Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

First published: 1974

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1950-1970

Locale: The northwestern United States

Principal Personages:

• Robert Pirsig, the author and narrator
• Chris, his eleven-year-old son
• John and Sylvia Sutherland, two friends who accompany the Pirsigs on the first leg of their motorcycle journey

Form and Content

Despite its title, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance offers little information about either Zen Buddhism or the maintenance of motorcycles. The author includes a direct warning to this effect, indicating that the book is instead a narrative based on personal experience. The narrative functions on three levels. At its simplest, it is a travelogue describing a cross-country motorcycle trip taken one summer by the narrator, Robert Pirsig, a middle-aged technical writer, and his eleven-year-old son, Chris; their westward journey begins in Minneapolis, goes through the Dakotas to Montana, then over to Oregon and down the California coast.

On another level, the book describes a psychological journey. Years earlier, Pirsig suffered a serious mental breakdown culminating in electric shock therapy that virtually erased his previous personality; now his son is showing early symptoms of psychotic illness. Each is haunted by the ghost of Pirsig’s past incarnation, named Phaedrus by Pirsig, and each in his own way is trying to recover a relationship with that self. Their journey literally covers some of the same ground Phaedrus traversed, including the university in Bozeman, Montana, where Phaedrus was a teacher.

Most important, however, the book retraces the theoretical ground of Phaedrus’ thoughts, ideas about the split between classical and romantic thinking and how that dichotomy informs the crisis of modern technological life, thoughts which became so strange and which Phaedrus pursued so intensely that they drove him to madness. These ideas represent the book’s third level.

Pirsig is not so much remembering Phaedrus’ thoughts as he is trying to pick them up and complete them—only this time, without going mad. His pursuit takes the form of a series of meditative soliloquies appropriate to a motorcycle journey, where conversation is difficult but where long solitary bouts of thinking are possible. These soliloquies, while following a generally consistent theme, dip in and out of diverse philosophical systems, from empiricism to Oriental mysticism to pre-Socratic thinking; they give the book its subtitle, An Inquiry into Values. He calls them “Chautauquas,” for traveling shows popular in the United States at the turn of the century. These shows consisted of a series of talks meant to enlighten and entertain their listeners and ultimately to raise their level of cultural awareness. Pirsig’s inquiry into cultural and personal values is driven by a similar aim.

Assigning the book to a particular genre is problematic. Because the work is based on the author’s experiences, “autobiography” may be an accurate descriptor, but the book’s focus on philosophical ideas and its relative paucity of biographical details make this label somewhat misleading. Yet Pirsig’s ideas—though intricate, complex, and even profound—are not argued with the rigorous, systematic care that would be necessary for the book to be classified as philosophy. The unifying theme of the journey, the presence of characters in conflict, and the often-symbolic interaction of setting and theme make this work more than a mere journal or travelogue and have led many critics to call it a novel. That Pirsig’s book straddles so many categories is fitting, because the aim of his intellectual and spiritual journey is to break through such divisions and to unite what have been accepted as opposites, such as reason and emotion, science and art.

An interweaving of place and theme is fundamental to the book’s forward movement. At the outset, Pirsig declares that he prefers back roads to freeways, because the aim of this motorcycle journey is to make good time, not in the sense of arriving at a destination quickly but in the sense of spending the time well. Traveling secondary roads allows them to cut more deeply into America, to see things more carefully, even though it may also mean hours spent riding on a road that leads nowhere. Pirsig’s Chautauquas are often like these routes: long, circuitous roads of thought dissolving into dead ends, yet along the way providing flashes of beauty and brilliance, recognitions of things forgotten.

In Montana, father and son temporarily leave their motorcycles and hike into the high country; the difficulty and danger of their climb and their isolation from civilization mirrors the path that Phaedrus took into the lonely high country of thought that threatened to cut him off from society. When Pirsig decides not to continue their hike all the way to the summit, it represents a psychological turning point; their turning back toward civilization reflects Pirsig’s desire not to follow Phaedrus into madness again. Yet the psychological tension mounts when their trip by motorcycle resumes and Chris becomes increasingly moody and rebellious; the tension culminates off the foggy California cliffs in Chris’s desire to throw himself into the sea. The fog surrounding father and son objectifies the confusion of their relationship, the treacherousness of the cliffs, the urgency of their situation. The scene calls for a new recognition from Pirsig, a reconciliation of the father, the son, and the ghost of Phaedrus. That reconciliation, which occurs in the final pages of the book, signals that the journey has reached its destination.

Critical Context

After 121 publishers had rejected the manuscript of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one editor decided to accept it, primarily as an act of conscience; the book had forced him to clarify the reason that he was in the publishing business. He offered Pirsig a standard three-thousand-dollar advance, noting that it was probably the last payment the author would receive, because such books never made money. To the surprise of many, the book soared to the top of the best-seller lists. Pirsig was besieged with requests for interviews and offers for film rights and foreign publication. What made this unusual book so popular?

In an afterword written ten years after the book’s initial publication, Pirsig explores the reasons for his book’s astonishing popularity. He fits Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance into the category of “culture-bearing books,” books which serve to move the culture forward. Such an effect can never be planned; a book will almost accidentally coincide with a culture’s restless need to change, to challenge old assumptions, and to find new solutions. At the time of this book’s publication, the tumultuous 1960’s had just concluded. Those who had participated in radical group protests against war, racism, and corporate profit at the expense of humanist values now found themselves faced with individual choices: Should they simply enter the work force and pursue material success as their fathers did, or was there another path they could take? Pirsig writes:

This book offers another, more serious alternative to material success. It’s not so much an alternative as an expansion of the meaning of “success” to something larger than just getting a good job and staying out of trouble. And also something larger than mere freedom. It gives a positive goal to work toward that does not confine. That is the main reason for the book’s success, I think. The whole culture happened to be looking for exactly what this book has to offer.

Bibliography

Abbey, Edward. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXX (March 30, 1975), p. 6.

Adams, Robert M. “Good Trip,” in The New York Review of Books. XXI (June 13, 1974), pp. 22-23.

Basalla, George. “Man and Machine,” in Science. CLXXXVII (January 24, 1975), pp. 248-250.

Schuldenfrei, Richard. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” in Harvard Educational Review. XLV (February, 1975), pp. 95-103.

Steiner, George. “Uneasy Rider,” in The New Yorker. L (April 15, 1974), pp. 147-150.