Subject: Re: 2 Q's
AntiUtopia@aol.com
Date: Sun Feb 20 2000 - 17:59:58 EST
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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