really wants to know is, what is the relationship between the True and the Good?

    It makes sense that the book caught hold as a cult classic among the young people who were also reading Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Pirsig argues through the long-running contention between the Classic and the Romantic, the Hip and the Square, and he shows how they might benefit from learning to appreciate each other. Notwithstanding the quirks of the vehicle, the passion of the argument still resonates.