Re: Kerouac and Shade / Salinger and Nabokov -Reply -Reply -Reply
Daniel Mahanty (MAHANTYD@ojp.usdoj.gov)
Wed, 19 Aug 1998 09:49:17 -0400
>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.
I think the two are very similar... although, I believe it would not be
entirely inappropriate to separate the two by ostensible differences in
what the two vicarious authors choose to represent through their
ventriloquy. (This may just be a statement of the obvious..)
I always mix up Playdough and Socrates.
>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.
Hmmm.....
>Well, there you go. Again, we're separating fictional reality from
>ostensible reality from `real' reality.
Kilgore Trout-ism.
> 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?
He is, quite figuratively, dead. Is he dead in fictional Buddy's mind? Or in
his fictional reality?
> 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.
Ahh, I couldn' t have said it better myself (which is probably the sad
truth.) The lessons of Gilgamesh, write? The conception of a character
within a character. Seymour has been given immortality of character by
Buddy, literal immortality by Salinger - as has been given to Buddy as
well (by virtue of his creation/recollection of the newly immortal
Seymour). So, did Shade grant Kimbote immortality, or vice versa? Or
could both be true, regardless of the "true" author? i think the latter is
true - mainly because Nabokov created both - like a set of mirrors directly
facing one another.
>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'.
Perhaps, in the short run. But creating characters with such magnitude,
an author can open a pandora's box of creative liberties to be taken by
readers and future readers. Take, for example, even the most trivial
example - something like Star Wars - does the entire "Star Wars
Universe" really come back to George Lucas? (God, I know I open myself
to ridicule with that one.) Occassionally, again to state the obvious,
characters outlive the name of their creators (perhaps Santa will outlive
Jesus, Jesus outlived God, and in any case, they all outlived Neitzche,
yuk yuk.) , and in many cases, are well beyond their control. To bring in
another quasi-sequitir, Voneguts "heavy inertia" characters in
_Breakfast of Champions_ , as he is connected to them more by "stale
rubberbands" than steel wires.
>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.
This one could take some serious pondering. On (US) government time.
I'll get back to you, probably.
Dan