Subject: Re: sectioing the Scot
From: Michael Snyder (mkesnyder@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Apr 01 2001 - 15:12:41 GMT
Scottie B. wrote:
> I'd forgotten what sound sense old Lane spouts. Because he IS
absolutely on the button. If you have such an overwhelming
world of stuff to get out - the way Leo or Marcel did - you
don't have time for word trimming or word strutting or word
squeezing or word wanking. (The Irishman, of course, always has
to be the exception.)
For someone who has built a skyscraper of verbal-preening on
the modest base of three or four gabby New York neurotics,
that passage must have been written at the cost of some
pretty painful self knowledge.
*************************************************************
I doubt it. Recall, Lane is being parodied and ridiculed
in this passage. He is portrayed as self-obsessed, pompous,and
egotistical; for example: "Lane was speaking now as someone
does who has been monopolizing conversation for a good quarter
of an hour or so and who believes he has just hit a stride where
his voice can do absolutely no wrong." Or, "...Lane said, very
closely following the trend of his own conversation." He wants
to read his English paper out loud to Franny, for G's sake.
The narrator's commentary and the context of the scene in
Sickler's would strongly suggest that JDS feels that Lane's
ideas about writers who "just wrote" are bunk. All writing
requires conscious choice and deliberation, though obviously
some individuals are more inspired than others. That's why JDS
didn't like the Beat writers and saw them as undisciplined
(Kerouac is a prime example of one who 'just wrote'-no revision,
1st choice=best choice).
Lane's repeated use of phrases referring to "the really
good boys"--the old patriarchal canon--portrays him as an
imitation of the overzealous "section men" that Franny despises,
who are anxious to critically tear down dead writers, thus
spoiling the pleasure of discovering and finding meaning in a
text on one's own (p. 15).
I have nothing against academia in itself (I have an MA in
lit.) but I see no particular reason to privilege a literary
portrayal of a male/female romantic relationship as a kind of
prerequisite for entering the "highest level" of writers, just
because great writers of the past did so. Comments about
"section men" are meant to show the parallel between Lane's
ideas, and patriarchal, heterosexist notions of canon-formation.
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