I am starting a project writing about all the books I formerly read, and putting them into a scheme.
That scheme will frequently align with Historical context and otherwise Humanities other productions, such as Theater and popular, digital media.
I have been thinking and listing and relisting which writers and which books I should include in this rather superficial analysis and critique.
Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which I read in 1981, and then again in 1983, I have come to conclude, represents the best book with which to begin.
I will not proceed chronologically, but by association, making the first book re-evaluated significant.
This critical association also supercedes the order in which I read these books but I will probably mention some autobiographical detail if only because in small bits it can sustain attention.
Nor does it include the textbooks I have read, though I am also including that knowledge in constructing a survey.
I am more interested in contextualizing these books much like a introductory Humanities class.
What is actually inside of them you would have to read yourself, according to now fading pretense formulated by Roland Barthes. But I jest...
...I use the wikipedia articles on these novels and writers, yet I do have a very good memory of what I have read, so I am not re-reading them.
I do this because I seem to have read more widely than many of my peers. Furthermore, I have a very solid background in History, wherein, putting these books into the circumstances, and guessing at the psychology of the times, is in fairly well rehearsed hands.
"Zen..." is a capstone to a variety of books written as estrangement from American or really Western Society. There are many ways to substantiate this estrangement, and it is important to understand it because the Middle East is now experiencing revolutionary estrangement.
So, in my case of being American, the best boogeyman to use to signify Western discohesion is Communism. Bu then Communism accuses Capitalism as the cause of discohesion, and so on.
Communism made much more sense in the late 19th and early 20th century. Times have changed.
The estrangement is not really just American society, but the counter-cultural society that began perhaps best indicated by Jean Rousseau and his ideas of the Commune, which was the general rejection of the Autocratic/Theocratic in Western Civilization. Well, a rejection that survived a bayoneting.
One sees this peak most visibly in the news of late sixties of both America and in France, but it was widespread elsewhere, including Latin America and Russia. Race as an issue of National criminality the key to emerging onto a common world stage bereft of Authoritarianism.
The youthful disenchantment may be merely unanticipated growths in population. Population booms that superceded the instruments in containing the booms.
(The thinking of "Hey, we will just do what we did before...it worked with 1 million so it should work with 10 million, right?)...a population boom that didn't fit with how the powers that be ran things: add to this the beginning turn in Western thought in the 16th century toward Science and away from Symbolism that only was relevant to the Nation or Tribe.
The spiritual answers were naturally eroding. Even as Literacy became far more widespread than ever, the discontents: the Rousseau's, the John Stuart Mills, the Darwinians, the Nietzchians, really, the Scientists and their culture, began to form a irresistable critique regarding accepted values.
Yet, it was getting off to a bad start as it white washed the Bible as mere mysticism. But Science can self-correct better than Religion, and in a sense, that is what a long history of Scientifically inspired novels elucidate, self correcting as actual whole self and not a metaphor for a engine. This drama of self correction is done best by Pirsig's "Zen..." and "Lila".
The broader genealogy of this self correcting scientific demythologizing narrative can be read in the popularity of Hermann Hesse: the reaching beyond Western values to an older tradition, a tradition not so stamped with the rule of Rome.
Hesse's enormous popularity (he has sunk into obscurity now but literature is not the same game since the digital age) was due to his main theme, a confessional confrontation with non-Christian thinking...or who James Joyce and the atheists anticipated, the "Human, All Too Human" freethinkers of Nietzche, anxious in this freedom.
Hesse embodied that pre-staging, countering Nietzche's professorial/Autocratic charm into a common voice, a confessional voice actually smarting with the freedom to total rre-evaluation.
The previous common voice of the revolutions, the Rousseau voice of popular revolt, this had its say, already. The Revolutions class wars against bad laws and corruption, Autocraticism and just bad government disconnected to its people...one can argue, is a Protestant practice as well, drawer deeper roots to those discontent with Rome.
But then this practice of seeking a common voice vs. the autocratic was just one, of many practices of the Protestants. In this case we can say it anticipated a larger cultural voice of protest, taking over the Vulgate's final control of content.
To digress into what could be more a historical argument that Protestantism pre-staged the closure to the older voice, the Patriarchal/Autocratic voice. It was evidently monotone, autocratic worship of the "State Hero". Oh, wait, that's still around!
Think: this must have sounded widespread among the northern people, this Autocratic voice of the South and the East: Northern Europe was an 3000 year old invasion route in, before it ever became, briefly and intensely, the 300 hundred years of inner turmoil then turning out over only two recent generations (as Genxer I can barely feel those generations: as a boy I got haircuts from a WW1 vet).
