RE: The Worst
jordie chambers (jordiekc@rocketmail.com)
Fri, 04 Jun 1999 01:34:53 -0700 (PDT)
Jord wrote:
> > These were dangerous, messy circumstances, and J.D.
> > avoided them like a tightrope walker wearing two by
fours
> > for shoes and ten safety harnesses.
Sean wrote:
> Indeed, enough of this letter reading crap! Where is the
blood?
> Where are the headless bodies? Where are the entrails?
Why is
> Salinger holding out on us?!
Salinger didn't include any gore because it wouldn't have
served any purpose. Gore and tits are best left to the
producers of thousand dollar horror movies.
>
> By the way, what in the hell does "like a tightrope
walker
> wearing two by fours for shoes" mean?
It was a bad metaphor. Lucky soldiers in WWI wore
strapped two by fours to protect their feet from rotting
in the trenches. What I mean is it seemed like Salinger
was backing away from the kinds of things that a New York
Times critic would grind him for. War literature has a
distinct place in literary arts and people are eager to
attack a well known writer for mistakes, it's just
something people do to defy those, like J.D., writers with
huge stature. I think J.D. was scared if not aloof from
writing about the deeper parts of this scene, this slice
of wartime. If a writer is going to begin describing the
drudgery of war, the unwritten code among veterans/writers
of the wars is to finish the job. I bet Hemingway
would've puked if he read A Boy in France. The tactic,
albeit a useful one for stories like Hapworth, for
example (haven't read it but people seem to like it), is
overdone and unoriginal and I felt it did no justice to
the boy's frame of mind in the war besides, what you say,
contrasting the two: wartime France and a struggling
America. That said, I'm wondering now if I misread
Salinger's intentions. If he did intend to contrast the
two, that makes the story a simple little experiment with
Taoism. I don't care as much for his intentions as I do
for effect, and I was unimpressed. Cheap trick. I do
think he probably meant to write something bigger, but
edited the manuscript into a chicken-soup-for-the-soul-ish
ploy with Taoism as an afterthought.
> > For J.D. to describe the pestilence of the trenches
and to
> > link that flavor of war to that with a soggy old
letter is
> > a cheap tactic.
>
> It's fair to say the letter is a tactic. As I'm sure you
know,
> Salinger makes liberal use of letters in his writing
(_Hapworth,
> 1924_, for example, is essentially one long letter).
However, you
> have entirely missed the point of the young boy in
France's
> letter, written to him by his little sister, Matilda,
and not
> by his parents, as you earlier stated. The point of the
letter
> is to provide a CONTRAST between the rotten, stinking,
miserable,
> unlamented circumstances the boy is in, and the day to
day concerns
> of a young American girl. Children as salvation is a
recurring theme
> throughout Salinger's writing. Read _For Esme With Love
and Squalor_
> for a second, more developed version of the idea behind
this story.
I will read it. Is it one of the stories that the
Depressed guy at collegemail offered on his website?
Because I downloaded those.
>
> > He chews emotion like bubble gum. When he got it
stuck in
> > his hair, and tried to pull it out, he backed into the
corner
> > of ancient didacticism.
>
> No, no, no. He smokes emotions like cigarettes. When his
pack ran out,
> he tried to mooch one from the guy on the corner, but it
turns out he
> smoked menthols, so he ran into the street and was run
over by the
> taxi cab of twentieth century post-structuralism.
I like the complications in the story, though I don't dig
deeply because I believe J.D. spent oodles of frustrated
time working on this story and destroyed the heart of it
in the process. I think the digging won't result in
anything. I like fiction that can move people, as well as
inform, and A BOy in France did none of that for me.
There is definitely something missing from this piece when
compared to his other stories. The characters are one
dimensional, so I'm going to have to assume this was a
symbolic writing game he played in fun, with no intention
of affecting anyone deeply. I love the idea of colorful
children contrasting a black scene, but I've seen better
examples of this tactic used. I'm still unimpressed by
this story, though I feel like reading it again just to
prove me right.
> > Cynics will be around ad infinitum, you'd better get
used
> > to them.
>
> I have nothing against cynics, just graduates of the
Ethan Hawke
> from _Reality Bites_ School of Cynical Posturing.
>
> -Sean
>
I'm with you there, I'm sick of Cyndi Lauperish people
posing as original in the endless quest of originality to
the shrine of plastic barbies and pig chodas - another
tortured metaphor for no one.
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