Subject: RE: Muriel questions
From: Sundeep Dougal (holden@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in)
Date: Tue Apr 29 1997 - 09:06:34 GMT
On Mon, 28 Apr 1997, Matt Kozusko wrote:
> As long as we're digging around in JD's drawers--which, despite all my
> close-reading, author-ignoring training, I engage in with all imaginable
> glee--should we not also consider whether he had yet been married when he
> had Seymour married to Muriel? The shady, short-lived French marriage
> seems perhaps too unconventional to come to bear on Seymour's. The
> American marriages were all later, no?
I share these sentiments exactly--but it *is* interesting that marriage
and family as a recurrent motif starts appearing in the narratives--or,
compositions, if you will-- only when his own is almost impending.
As to whether he was married or not when he has Semour married off to
Muriel, it depends on whether we are talking the fictional time-space of
Seymour-Muriel wedding or the *actual* public announcement of it in print
(ha! Whatever that means, but I have far more important theories to
propound, so I shan't indulge in too many digressive parenthetical
pontifications about Zen butterflies dreaming etc..I am talking only of
RHTRBC) It *depends*, again, on whether we are talking post-Bananafish
Seymour. If we are, then RHTRB--as, indeed, Franny, modelled as she is
after the first American Wife-- appears *after* his own marriage (uh,
okay, the first American-marriage). Even Teddy, with its authorship
appropriated by Buddy, had stopped meditating after he "met a lady", comes
soon after meeting what was to be American Wife #1.
It is interesting, in a way, that all the post-Bananfish stories dealing
with the Glass family coincide roughly with the duration of American
marriage #1.
Meets Am Wife #1 1953
Franny Jan 1955
Marriage Feb, 1955
Hapworth 1965
Divorce 1967
Also, to perpetuate your excellent hypothesis, and turn it into almost an
urban legend, or folklore, about the reasons behind the re-issue of
Hapworth, I'd imagine it makes sense to speculate that the reasons for
silence all these years may have had something to do with an agreement and
understanding to not discuss married life or its breakup?
The first-wife may have demanded, with no little justification, that a
silence on her part was deserving of a silence on JDS's part too, in sheer
reciprocation. She could have argued, I may add getting carried away by
all this, that she resented the idea of people reading meaning or messgaes
in subsequent JDS texts, real or perceived, no matter how obliquely or
obfuscatingly--or, indeed, misleadingly--presented. Given the hallowed
traditions of literary criticism, where autobiographical detail is
microscopically looked for, and adaptationlly attributed, in particular
for somebody of JDS's reticense and aloofness, I think JDS would have
decided it made sense to hold onto his texts. Else, how could he ever dare
to have any subsequent text even remotely dealing with the miserable
married life of the Glass children-- or any other of his characters.
Mercifully, Inverted Forest hasn't really been subjected to much of the
psycho-analysis from the view point of a marriage of an artist in
wedlock, or has it? I mean, read as a worried insecure artist dealing
with prescience or premonitions...
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Sundeep Dougal (Sonny, to friends) Holden Caulfield, New Delhi, INDIA
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