Re: Seymour an Introduction

I can't freaking stand French's introduction to Salinger
criticism....bleah.

Kim -- Ulysses was, I'm pretty sure, released serially before it was
published as an entire novel. Many early assessments were indeed based
upon a very limited part of the text -- a text which was later revised
from the earlier published versions before put into book form. Many,
many people had a very hard time with it. But many people recognized
its genius as well.

Since Ulysses was based upon Homer's Odyssey, tried to keep a unity of
place a time, and HAD TO end with Penelope, there's a good argument for
not really being able to judge Ulysses based upon the first five
chapters.

There's really no such argument for the Glass family corpus. There's no
coherent organizing principle that I can see (or have heard alluded to)
governing the entire Glass family saga -- it's not like one part really
needs all of it to make any sense as part of a coherent whole.
Furthermore, Salinger really "rewrote" Glass history after the fact.
It's like calling Buddy the author of Catcher, as you allude to. It's a
neat trick pulled in after the fact.

But this hardly has the structure and organization of a work like
Ulysses.

I'd just give up on comparing Salinger to Joyce :). Salinger will lose
every time ;). Joyce abandoned the short story format to go on to write
a Ulysses. Salinger abandoned that to write a S:AI. There's just no
comparison.

Paul -- In this case, the fact that it has been done before does indeed
mean it it common. Writers like Pynchon and Delillo and even, of all
people, George Lamming in the Caribbean picked up on the modernist
project and took it in new directions. It's not just that it's been
done before, it's been done by major figures who set this format as
_the_ mode of literary discourse for pretty much the rest of the 20th
century. Since these people are who everyone are looking to -- they are
very much "common" in the sense of "in common" and widely known.

Authorial intent is always a difficult thing to establish, esp. simply
by looking at the text. If all you're saying is that Salinger had no
intent of writing a basic short story in works like S:AI, then no one
has ever argued with you -- it's like saying the sun is Hot. You need
to go beyond that.

I believe you've read book reviews that mishandled S:AI. That's hardly
professional criticism, though. I have read a little bit of Salinger
criticism, including French's overview. The guy drove me NUTS with his
narrow opinions about Catcher (which were justified in themselves but he
wasn't able to see justifications for other readings...which make his
seem less credible), but other than that, I felt he was pretty fair
about the rest of Salinger's fiction. I don't recall precisely what he
said about S:AI, but I don't recall it bothering me at all. Seems like
some of it was helpful.

If you want professional criticism you need to look in literary journals
and generally not on the internet.

But establishing authorial intent is hardly ever the "real" aim of any
good criticism. People don't usually understand what they really mean
by that. You can never and will never be able to read an author's mind
through his characters. You can make some inferences, but unless the
author backs them up, you will never know exactly how accurate they
are. What most people really do is establish the nature of the first
community that read the fiction (of which the author was a part), and
speculate about how they would read the work based upon their
historical/cultural referents. It's a good exercise, but it is Not an
exercise in mind reading. It's not at all about authorial intent.

Many authors don't ever know quite what the heck they meant when they
wrote something.

BUT, I totally agree with you here -- I think Esme is the best thing
Salinger ever wrote, his most perfect story. It seems to communicate
completely what much of his other fiction communicated only partially or
imperfectly.

Jim

Kim Johnson wrote:

> --- Will Hochman <hochmanw1@southernct.edu> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure what make a special case
> > for SAI needing
> > better criticism...we're getting there though...the
> > informality and
> > intimacy of the narration go past Booth's sense of
> > unreliable
> > narrators, I think.
> >
>
> doesn't warren french, salinger's fairest, least
> biased reader, rather short the glass stories? i
> vaguely recall that he champions buddy as salinger's
> second most successful creation of an i voice, but
> don't recall him shedding a full illumination of
> 's:ai'.
>
> when you say 'we're getting there though', who do you
> mean?
>
> kim
>
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