Subject: seymour's goggles et al.
From: Rick Lampe (lampe@math.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 17 1997 - 14:52:50 GMT
Hello. I've been happily and quietly enjoying the Bananafish digests and
the discussion. I (like nearly everyone else) first read CitR as a tenth
grade student many many years ago. With a little prodding, my English
Lit teacher pushed me to read Franny and Zooey and Roofbeams as well, but
I certainly didn't appreciate them as I do today after re-reading them
(and after far too many intervening years).
Rod Lobaugh <ral@xc.org? wrote:
>I have this interesting little option in the whole connecting with
>Salinger thing... Maybe the whole problem with placing Seymour or even
>Holden on this pedestal. Maybe they are "bad" examples... I mean maybe
>Salinger wasn't showing something we should model.
I have often wondered about this as well. In Kelly Maura's post, she
wrote that `I think the whole Salinger obsession-- the reason that people
get obsessed with him-- has to do with wanting to connect with Salinger,
with wanting to understand what he understands and how he understands...' To
see things through Salinger's (or Seymour's?) goggles. And maybe it is
the case, that for all the mystical insight these optics provide, peering
through them one doesn't really see (or connect with) anything more than
anyone else... perhaps all one can see is ... more glass... and maybe JDS was
after all just politely pointing out a bad role model to us.
But I don't really believe that. Salinger writes with too much love and
affection for his characters. I know nothing about the man, but his
characters come across with so much honesty, that I
sometimes wonder how biographical a lot of it is. I believe (but I'm
certainly open to comment on this) that JDS invented these characters -
and maybe invent is not the right word to use here...- and that he followed
them (Seymour and Holden) as long as he could, and they lead him to these
ends. And those ends, being the truth, had to be presented the way he saw
them: honestly and truthfully..
Rick
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