Re: How many geniuses did JD send to the grave before he finally got it right?


Subject: Re: How many geniuses did JD send to the grave before he finally got it right?
From: Louise Z. Brooks (invertedforest@angelfire.com)
Date: Fri Feb 18 2000 - 01:30:55 EST


How do you know that? If you picked up the book, clean as a whistle, never heard of JDS, never heard of a Glass in your life - if you were an amateur reader, as JDS puts it - would you really be able to say that?

Literary allusions aside, there can be no doubt that a writer asks himself such a simple question which, in this case, set him off on a good 30 years of thought (considerably more if you count the theme being touched in `The Varoni Brothers' and again in `The Inverted Forest') All I'm saying is that a writer starts with a basis that can be built up or stripped down, and once you strip it down, that's what Bananafish is all about.

So much of our perceptions of that story are shaped by retrospect. I imagine that if I read it in aforesaid slick I would have been quite maddened by it in the same way that I am still maddened by Teddy. In the same way that revolutionary movies look remarkably cliched today until you realise that it was they which actually set the cliches that everyone copied, retrospect irrevocably alters our perceptions. It's so very hard to keep sight of that.

IF I am reiterating things that have been said longer than three months ago I can only argue that I have been here for less than three months! In the meantime, I will not be a member three months hence if my boss realises how much of my company's precious Internet time I have expended on literary discussion today! I'll try to restrain myself from now on ;)

---
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 00:20:32 Matt Kozusko wrote: > >Louise Z. writes: > >"It's quite clear that Bananafish was a slick story, with probably not >much more behind it than `What if there was a poetic genius who took his >own life for no apparent reason after the happiest day of his life?'" > >Damn and fie if here we don't go again. Given that "The Inverted >Forest" features prominently in your email address, it is a staggering >mystery how you arrived at so slight an opinion of Death of a Tortured >Seer part III. No poetic genius in Salinger ever took his life without >ample reason. > >The more one looks at "Bfish," the more it stands out as the richest and >thickest of the nine. There are so many possibilities. It becomes less >complex and less interesting the further Salinger tunnels into the Glass >mines, but before the 1950s emendations began arriving, the potential >was inexhaustible. Pedophilia, podophilia, Freud, Marx, Rilke, Eliot, >Genesis, logocentrism, phallogocentrism, materialism, >spiritualism...everything from numerology to Nazis. The story excludes >nothing. We've been discussing it here with only short breaks for >cigarettes since 1996, and I only have to repeat myself once every three >months. > >-- >Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu >- >* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message >* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH >

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