Cultural Encounters

Deconstructing East and West

Chen Enjiao (U1030593F)

Question: How does The Good Person of Szechuan and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance relate to the Other?
Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 2 Why Discuss These Two Texts Together? ............................................................................................... 2 Relations to the Other in The Good Person of Szechuan .................................................................... 2 The Other as Inherently Gendered ......................................................................................................... 3 Interpretations and Reinterpretations of ZMM .................................................................................. 4 A Critique of Relations and Temporality ................................................................................................. 5 The Other as Constituent of the Self and Vice-Versa ............................................................................. 6 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................................. 8

Introduction
From the pre-Greek encounters with Pelasgian cultures to a newfound respect for the deep Chinese wallet after its major economies lay in rubbles of sovereign debt, the Western idealization of the Other had always titillated at various extremes; the Other, the Orient tears at the seams of familiarity, complicating identities. In this paper, I will scrutinize various Others as I ponder the relationship between The Good Person of Szechuan (The Good Person) and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) to them. We will realize that the Self and the Other are never ontologically stable realities, but involve the dynamics of contestation as well as the fluidity of representations. Finally, we consider the implications of this realization in a globalizing age.

Why Discuss These Two Texts Together?

Some starting thoughts: both texts are effectively responses to the question of what is the good life? United in their query but divided in their treatment of the alien, I believe thus that our progression in time from the play to the philosophy novel will serve to highlight a dramatic change in Western thoughts about the Orient. Through a detailed exploration, we will also realize that Otherness takes on various forms and functions.

Relations to the Other in The Good Person of Szechuan

We cannot begin to understand The Good Person without going back to its Marxist roots (Willett): influenced by a dialectical materialism that sees a societys morality as being determined by economic conditions, the play posits Goodness (at least as defined by the Gods) as polarized, opposite to and incompatible with the first Other, the capitalist economy. The Gods lamented the lack of good people on Earth thus. Directly in-play, the encounter with the Other is then one of being overwhelmed and subsequent transformation, as in the dramatic invention of a male alter ego for Shen Tei, as she tried to be good in an exploitative world.

On a meta level, the second Other as the Orient was used to provoke critical self-reflection. Brecht himself had admittedly chosen the site of Szechuan arbitrarily, i.e. it was meant to symbolize any industrial city. It follows then that much geographical and cultural details were omitted altogether such that the setting as Szechuan could be dropped and it would not make a meaningful difference to the plays central content and message. Brechts concern was not over an aesthetic or truthful representation of Chineseness on stage per se, but the Verfremdungseffekt (or distancing effect) (Aitken) made possible by invoking the Orient and making the actor address the audience directly. This serves to remove emotional identification so that the audience may call on reason to answer questions raised by the play.

The Other as Inherently Gendered

Also, this much was apparent in Brecht: The female sex is kind and incapable of fully fending for herself (Lennox). The dualities expressed here is thus obviously between the male and the female. Despite the attribution of such sexual differences to more social expectations than biologically-imbued differentiations, Brecht regrettably never pursued the topic further. Essentially, femaleness is so fundamentally tied to faculties of reproduction that Shen Tei sacrificed her self-identifying characteristic of kindness for the welfare of her son. It may be said that the Other is weak (marked by her lack of agency) and that the story would not have progressed if it were not for Shui Ta, the male ego who emerged to protect. This serves as an interesting contrast with what had transpired in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: the narrators masculinity was expressed through his withdrawal and emotional distance against Chris who was prone to crying. The son is treated as the Other, though it is also ultimately this Other that lends the narrator reconciliation between his divided selves (I havent been carrying him at all. Hes been carrying me!") (Pirsig 404). The

differential treatment of the Other is thus very obvious. In The Good Person, the Other is weak and without redress; in the latter, the Other is still weak but is necessary for redemption. Ultimately, The Good Person really started a conversation on what is good rather than try to answer it. With this, we now turn to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance alone incidentally an attempt to answer this question as it dissects Western philosophy.

Interpretations and Reinterpretations of ZMM

When I first finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it was very tempting to see Pirsig as appropriating the Orient, which when juxtaposed against the dramatic conflict between his past and present selves comes across as little else but a storytelling strategy. Yet further pondering on Phaedruss proclamation of To go outside the mythos is to become insane (Pirsig 344) has led me to think that he was looking to the Orient, the Other, precisely because what he wanted to seek was lost/unknown to his own culture (until he rediscovered the Sophists). The personality annihilated by electroshock therapy had searched for the ghost of reason and ended up in madness with his personal repudiation of reason. Phaedruss search had taken him to Korea and India; where the former was a turning point as evidenced in the emotional intensity of his letters, he had given up after leaving the latter. It is apparent to me then that the appeal of the alien Orient to Pirsig laid in its strangeness: because the set of ideas that he was contemplating went against the bedrock upon which the Western culture as we know it was built, he had to look elsewhere. Because the East is alien and irrational (MacKenzie), it was then possible to equate Quality with Tao.

