Dr. Peter Olson will present “Robert Pirsig and Wallace Stegner: Crossing to Safety” on Friday, April 19 from 2:30-3:30 p.m. in Wimberly 104.
Robert Pirsig, the writer who transformed a startlingly original Chautauqua delving into the metaphysics of quality was also a reformer at the nexus of technology and art; Wallace Stegner, a writer raised on the plains of Saskatchewan, became the founder of Stanford’s creative writing program. Stegner divided his creative energies between didactic environmental writing and imaginative literature. Pirsig sought a reconciliation, perhaps futilely, between Western metaphysics and nominalist psychology. Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance traces a complex narrative that combines travel journalism, nature writing, rhetorical exhortation, and the implications of an “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum,” through the development of his alter ego Phaedrus. Pirsig’s narrative is a chiasmus, a crossing that witnesses failure and reversal. Stegner explores human relationships that survive by means of trust and empathy even as his perspective remains critical and ironic of human potentialities that appear to be incapable of transcendence. Stegner’s environmental writing attributes human action to the willful harm done to the natural environment. Both authors recognize their own sense of contingency with respect to place—the West—and to American cultural dilemmas precipitated by late capitalism. Both authors attempt to address their contingency through a movement of return, a crossing to safety through their ability to translate their experience into art. Their connections to the landscape and commitments to direct and original seeing ultimately illuminate what Lawrence Buell terms the “environmental imagination.”