Capote and Hofstadter

Sundeep Dougal (holden@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in)
Wed, 27 Jan 1999 09:46:06 +0500 (GMT+0500) 

On Camille on Capote on Chaplain and others --

Penguis 60s' _First and Last_ is where I first encountered the same passage
quoted by Camille some years back, which I had duly posted to the list
then, and I was surprised myself to find that I have also had it on my JDS
page at:

http://members.tripod.com/~SundeepDougal/oona.html

I had entirely forgotten that Hamilton quotes from a biography of O'Neil
too in In Search of...

By the way, in the past I have gone on at some length about my admiration
for Douglas Hofstadter, known largely for _Godel, Escher, Bach_ but his
latest book _Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language_ had
me enthralled from the very first line:

"Picture Holden Caulfield all grown up, now a university professor, writing
a book about translation. Okay, don't. It's too silly...even if this sounds
like an utter cliche, there _is_ some kind of deep kinship between my soul
and that of Holden Caulfield..."

and going on to add that one of his school essays had been returned with
"D+, this sounds like poor, poor, Salinger." More on poor, poor, Salinger
later.

Oh, I guess I better take a deep breath, control myself lest I get carried
away rambling about this book, but what I did wish to mention here was this
memorable micro-miniaturisation of _Catcher in the Rye_ in Maurice Sagoff's
ShrinkLits (any one here read this? Sounds fascinating. Encountered him
before in Hofastadter. Apparently he took 50 canonized works of world
literature and shrank them down to "constructive distillations of
themselves") that Hofstadter mentions:

School was crumby,
Classmates mean.
Holden Caulfield,
Aged Sixteen,
Copped out to the
New York scene.

There he wondered,
Sorrow's son,
Overgrown
But underdone,
Seared by girls...
It wasn't fun.

Broke, disheartned,
Home he slid.
Since Phoebe
(Perky kid)
Buoyed him up,
She really did.

Only for the
Moment though;
Down the skids
Alas, he'll go,
Landing in a
Shrink-chateau

Ah, what torment
Must be his
Who Goddams
But feels Gee Whiz!
Youth is rough,
It really is!

There are some fascinating (at least for me) nuggets too -- Hofstadter
writes at some length about his unease on reading the Brit edition of CITR:
cribs about em-dashes converted to en-dashes, different spellings --
"phoney" with an "e" etc. -- single quote marks, and so on, but the best
comes after that when he says:

"Well these anglicisms were harmeless enough, I suppose, but then, in the
space of a one single page, after running into a "coloured girl singer" and
a "pearl grey hat", I banged straight into the _kerb_. A _kerb_ in New York
City! Blimey! That was too much. But the worst came when I read _this_:

        'Note to the reader. I've left this passage as if in small
        type (size 10, in point of fact) so that it looks just like
        the extract that was originally here, taken from the British
        _Catcher in the Rye_(two paragraphs from James Castle's
        pathetic death, in which "gaol" is used for "jail", and
        "Maths" for "math") However as you may have guessed, what
        you are reading is not that extract. No, this is in fact your
        author, improvising at his Macintosh keyboard. Why on earth
        is that? Simple -- here it is, an eye-blink from press time,
        and guess what? Old J.D. _won't give me permission_ to quote
        a measly 26 lines from his book! No, he won't! Don't ask
        me why. He's a funny guy, I guess. I could plead till the
        cows come home but he won't budge.

And then he goes on to describe, still in small type, quotation-style, how
this denial of quotation would have screwed up all the calculations about
page-breaks about which he is so fussy, so he just put in his own text
where the extract was to go, JD-style italics and all:

        '_Some_thing had to be done to make up for the missing 26 lines.
           Something -- but what? Yes, _what_?? And as I pondered my
        dilemma, I kept on asking myself, "Suppose old Holden _had_
        grown up and become a university professor and written a book
        on translation...Would Salinger have denied even him permission
        to quote from _The Catcher in the Rye_" If so, I pity the old
        guy. Poor, poor Salinger.


Apologies for spoiling the fun of those who would otherwise have read this
in the book itself... Ties in somehow, doesn't it, with Mattis' take on
those FUQs. So this could pass as an addition to that, I guess. Not to
mention an earlier thread about the Brit edition of CITR. But, read this,
read this remarkably readable and enjoyable book on a subject that has
often been made remarkably tedious and pedantic by most (no apologies for
the shameless plug) for sundry ruminations on Vikram Seth's _Golden Gate_,
Pushkin's _Eugene Onegin_ and some wonderous extracts of various rhyming
translations of Dante's _Divine Comedy_ (and great ribbing of Nabokov --
see, the fundamental interconnectedness of everything is at work here too)
and oh-so-much more, including (and this is relevant here again,
considering Seymour's interests) Haikus...I don't think I have been so
enthused by anything I have read recently or even not so recently, and that
makes me wonder how I desisted so far, considering that it's been at least
two weeks since I finished reading it. I guess I have been too busy just
reading and re-reading it. Now back to interesting things like work.

Sonny,
Concerned about having breeched some copyright law or the other, and more
than aware now of the schizoid Anglo-American hybrid that I write.