cracking the code

Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Tue, 17 Aug 1999 09:42:07 +0100 

    Thank you, Jim, for the explanation of 'cultural codes'.  

    It sounds rather an arcane phrase to denote the difficulty 
    we all have in entering someone else's world - a difficulty 
    which increases, naturally, with the distance in time.  
    When I write a book I try to offer a world for others 
    to enter.  That is my intention.  And it's the worlds offered 
    by Salinger or Henry James or Graham Greene that I try 
    to enter when I open their books.  I make the simple - 
    but no doubt academically irrelevant -  assumption that 
    that was also *their* intention.

    What I find extraordinary is the general assumption throughout 
    this discussion that Salinger in writing about New York 
    in the late 40s is just about as accessible as some scribe 
    from Ur of the Chaldees.  

    For Cripe's sake, the man is still alive.  (So far as we know.)  
    Some of you younger girls shouldn't stop dreaming altogether 
    of having an affair with him, even.

    We discussed something of the sort over a year ago 
    when the topic of Hemingway's popularity came up.  
    Matt Kozusko 'defended' the young of today by suggesting 
    they would have great difficulty - & little interest - 
    in relating to the Paris of the 20s, the scene of Hemingway's 
    first great novel.  I couldn't believe this.  But perhaps 
    it really is true that this generation of American 20 year olds 
    is so blinkered in the present that they must be literary 
    or historical scholars before they experience any curiosity 
    about their parents' lives?

    When my grandfather taught me the more risque songs 
    of Edwardian music hall or showed me photographs 
    of himself driving the first motor car in the town, 
    he wasn't trying to inculcate a sense of my English Heritage.  
    We were simply having a laugh.  Is American society 
    so deracinated that no one nowadays talks to his Grandpa?

    The past was never so accessible.  You don't have to be 
    a musicologist of mid 20 Century studies to know 
    Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.  You need only turn the late 
    night movie.  When you watch a Woody Allen film, 
    do you never wonder about the soundtrack tunes?

    What a bunch of dull dogs.  No wonder you're all more 
    at home with the metaphorical beads & flowers 
    of the Glass family - while Holden remains a remote 
    figure from a set book on a middle grade Eng. Lit. course.

    Scottie B.