P is for Pirsig
In September 1969 the university term was yet to begin; the city was quiet as most students were yet to return from the summer break. My teaching included short executive courses in July and August, and so I’d stayed on. Taking time off from research and course preparation, I went to see Easy Rider (it had been released earlier in the US, to critical acclaim and to controversy). Marketed as a film about hippies, drugs, free love and communes, it was a road trip film, with Peter Fonda (as Wyatt – an intended reference to Wyatt Earp, the gambler and old-style lawman) and Dennis Hopper (as Billy – in this case a reference to Billy the Kid, a gunfighter outlaw). Hopper was the film’s director. Packed full of cultural references, social and geographical markers, most of which an Englishman like me could hardly grasp, it was accompanied by some stunning visual images and pounding, thrilling music by The Band, The Byrds, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Steppenwolf, among several others. An adrenaline filled experience, it was compelling, confusing, and ultimately frightening. Recalling that day, two images are stuck in my mind: bikes travelling across empty desert, and a silent audience as the final credits rolled.
One of my students was a big bike enthusiast. An American, he had bought himself a powerful Norton motorcycle. He had recommended the film, which he’d seen on the day it was released. He didn’t explain that the two motorbikes, as much the stars as Fonda and Hopper, were chopper modified Harley Davidson Hydra Glide bikes (choppers were customised motorbikes, and at that time most of the rebuilding work was undertaken in California). The film launched a million Harley Davidsons, and the young of that era (hippies or not) can be seen today as the leather clad, overweight older men still out on their bikes at weekends, especially in the summer.
The road trip began in Los Angeles, where Wyatt and Billy had successfully completed a drug deal. Their plan was to ride to New Orleans in time to enjoy the Mardi Gras, although they only got as far as Alabama. With little dialogue, and not too much effort at character development, what we see is beautiful stretches of the US, and the astonishingly wide variety of people and attitudes found along the way. The film was seductive. We are encouraged to identify with, and even glorify in the antics of the two riders. We are lulled into the beauty of the visual images, swept along by outstanding, pulsing rock music. If the scenes with other people reveal that these two were self-absorbed males, so, what was new? It was a trick, of course, as the last part of the movie threw us right into violent, unremitting hatred. Confronting and clever, although I had one reservation: did the ‘heroes’ have to be drug dealers? A little too much realism for me.
Many years later, it is hard to be clear about Hopper’s intentions. Wyatt and Billy are the film’s focus, and we are devasted by their murder. They exemplified 1960’s freedom, drug culture, casual sex and carefree travel on a motorbike. At the same time, they were criminals, making drug deals with Mexican sellers, dishonest and exploitative. Was this a paean to a counter-culture life, and an exposé of the horrors of southern racist behaviour and class aggression? Or was this meant to be read more like a documentary, America as a confusing mix of beauty and violence, freedom and crazy behaviour? The music included such hits as Born to be Wild (Steppenwolf) and I wasn’t Born to Follow (the Byrds), only to be balanced by the dark Bob Dylan composition It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding): “The hollow horn plays wasted words Proves to warn that he not busy being born Is busy dying”.
Road trips provide a helpful framework for a story. Easy Rider took us from hippie California to the racist South. Another biker road trip, this time in book form, went from east to west, as told in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.[i] In this case it was also a journey to confront the past. Pirsig’s book was published five years after the release of Easy Rider, but it captured much of the counter-cultural zeitgeist of the time, just as the film had done. John Sewell’s art on the front of the dust jacket advertised the theme: a person in black and white is sitting on a motorbike, feet on the ground. One hand wearing a glove, holding a spanner, while his head is resting on the other. He’s looking thoughtful. It’s a classical figure, wearing a Roman toga, the head stylised like a Roman sculpture, but out of his head a tulip is growing, the green leaves the only bit of colour in his portrait. The rest of the cover is in black and yellow, with Pirsig’s name in green. A cover full of curious promise. If Hopper’s Easy Rider was about America, Pirsig’s road trip book is only incidentally concerned with geography or the character of the country. This is an intellectual journey, about philosophy, about relationships, and about the author’s past. It is structured around a seventeen day trip from Minnesota to California, and although described as a novel, it is clearly informed by Pirsig’s own life story. [ii] It sold like hot cakes: 50,000 copies in three months, and more than 5m to date. [iii]
On this journey Pirsig is travelling with his older son, Chris. Central to the book is a character called Phaedrus. As read, we discover Phaedrus is the narrator prior to having a mental breakdown. Many aspects of Pirsig’s own life appear throughout the novel. In 1958, he had been appointed a professor in the Bozeman campus of Montana State University, a place where the narrator and his son stop during their journey west. Pirsig suffered from schizophrenia, and spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals between 1961 and 1963, where he was treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), another topic included in the book. Is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance an autobiography dressed up as a novel? Perhaps, but it doesn’t really matter. We know we are dealing with the issues Pirsig faced, and how he worked them out.
