Re: hi
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Sun, 19 Apr 1998 01:48:07 -0400
> i was wondering if people think salinger is a realist or an idealist... i've
> finished all his stories.. and i'm a little unsure.. if anyone has an opinion
> one way or the other and can support it..
I can't support it with quotes, because all my Salinger books are in one
place and I am in another, a situation that seems to happen with increasing
regularity and predictable frustration.
(Digression: This is one good reason I'd be in bliss if I had the stories
and Catcher on a CD-ROM in text form -- just to have the contents of the
books would be wonderful, the way I have copies of most of James Joyce; at
least I can get my hands on, say, "The Dead" when I have a craving for it!
One can only IMAGINE the entertaining, doomed adventure that would occur in
attempting to get Salinger's work reproduced legally in electronic form!)
Salinger is clearly a realist, as I read him. I think it would be
difficult to characterize him otherwise, based on what he has published in
book form. (I'm not really thinking of the apprentice stories he did for
slick magazines during the 1940s.) In some work ("Raise High the Roof
Beam, Carpenters," for instance), his narrative serves as a virtual
guidebook to a vanished time and place.
But an idealist ... that's a harder one to touch. In his work, he reminds
me of a man who has lost touch with a religion. Such a man WANTS his
religion to work for him, YEARNS for it to be "true" in the way he has been
taught to believe in it, yet is consistently disappointed in the disparity
between what the religion could be and what it really is.
Some of his characters are idealistic. Despite all his surface bluster,
and his troubles, Holden (in my understanding of him) masks his idealism
beneath that cynical, wisecracking exterior. It's not too far removed from
the kinds of characters Humphrey Bogart often played -- think of Rick in
"Casablanca" or Marlowe in "The Big Sleep."
I'd say that the Chief, in Salinger's "Laughing Man," wants to be an
idealist, but the dark side gets the best of him, in the end.
The narrator of "For Esme...," on the other hand, wears his idealism
painfully in public -- and in private. (I think of those bleeding gums ...
the shaking hands ... the "Dear God, life is hell" inscription he finds and
notes and attempts to answer ... the solution he settles for to get his
sleep and relief in the end.)
Franny ... well, nobody is an idealist if Franny's not, and Franny
certainly meets plenty of resistance in her pursuits.
I would suggest that many of Salinger's characters want to believe in a
basic sense of goodness and justice in their worlds, even when they run up
face to face against evidence to the contrary. (Think of the ending of
"Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.")
This is not nearly as thorough as the question deserves (though I suspect
and hope that others will speak more eloquently on the subject than I can),
but perhaps it's a start of one kind of answer to your question. Or it may
launch a series of disputes. One could learn from either, I suspect.
Cheers!
--tim o'connor