Throwing out the Whore

Today I want to develop some of my earlier thoughts about Lila and the metaphysics of quality.

I still think there is an important sense in which the character Lila represents or stands for the Female in Pirsig's work. She is the only fully felt, and fully expressed female character - and this is true in spite of what I believe is Pirsig's "cheating": where he weaves in an implausible plot-line about Lila plotting to kill him and steal his boat. (This, to me, is a cheap manoeuvre to make the central character into a seriously crazy person - in contra-distinction to the seriously misguided and chaotic person who is otherwise embodied in the person who lives, breathes, fucks, drinks, thinks, dreams and does the washing up throughout the remainder of Lila's pages).

As the only real woman in the combined 2 volumes of Zen and Lila, and the only person to have a plausible perspective on the spiritually emaciated half-person who is offered to us under the various names of Phaedrus, "I" and "the author" - we should not allow or accept, in my opinion, that Lila be dumped in a lunatic asylum never to be heard from again.

This could seem like me carping about a purely fictional element - but I think Lila carries real philosophical truth, and real Quality of the highest level, that has been dumped out of the boat, and by implication dumped out of the universe. We really can't afford to lose her. Without her, we have a skewed philosophy, and Pirsig's opus becomes part of the Problem we are facing, rather than part of the Solution (as we used to say this in the good old 1960s).

I want to try to develop this further. If we buy into Zen and Lila as an adequate account of the entire situation (metaphysical, factual, historical) as of 1992 - we are buying into a fractured and incomplete universe. The Mother has been chucked out. The Whore has been dismissed as a potential murderess, thief and lunatic. There is no Madonna, since she was never invited into the story in the first place. This is a universe that is majorly deprived, and we are left with a sad and broken male thus lost and abandoned in the universe - who has axes to grind and things to prove about himself, and a hatred for the "winners" in life's game (a psychic "move" which Nietsche depicted very well - Nietsche, a philosopher whom I am otherwise quite unhappy about and certainly would not accept as any sort of role model - but who well depicted this psychic move in his phrase "ressentiment". Which boils down to a kind of hatred of the strong, on the part of the inadequate weakling).

This is not meant to be any sort of attack on Robert Pirsig himself, who I think is a wonderful and honest writer. (And a far better philosopher than Friedrich Nietsche.) I am talking about the psychic and spiritual universe which Pirsig has embodied in the writing he has chosen to share with us.

The question is: what sort of skewed universe is this, that excludes the Female principle to this extent, and leaves us vaguely resentful and unhappy because we are not really being fed and nurtured in the way our biological nature constantly whispers in our ear that we are entitled to?

I shall try to develop these thoughts further, in later posts.

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