Re: 2 Q's

Subject: Re: 2 Q's
From: Louise Z. Brooks (invertedforest@angelfire.com)
Date: Sun Feb 20 2000 - 17:42:59 EST

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

On Fri, 18 Feb 2000 18:51:40   AntiUtopia wrote:
>In a message dated 2/18/00 1:31:37 PM Eastern Standard Time, wh14@is9.nyu.edu 
>writes:
>
>> Dear All,
>>  
>>  I have to respectfully disagree with Jim--I don't think making Buddy a
>>  writer is screwing with critics--Salinger wrote about writers before he
>>  had critics publishing comments about him.
>
>Nah, it's not just Salinger making Buddy a writer that's problematic.  It's 
>Salinger making Buddy the writer of stories we'd already read as Salinger's 
>own **after the fact.**
>
>And I think it's only problematic when we try to use this understanding as an 
>interpretive device for the stories themselves.  What can it possibly do to 
>help us understand Bananafish?  We naturally start asking questions about the 
>veracity of the details such as Muriel's phone conversation -- where before 
>we'd take it at face value, once it becomes Buddy's artifice it become 
>artificial.  In other words, not to be trusted. 
>
>It's like me writing a conversation I'd heard about but not heard.  "How do 
>you know it went that way?"  As soon as we start asking these questions we 
>start losing the story in a number of fruitless quadries, 
>
>which I think is Salinger screwing with us :)
>
>Jim  
>-
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