People with Glass Yogis Sooner or Later Throw Stones


Subject: People with Glass Yogis Sooner or Later Throw Stones
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliaann@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Apr 13 2000 - 18:42:50 EDT


My good and absolutely correct friend Bruce wrote:

>What bothered me, and still bothers me, about most literary critics
>(Laughing Man, quick, please quote the section re critics from _Godot_) is
>their smug insistence that they (oh lucky them! and soon unlucky us) have
>found the _key_ to whichever novel, story or poem one just happens to be
>having a love affair with. And that this _one_ key, let's say, is going to
>fit each and every locked door to each and every room of the Glass mansion.

Perhaps this is why I always feel like I need to revisit the Glass stories,
time after time. Because there simply is not one single "key" to the
understanding of them, or if the author is to be believed, their main
character, one "Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my
still-uncompleted series about the Glass family".

And perhaps it is because my understanding of Yogic Philosophy or Advaita
Vedanta or Zen Buddhism or [fill in the blank here] is so flawed that when I
learn more about any of those... schools of thought, I am quick to shout
aha! when I make one connection or another.

But, I think, yes, Bruce. You are right. You cannot assign any one key to
the Glass family works because they are influenced by any and all of those
philosophies. However, what we have here are layers upon layers, certain
universal traits of many schools of thought converging to make a
Seymour-school-of-thought.

And it is the understanding, the unravelling of that school of thought that
so fascinates me. But again, to jump in and pull it apart to arrive at some
sort of truth, I need to push past Seymour's protector, Buddy.

So again, I don't think that many would argue that in the oft-published
works, we're looking at a flawed picture of Seymour, one colored by the
loving palate of one Buddy Glass.

But Hapworth is supposedly a different story. It is a letter from Seymour,
which his interfering brother did not touch. In fact, he only "type[d] up
an exact copy of the letter, word for word, comma for comma" for the world
to see. And what follows is not the most attractive picture of young
Seymour, so why would Buddy lie?

Or, as Mattis put it:
>I know this is only a small segment of your post, but I think I am
>not doing you an injustice by using it to point out that your point,
>that we now seeing a whole, if flawed, Seymour, is true irrespective of
>whether we say that this is Salinger trying to fill in the white space
>(or cover his mistakes, as Ms. Kakutani might suggest) or Buddy
>giving us his version. And as it appears to me, Buddy is not prominent
>in Hapworth.

Well, yes. And I'm not saying that one can't take that viewpoint. One can
look at Hapworth only through Seymour's too-knowing seven year old eyes and
run with it. Certainly the story is strong enough to stand by itself as a
method of finally revealing Truth to us, the previously unenlightened.

Mattis again:
>As a matter of fact I thought I saw you slip in that this is Seymour
>*without* Buddy's rose colored glasses here, in contrast to what I had
>thought you were saying originally that there is as much Buddy here as S.
>Droit de senorita?

Oui.

And this is where I need to explain myself a little better.

Yes, I did say that the Truth found in Hapworth is the result of the loss of
Buddy's rose-colored vision, and I meant it. I still do.

My meaning, though, is that what is important to my understanding of
Hapworth is why Buddy's rose-colored vision is now clear enough to do one of
two things:
- allow his brother to speak for himself, or
- create a fictional circumstance in which his brother, his true brother,
appears for the first time.

I'm going to leave all linguistic similarity arguments out of this because
that could simply be a result of the fact that old J.D., not Buddy, is the
*real* author (I know, you all thought that I was losing a grip on reality
and had totally forgotten the existence of the old man...), and instead
concentrate on why I think that Buddy's hand is still so strong in this, the
last of the stories.

If Buddy is to be believed (and I like disbelieving Buddy), he began a
portrait with Bananafish and ended with Seymour: an Introduction, allowing
Seymour to speak the final word in Hapworth.

But this is where the addition of Buddy's hand to Hapworth is meaningful to
me: even if he didn't write the letter, the fact that he allowed it to be
seen has as much meaning as anything else.

Madhava/Ben (I don't know which you prefer-- you seem to use them
interchangeably) made an excellent observation:
>Almost like he's coming back to life... Birth, Death, and Rebirth. A great
>theme.

(Thank you, Madhava.) Ah, rebirth. Where have I heard that one before?
Only everywhere. If Buddy has been struggling all along to give rebirth to
a savior, why is it that it isn't until now that he finally allows even the
meanest of details their voice so that the full picture emerges?

Zooey chastizes Franny that she stopped liking Jesus when he went to the
temple and knocked down all the tables, and it isn't until that story that
the less appealing aspects of Seymour begin to appear. Because much as his
family wanted to believe it, Seymour simply wasn't a saint. More
enlightened than the rest of them perhaps, but not a saint.

In Seymour: an Introduction, Buddy reveals even more less-than-attractive
details. And here, we get the most loving portrait yet. I don't know why
he threw the rock at Charlotte, Buddy thinks, but he must have had a good
reason.

And in Hapworth, we find a Seymour who threatens counselors, imagines the
Camp Director's wife naked, and condescends to his mother. Why does Buddy
allow us to see this? He could have left us alone with that shiny happy
Seymour introduction. Why finish the story?

He's been working towards the realization all along. For hasn't he already
told us that [paraphrasing because yes, I lent out F&Z too] "We're all the
fat lady. We're all Christ"? Even the ugly table-tipper parts of us?
(This could send me off into a Seymour-as-Christ discussion, but I'll
refrain, since most of you have heard it before.)

He's finally gotten to a place where he can truly know his brother. And
it's not a shiny happy worshipful knowing like before. Rather, it's a true
knowing, a true loving. You can't take another human being and put him on a
pedestal for very long. Sooner or later, he's going to fall off. However,
knowing a person's faults, confronting those faults, and still loving him?

Now that's the ticket, Buddy.

Regards,
Cecilia.

(It's time for me to go off and paint some fingernails now, I think.)

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