Re: Genial Fish theory
WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Fri, 30 Jan 1998 09:08:58 -0700 (MST)
Like Matt, I like to pick and choose reading strategies and ideas from
theory without making theory a monolithic aspect of literary
experience...I will confess to enjoying theory though, and believing that
Salinger's work is not beyond or above theory. In fact, Matt's claim
about Barthes "disappearing author" for me, is linked to Mr. Salinger's
desire to remove his public self from his work...I read his cryptic
statements on the subject to possbily be about his belief that his
authorial presence is phony compared to his textual presence...and in f
act if I learned anything from my dissertation (I studied critical theory
and ananlzed 40 years of critical response to Salinger's fiction with an
eye on reading strategies and their theoretical links), it's that the
text, what an author writes (not intention), that is most likely to shape
the theoretical links, not the other way around...so I like to use
theoretical insights to give me new ways to see Salinger's fiction, but
believe the base of the work is not going to change because of theoretical
constructs...
Where theory and text best converge for me and in Salinger's work seems to
be in Reader Response Criticism...Salinger's work deals so centrally with
love and spirit--things most theories don't handle well--and it's my
belief that his work makes individual readers aware of love and spirit in
such powerful ways, that that's where the "liteary action" is--in other
words, Mr. Salinger was probably aware that his "amateur readers" were
really the best links to his work in his first place, since amateur
readers can talk about how text influences their lives, not their literary
theories...
will