Subject: Re: Franny, Zooey, and Janet
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Tue Jun 12 2001 - 04:17:35 GMT
No point in boring people with a yet another repetition
of my misgivings about the post-Catcher Salinger. But
Janet Malcolm’s article prompts one small comment.
It was only in the past couple of years that I tried to put
my objections into words, but my natural smugness was
certainly reinforced reading these similar criticisms first voiced
fifty years ago - so much more elegantly & by such a formidable
collection of sensibilities.
Having summarised their shared distaste for the self-consciousness,
the preciousness, the incestuous inwardness of the Glasses,
Malcom reasserts - without apology - that Salinger: '... would
permanently retain the dualism of “Bananafish,” the view of
the world as a battleground between the normal and the abnormal,
the ordinary and the extraordinary, the talentless and the gifted,
the well and the sick ...’
This, at heart, is what I find appalling about him: that such a gifted
man should embrace the elitism of the second-rater. It’s the kind
of sniffy withdrawal of the swot who has been turned down
for the team, who can’t make it with the girls but flaunts his
collection
of Rilke in consolation.
OF COURSE if he has greater facility in certain directions he’ll
feel different. But that makes it all the more important he understand
that in his essential humanity he is NO different. A real artist -
a Tolstoy, a Joyce - is very, very other than Joe Soap at the end
of the bar. Yet his preoccupations convey nothing of this difference.
He identifies a dodgy little Dublin Jew or a bumbling Russian bastard
& in that unpromising focus concentrates mankind in general.
There’s none of the adolescent’s grandiose condescension to some
mythical Fat Lady or etherealised Jesus.
Sean loves the skewering of Lane Coutell. It gives him, presumably,
a delicious feeling of superiority or perhaps an even more deliciously
masochistic sense of self-identification. And, of course, everyone
pisses
themselves at the thought of Muriel’s mother. You can certainly hear
Salinger giggling in the background.
Count Leo would probably have laughed too. But as you put his book
back on the shelf the feeling would something warmer, more accepting,
more DELIGHTED, than that awful patronising sense of complicit
one-up-man-ship that J.D. dispenses so compulsively.
There may be something unimaginable building up in that underground
bunker in Cornish. But only if he has abandoned this overworked seam
& started over again - as real artists make themselves do, all the time.
Scottie B.
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Jul 24 2001 - 09:20:44 GMT