bananafish-digest V1 #279 -Reply


Subject: bananafish-digest V1 #279 -Reply
From: Michael Zabel (MPZABEL@holycross.edu)
Date: Fri Apr 25 1997 - 15:41:46 GMT


Here's a little something that I'm sure some of you have seen, but I
thought I would pass along anyway for the sake of those that haven't.
Taken from the John Guare play/movie "Six Degrees of Separation,"
here Will Smith's character Paul discusses his fascination with CITR after
having noticed Chapman's (Lennon's assasin) and Hinckley's (Reagan's
would-be assasin) ) love of the book:

PAUL:
I borrowed a copy from a young friend of mine because I wanted to see
what she had underlined and I read this book to find out why this
touching, beautiful, sensitive story published in July 1951 had turned into
this manifesto of hate.

I started reading. It's exactly as I remembered. Everybody's a phony.
Page two: "My brother's in Hollywood being a prostitute." Page three:
"What a phony slob his father was." Page nine: "People never notice
anything."

Then on page twenty-two my hair stood up. Remember Holden Caulfield
- the definitive sensitive youth - wearing his red hunter's cap. "A deer
hunter hat? Like hell it is. I sort of closed one eye like I was taking aim at
it. This is a people-shooting hat. I shoot people in this hat."

Hmmm, I said. This book is preparing people for bigger moments in their
lives than I've ever dreamed of. Then on page eighty-nine: "I'd rather
push a guy out of a window or chop his head off with anax than sock
him in the jaw. I hate fist fights...what scares me most is the other guy's
face..."

I finished the book. It's a touching story, comic because the boy wants
to do so much and can't do anything. Hates all phoniness and only lies to
others. Wants everyone to like him, is only hateful, and is completely
self-involved. In other words, a pretty accurate picture of a male
adolescent.

And what alarms me about this book - not the book so much as the aura
about it - is this: the book is primarily about paralysis. The boy can't
function. And at the end, before he can run away and start a new life. it
starts to rain and he folds.

Now, there's nothing wrong in writing about intellectual and emotional
paralysis. it may indeed, thanks to Chekhov and Samuel Beckett, be the
great modern theme.

The extraordinary last lines of "Waiting for Godot" - "Let's go." Yes, let's
go." Stage directions: they do not move.

But the aura around this book of Salinger's - which perhaps should be
read by everyone but young men - is this: It mirrors like a fun house
mirror and amplifies like a distorted speaker one of the great tragedies of
our times - the death of the imagination.

Because what else is paralysis?

The imagination has been so debased that imagination - being imaginative
- rather than being the lynchpin of our existence now stands as a
synonym for something outside ourselves like science fiction or some
new use for tangerine slices on raw pork chops - what an imaginative
summer recipe - and "Star Wars"! So imaginative! And "Star Trek" - so
imaginative! And "Lord of the Rings" - all those dwarves - so imaginative
- the imagination has moved outside of the realm of being our link, our
innermost link, with our inner lives and the world outside that world - this
world we share. What is schizophrenia but a horrifying state where
what's in here doesn't match up with what's out there?

Why has imagination become a synonym for style?

I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the
real world.

I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us.

Jung says the greatest sin is to be unconscious.

Our boy Holden says "What scares me most is the other guy's face - it
wouldn't be so bad if you could both be blindfolded - most of the time the
faces we face are not the other guys' but our own faces. And it's the
worst kind of yellowness to be so scared of yourself you put blindfolds
on rather than deal with yourself..."

To face ourselves.

That's the hard thing.

The imagination.

That's God's gift to make the act of self-examination bearable.
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