Re: 2 Q's

Subject: Re: 2 Q's
From: Louise Z. Brooks (invertedforest@angelfire.com)
Date: Mon Feb 21 2000 - 18:59:15 EST

Of course it is. That's just what Salinger wants. He wants to walk down through history - tear it from every page of every Nine Stories and every New Yorker - and start the whole thing again. It's metaphorically what he does to both it and `Teddy' in Seymour: An Introduction. The latter he describes as `unsuccessful' (is it even `entirely unsuccessful'?), the former he decries as mere speculative fiction; he even admits that the Seymour of his tale is more himself acting the role of Seymour, just like the ventriloquising phone call in (is it?) Raise High The Roof Beams. And what I'm saying is that this does ask questions, and asks them in an interesting way. 

---
Louise Z. Brooks
"Invention my dear friends is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation and 2% butterscotch ripple." - Willy Wonka

On Mon, 21 Feb 2000 08:32:43   AntiUtopia wrote:
>In a message dated 2/20/00 11:55:44 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
>invertedforest@angelfire.com writes:
>
><< Well then. If Salinger is disappearing from your view, he's obviously 
>achieving exactly what he intended, in a very clever and elegant way - as I 
>said, it's a lot cleaner than adding `disregard' on the first page of any new 
>edition of Nine Stories or actually issuing an obituary. `Salinger As Living 
>Dead Man', there's a title for an essay if I ever heard one. Those 
>post-modernists among you might even say that Salinger is fulfilling the idea 
>of the absent author. Gee whiz.
> 
> ---
> Louise Z. Brooks >>
>
>Yep, but at the same time isn't the story is disappearing from view as well?  
>I never doubted it was a clever trick on Salinger's part, but that's just it 
>-- it's a trick.  He's not erasing the author, though, just fictionalizing 
>him.  I think Joyce's literature comes closer to erasing the author than 
>anything.  
>
>I mean, we can ask these questions, or we can ask the questions the story 
>itself asks, but we can't ask both at once.  I'm drawn to the stories because 
>of what they ask.
>
>Jim
>-
>* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
>* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
>

Angelfire for your free web-based e-mail. http://www.angelfire.com
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH

This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Mar 02 2000 - 19:30:21 EST