In this article, I reexamine quality and rhetoric in Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance through Julia Kristeva's semiotic chora. To that end, I review three analyses of Pirsig's novel, reinscribe quality as a prediscursive experience of undifferentiated wholeness, argue that regression back into Kristeva's chora is one way to recover this prediscursive experience, and hypothesize that the rhetoric of Zen is an unstable discourse in which prediscursive energies from the chora disrupt and realign the meanings of signifiers. I conclude by generalizing my work beyond Pirsig's novel to three concepts in rhetorical scholarship.

Abstract In this work, I argue that creative metaphors are formed when some persistent problem, caused by an inadequacy in preexisting knowledge, descends into the collective unconscious, is reconfigured unconsciously in novel ways, and then reemerges back into consciousness where the impasse is resolved by the metaphorical expression of new knowledge. To develop this position, I (1) review and critique some well-known language-based studies of metaphor, (2) summarize psychoanalytic and depth psychological approaches to the psyche as one way to overcome the shortcomings of the language-based scholarship, (3) relate C. G. Jung's account of the psyche and his related notion of synchronicity to creative metaphors, (4) graft a quantum physics approach to material reality back onto Jung's work as a provisional structure of the collective unconscious, and finally, (5) offer some suggestions about how creative metaphors might work psychologically.