Re: Zooey rediscovered
AntiUtopia (AntiUtopia@aol.com)
Mon, 19 Jan 1998 01:49:16 -0500 (EST)
Scottie B's post below was well written, well thought out, and fraught with
assumptions I don't feel I need to share....which I tried to point out below
interspersed with the quotes from the post.
In a message dated 1/18/98 8:13:10 AM EST, bowman@mail.indigo.ie writes:
<< My copy of Franny & Zooey is dated 1962. There are one or
two stains left by people to whom I - possibly misguidedly -
lent the book over the years. But I hadn't actually opened it
myself for at least two decades. Finding myself nowadays with
so many new friends on Bananafish I thought I'd better polish up
the old lens. So I read Zooey again last night.
It was a bit like opening the freezer & discovering that at some
time in the past there'd been an unannounced power failure.
Quite large chunks of the meat had begun to rot.>>
Kinda responding to the follow up posts here, I knew from this last paragraph
that you were saying you had changed, and as a result your opinion of Fand Z
had changed.
<< I'd always had thought of Salinger's style (though not in
The Catcher) as containing a big element of "New Yorker"
dandyism. But in Zooey the curlicues, the hyperexactness,
the look-at-me-I'm-going-for-the-unexpected-but-juste-mot give
a terrible feeling of archness. When the narrator mocks his
own familial weakness for long windedness, you suspect he's
putting in a pre-emptive strike to forestall criticism.>>
Scottie, how much of this is cultural? Hadn't it occured to you that those of
us who either live in New York, or know people who lived in New York, see the
voice represented as being a pretty believable representation one from New
York? And hadn't the thought further occurred to you that Every Main
Character in F and Z were Actors? What does that say about their
personalities, their speech habits, their mannerisms? I felt--especially in
"Zooey" and in his dialog with his mother--that the two were deliberately
trying to manipulate each other using the tricks of their trade. I thought
Salinger pulled this off with no small degree of subtlety...
<< The dialogue clunks. Bessie - addressing her children as
`young man' or `young lady' - speaks like Fay Bainter in an
Andy Hardy movie. (The tool kit in the house coat doesn't save
her from being the stereotypical Jewish Mother - even down to
the chicken soup.) And the tone of insulting affection with which
Zooey abuses her becomes dreadfully laboured after many a long
page. And aren't the exchanges with Franny just a bit expository ?>>
Eh, of course they're labored if you don't like the book. If you do, well,
you can't get enough. This isn't real criticism here. I don't feel like
you're saying anything really meaningful about the work.
And, eh, if you think THOSE exchanges were expository, go home to YOUR mother
for a few days :) You'll change your mind :)
<< Although already far too old when I first read the story, I'm sure
part of the attractiveness I found in the whole Glass cycle was the
temptation to identify with this tremendously gifted, tremendously
beautiful, tremendously aware, tremendously tough-minded bunch
of young people. But now, they just sound precious.>>
Of course. You've grown up, and the fictional characters haven't. What, you
expected Zooey to be 45 in the story now that you are reading it 20 years
later? ;)
<< If you're going to write about the redemption of the soul I don't
think it's humanly possible to do so with any conviction whilst
setting your story in the Upper East Side. The stews of
St Petersburgh perhaps, or a carpenter's shop in Galilee, or
the Gulag Archipelago. But who'd really want a painting of
the Resurrection by Warhol ?>>
I'll be honest with you, Scottie B, you sound like a pretentious jackass here.
But you're a Brit, you can't help it :) Tho I can't say I ever heard an
Irishman come across that way...
If redemption isn't meaningful in the Upper West side, it's not meaningful
anywhere. Galilee was painfully average, if you remember (something like the
Glass family apartment), and the rich and notable such as Matthew the tax
collector, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were drawn just as well as poor
fisherman. I think you're missing the point.
<< In the Fifties, Oriental philosophy was all the rage. Oppenheimer
watched his bomb going off & quoted the Upanishads to himself.
As undergraduates, we read Gerald Heard & Aldous Huxley & spent
endless hours discussing the freedom of the Unattached Man -
all the while slurping down oysters & Guinness in some of the finest
bars in Dublin. As I remember, we were every bit as sensitive &
dedicated as the Glass children. And although one or two of us
did also manage to contrive our own deaths most of us simply
grew up.
Scottie B. >>
I appreciate the bit of historical setting provided here, and I'd LOVE for you
to expand on it. I mean it. But aren't you betraying the falseness of your
expectations here? Whoever said the Glass children were supposed to be grown
up? That's the point, is it not? We're talking about a 25 year old male and
a younger female. Yes, some of you did just grow up. But at 25 you weren't
yet. The point, I think, is to depict the struggles of youth with the growing
realization that their ideals aren't met--not even by those who hold them the
most sincerely. This is not just about a bunch of intelligent kids, it's
about intelligence itself--and ethics and idealism and spirituality--meeting a
banal, shallow, idiotic world.
>From the condescending tone of your post, I don't think you ever learned from
F and Z. You still prefer to mock the fat lady rather than serve her.
Jim