Before 1961, Pirsig had taught creative writing, and some time later he became a technical writer, working on computer manuals. Technology, and making sense of technology is a key theme in the book, and there are several long passages describing the narrator maintaining his bike. We quickly learn he is rather reclusive, happy to fix a minor problem with the engine in his motorbike, a Honda Superhawk CB77, and less willing to spend time in idle conversation. When he is provoked into speaking, he often launches into a long, complex, and occasionally rather unclear expositions on the issues he has been considering as they travel. When it comes to personal discussions, he can be spiky, unclear, or even rude.
Pirsig as narrator seems to live in three rather separate worlds. There is the practical world of mechanical engineering, a reflection of his first degree in science. There is the world of philosophical exploration, an examination which appears to take place almost entirely in his head: Pirsig had studied philosophical issues in both India and the US. Finally, there is the world of people and relationships, one in which he appears to be something of a dab hand in saying the wrong thing, often ignoring or misunderstanding others!
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance appealed to the ex-hippie ex-student population of the 1970s. How could it not. It was about motorbikes, about travelling to California (still the home from home for many self-respecting radicals and free thinkers), and about the challenges of understanding life. Written in the midst of social change, some of the messages of the book struck home for its readers. I knew students who reveled in the details of looking after their bikes, talking wisely about how they had dealt with excess carbon on their sparkplug points! Others loved the almost impenetrable stuff about philosophical issues, debating the distinction between the romantic and the classical; between living in the moment, and trying sort out problems when they arose, as opposed to living life with an analytical fervor, checking, diagnosing and fixing every bit of equipment – and every person – around them. It was a man’s book, too, where bikes and the elusive meaning of ‘quality’ grabbed attention, and any stuff about women’s views was, as I saw it, pushed aside after a few sentences.
It was a book for a troubled and confusing time. In the US, Richard Nixon was coming to the end of his presidency (1969-74), with all the dramas of break-ins and taped conversations. The Cold War had taken a bad turn with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, followed by Brezhnev’s subsequent claim Russia had the right to violate the sovereignty of any country attempting to replace Marxism–Leninism with capitalism. If all that wasn’t bad enough, the activities of OPEC (the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) began to take a more interventionist turn. In October 1973, the Arab majority of OPEC announced major production cuts and an oil embargo against the United States and other nations supporting Israel in their war with a coalition of Arab states, the Yom Kippur War. Oil prices quadrupled, rationing was put in place, all of which was compounded in the UK by a lengthy coal-miners’ strike. Both Nixon in the US and the hapless Heath in the UK were replaced in 1974, but observers sensed this was only one step in a process of change. They were right, as Harold Wilson was reappointed Prime Minster, shortly after he was replaced by Jim Callaghan, and then in 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected. Similarly, the US saw Nixon replaced by Gerald Ford, then Jimmy Carter, and in 1981, Thatcher’s ally, Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981. The slow decline of left-wing radicalism was coming to an end; the conservatives were about to take over.
