one more time
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Thu, 04 Feb 1999 02:49:53 -0500
Nothing like a good state-of-affairs challenge to awaken the slumbering
list leviathans and usenet junkies with semantic bones to pick.
January and February, distant prologues to that cruellest month, seem to
have inspired a kind of hibernation here. Maybe everybody's been out at
the gym, pursuing New Year's resolutions.
I've just finished reading "Bananafish," in its entirety, for the first
time in a long time. I was surprised--struck forcefully, even--at the
oddness (the ambiguity?) of Seymour and Sybil's relationship. I am
accustomed to chuckling good-naturedly at psychocritical readings of the
story, especially those that brood over the Seymour-Sybil sexual
tension, but, due to the hour or perhaps the weather or maybe to
something that we untrained readers aren't quite qualified to ponder, I
felt the relationship was indeed more ambiguous than I had previously
allowed.
The story, to a new reader, must be a very puzzling thing. There is so
much going on in it, and the more you consider the offered directions,
the more the whole business seems to head off in an impossible,
unmanageable number of different attitudes at once. Is this skill, or
bungling? The narrator takes cracks at psychoanalysts--Sivetski spends
all day in the hotel bar, and "they" (Salinger's derisive tone, or
Muriel's vacuity?) "have to know about your childhood--all that stuff."
And yet that same narrator seems to invite readers to read
psychoanalytically with a perfectly equivocal but wonderfully
accommodating account of Seymour and Sybil on the beach.
Tomorrow, in my freshman comp classes, we will discuss it. I have
whited-out the final four words on the student copies again and will
begin by asking them to fill in an ending. Report forthcoming.
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu