Re: shucks, i'm all emotional.
Brendan McKennedy (the.tourist@mailexcite.com)
Tue, 09 Dec 1997 07:54:13 -0700
Bethany wrote:
] i went to my local
>library and took out all of his books they had----with no intention of
>returning them. i wanted to keep salinger from the critics, from the very
>literary theorists and analysts that we now speak of; those to which perhaps i
>belong. because i knew, even then, that there was so much vulnerable, that
>they could warp to fit their case, so much that they could misinterpret and
>misjudge.
I know how you've felt, about wanting to keep Salinger from the world...it happens
any time I take a literature class, and I have to listen to people talk nonsense
about Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath or some other perfect writer...
But I think you just gotta remember that these are not only vulnerable works but
they are also STRONG works...
While they may "teach" it, it means a LOT that Catcher has been mandatory reading
in high school for all these years--even in Catholic school!--and it means a lot
that the critics go wild at the first mention of a new Salinger publication.
The world loves Salinger. Maybe not as much as the bananafishers do, and maybe not
in the ways that Salinger himself wants...
But his works have withstood the test of time, they've gotten to you and me and we've
read them without the horrible critics ruining it for us...
Just imagine, Bethany, if someone had taken those books out of the library, with
no intention of returning them, before you got to them. Imagine all the potential
bananafishers of tomorrow who will go the library and find nothing to change their
lives like ours have been changed.
I think Salinger's writer belongs to the world as much as it belongs intimately to
us. It's scary, but it's also very very wonderful.
Brendan.
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