Re: what, exactly...?
J J R (jrovira@juno.com)
Fri, 04 Dec 1998 20:22:18 -0500 (EST)
RE: Camille--
If you ever, ever want to me respect anything you ever tell me again,
DON'T tell me about the activities of Salinger's subconscious :)
I think you're subconsciously projecting your Electra complex onto
Salinger, attempting to consume him as a father figure of your writing
side :)
RE: Mattis and Scottie--
Don't you see how you're degenerating into guessing games by trying to
figure out what Salinger "meant" by what's in the text? In Scottie's
case, authorial intent equals the emotional effect of the writing upon a
first time reader, it seems. In Matt's case, it seems to mean decoding
the use of language in a text to see what it's doing...which MUST have
been what the author meant it to do, no? :)
RE: This whole thread--
Good readers, generally, ask questions while they're reading a text.
Some questions are relevant and important, some are not. The whole
question of, "who was Holden talking to?" and "where was Holden writing
from?" are just natural questions that arise for many people while
reading Catcher. In the process of trying to answer them, sometimes it
seems like the whole question is irrelevant. Once we've gone through the
whole process, maybe they will turn out to be irrelevant questions :)
But my experience has been that you do learn a whole lot about relevant
things in the process.
I wonder sometimes if we say a question is irrelevant out of laziness?
Is it that we do not want to do the work to examine it critically? I
know in at least some cases the questions just contradict our current
feelings about the text, and it don't seem important to our experience of
it. But they may reveal some things about Catcher we hadn't considered
before, eh?
Jim
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