The Mythos of Zen

I think the clearest example, for me, of Pirsig doing something that is reasonable but not good is the entire project of this book: tell a story about an awkward man and his son to show how insane it is to live hyper-intellectually without the “human element of life,” as Kaylee calls it. I am reminded of advice one of my professors in my undergrad once gave me. He said: not all our problems can be solved through intellect. And that was relevant because we had been reading a polemic on love, which just showed that you can analyze love intellectually until the cows comes home (did we figure out when that was?), and it won’t get you anywhere because it doesn’t predict the emotional reactions that would incur from cheating, disloyalty, or despondency.

I, like Kaylee, was struck by how little mention there is of the notion of love in the first place in this text. I find it fascinating that Pirsig goes all the way back to mythos of the ancient Greeks and never stops to weave in mythos about emotional encounters that have carried on wayward through history. But, again, I think that is one of the goals of this text. If, by the end of the story, we are still sitting there scratching our heads about: was that love? Was there any of that in there AT ALL? Perhaps the point of the text was to show how, in a way, life can be utterly meaningless when its entire project comes down to dividing, slicing, and pigeon-holing existence into false categories. Categories which offer no consistent fulfilment—a fulfilment that we cannot explain because it is not tangible to us, only observable, like love.

I say Pirsig is doing something reasonable and not necessarily good with Zen because he is not totally naïve as to how he is portraying his narrator. I thought it was quite deliberate that he wrote this story with a detached main character—all the wisdom of Buddhist monk who has no earthly desires—showing the potential emptiness that derives therefrom when paired with Western hyper-rationalism. The story isn’t “good,” as in: it doesn’t make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside; it’s quite the opposite actually. Do I have to see love as an arbitrary pattern now?
But Zen is reasonable because it has the self-consciousness of its frigid nature, which teaches us the futility of a life like that of Pirsig N.

Pirsig shows us in Zen that the moment when his narrator actually loses his mind is when he comes to self-realization that his own intellectual project of defining quality has been futile all along, and a meta-level, the project of the book. But this mental breakdown of the narrator can be read as symbolism for the reader that the project of definition is literally crazy. Furthermore, this is the moment in which rhetoric really “wins” the rhetoric-dialectic battle (according to Pirsig) because the project of defining is never perfect in rhetoric; it is wholly contingent. This entire novel shows us a rhetorical quest—in the guise of a dialectic—because it never culminates with a perfect definition, and thereby the word Quality becomes irrelevant. Our author simply models how rhetoric’s project is to get into the cracks and crevices of language and how it can constitute meaning, eventually all the way to the level of mythos where we generate cultural reproduction through unassuming narratives that do more to speak us than we can ever do to speak well about them.

 And then Zen itself becomes a part of our mythos—open for objectification, subjective opinions, measurements of good, bad, and especially, Quality.