Re: Kerouac and Shade / Salinger and Nabokov -Reply -Reply
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Wed, 19 Aug 1998 09:25:25 +1000
> I think its highly possible, perhaps even probable. Seymour is to Buddy
> as Buddy is to Salinger?? Seymour is Buddy is Salinger. Kimbote is
> Shade is Nabokov.
> Seymour wrote Hapworth? Buddy wrote Hapworth? Salinger wrote
> Hapworth.
Ultimately, this is true. If this is what Salinger is saying (and I think
it's definitely what Nabokov is saying) it says something very profound
about writers and writing.
> >That's the point
> >I'm making when I say that Salinger doesn't let us make our own
> >decision on
> >Seymour.
>
> No?
>
> Everything in what we know of the Glass world is tailored to the
> >irrevocable image of Seymour as the family Genius.
>
> Perhaps, but I would offer the notion that the fabric of Glass may be
> sewn more with the eccentricity and genius of all of the Glass "kids".
> The image of Seymour may serve, in my opinion, more as a sort of
> ground zero for discourse.
Well, that also conforms to my theory. Seymour is more or less a catalyst
for discussion; a concept rather than a person. We never even hear his
voice until Hapworth, and even then I wonder if it isn't some sort of
Plato-Socrates relationship we have between Seymour and Buddy here. For
some reason I missed Jim's earlier post about Plato,Socrates etc but came
across it the other day, and I think it made a fine point. Socrates says
things that any compiler of a quotes book would comfortably ascribe to
Plato, simply because Socrates puts them in the fictional character called
Plato's mouth. The only difference is that Plato was at one point real. But
this does not mean that the Plato that has reached us in `Lives of Plato'
is anything other than Socrate's Plato, just as Seymour is Buddy's Seymour.
> Somehow, the suicide of Seymour is real to me.
Well, there you go. Again, we're separating fictional reality from
ostensible reality from `real' reality. Is Seymour's suicide a case of
Poetic Justice on Buddy's part; what Nabkov himself describes as
coincidence moving beyond itself to create a new web of meaning? Seymour is
dead in a literary sense, but is he literally dead? After all, dead Seymour
is what gives Buddy all his writing material and keeps him enfranchised. He
is a college professor; the only way he is going to gain his immortality is
through the mythical Seymour. He'd be a very good thing for such a guy to
create. Likewise, Salinger has already gained his by creating Seymour who
*is* dead, and in fact never lived, but like Buddy, forms the basis of
nearly all his known material. Like Dante Gabriel Rossetti who wrote in his
sonnet `The Portrait' `Those that look on her must come to me'.
> The idea that the author, in these circumstances, can make us question
> the intent, the identity and the validity of a fictional first person is
> remarkable.
Absolutely. It constantly amazes me that we're always asking questions like
`is Franny pregnant' without even questioning the fact that Franny is a
piece of fiction (: Perhaps it's a testament to the mythical status
Salinger seems to bestow on his characters - and, it must be said, himself.
It would interest me very much if what Salinger himself has done is pulled
a John Shade, `faked' his own literary `suicide' so that he can be in
perfect aesthetic synchronicity with his characters. It's a thought that's
crossed my mind before.
> Satis verborum for now, I reckon.
Aww !? (:
Camille
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