Re: 2 Q's

Subject: Re: 2 Q's
From: Louise Z. Brooks (invertedforest@angelfire.com)
Date: Sun Feb 20 2000 - 23:54:52 EST

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

On Sun, 20 Feb 2000 17:59:58   AntiUtopia wrote:
>In a message dated 2/20/00 5:43:49 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
>invertedforest@angelfire.com writes:
>
><< Well, I don't see this so much as a `problem' as a `problematic', one of 
>those delightful words I picked up from my university days which mean a 
>(perhaps wilful) muddying of the thought pool. I think all the things you 
>list are *exactly* the sorts of questions he intended you to ask. One of the 
>cornerstones of the Glass stories would have to be: can I trust Buddy Glass? 
>He says he's trustworthy, of course he does, but as his vision of Seymour is 
>the one and only we ever gain - including those Nine Stories which contain 
>Glasses, which we can assume `Buddy' also wrote - what's to say Seymour was 
>merely a not-very-good aspiring poet who got selfish and took the easy way 
>out? We're never allowed to see Seymour's poems and decide either way 
>ourselves, we are simply asked to trust this outrageously biased view. 
> 
> ---
> Louise Z. Brooks >>
>
>Hey...I think I used the word Problematic too :)
>
>BUT, what happens to the stories once we start asking these questions?  I 
>think they disappear.  I think that's only the "intent" for people who would 
>ask these questions to begin with (namely, the critic and not the beloved 
>simple reader praised at the beginning of Nine Stories).  
>
>It's hard to say about the poems.  I think Salinger was in a bit of a fix.  
>He couldn't possibly let us See the poems themselves.  No way.  That would 
>mean he would have to write poems that lived up to the praise, and we can't 
>expect a short story writer to do so, I don't think.  I mean, can we expect 
>ANYONE do so?  I think we're expected to trust Buddy on these details, but by 
>Buddy, of course?  
>
>And you see what's happening? Salinger is disappearing from the discussion.
>
>If anything, that's his intent.  I don't buy it :)
>
>Jim
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