Re: try the real

Responses below:

Kim Johnson wrote:

>jim, thanks for explaining.
>
>IF you are right, it wasn't the voices that sounded
>identical to me. it was aaron's near flawless recall
>of details in the stories, and that john g. had
>disappeared from sight.
>
>HOWEVER: if i remember correctly, john g. once said
>that 'zooey' was salinger's masterpiece. from aaron's
>posts, i don't think he would agree with that
>assessment.
>
perceptive reader, as usual :). I'm not going on this type of analysis,
though. I'm almost certain I saw an e-mail one to two months ago from
John G's e-mail address that had <<Aaron Summers>> in the FROM: field
:). Seems like this was fixed with the very next e-mail. I could be
wrong, though.

>and to sort of bring this around to salinger: up
>through 'raise high' there are no self-conscious
>references to responses to his work. but at the
>outset of 'zooey' we find the first time: that remark
>about people already shaking their heads about his use
>of the word "God", and that any further use of this
>except as a healthy american expletive would be a sure
>sign of him going to the dogs. (granted, all this is
>in buddy's voice.) but i do think that's salinger
>speaking through buddy: no doubt the head shaking was
>going on because of 'teddy' and 'franny' and probably
>'raise high'.
>
>and in 'seymour: an intro", we have the further
>blurring of salinger and buddy and references to
>responses to him and his work. (to me, when there is
>the allusion to 'catcher' as one of buddy's works,
>well, that doesn't work for me.)
>
Salinger did refer to Buddy as his "alter-ego" (his own personal sock
puppet :) ), so there's no doubt that at times Salinger is using Buddy
as a mouthpiece for his own ideas. It's just questionable to me to
make this assumption All the Time, so then the question is...when? When
is Salinger speaking through Buddy, and when is Salinger demonstrating
the limitations of Buddy's character? We have evidence both ways - we
have caveats on the accuracy of Buddy's reporting, from the Glass family
via Buddy, and we have strong subtext about Buddy's emotional investment
in the stories.

>what i guess i'm driving at is the question: does any
>one know of other writers who have done this same sort
>of thing?
>
>kim
>
There's Joyce's _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ -- Stephen
Dedalus. There's more distance, I think, between author and character
in that relationship than between Salinger/Buddy. Pretty much any time
we have a book featuring a main character who's an author we have to
wonder if the character is a sock puppet of some sort for the author.

Jim

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Received on Fri Mar 21 14:20:09 2003