From: Ian Glendinning (ian@psybertron.org)
Date: Thu Jul 01 2004 - 17:15:01 BST
Ah brilliant Rick.
Great find.
This is the artcle where Pirsig was subsequently branded a "bigot" yes ?
I'll get the content up on my site now - I didn't put the original critical
artice up because I didn't have this article that had caused the response,
so it had no context.
Magic
Ian G
----- Original Message -----
From: "Valence" <valence10@hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 3:45 AM
Subject: MD Pirsig the Critic
> Hi all,
> My recent withdrawal from the MD notwithstanding, I just had to share this
> one with the friends I know I still have here :-)
>
> Anyway, following up on a lead I found at Ian Glendinning's wonderful
> Psybertron website (http://www.psybertron.org/pirsigpages.html), I
shuffled
> down to the basement of the New York Public Library and eventually was
able
> to locate this "long lost" Pirsig article. It's a book review he wrote
for
> the The New York Times Sunday Book Review which was published on June 8,
> 1975. I had to retype the whole thing from a blurry print-out of a
> microfilm archive. Words that (I think) were in italics are herein
rendered
> with asterisks.
>
> It's my gift to you.
>
> Enjoy...
>
> and take care
> rick
> --------------------------------------------------
> A husband without a wife
>
> ONE MAN, HURT
>
> A Shattering Account of the End of a Happy Marriage. By Albert Martin. 278
> pp. New York: Macmillan. $8.95
>
> By Robert Pirsig (Robert Pirsig, author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
> Maintenance," is now a Guggenheim Fellow writing a second book.)
>
> "One Man, Hurt" describes in detail the agonizing chronology of a divorce,
> shows the life that preceded and surrounds it, and calls for opposition
> to the social trends the author feels produced it. As a document of
marital
> bliss and as an attack on feminism it backfires completely. The author's
> atrocious suburban banality drowns out everything else.
> We never get done reading how much the author loves his wife, his
children,
> washing dishes, doing diapers, his house (a suburban one in Connecticut),
> his neighborhood, his job, his church, his priest, his mother and father,
> his mother-in-law, his father-in-law, the Little League, kid's hockey, TV,
> their cats and dogs. For him suburban life is some sort of continuous
> ceremony, a ritual he must have learned to imitate watching old Andy Hardy
> shows on the late-late movie on TV. Then, when his wife tells him she
wants
> a divorce to "discover herself," he cries *what* is she *talking* about?
> What more can he possibly *give* her? Throughout the book, he never finds
> out.
>
> However, if one can transcend this banal level, one can find in this book
> some unexpected literary merit. The author tells us how miserable he is,
> yet because he doesn't know how to render it properly we never see it for
> ourselves. But he really is miserable. As one reads on, one begins to
see
> beneath the surface of his plastic suburban style and acquire tolerance
and
> even sympathy for his predicament. His one saving grace begins to shine
> through: he is not an arrogant man. He sincerely tries to learn what is
> wrong, tries to change himself. He really *is* hurt, and he hasn't
> deliberately hurt anyone else to provoke it. What are the real causes?
> What could he have done? he asks. What can he do now? It would be an
act
> of arrogance not to try to answer.
>
> The first key is his pathetic clinging to the material symbols of
> middle-class life. This, one discovers, is a poor boy, ambitious and
> undoubtedly hard-working, from a Polish Roman Catholic childhood in New
> England. Everything he loves, down to his cats and dogs, are symbols of
his
> upward rise from the background of his immigrant parents. Now, like Jay
> Gatsby and Sammy Glick before him, he sees it all turning to ashes. The
> central shining symbol of his own aspirations, the ballet dancer on the
New
> York stage whom he persuaded to marry him, wants out. She sees her whole
> life is just a cheap symbol, like everything else in his world and she
wants
> something more real.
>
> She asks him to look inward, but he doesn't know what she is talking
about.
> For them there is no inward self, only roles. He is a totally
> other-directed man, a result of a background he cannot change and cannot
> even understand. At the superficial level of his own understanding there
is
> no difference between his New England Catholicism and his wife's Texas
> Methodism, but at a level he is unaware of there are very deep
differences,
> and these, I think, are the root of it all.
>
> I once taught a college course where I asked the class, "Is the an
absolute
> external morality?" And I was astonished to discover that, without
> exception, every Catholic student said yes, and every Protestant student
> said no. There is a profound division here.
>
> For the traditional Catholic layman, morality is external. The author
> remembers vividly the terror he felt in parochial school when he saw what
> happened to Cecelia after she defied Sister Anastasia. He still feels it.
> For him the other-directed authoritarian system of his moral education has
> become the pattern of his life, and we see in page after page his
professed
> love of, and obedience to, authority. He is a system player. That is how
> he had to learn it. You love the system and the system loves you. Now
the
> system is failing and he is without a clue and in terror as to why this
> should happen.
>
> Protestants, including his own wife, tend to take more heed of their own
> consciences when coming to moral decisions. This is more true among
> Methodists than many other sects, more true of all, I think, among
> Protestants residing in the state of Texas. In fact, if there's one thing
> the traditional Texas Protestant knows how to do better than anything
else,
> it's how to make up his *own* ornery mind about what is right and what is
> wrong, and *keeps* it made up, come hell or high water, or anything else
you
> might want to run in front of him. Texas girls see this in their fathers
> and grow up unconsciously expecting to find it in every man. This,
> tragically, in the one thing the author cannot supply. He must run to
> authorities for every moral decision and every major idea in his head.
And
> by Texas Protestant standards this makes him a moral weakling and a
failure,
> and this, I think, is why his wife cannot love him. And there is nothing
he
> can do about it.
>
> Nevertheless, I think this book will provide a happy ending for its
author.
> It is, among other things, a 278-page marital advertisement which should
> produce dozens, if not hundreds, of matrimonial offers. I hope, for his
own
> sake, that his final choice is someone who really appreciates him for the
> good man he is. Preferably, it should be an Eastern, Polish, Roman
Catholic
> woman, heavy-boned and big-breasted, domineering and authoritarian, from a
> childhood of poverty like the one he got away from by marrying the little
> ballet dancer from Texas. She should love him earthily, and also her
> children and her church discipline and the suburban life, because she
finds
> in these things the meaning of life itself. He deserves it.
>
> As for his divorced wife, I don't know what will happen. She has a hard
> life coming.
>
> But there's a feeling, rising up from deep inner sources, that in the end,
> when it is all over for all of us, it will be she who goes to heaven long
> before he does.
>
>
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