Re: Kerouac and Shade / Salinger and Nabokov -Reply
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Tue, 18 Aug 1998 15:35:38 +1000
> > For one we have the
> >poet-seer (whose wife's name is SYBIL for Chrissake!), and his
> >chronicler.
>
> Hey, I hadn't thought of that -
> and, don't a few scenes, namely John Shade in the tub remind anybody
> of Buddy and Bessie? (This could be a far cry...)
I don't think so. In one of my earlier posts on this subject I worked out
that the dates are such that Nabokov could have well and truly read `Zooey'
by then.
> I think there might be a bit of a difference here, considering
"Hapworth",
> unless Seymour didn't WRITE "Hapworth"... (any takers??)
Yes, that's true ... but I'm talking about Seymour's more self conscious
`creations' - i.e. his poems. But that raises an interesting point -
Salinger has in Hapworth deliberately chosen to depict Seymour at a time
when he is not `performing for the Fat Lady' so to speak - thus, again,
avoiding the problem of authentically rendering the poetry of a genius. As
for `who wrote Hapworth?' I've been having a lot of thoughts about that
lately. About the position of Buddy in relation to Salinger, and Seymour,
and so on. It intrigues me that Buddy always has his little editorial gloss
in there before he quotes Seymour. And who's to say Buddy isn't altering
things here and there to perpetuate the image of Seymour? Adding things?
Subtracting things? (could a seven year old boy *really * write a letter
that long??) Who's to say Buddy *didn't* write Hapworth? That's the point
I'm making when I say that Salinger doesn't let us make our own decision on
Seymour. Everything in what we know of the Glass world is tailored to the
irrevocable image of Seymour as the family Genius. Which, for Buddy as a
member of said extremely insular family must be a difficult thing to be
objective about.
> I think that among possibilities, Shade may or may not have been a
> genius, may or may not have even written the poem, may or may not
> have even existed.
Actually the opposite theory has been much espoused (the author of `Nabokov
- The American Years' basically takes it as read) - that Charles Kinbote is
the creation of John Shade! He quotes an unpublished section of Nabokov's
`Speak, Memory' in which he more or less admits to this.It does make a lot
of sense in some ways - Kinbote being in every way opposite to Shade, who
you could see as oppressed by his very normality, through which he escapes
via a faked shooting into his own fantasy.This, I think, is an interesting
theory (I don't necessarily agree with it) and sheds an interesting
possibility in the Glass direction - IS SEYMOUR REALLY DEAD??? We don't
know it. The only record we have of it is Buddy's. He already admits in
`S:AI' that he was `lying' about Seymour's character - who's to say he's
not lying about the suicide? Are Buddy and Seymour one and the same?
And thus I have justified my ramble into Nabokov land by comparative
literature, QED (:
I'll try and find that list of Glass/Kinbote comparisons. It was last
semester at a really boring time so my notebook was littered with them. A
couple of lines in particular I just went `You've *got* to be kidding!' (:
I would love to go to that Nabokov seminar ... he fascinates me as a
writer, he really knocks my socks off. I will just have to envy you and
think up some questions to get you to ask them.
(-:E|
That was a very feeble attempt at Holden in his hunting cap (:
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
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