Subject: Re: uncollected stories
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Sat Mar 31 2001 - 14:10:43 GMT
On Sat, Mar 31, 2001 at 06:27:34PM +0100, Scottie Bowman wrote:
> Well, Tim would hardly expect me to keep quiet -
> & I've already expressed my reservations privately
> to Levi.
<grin> But of course!
> I hate to see Holden being taken seriously as the
> spokesman for a small elite of supersensitive souls
> standing out bravely against the insincerities &
> corruptions of the adult world.
Agreed; I think it's why I had, at one point in my reading life, a
kind of backlash against CATCHER, because I was tired of that
either/or-ness about the book (the serious vs. the phony, the
sensitive vs. the callous), but I think I've regained my balance on
that matter now and can appreciate Holden as a brilliant literary
creation.
> The point about him, surely, is that he's VERY FUNNY
> & we laugh because he personifies all of us as we then were -
Precisely! He makes me roar with identification and with that
hilariously confused view of the world.
> in our baffled, sentimental, idealistic, raging, absurd,
> paranoid, adolescent selves. To paraphrase the old saying:
> anyone who didn’t feel like Holden at sixteen has no heart;
> anyone who still feels that way at twenty is suffering
> from emotional retardation.
That's an interesting idea: For those who don't mind talking about
their ages and their milestones, when did you STOP feel as if you were
a part of Holden (or vice versa)? I'd say I stopped at about 22, when
I realized how very silly I was being. It was when I stopped, I
think, identifying with anything and started being my own person. So
I guess, according to Scottie's yardstick, I went two years into
emotional retardation.
But some days it feels like an emotional waste land. Fortunately,
it's only some days.
--tim
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