Subject: Re: 2 Q's
AntiUtopia@aol.com
Date: Fri Feb 18 2000 - 18:51:40 EST
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
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Mar 02 2000 - 19:30:22 EST