Re: The Inverted Forest

--- James Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu> wrote:
>
> Psychotic/psychopath/sociopath all used to have
> specific, distinct
> meanings. I wonder if they do in Salinger?

yes, i wonder how careful he is regarding using these
terms.
 
> What we seem to be reproducing here is what we see
> represented in Glass
> family fiction -- looking back, sifting through
> available evidence,
> trying to make sense of an insensible sucide.
>
> Pretty realistic, no? We're drawn into the Glass
> family orbit by
> looking for answers to these questions ourselves.
> If that's the whole
> point, Salinger did a pretty good job. If he
> actually meant the suicide
> to say something about genius and sensitivity in mid
> 20th century
> American society, well, we need to keep looking to
> see if he pulled it off.
>

if we trust what salinger wrote on the dust jacket of
'franny and zooey' in 1961, his intention is:

"a narrative series I am doing about a family of
settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses.
It is a long term project, patently an ambitious one,
and there is a real enough danger, I suppose, that
sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear
entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and
mannerisms. On the whole, though, I am very hopeful. I
love working on these Glass stories, I've been waiting
for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly
decent monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care
and all-available skill."

well, that doesn't really answer our questions.

i'd just say that i'd plump for jim's latter
proposition.

kim

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Received on Wed Mar 19 13:44:42 2003