A Critique of Relations and Temporality

We acknowledge that Brecht and Pirsig are but two characters in the universe of known characters who had sought to find their selves in confrontations with the Other: Into the Wild, Eat Pray Love, The Heart of Darkness and etc. all comes to mind. In The Good Person, the East is a site of generalized poverty where living is hard and the question of how to be good left hanging only to be answered by a Western audience at the end of the day. Subsequently, the pre-sixties Beat Generation had followed the suggestion of Spengler (Prothero): that the solution to such personal crises of faith and the American crisis of spirit probably lay outside Western culture and civilization, and in the Other, the Orient. Pirsigs book is in succession to this increasing American interest in Zen Buddhism and may be, as the author called it, a culture-bearing book. In Pirsigs book, the East itself finally becomes a possible site of wisdom and enlightenment. This, set against the story of his journey across America, lends full force to the final conclusion that the bitterest enemy is often oneself - one must come to terms with ones internal divisions of East and West, leave home and discover America in order to be finally whole (Holt). This wholeness has resonances in other cultures as well (The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece.). Saids now classic polemic had said: The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europes greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. (Said) In summary, for Brecht, the Orient is effective as a mean of alienation; for Pirsig, the Orient acts as a mirror against which ones own culture may be critically examined. The Orient is

never oppressed in both cases but given a voice through effectively Western narrators to serve their particular interests. Admittedly, our critique of these relations to the Other is inevitably undermined by a fatalistic resignation that scrutinizing Eastern ideas and representations through a Western academic discourse may run amok of Orientalism itself. I should further like to advance that such a resignation is however problematic, in that it presumes passivity on the part of our subjects, committing the same error as people who had equated globalization with Western imperialism. The subject is always able to exercise agency in responses and adaptations. In addition, though such a deconstruction passes through Western notions of rational discourse and hermeneutics, it is not the same as to claim that the West is the source and final destination of all things, as Levinas would point out (Jones). Most, if not all texts that had been referred to in this paper are faces of an ego-centric West, as testimonies to Saids claim that the development and maintenance of every culture require the existence of another different and competing alter ego. Such a historical evolution of inter-relating and various interpretations is given treatment in the book of Pirsig as he confronts the Good and the Truth, Phaedrus and the narrator, father and son. His discovery of Tao and rediscovery of Sophists come full circle in achieving transcendence, through as the Other-in-the-same: an idea introduced by Levinas, who gave birth to the philosophical Other as well (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence).

The Other as Constituent of the Self and Vice-Versa

Much of what we had discussed about this Other has been stripped of its moorings in the primacy of the intersubjective encounter but focuses on social constructions (Levinas, Humanism of the Other). At this point, I hope I had already illustrated the utilitarian nature of these constructions which is somewhat more attached to convenience than ethics.

In light of this, how then does one constitute/construct the self? The phenomenology of Levinas is not said to be a bridge to Eastern philosophy without reason and together with the final reconciliation in Pirsigs American journey, allows for the East may definitely hint at an answer regarding the question of how then does one construct/constitute the self? Unlike the Western idea of dualities as opposites, the Eastern concept of yin-yang allows for complementarities (Leaman), i.e. there is no shadow without light, and so on. Instead of seeing two different qualities as existing in opposition, it is possible to imagine them both as part of a whole. In a globalizing world of shifting mobility and boundary, it is perhaps this exact same state of mind that we need to uphold and envision: One cannot exist without the Other. The Other is not inferior or any lesser and is no longer defined by its relation to the ego; rather the ego would be defined by the Other. The point here is to realize that the East is also a part of the West, insofar as yin and yang exist together, and as described by Said (the Orient is the source of European civilizations and languages). We conclude thus that it is not only possible but of the highest exigency to understand one's humanity through the humanity of others.

Works Cited
Aitken, Ian. European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2002. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. "A Guide to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values." n.d. Elements of Literature. 9 August 2012 <http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/novelguides/hs/Mini-Guide.Pirsig.pdf>. Jones, Lindsay. "Encyclopedia of Religion, Second Edition." n.d. John Hopkins University Humanities Center. 10 August 2012 <http://humctr.jhu.edu/pdf/Orientalism.pdf>. Leaman, Oliver. Eastern Philosophy: The Key Readings. New York: Routledge, 2000. Lennox, Sara. "Women in Brecht's Works." New German Critique (1978): 83-96. Levinas, Emmanuel. Humanism of the Other. Illinois : University of Illinois Press, 2003. . Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. New York: Springer, 1981. MacKenzie, John. Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. William Morrow: New York, 1974. Prothero, Stephen. "On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest." The Harvard Theological Review (1991): 205-222. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1995. Willett, John. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.