Who's on first, What's on second ...
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Wed, 22 Apr 1998 11:38:28 +1000
I've been doing some reading of late (paying special attention to `Nine
Stories')
and here's a couple of things I came up with :
Someone (I think it was Brad, aka Godot) suggested a
correlation in `The Laughing Man' between the baseball game
and the concept of `getting to first base' in the sexual
sense. I think there might be something in this - especially
as it is emphasised that Mary didn't like to stay on first,
she always had to steal second. Mary is set up as a kind of
antithesis to The Laughing Man (his ugliness/her beauty; both
are in their own way fantasy objects of the Chief's design).
The Laughing Man is described as having a compassionate side
that frustrates the Comanches - i.e. they want him to go
further - whereas perhaps the implication is that Mary Hudson
is too willing to `get to home base' (could you say that her
insistence on wearing the wrong mitt because it's `cute'
indicates her choice of the wrong kind of contraceptive ???(: )
as well as being too overeager to play the game that the
Chief didn't want her to play. (whatever the answer is this is
one of my favourite 9 Stories.)
On another topic, I know this has probably been discussed ad
infinitum, but could Jane Gallager keep all her kings in the
back row because like Holden she refuses to play the `game' of
life (cf Holden, Chapter 2 - `Game, my ass. Some game. If you
get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's still a
game, all right') and is attempting to keep all the `hot
shots' on her side - i.e. like Holden, trying to find strength
in herself ? This would add resonance to such things as Holden
forgetting the foils, being lousy at skating, not caring who
won the final in Chapter 1, and using the excuse that he has
to go to the gym to escape from Mr Spencer's diatribe in a
literal sense, and his refusal to play by the rules in a
broader sense. Don't ask me how his expert golfing comes into
it though. ...
In an art threory class (which I'm sick of because it's full
of wankers - jerks, for you Yanks (: ) we were told that the
word `phoney' was first coined to describe a suspicious or
unreliable thing or person because of people's early mistrust
of the telephone (I guess hearing someone's disembodied voice
like that must have been pretty alarming the first time). This
theory sounds pretty suspect to me (and knowing said class
full of wankers, could have just been an analogy), but can
anyone else substantiate it or come up with the real
derivation?
By the way, I'm also re- reading Vladimir Nabokov's `Pale Fire',
and it struck me how similar the whole situation in it is to
Seymour and Muriel's, (and also Raymond Ford's). The book is
formatted as a scholarly text - a foreword, the poem itself
by the dead poet John Shade (`Pale Fire') and the commentary
on the text by the frame narrator,Charles Kinbote - who
instantly strikes me as a kind of Buddy Glass, especially in the
way he almost wholly shapes the way we see the late John Shade.
Finally, a small shiver went down my spine when the name of
Shade's widow suddenly leapt out at me : SYBIL Shade!
This book was first published in 1962, which means it is post-
Bananafish, Raise High The Roof Beams, and Inverted Forest
but came out the year before Seymour: An Introduction. You'll
have to refresh my memory however - was Seymour published
anywhere else before this? It's a very interesting parallel,
anyway - and Nabokov's work is rife with intertextuality.
Well, there's some stuff to chew on. Have fun with it (:
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442