Travel and Identity: Studies in Literature, Culture and Language by Jakub Lipski

Author:Jakub Lipski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

2 Counterpath

Pirsig’s story indicates that both the trip the readers take up and the journey recorded in the book’s pages is not a traditional travel narrative, but one which deviates and meanders off the beaten track of the readers’ expectations to register on its way various aspects of travel, identity and theorizing. What on a general level is a road narrative about father and son’s motorcycle trip across America, on another plain constitutes an intellectual journey through the past psychic and intellectual life of the narrator Phaedrus haunted by his past identity throughout the story.

One trait of the book which might be taken as an organizing principle is exactly its counterpath movement. It offers a different route—one full of detours, stopovers and even impassable paths (aporias) or no-places. Since for Derrida “[t]he voyage is an exportation, a provisional drift or diversion between the two fixed terms of departure and return” (Malabou & Derrida, 2004, p. 40; my emphasis), travelling can also be taken as a certain mode of drifting. Surprisingly enough, when one reads back into etymology of derivation, it can be seen that the Latin “deriver”, from the Latin rivus (stream) or ripa (bank), can be connected to departure and arrival (Malabou & Derrida, 2004, p. 1). Significantly, in the context of Pirsig’s book it can also refer to the loss of control, deviation or skidding. Correspondingly, the book opens with a description of a morning ride off the beaten track in the area of Central Plains (Pirsig, 1991, p. 13). The characters follow a route of the past which “is an old concrete two-liner that hasn’t had much traffic since a four- liner went in parallel to it several years ago”; it is a place which “is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that”; a “secondary America” as it is later termed (Pirsig, 1991, p. 361). Similarly, some of the final sections reveal that the arrival point is of little importance as well:“We just keep going and going,” he says.

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