Re: FW: gunnery
Mattis Fishman (mattis@argos.argoscomp.com)
Tue, 13 Jan 1998 16:12:39 -0500 (EST)
Sam writes:
> that whatever the hell he was thinking on the driveway that
> day with charlotte was somehow connected in his mind, by some seymour
> logic, to throwing a rock at himself
I have a problem understanding the suicide and the rock throwing
incident. Since JDS seems to portray what are patently negative acts as
some sort of enlightened holy acts, he is presenting me with a puzzle,
or maybe a koan, which he expects me to solve by leaving my natural
logical thought processes behind. To do that, he must drop insights like
spiritual bread crumbs that will lead me to some enlightened state in which
it is beautiful to throw rocks at innocent girls. I have read the stories
many times and thought about them for the last 25 years and have yet to
be convinced. Buddy, and JDS, can tell me, or imply, that throwing that
stone (or shooting that bullet - though we don't have an explicit
explanation for that) was the right thing to do, but I don't have to
believe them. In both a logical (a word that need not be used derogatorily,
sorry, Teddy) and spiritual sense I am left shaking my fist at Seymour.
As I write this, however, I think that I can look at the rock throwing
in a new (to me) way. The revelation about Seymour and the rock comes at
what might even be called the climax of the story, and therefore I am lead
to believe that we have already been shown enough about Seymour in Raise High
itself to relate to this incident and understand it. Can anyone provide
a clue?
For an attempt, I would like to say that the whole flow of the story concerns
Seymour's sense of being overwhelmed by his feelings, of being too happy
to get married. In the end he succeeds in dealing with them (and here I
feel like a fool - I cannot remember that we are shown at all by what
means Seymour manages to do this) and gets married. In Charlotte's case,
he was also overwhelmed by her perfection, and threw the rock, *not* out
any desire to hurt her, or place a blemish on this transient world's
false perfection, but rather in order to reduce the scene of Charlotte in
the driveway to one which would not overwhelm him (sorry for the same word, but
I can't find a better one here). As though to cure his bananafever, he
needed to ruin the bananas. This was a flawed reaction, an immature one,
when contrasted to his behavior in Raise High, where he eventually gets
married.
If you wish, you might say that by the time of APDFBF, his fever had progessed
to where his reverse paranoia (how do you spell that word?) lead him
overdose on happiness to the point that in order to deal with it he had to
kill himself. In such a sense, you could call it throwing a rock at himself.
Do I believe this, I don't know (talk about abiguousity), but I am
trying to relate the rock throwing to the entire context of the story.
I would really like it if someone else could do it better, any takers?
Even better, can someone enlighten me as to where we are shown what
enabled Seymour to finally go ahead with the wedding, other than suggesting
that he just was too sensitive and needed privacy? (Forgive me, my
own copy has disappeared and I do not have the book at hand)
all the best,
Mattis