If you do, you start missing everybody.

Brendan McKennedy (the.tourist@mailexcite.com)
Sat, 06 Dec 1997 00:06:50 -0700 

I'm sitting here staring at a blank screen, trying to think where I want to begin.
 In two days, I've gotten upwards of thirty bananafish posts, and having read them
all in the past hour, my psyche is already exhausted.  

This list is such a dynamic place, so unrepresentative of the Internet...or at least,
my (albeit limited) Internet experience.

It's so real and true and frightening...I feel I've adopted myself into an enourmous
family while they weren't watching.  Where else but in a family can you find such
tenderness and such pain all at once?

I have to admit, I'm sort of vexed at the tangents taken here--regarding homosexuality
and "god" and what can only be described as Science Fiction (hoping that Mr. Vonnegut
isn't reading...).  I want to get back to poor Mr. Antolini and poor old Holden...but
I can't remember where those things went to.

We are all critics here...Isn't that why we're all here in the first place...?  Not
necessarily to Pick Things to Pieces--but observing the Beauty of Salinger is a sort
of criticism as well...

I first read Catcher when I was fifteen, and it was my first experience with Symbolism...it
was the first time I was encouraged to read beyond what the syntax told me.  After
that, I sort of delved bodily into an Interpretive Fervor, and I don't regret having
done that.  With or without the Vocabulary, there is a brilliant moment of lucidity
when, parallelling symbols to discover What Salinger Meant, the meaning of the Symbolism
HITS me.

That moment is quiet and beautiful and ecstatic--as perfect and personal as the simple,
surface reading of, say, Seymour suspecting people of trying to make him happy.

Unfortunately, I was still dazed by the Interpretational Fervor when I read Nine
Stories for the first time...and I missed the entire point amidst my attempts to
find the Point.  Last year, though, I got Nine Stories for xmas--and having read
more Tom Robbins than Camus in the recent months, I had sort of shed my Fervor, replaced
it with the Pure Enjoyment of Reading the Words.

After that, Nine Stories was the most beautiful thing I'd ever read.

After that, I read Catcher again.  Suddenly it was more (or less, perhaps) than a
coded philosophy...it was a hilarious, sad, and overall deeply entertaining novel.


Having joined this discussion group, I'm starting to rediscover the beauty beneath
the beauty--that is, the very personal Discovering What Salinger Meant.  But I would
never again forsake the Surface Reading for the Interpretive Fervor.

Salinger, for me, has written fiction to read when I feel like reading Good Fiction,
for whatEVer reason.  Nowadays I delve into Nine Stories more because I crave the
sad wit of Eloise or the lovely zen-like superficiality of Muriel Glass. If the Symbolism
Hits me, I let it.  But if it doesn't, then I can still close the book feeling...well,
just Feeling.

Brendan 





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