Re: Salinger and Buddhism as promised
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Mon, 29 Jun 1998 14:05:42 -0400
Curtis Maxwell Perrin wrote:
> For there to be a Zen element to Salinger's writing, he doesn't explicitly
> need to write koans or nonsense.
Certainly not. My initial contention was that while Salinger's writing
is extensively concerned with Advaita Vedanta (or whatever fantastic
distillation of Eastern thought we settle on), he's essentially a
western person with especially western narrative methods. I never meant
to equate Zen with reaching outside of language.
> I'm not so sure that one needs to write "sdrawkcab" in order to play with
> language. Indeed, writing backwards and using other *tricks* might almost
> be called violations of the rules of the language game, because, properly
> speaking, such tricks are outside language.
They aren't, really--they can't be. In a sense, nothing can be outside
language, because the moment we identify something as "outside of
language," we've cast it relative to language; we've made that something
part of the phenomenological mass we differentiate with language. You
can't get outside of structure, because once you do, you've simply
stepped into a larger, ur-structure that governs both the space you
inhabited initially, and the space you stepped into.
But I see your point. Now, writing backwards does indeed violate the
rules--but that's the idea. We can't get outside of language, but we
can gesture in that direction by violating its rules. Strictly
speaking, such gestures are futile, but that's no fun. We can try to
escape language by subverting its rules. Salinger doesn't often try to
subvert the rules. He appears to delight in playing by them.
Somewhere, we lost track of who was arguing which point. As you say, to
play the language game, one typically works with the rules, as Salinger
does (metamoments--the blank sheet paper by way of explanation, the
boquet of parentheses--aside).
The most difficult means of
> producing "differance" is not through breaking every rule, but by submitting
> to every rule while simultaneously conveying a sense of high
> self-consciousness in the act of submission. I think Salinger's writing
> does call attention to itself in this way, and in so doing it heightens
> one's awareness that it is a "construction."
I'd never actually considered what applied differance would look like in
a story. I only ever saw it as a little game in which Derrida tries to
present a concept while insisting it's not a concept--eating his cake
*and* having it, while denying the existence of flour and water. But
Derrida really isn't my thing. Care to expand on your point?
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu