Re: A new (or possibly old) thought...

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Tue, 07 Jul 1998 11:31:47 +1000

>       J.D. Salinger always left his stories very open ended and up for
> interpretation.  The different meanings and connections a person can make
with
> a single story are endless. That's what I think the beauty of the stories
are,
> the many ways they can be. The questions left over by his works that can
> ponder in the heads of the reader for days, if not a lifetime.

This is the very reason that I for one made such a big deal of Salinger's
Zen connections, because I think that this is the very quality he has
appropriated/borrowed/homaged in his writings - the idea of ambiguity
within succinctness are inherent within Zen.

  When we as
> critical readers, start to breakdown and deconstruct Salinger's work we
can
> find hidden messages not visible to the naive reader.  Does this mean
that
> these underlying, obscure messages are what the purpose of  Salinger's
works
> are supposed to convey, and they are only supposed to be understood by
the
> highly intellectual?

No, not at all - not everyone on bananafish is an `intellectual'. To me,
that implies using certain methods of interrogation on the texts, and it's
certainly not what I do. I simply apply what knowledge I have about them to
the service of finding more and loose ends to have the fun of tying up.
True, that's what so called `intellectuals' do (although with far more
knowledge than me) but that doesn't make their reading of a text any more
valid than mine, or yours, or anybody's. Being interested in the `teenage'
aspect of TCIR is every hit as valid an explanation and point of entry into
interpretation as any - in fact, as you point out, we often forget that
above all, TCIR is the best teenage novel ever written. In a lot of ways
you're the reader Salinger prefers - the `amateur reader', who lets the
revelations of the novel be absorbed into themself without questioning
them. But it also must be remembered that Salinger may have an alterior
motive in this, which is another thing I've discussed before. The amateur
reader absorbs ideas of Zen, Taoism, etc secretly packaged within this text
with which they find a natural sympathy without even realising -  which is
in a way an even more Zen way of receiving (and teaching) them than making
them explicit.

Don't be afraid or daunted when people throw names at you like Barthes,
Derrida etc. They're not evoking sacred, inescapable gods here - they're
just touching upon people whose ideas are very similar to yours but have
put a name (and many books of theory) to these ideas (: Thanks for keeping
us all on our toes and reminding us what we're all here for!

Camille 
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442