Re: Universitatlity

On Sun, Dec 7, 2003, ukmarcus@sbcglobal.net said:

>Well no chance of a film of course. Anyone know if a sequel (official or
>otherwise) has ever been attempted?

A sequel to Catcher in the Rye??????

A woman named Betty Eppes once snagged Salinger in a pseudo-interview
that was published in The Paris Review, and as Salinger was trying to get
away from her and her banal questions, she kept calling after him, "Is
there going to be a sequel?" (To Catcher.) He seemed taken aback by the
question. I don't think of it as sequel material any more than I do The
Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises. Sequels are what I think of as a
recent phenomenon. I don't imagine literature in terms of sequels.
True, some writers (think Proust, just to name one easy target) wrote
books that were strung thematically together, but the concept of a sequel
is, I think, rooted in the world of cinema, and has leached out into
other areas.

I personally feel that Catcher is such a "fly-in-amber" story, such a
snapshot of a critical time in a boy's life, that any followup would be
absurd. In fact (and I'm sure that perceptive critics have noted this),
as in Ulysses, TIME is a crucial part of the novel's inner workings.
Catcher doesn't just happen. It takes place in a tightly structured and
compressed period of time. It would lack the urgency it has if, say, the
story meandered over the course of weeks or months, just as Leopold Bloom
and Stephen Dedalus's wanderings would lack the dramatic impact they have
in a book that takes place on June 16th only.

Well, I'm no critic, and I don't walk the walk or talk the talk, so I may
be as full of horse manure as, well, a horse. ("A horse is at least
HUMAN, for god's sake.")

--tim

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Received on Mon Dec 8 01:31:34 2003