Subject: Re: women in Salinger's work
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Fri Mar 30 2001 - 03:38:02 GMT
I might not be quite as generous as Mattis to Salinger's
WOMEN characters - perhaps on the simple & general
grounds that none of them are afforded remotely as many
words as Holden or Seymour & that many of them slide
dangerously towards the stereotypes of college girl or
Jewish mother. But Phoebe & - above all - Esme certainly
come dancing off the page as the genuine article.
I agree wholeheartedly, though, about Salinger's refusal
(so far) to attempt an ongoing, dynamic engagement of
a man with a woman. This has always seemed to me to be
the measure of a writer. I still regard it as the nuclear human
relationship & if a novelist asks to be considered at the highest
level he must offer at least one fully realised couple. All the big
boys have done so: Tolstoy (numero uno), Joyce, Proust, Eliot,
Balzac, James, Hardy ....
But then it occurred to me: is there something about American
life that devalues this particular relationship? (In my prejudiced
European way I think of you all as deracinated creatures, wandering
the prairies & concrete canyons, moving restlessly in & out of brief,
moth-like couplings.) I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be with
American writing but I can't, offhand, think of very many 20th C.
US writers who made it their central concern. Updike, I suppose,
but with Roth & Bellow it seems to be more about its failure or
absence. Of the older chaps, Fitzgerald & Thomas Wolfe made
a kind of stab at it, but Hemingway was never happy with it -
what about Faulkner? Mailer? Others?
Maybe it just doesn't belong comfortably in the culture?
I'm not demanding some idyll like Natasha & Pierre's - just
a day-on-day, eye-to-eye dialogue - verbal & emotional -
between a couple that extends over more than a week.
Scottie B.
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Apr 10 2001 - 13:24:05 GMT