Re: Zooey rediscovered
Brendan McKennedy (suburbantourist@hotmail.com)
Sun, 18 Jan 1998 20:23:00 -0800 (PST)
>Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 12:12:37 -0500 (EST)
In Salinger's quest
>for us to admire and want to emulate the spiritual purity and
>prayerfulness of the Glasses, he loses the necessary objectivity
required
>to write fully fleshed out characters. Bawer states, "Salinger is more
>interested in having a family of incurable childlike adults to play
with
>on paper than he is in trying to figure out how people like that
*really*
>get to be that way or how they they might manage to become (horrors!)
>emotionally healthy adults."
>
>does Salinger's preoccupation with them point to
>his own level of immaturity?
>Do we all just need to 'grow up'?
>the last we've heard of the Glass family, no one else has.
>And what does 'growing up" mean in this case? How does it help?
>
I haven't read Franny and Zooey for awhile either, so I can't really
talk about those exact stories right now. I've been lucky enough,
however, to have started reading Salinger as a teenager to have have
Bananafish here to help me be aware of my feelings as I grow away from
those years.
As I've grown older, my opinion of not only the characters has changed,
but of Salinger's treatment of the characters as well. I've started to
think that perhaps he didn't intend--at first, anyway--his characters to
be the bottom line on life. I don't think he wanted to use his
characters so much as examples of How We Should All Be as he wanted to
use them to display a disturbed group of people.
Take Holden as an obvious example. While he may not have had the
precocious presence of mind that the Glasses did, he had the same sort
of draw towards innocence and the purity of children. But he is a very
sick individual. I don't think he is intended to be idolized in the way
the I and the rest of the teenagers initially idolized him. For
instance, Holden tries to punch Stradlater's toothbrush, hoping it'll
split his throat open. Does that sound like an example that the author
thinks we should follow?
Also, look at Uncle Wiggly. In this story, Salinger seems to be telling
us that good intentions and innocence eventually die, and the search for
them after they have gone can only lead to a terrifying sense of
nothingness--very similar to Catcher's theme.
And there is always Teddy, where Salinger shows us a precocious young
man and his younger sister, neither of whom are very Innocent people, at
least Innocent in the way that Holden seems to believe that all children
are Innocent. Salinger's constant references to reincarnation, by
association, refer to karma, which tells us that our loss of innocence
in adulthood carries over into our "Innocent" childhood.
As for the Glass stories, I'm not sure that Seymour was meant at first
to a sort of Avatar either. If indeed he is always seen through Buddy's
eyes, then he cannot help but be portrayed lovingly. But there is much
between the lines that sort of impugns Seymours sainthood. Throwing a
rock at Charlotte, for one example, as well as killing himself. These
traits, I think, have been canonized by Buddy and us, the Bananafishers,
but not necessarily by Salinger himself.
Perhaps Salinger lost the objectivity. Perhaps by always writing
through Buddy's eyes, Salinger himself fell in love with his characters
and therefore wasn't in a position to expose their mental illness as a
not necessarily Good Thing.
I don't know. What do you all think?
Brendan
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