Re: I am Franny!!! / We love Bill
patrick flaherty (pfkw@email.msn.com)
Thu, 16 Jul 1998 00:04:55 -0400
-----Original Message-----
From: Camille Scaysbrook <verona_beach@geocities.com>
To: bananafish@lists.nyu.edu <bananafish@lists.nyu.edu>
Date: Wednesday, July 15, 1998 9:59 PM
Subject: I am Franny!!! / We love Bill
>
>> And now on to a somewhat relevant posting (just for fun) may I ask whom
>do
>> most of you associate best with in the Salinger novels? (Just
>wondering...I
>> hope I do not get all Holden answers...but I imagine he is the easiest to
>> associate with since his character is so alive and colorful)
>
>Funny you should ask that, because I read `Franny' the other day for the
>first time in quite a long while. Apart from being struck with the fact
>that it's probably one of the best constructed short stories of the English
>language, I realised - `My God - I AM FRANNY!!!' I guess it comes from
>having once been an actor and also being at a Uni which, like any other, is
>full of self important ramblings about things they barely understand
>themselves. That story really touched me the last time I read it; it's
>definitely a story I had to grow into, I read it originally straight after
>TCIR but I think I understand it much better as a 20 year old uni student
>than a 16 year old schoolgirl.
>
>> Oh and Patrick...Billy, well, he is a mystery, that is one thing that
>keeps
>> him alive.
>
>Ah, no, no .... I've been in this argument so many times. There's so many
>things that keeps Shakespeare alive, and the fact that he is an enigma is
>merely a function of this fascination - after all, Marlowe was probably
>even more of an enigma but far less people know about him. I don't see it
>as the *one* thing at all. I've said before there's no one I am more sure
>was a true honest to God genius than Shakespeare. I classify writers into
>two categories - one, writers whose magic occurs in the lines (I would put
>Nabokov into this category) and two, those whose magic occurs mainly
>between the lines, some indefinable magic than no one else than a genius
>could have subconsciously put there (Salinger is a good example of that).
>Shakespeare is about the only one who has totally successfully married
>these two magics together; he taps into the human psyche so effectively
>that sometimes it's hard to remember that 400 years separate us and
>Falstaff or Hamlet, because even today we all know someone like them. We
>love Bill because he was a genius, but even more so because he was so
>endearingly human.
>
>Camille
>verona_beach@geocities.com
>@ THE ARTS HOLE
>www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
>THE INVERTED FOREST
>www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest
Camille, I think the most important thing you said ther was that "we all
know someone like" Falstaff or Hamlet. In my mind, a great sort of "test"
for whether a piece of literature is able to be somehow "universal" is
whether or not one, as a reader can make connections between the fiction
they are reading and some aspect of their own lives. I'm convinced that my
life has been significantly effected by the characters in the fiction I
have read. That's what great literature is all about.
I apologize and hope I have made some sense.
Patrick