Re: a sense of proportion
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Tue, 14 Jul 1998 16:33:58 +1000
> Camille tells us she feels almost as much an alien in 1950s
> New York as she does in 1600s London. This is very understandable.
> It derives from what we psychiatrists call the Antipodean
> Strangeness Factor which renders its victims uneasy in any culture
> based more than 200 miles north of Sydney.
Scottie will you PLEASE stop attempting to filter my every utterance
through the fact that I am Australian !?! I felt compelled not even to
finish reading this post as I am so sick of this facile approach. I would
have thought someone in your profession wouldn't have stooped to this low
humour (if it is intended to be humour) ):
> JD, on the other hand feels much closer to the adolescents of 40
> years ago than to their parents. Yet I have to say that to a young
> man in London in 1957, when it came to shared experiences,
> the bootlegger of 1920 seemed no more remote than the teenager
> from Upper East Side New York. I could feel my heart turn over
> for both of them. I had been just as idealistically obsessed with
> my own Daisy as I'd been enraged by the posturings of my elders.
Me too. We can all sympathise with Hamlet, or Holden, or even Jay Gatsby.
But that's beside the point. The basic humanity of these characters and the
problems they face transcend the obscure references to children's theater
companies, 50's songs that I've never heard and Jazz age parties which
firmly place the texts within their historical contexts. It's the emotions
you identify with and empathise with. If anything, it is the complex
historical and topical allusions in Shakespeare that pose the most serious
threat to his longevity, not the basic blocks of human dilemna which make
his work so magnificent.
> And along with Matt I have to ask what standards of reading
> & judgement could seriously place Holden at the very pinnacle
> of all Western literary endeavour ?
I think it's impossible to say `X' is the best book ever written', and I
never attempt to. It's like saying `The Mona Lisa is better than Warhol's
`100 Marilyns' - They are both masterpieces of entirely different, nearly
mutually exclusive domains. But the reason I do think TCIR is so timeless
(and notice we always term books of this special transcendence are always
described as `Timeless') is because eveyone recognises the struggle from
adolescence to adulthood, regardless of whether or not they live in New
York or know how `Smoke Gets in Your Eyes' goes. For that reason it comes
as close as I'd ever like to get to being aptly described as the good ol'
Great American Novel.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
THE INVERTED FOREST
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