Re: a theory of "Bfish"

Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@virtual.park.uga.edu)
Thu, 29 Jan 1998 01:02:50 -0500 (EST) 

On Wed, 28 Jan 1998, Tim O'Connor wrote:
     
     Matt -- a wonderful approach to the deep ambiguity of the story, and a
     great hook to get students interested.
     
Why, thank you!  I should have mentioned in the post that it's long been
a theory of mine that the clues and the wording throughout the story are
supposed to lead the reader to suspect Seymour will kill his wife.  Until
the last six words.  Last year at this time, during the second
group-conference on the subject, someone (can't remember who--Sonny,
maybe, or Lisa) suggested altering the end and testing it on real readers.
Thanks to whoever it was; the thing worked beautifully.


     I wonder: had any of the students previously read the story?  Were any of
     them motivated to go get a copy of it to see what the real ending was?
     
Not a one of them.  A few have read _Catcher_.  Sadly, nobody sought out
an alternate copy.  But they were excited when I passed out "Laughing Man"
today (ending unaltered)...

     
     What's the ethical issue?  (I'm intrigued.)

Well, changing the end of the story, if only temporarily.  I'm not sure
it's exactly right.  It's a horrible kind of violence, actually--
especially if used to ignoble ends.  I've had enough theory to make me
cringe when I hear words like "author" or "intention" (particularly when
they're used near each other), but for some reason, I still believe in the
integrity of Salinger's "meaning"--and I fear that some irreperable damage
is being done, if only on a karmic level, when endings are changed. 

Does this exercise help to bring out "meaning" that is otherwise obscured? 
I am confident that we do the story great injustice by reading later
versions of Seymour onto it.  I think the only truly qualified reader of
"Bfish" is someone who has no previous exposure to the Seymour industry. 
Our preconceptions about Seymour preclude our reading the story as
Salinger "meant" it in 1949.  In the Salinger community, though,
uninitiated readers are hard to find.  

People do absolutley horrible violence to Shakespeare every day.  Nahum
Tate changed the ending of _Lear_ so that Cordelia lives to marry Edgar,
and he didn't change it back.  We change other writers' texts all the
time--Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's _Frankentstein_ (well, whose is
it??); Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_ (act V?  remember act V?); We even
change texts themselves.  Every general "scholarly" version of _Hamlet_
available today (including the Arden and the Oxford) is a conflation of
three very different versions of the play from the early 17th
century--Shakespeare *did not write that*! 

For some reason, though, changing Salinger's texts makes me uneasy (as,
for that matter, does passing them out to my students--I will have to take
them up again Friday).  But I've gone on long enough...
     

clinuhmen
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mkozusko@virtual.park.uga.edu