Subject: Re: Seymour - a Malediction
From: Benjamin Samuels (madhava@sprynet.com)
Date: Fri Mar 17 2000 - 10:36:35 EST
> Salinger
> by starting out with a contrived & extraordinary character
> winds up with a folly whose only interest is his very grotesqueness
> & who, finally, says nothing about the human condition.
>
> Scottie B.
For me "Seymour" works the way someone was suggesting we read Kante. I
start off "bought in" to Buddy's situation as he's writing and look at it
from inside. I never posted my top 3 salinger stories when that was going
around but "Seymour" makes it up there somewhere and If remember right
others felt the same. At the same time I could understand someone not
liking it at all. Some people just not getting it, and not liking it for
that reason. But others "getting it" just fine but still not liking it as
seems the case in your post. And funny enough, I think I like it for some
of the reasons you don't (though I admit I couldn't follow all your post.
What was that about nerves?) Buddy does seem to go a little off the deep
end here. It's not a refined approach. He practically drops the whole use
of narrrative and seems to babble his way through some utterly emotional
material that just isn't relative to all (or even many?) readers.
I love it though. Why? For one thing, I was already bought in. I was
hooked by his more narrative entries in to the world of the glass family.
So for me, his "experiment" worked. It may have helped that I sometimes
feel as crazy with emotion and feeling as Buddy comes across. When open
eyes with a rational approach lead to wild, incredible, and crazy (but
beautiful) realities as compared to "normal," maybe phony life as usual it
often has the effect making you feel estranged. So, getting a glimpse of
it inside someone else creates a feeling of kinship. To digress, this
captures my best understanding of the essential function of art: to mine the
depths of the human soul and bare it to others in such a way that in the
other's recognition of what you've uncovered they feel kinship; that you
have shown a piece of their own soul. The artist's choice is where and
what to mine up and bare. Salinger goes deep which is risky. It means many
people may not be able to recognize inside themselves what you are sharing.
And for those that do ("get it") some may embrace it and feel kinship,
others will label it folly.
Art immitates reality because it comes from the reality of the artist.
Reality imitates art when someone tries to understand art and that piece of
the artist's soul that it bares; when they find that work of art inside
themselves and embrace it as part of themselves. In this way art is a
process of growing, of teaching and learning. The places and bit's of soul
that salinger gives us in the glass stories are the dillemas faced by the
"enlightened" living in the modern world. People that have developed their
minds both in a western scientific way and also an eastern metaphysical way.
These people See-More. They are both blessed and plagued by beauty and
phoniness of it all.
And it is crazy.
And that's OK.
This is what Salinger means to me. He bares that craziness that I know from
inside myself and so transmutes it into a feeling of kinship, of Love,
Madhava
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