Re: Salinger, Shade, Notes from Underground
Daniel Mahanty (MAHANTYD@ojp.usdoj.gov)
Wed, 26 Aug 1998 11:38:34 -0400
Upon thinking about our recent discussion re: the literal, figurative,
representative truths and intentions in writing, partucularily in "Pale Fire"
and F&Z, RHTRBC, SAI, and PDFB, I began to include Dostoevsky's
_Notes from Underground_ in my ponderings.
As I read the part detailing the intended reader, notably the author
himself,I would posit the notion that this style is much more akin to the
use of Buddy by JDS than Vladimir Nabokovs Kimbote or Shade -
especially when reading the first few paragraphs, nay pages, of SAI. I
have come to the decision (although probably not an unmalleable one)
that I personally have no reason to suspect any disguise on behalf of
Buddy in his descriptions of Seymour -they have perhaps revealed
themeselves as figurative truth to me. It is almost surely a more
burdonsome task, perhaps responsibility, for the pseudo-masochistic
author to be truthful - if not embroidering obscurities and otherwise
passive relations and perspectives with liberty (which is to say, doing
what most authors do), as he speaks to said reader - which may be the
author himself. This, now, seems much different than the style of
Kimbote - while nonetheless probably still sharing other similarities.
Salingers work now seems self-contained. He doesn't neccessarily
need an audience, or a reader at all, and he certainly doesn't need to
establish a relationship with a reader - this task is left to the reader
himself, who, by opening the first page, has been struck with a golden
arrow by virtue of his desire to think vicariously, and must now go about
chasing Daphne about until she goes and becomes an olive tree
somewhere in Cornish, NH.
Dan