Re: Buddhism and Salinger as promised

Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Wed, 17 Jun 1998 15:55:39 -0400 

> I don't say he tries to escape it. Obviously, a writer must depend on words
> to convey his or her message. As I see it, the way he `reaches into
> silence' is similar to the way his poetry seems to occur between the lines.
> He recognises that real emotions occur between the broad definitions we
> give them - there are an infinite number of increments between `happy' and
> `sad'; even between `happy' and `joyful' - and that we cannot rely on them
> wholly to put across what he is saying. This is the reason why his best
> writing is so compact - the *real* action occurs outside the writing on the
> page; it is beyond language and into that `silence' of the indefinable.

I'm coming at this from a different perspective.  Especially in the
west, we are stuck inside of language.  Difference, differance.  I'm
thinking of "reaching outside of language" differently--a writer who
reacehs outside of language might show frustration with it...she might
write nonsense, for instance, or write backwards--something to call
attention to the use of language itself as a contsruction.  Perhaps
Salinger comes near this with the boquet of parantheses.  In general,
though, he's enamored of language; he likes to play and to play by the
rules.  He's a prose stylist.  When you initially said something about
reaching outside of language, I thought of people who try to subvert
meaning by being nonsensical, I thought of koans, of instances of
language use that almost "mean" something only inadvertently by
directing you away from semantics and the rules of syntax.  Salinger is
clever and maybe puzzling, but he doesn't do much nonsense.  He
*translates* nonsense all the time, perhaps...but my point is that he
doesn't do any first-hand reaching outside of language.  

> 
> > I agree that Salinger's fascination with/exposure to eastern thought
> > informs much of his fiction, but he's ultimately a very western
> > personality.  His few mystic moments are loud and obnoxious.
> 
> Do you really think so? Would you call Holden's realisation at the carousel
> `loud and obnoxious' ? To me his moment is made beautiful by its very
> quietude and simplicity within the generally `loud' world that has made up
> his journey. 

It's loud for me because the setting of the novel is, as you say,
"loud."  Salinger hasn't published many cryptic verses about
grasshoppers or rocks.  His mystic moments (I was thinking of DD-Smith,
whose epiphany is not only loud, but kind of tacky--even though it is
brilliant) are loud because they aren't trying to be quiet.  Maybe this
idea of Salinger as "translator" will work, here--Salinger translates
extralinguistic (even extrasemiotic?) moments, and he translates moments
of eastern spiritual enlightenment into their louder, western
counterparts.  

You seem to see both Salinger and Suzuki as representing a
> kind of chocolate-box supermarket queue magazine Zen. I think that's an
> unfair accusation. It's interesting that Salinger seems to recognise his
> (for want of a better word) `Teddiness' - he knows that to teach any
> Western person the fundamentals of Zen - even by sheer osmosis - is through
> a Western mode of storytelling. It's a controversal point I know, but I
> believe that sometimes the message has to be altered or made vernacular in
> this way to get across at all. 


That's more or less what I mean when I call Salinger an ultimately
western personality.  At this point, I wonder whether we're arguing the
same point with different terms and emphases.

I'm not suggesting that Salinger is pseudo-Zen or even diluted Zen.  As
I said before, during the first great ZenBeat debate here, Salinger
apparantly hates the beats for this very reason.

Some would condemn the loss of essential
> purity in that action, but frankly I doubt Cosmopolitan would have been
> publishing haikus or koans in the stead of a short story such as `The
> Inverted Forest' which their readership would actually appreciate. 

Their readership, of course, didn't appreciate it.  
 

> It's interesting also that you see Seymour as belonging to a more western
> tradition. As a writer, perhaps - but as a figure he has far more in common
> with Gautama Buddha, that paradox of genius who is meant to be worshipped
> in a non-worshipful way (or vice versa).

Both Seymour and Raymond Ford originate in Eliot.  So does Salinger's
initial personal spiritual crisis.  He was a Jewish-Catholic kid who
grew up in New York reading classic western literature--I don't think
non-occidental experiences are available to people with that kind of
background!  Not until they're much older, and have had a chance to
grow, anyway.  And indeed, Salinger eventually becomes very involved in
eastern thought, but not until after the war.  The war was probably the
catalyst (or the crowning event) in his life that lead to the creation
of Seymour.  The years between 50 and 54 pulled him in another
direction, and while he kept his new cast, the characters underwent a
change.  I just don't think SEymour can ever be entirely removed from
his western beginning.       

Salinger works toward eastern thought, but his origins are in American
modernism (and its European coutnerparts...French symbolism, Rilke (ie,
German French-symbolism), the Russians).  I think the movement  is
chronicled in what happens to Seymour and Buddy (who started out as Ray
Ford/Joe Varioni and Babe Gladwaller):  in "Bananafish" (and in
"Forest"), they have spiritual crises via Eliot's "Wasteland."  Sybil,
mixing memory and desire, April, underground forests instead of
wastelenads, etc.  In "Teddy," which is a retelling of "bananafish" by a
recently re-educated Salinger, with Teddy as Seymour and plain old
apples instead of bananas (clever substitution, JD), the spiritual
problems are more eastern.  Seymour's death becomes an eastern thing
only after Salinger gets seriously involved in Eastern thought.  The
general swing in his fiction goes the same way, from west to east. 
Holden and Allie and Phoebe (Greek, notice--not Indian) and Vincent to
Buddy and Seymour and Franny and WaltWaker....  

 
 
-- 
Matt Kozusko    mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu