Re: Plot Plot Plot?

Ahimsa2000 (Ahimsa2000@aol.com)
Wed, 24 Dec 1997 16:33:46 -0500 (EST)

 hey 'fishers,
 
it's lagusta, at home on my mother's account. 

happy hanukkah, christmas, solstice, kwanzaa, etc. 
 
 to dave koch: i've been thinking a bit about your post, and i think you
brought up a really interesting, underexplored area with salinger's writing
style. i think it is harder to talk about the way he writes than about the
plot he writes, because for me, his style is much more internal and slippery,
it just makes me feel very good. i often love his plots, too, but i think my
favorite parts are when nothing happens, or very little. zooey's shaving
scene, i  could read that forever, just marvelling at the way he
 makes sentences out of little nothings.
 
unfortunately, i don't have the books here, or else i could find about a
million examples. there are some wonderful stylistic things in some of the
unpublished short stories, but i don't have those at hand, either. the one
where umm...what's his name...goes to tell vincent caufield's old girl he's
dead (either vincent is the one who is dead or he's the one who's telling, and
i think he's the one who died) strikes me as full of lovely little strings of
words.
 
 like tim, the sentence about lane being one of those people who ought to be
 given only a very probationary pass to meet trains is one of the all time
greats.
 
i wish i had my books here so i could go back and find some great lines. i'm
always amazed at the way he takes such ordinary words and twists them into the
kind of sentences that give you goose bumps.

 tim said:
 
 >>It's lines like that -- the narrator's throwaway remarks -- that make
 >>Salinger stories so memorable.  That and the dialogue, of course.  The
 >>perfect pitch that catches the italics that appear in only one syllable of
 >>a long word.
 
ah, yes! i think a whole books could be written analyzing his amazing ear
 for dialogue. i've met some other writers like that (of course my mind is a
holiday blur, so i can't think of any) and even through i know some are older
than salinger and he probably learned such dialogue from reading them, i still
always think he is the master and all others took lessons from him.
 
 >>Just in general, to everyone on the list: what phrasing is, for you, the
 >>absolute sound of Salinger's narrative voice?  What about a line of
 >>dialogue?
 
 hmm, maybe i'd go with the train comment, or some stuff in "teddy," maybe,
his dad and the gladstones. or probably some dialogue between muriel and mrs.
fedder in
 "APDFB."  part of the chats with the two women in "pretty mouth and green my
eyes" might be a contender. but the winner would ultimately holden's
narrative. the perfect way he sums people up that has let so many people
stereotype as classify people as "keep all their kings in the back row"
people, "would go ice skating just to wear one of those skirts that their
butts look cute in" people, "red hair that you
sense before you turn around" people, "roller skate legs" people, "make you
 keep picking up stuff from the floor they've tried to chuck onto the bed and
missed" people, "craning their heads around trying to look for movie stars"
people, "they play the piano well but like they know that they play well"
people, people who talk about the lunts in the intermission of plays and call
them "angels" (or whatever they called them), people who can write well but
are now out prostituting themselves in hollywood. etc etc.
 
this list is getting longer and longer because i'm searching for this perfect
classification that i can't remember. i'm saying what i want, but only partly.
there is a certain way holden sees people that is so achingly accurate that it
just kills me every time, and that is what i love best about salinger. oh! i
thought of an example, although it's not from "catcher." when salinger tells
us that muriel is the kind of
girl who "looked like she would drop absolutely nothing for a ringing phone"
(paraphrase) -- THAT'S what i mean. that's the heart of salinger's style, what
i love most. when he says something like that and you understand so perfectly
what he means, it's the most beautiful solace. it's that "other people feel it
too!!" glee that draws people to salinger so strongly.
 
i'm drawn as well to the idea that the best, most well written page is that
which is blank -- that reminds you most closely of the world before it
existed, of words before language, stuff like that, and i feel a lot of that
in salinger. when buddy speaks of how he thinks an appropriate wedding gift
for seymour would be the little old man's cigar "perhaps with a blank page
enclosed, by way of explanation" THAT'S it. that's exactly what salinger is to
me: the writing that comes closest to the blank page that explains everything.
does anyone know what i mean?
 
 lagusta