Re: Seymour an Introduction

--- Jim Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu> wrote:
> I can't freaking stand French's introduction to
> Salinger
> criticism....bleah.

i think french wrote two if not three editions of his
book. the first in '63 (perhaps slightly revised in
'76) and the last with a new title, 'salinger
revisited' in '86. i think in this one he repudiates
much in the '63 book. i found the handling of
'catcher' here quite good; felt he didn't do justice
to the glass stories.

> 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.

i think you're right about the serially publication of
much (if not all) of 'ulysses'. believe it was ezra
pound who placed chapters with a couple of courageous
women who ran 'the dial'. pound's letters to joyce
and vice versa are quite interesting during that
period.

syvlia beach certainly gets a round of applause for
publishing the book. a lot of publishers turned tail.
 i know the woolfs' hogarth press did. and v. woolf
after reading it sneered at joyce.

> 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 agree in part but the glass saga isn't a single
novel. my guess is that we've seen only the tip of
the iceberg. what's in the vault might sink
salinger's reputation, or save it.
 
> 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.
>

oh, i'd never say salinger could go 15 rounds with
joyce. though i'd put up '9 stories' against
'dubliners', and 'the catcher' against 'portrait'.
but after that jds gones down. yet, we're judging a
writer who has stopped at age 46. the unpublished
work might totally change salinger's stature. it's
possible there's more than just more glass stories.
or: the unpublished glass stories might be more to the
critics' liking (since they make or break
reputations). or, the unpublished writings might prove
jds went off the rails and became a complete
embarassment. we just don't know at this point. and
might never...

kim

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Received on Wed Aug 14 12:09:35 2002