Re: one more time
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Thu, 04 Feb 1999 11:16:46 -0500
At 2:49 AM -0500 on 2/4/99, Matt wrote:
> 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.
It seems (after considering the traffic during the last couple of years)
that these are indeed very quiet months. In fact, I recall lamenting last
year, around this time, that we had a lot more people leaving than joining.
It just seems cyclical -- nothing more.
I myself find it interesting to hear of the author's comings and goings.
It serves as a kind of counterbalance, for me, to talking about the work.
Of course, I'm more interested in historical information (which, for me,
helps me have a fresh perspective on the work I read).
But I don't mind the rest, and I find fascinating the notion that the man
who wrote "Zooey" is the father of a man who is now doing bread-and-butter
acting.
> 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.
I absolutely agree -- there is an almost surreal air, like a low level of
smog, that hangs over the story, something like the thin haze you see when
you fly into a big city.
I especially enjoy the way Seymour switches from being completely not real
(in the talk of bananafish) to being gentle, almost parental (e.g., when
she kicks sand, he gently holds her ankle and says, "Not in my face, baby,"
the type of reaction a seasoned parent would have. But then, one could
argue that he was in a sense a surrogate parent to Franny and Zooey. I
could imagine him holding Franny's ankle and saying this to her.
> 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?
It's odd, but I found that the **more** I read it, the harder it was to
understand -- its opacity increased, so that after a while I was not
reading just the story, but trying to read *what the story meant,* and that
makes it much more ambiguous -- and multi-directional -- than it first
appears.
> 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.
It always sounded to me like a narrator who had what one might call a mixed
experience with analysts.
And placing the analyst in the bar almost exactly parallels something
Hemingway did in the Nick Adams story (sorry that I can't cite the title
from memory), in which Nick's father, a practicing physician, has a stack
of unopened medical journals at home, suggesting a doctor who has no
interest in keeping up with the literature. Kind of a subtle dig, I guess.
And consider that among "sophisticated" people at the time, analysis was
all the rage, just as Zen would be about ten years later -- and we know how
Salinger reacted to the increased popularity of his chosen philosophies.
(Amusingly, not much different than what you get when you observe a young
music fan, irritated that some cult-level group has reached MTV heaven,
declare that the band has "sold out.")
> 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.
Ah, very good, yet again....
--tim