Becoming literate, widespread and endemic atavism was evident in all other civilizations. What to do about peaking in an Empire, and then declining into tribal atavism's of yore? Reformers wondered.
I am not referring to the English or Dutch, but to the Germans in particular, the Holy Roman Empire 'Shields' that closed for good Eastern invaders who marched on into France (and Spain).
But as to the Literary as the representation of the common voice, this voice emerging after having incubated in these social reforms.
This voice had been cultivated in Theater, and indeed Homer, Greek Classical Theater and Plato, are critique atavistic tribal practices.
But Theater cannot reach so far as the Literate, so we have this super imposition of the Literate, over Theater, circa 1750's, as printing presses and trade routes surged.
So Hesse inherited a culture possessing a self critique. This self critique had not maintained enough control over the breakdown of Religious Authority. The market for the voices beyond Religious Authority increased, and also brought to the fore, the voice of estrangement.
Hesse accessed this mature market of estrangement: Poe, Dunsany and Weird Tales were contemporaneously popular.
Hesse's popularity was two fold, during his lifetime and then two generations beyond. Poe nevertheless remains influential. But this is about the end of Poe's estrangement...similar to Nicomean Ethics capitulated to the Tragedians, meanwhile formalizing and disclosing those plays mystery.
But then Hesse was probably most popular among the sixites readership, which included me, but also included many other Easter oriented estrangements in Alan Watts and Kerouac: the generation that came back from World War Two was perhaps more international and Globally sophisticated...which is to say there was a drop in the overall global view which was then toppled to a internal issue of Racism: the story of the the GI to the Hippie.
Hesse's internal monologue used less mythologizing and when it used mythologizing Hesse was using it more self-consciouly. Hesse was not throwing Symbolism out as had realism, perhaps due to Joyce's anti-Catholicism. Hesse's tone borrowed a great deal from Jung but did not indulge too much in Jung's thinking. Hesse's tone is actually more at risk than Jung...in effect, the dramatization of Jung is accomplished by Hesse, but Hesse is also addressing larger issues than scientific psychology: the need for Religion is always there, and is not taken for an easy sucker for replacement by other symbolisms, like Nationalism, tribalism or Communism.
Hesse's tone was confessional without too much sentiment and bit of mysticism, but mostly solid reflection- herein lays Pirsig as well. The tone was not unlike the confessional tone contemporaneous in the 70's, on the radio: the Singer Songwriters like Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac.
Pirsig belongs less to that tone by including pedantry regarding Classicism.
This congruence, Hesse with Fleetwood Mac and Communes and drugs, is like the Ren Fair, RPGer's, BDSM, Gibson, Wired Magazine congruence. I hesitate to call them markets, but they are networks of shared values, co emergent with generations.
None of these congruences go so far as to seek to include a philosophy to their identities. Pirsig's critique of American society regards this practice, of blind consumerism (Zombie hordes in modern parlance) as lacking Quality. I will not go into this main assertion, but Pirsig goes on to present the idea of Quality as having a generational need to be willed into practice.
Yet, I bring Hesse to the fore because "Zen..." is actually the same story Hesse told again and again, along with the psychic breakdown that became the dominant serious literary theme of late Popular Literacy.
Even now I wonder if the adjustment of the Motorcycle, as in maintenance, was some metaphor for a school (called vehicles, actually) of Buddhism, but I digress.
Alan Watts should also be thrown in here, as well as Kerouac, but maintaining focus on whose has the stronger publications overall: Hesse's revived and then finally extinguished in the Digital Age. Because Hesse traveled around and explored the self, can supercede Kerouac, is because Hesse had a better, more thorough autobiography of this struggle. There was less degradation into popularity and Cultural Event as had happened to Kerouac.
Kerouac was a writer who came along quite late in the democratization of voice that Hesse perhaps captured best in its weaknesses and failures, and its successes and thrills. Though, Kerouac does do enough, perhaps better than Hesse, surfing over the idea in literary fireworks, but the connection to Pirsig is not so obvious and and strong.
Furthermore, Kerouac has stronger connections to another axis: the Kerouac-Shepard-Bukowski congruence.
But then that tone is what "Zen..." is working at; confessional, but at first and here and here.
Included too, not for my appreciation for I do not resonate with "The Catcher in the Rye". Yet "Zen..." includes this tone of wandering away mad from conventional society.
And "the madman" story is not done in the adolescent way of Lovecraft, or Salinger's (at least more serious than Lovecraft), or even in the broadest tone of Kesey's mad characters.
"Zen..." took this tone, and had to progress it to use it anew. And it is this, further framed more maturely, as a psychic breakdown that leads to a hospital.
But then it leads to a deeper idea. Sure, its an otherwise harmful and disturbing personal psychic ill, but, unlike the others who seem more staggered, Pirsig's autobiographical character overcomes it through understanding a more serious use of philosophy.
Hesse had the seriousness, as Nietzchean and Joycean, or any number of serious writers of the early to mid 20th century. That anxious edge of their voice, waiting for the assassins to show up. But Pirsig took this trope, this trope of the agonizing narrator bereft of former assurances, a trope progressing further into the estranged from reality, into disconent/malcontent, and turned it into a moment of mental illness. As was the style of the times.
So, the narrative of "Zen" taps into this trope, however, it included something else: the review of the classical values, considered "revolutionary" in the 14th century.
This readership had seriously declined in the Industrial Printing Press and readers markets of the late 19th century. You can read their bemoaning the decline in quality books...was no one to read Milton anymore?
The modern seemed much more interesting than the past, you see. So two babies were thrown out with the bathwater: the baby Alex and baby Jesus.
For a time, this was all considered, in the common voice, as all a former and now delusional mythology, promulgated by a tyrannical Patriarchy. Look at all the wars.
Remove this practice and yet we get the "Scientific Dialect" gobbly-gook of Marxism. And that self mutilation of fabulas and invented terms continued into a Post Modern market of today.
You know, History as simplified, totally, as class struggle(though Post-Modernism is too hip for that old trope).
The assumption that the simpletons who were told "The Myths" still had a myth-slot to fill. They were right...dont we all have a myth-slot? Well, some more than others. Consider me one of the delusionals.
So, "Zen..." included a sketch of Western History and its values that were indeed being denied as Christian values were being thrown out (with the baby included). You know, by calling it the Patriarchy I don't have to study Classical civilization.
News...wholly modern too, had made the polis a bit more panicky. Which is understandable; the early and mid twentieth century (people would see newsreels before the movies in the 30's) were horrific as the Western World, ripe with vigor, lurched and fought its way to reform.
Its not so much Communism, although that is convenient, as it is a re-evaluation of Western values. More obvious now is the hand of the State, via the media technologies, that created this multi-generation market for new ideas. Digital markets are substantial enough to provide some capture of the Myth slot. Though the Myth slot might be a demanding addiction. Hence delusionals like myself.
"Zen..." and its follow up (important to include in the reading...they should be one book) "Lila" are narratives that frame, more or less well, most philosophical processes into simple language. If you dont know what to think these two books will do the best.
The narrative winding is emotionally relevant to today's readership of self help, adventure narrative and personal growth. This was going on in Esalen, Chautaqua, other places in the US, modern theaters were general Theocratic practices affirming creed and those who belonged (important to society) Modernized into these alternative locations for affirmation, emerging alongside the Hesse-Kerouac-Pirsig axis in the Fifties to become fixtures in Counter-Culture. Remember that term?
The Human Potential movement was a response to the Age of Anxiety, seeking to reaffirm some important values lost in the panic of the disenchantment of the West.
This common voice in print, of disenchantment, now a emergence into the popular market much later than the actual reforms and philosophical struggles. Literature can summarize great swaths of History by condensing social values down into processes of becoming that character in the story. This popular condensation of disenchantment fulled embedded in the Scientific is perhaps best sparked by Poe, though Frankenstein, a badly written novel, is usually attributed as the first mark.
To put it another way, Hesse's work...the more emotional, spiritual angst ridden books of self evaluation, the Monster's "atheism", is somewhat solved by "Zen..."
However, the whole vector of what we might consider a polis of similar reading, has vanished since. A best seller today is merely 20,000 copies yet there occurs cultural events, like DaVinci Code.
Sales really have eclipsed the former glory of the Literary world, which was almost all there was before, excepting Theater.
But Literature fell short late mid century:we were getting more information about the world from Movies and Television, while Lit. had always been more demanding a source we still had the greatest access, ever.
Well, that was back in the early eighties!
Literature was already transforming into "language arts" when GenX...the last readers who will probably "get" Hesse and Pirsig, were already leaking out of difficult reading, into the more difficult reading processes involved in constructing the Digital Age. Just watch a movie version.
Hence why I see a strong line of Modernism, perhaps the main axis of Modernism, Aria'd best by Hesse but ending with Pirsig and beginning a new axis with Gibson.
No comments:
Post a Comment