Re: unfortunately, more

AntiUtopia@aol.com
Mon, 16 Aug 1999 17:07:39 -0400 (EDT) 

In a message dated 8/16/99 4:06:57 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
rbowman@indigo.ie writes:

<< It seems to me that this is where the theory that 
     The Reader's Version Is More Or Less As Good As Any 
     will finally bring you.  Why should a writer go to such 
     pains to give you the one or two telling details that 
     will make his world for you?  Why bother at all?  
     Why not just put dots for the reader to fill in wherever 
     he thinks fit?   -- Scottie >>

I don't think you really understand the theory as well as you think (at 
least, my understanding of it), but I agree with your basic point.  

What happens when a work is carefully, accurately and meticulously set in a 
specific place and time (Salinger's gift) is that as readers become more and 
more distant from that place and time more and more of the work becomes hard 
to understand.  So we're not really trying to recover the author's "intent" 
for the piece, but we're trying to reconstruct cultural codes -- for example, 
your reference to all the nighclubs, martinis, etc.  It's a reconstruction of 
a presence, a place, that we're after.  Someone contemporary to Salinger 
could do so without thinking.  Someone a bit younger, well, it takes work :)  
  
Recovering that sense of place becomes more and more, therefore, the job of 
the professional scholar and less the job of the casual reader.  For me to 
understand the reference to the song Holden heard, I'd have to look it up, 
find a copy, and listen to it.  I wouldn't have even known the name of the 
artist, honestly, if you hadn't told me, Scottie :)  I'm really more 
acquainted with Beethoven or Mozart than I am with American pop music from 50 
years ago.  And there's really no substitute for a song, since music conveys 
a specific feeling in ways we don't understand unless we hear it ourselves.  
I think Camille understands the "feeling," even if she doesn't know the song, 
but I agree that you can't know the feeling the song conveys precisely 
without hearing the song.

Course, I wouldn't understand most of this if I hadn't read a bit of literary 
theory.  And people some certains schools of thought sure would have some 
fits over what I've said.  

Where's John Omlor when you need him? :)

Jim