Subject: How many geniuses did JD send to the grave before he finally got it right?
From: Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 18 2000 - 01:20:32 EST
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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