Subject: RE: Muriel questions
From: Sundeep Dougal (holden@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in)
Date: Tue Apr 29 1997 - 17:37:00 GMT
On Tue, 29 Apr 1997, Matt Kozusko wrote:
> Thanks for the fantastic post, SD--I had never thought to work through
> this (Salinger's marriage situation coming to bear on his fiction) before.
[...]
Er, nor had I! It was your post about the timing of JDS' own marriage and
the helpful Warren French chronology that came in very handy. Sounds
pretty interesting even to me, and like any theory one wants to believe
in, I guess one could find enough substantiating corroborative, well,
clues.
The fascination with eastern mysticism, and Vedanta in particular, seems
to start appearing post-1950 and their influence is ofcourse clearly
evident-- but JDS, writer of Bananafish, to my mind has no such guiding
philosophy, however well or ill understood, leave alone practiced.
You are right, (in an earlier post yesterday) the reasons for
Seymour-Muriel marriage do not obtain in the story. RHTRB is an
after-thought, with the mystic angles thrown in for good measure.
Somehow, I have always taken JDS's *religious*/mystical references to be
the result of a passionate *academic* interest, not the passion of a,
shall I say, archetypal *religious* man.
I would go so far as to want to put forward a case, and excuse my
expansivenss on this, that Seymour of Bananafish was just a social satire
about a mismatched couple-- lah-di-dah, frivolous, shallow wife, given to
every possible fad and fashion of the day, driving her war-bruised,
genuinely *artistic* husband to the point of actually killing himself.
That he thinks rather disparagingly and witheringly of her is pretty well
clear from the story.
Seymour post-Bananafish, and atleast in his RHTRBC diaries is ofcourse a
man exhibiting the classical signs of "being in love" and going through
the throes of indecisiveness et al. The description of Muriel's family's
objections/hostility to Seymour and that of Claire Douglas' reportedly
soothing her family with details that JDS lived with his mother, sister, a
whole lot of Buddhist monks and a yogi who stood on his head make, well,
interesting comparisons...
And we are still to address the much later revealed hyper-active libido of
Seymour, age seven, as yet another detail that JDS somehow wants us to
have...
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sundeep Dougal (Sonny, to friends) Holden Caulfield, New Delhi, INDIA
-
To remove yourself from the bananafish list, send the command:
unsubscribe bananafish
in the body of a message to "Majordomo@mass-usr.com".
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Oct 09 2000 - 15:00:36 GMT