By the time the book appeared, it was clear Pirsig was still a troubled man. He had recovered from his ECT treatment a decade earlier, but was still trying to come to terms with the person he had been. Back then, his interest in philosophy had been with this notion of ‘quality’, which he saw as a concept that could neither be explained by Plato’s theory of ideal forms nor Aristotle’s empiricism. He had attempted to resolve this, and, as the journey in the book progresses, he keeps returning to the issue in a series of reflections. Riding, he frees his mind from both the travel and the interactions with people, especially his friends who are with him for the first part of the trip, and his son, who is with him throughout. He saw understanding quality as central to developing a new path in contemporary philosophy. Maintaining his bike was another way he explored the issue, contrasting the mechanical tasks of maintenance and problem solving with viewing his bike as a realisation of ideas, a conceptual space as much as a physical one.
Like many critics, I find some parts of the discussion opaque and confusing, which may be a reflection of my own limitations. The use of the word ‘Zen’ in the book’s title is a little hard to understand. Certainly, the narrator’s practice is built around reflection, but his examination of the nature of mind and substance do not rely on any traditional meditative practice. It contrasts with Eugene Herrigel’s book, Zen and the Art of Archery, which had been published in 1953, and from which Pirsig had surely taken his title. Under the guidance of a Zen master, Herrigel accepts and develops skills through what he calls an unconscious control of outer activity, rather than the western belief that mastery can only be obtained through conscious control and direction. A central theme in Herrigel’s book is that through years of practice, a physical activity becomes effortless both mentally and physically, as if our physical memory (what today we might call our ‘muscle memory’) executes complex and difficult movements without conscious control from our mind.[iv] This seems to mirror Mihalyi Cziksentmihalyi’s concept of flow, the zone in which physical activity becomes unthinkingly effortless. [v]
Rereading the book now, it is clear maintaining his bike was one way in which Pirsig was able to step away from conscious attention. However, even if this was a kind of Zen practice, it is reflection rather than meditation that is at the core of the trip, as he attempts to link back to the person he was before his illness and the discussions he had with colleagues and teachers, while also trying to reframe his connection to his son. In retrospect, it is not easy to grasp why the book was so popular when it was published. Was it the attraction of the physical journey across the US, or the complexity and often unresolved interactions with his son and others, or the sometimes extensive and rather unclear ramblings through various philosophical issues? In uncertain times, his self-absorbed, jumbled journey might have helped other muddled people.
Journeys are a powerful way to structure thinking. Pirsig tried the model a second time with Lila, subtitled An Inquiry into Morals. [vi] In this case the journey was on a cruising sailboat down the Hudson River, accompanied by Lila, a troubled and aggressive woman. This time the ideas and their analysis are more discursive, and the result a great deal less satisfactory. As was the case with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the ending is inconclusive and somewhat frustrating, possibly a reflection of the stage Pirsig had reached in his thinking.
Many writers have used the idea of combining travel and philosophy. Norwegian author Jostein Gaardner followed a related approach in his novel Sophie’s World. [vii] If Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance caught attention in 1974, twenty years later Sophie’s World broke records. By 2011 it had been translated into fifty-nine languages, with over forty million copies sold. Like Pirsig, Gaardner takes us through philosophers’ ideas. However, this ‘journey’ is complicated, and it takes time before we realise that Sophie is fictional, her adventures written by Albert Knag for his daughter Hilde. The unfolding drama wanders between the real world and fiction, providing a structure for the reader to learn about the development of philosophy over 2,500 years. It’s a great story, and holds together more effectively than Pirsig’s novel.
A revealing photograph on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’s dustjacket shows a boy smiling at the photographer, resting on motorcycle panniers and packed bags. No helmets, but they’re about to leave. Pirsig is sitting in front, feet on the ground, holding the handlebars, his hair blown up high. But his attention’s elsewhere; you know he’s already on his journey.
[i] I have the UK edition, published by Bodley Head in 1974 (the same year as it was published in the US).
[ii] Some claim it is basically just an autobiography. See, for example: Edward Abbey, Novelistic autobiography, autobiographical novel? No Matter.The New York Times, 30 March 1975
[iii] https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-robert-pirsig-obituary-20170424-story.html
[iv] The UK edition was published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1953, and later by Penguin in 1988
[v] Flow, Harper and Row, New York, 1990
[vi] Bantam, New York, 1991
[vii] The first English version published in 1994 by Penguin in the UK and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in the US
