JDS's use of Capitals - Buddhism link
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Fri, 06 Mar 1998 23:23:05 +1100
I was reminded of the whole capitals argument today in a lecture on
writing of the English Renaissance, in which abstract entities such as
Fate and Fortune were capitalized to make them into personifications. In
relation to Salinger, I think this is relevant, turning a word into an
entity called that by that word - thus `soon' becomes an entity called
`Soon' - be that a state of mind or whatever. It has the effect of
opening the word or phrase up to a new meaning by encompassing many
things under that `entity' - it becomes a metonym rather than a word or
phrase with only one meaning.
This also ties in very nicely with Salinger's Buddhist interests, one of
the main axioms of which is `No reliance on words' - obviously a
conundrum for a writer ! - the implication being that words are far to
broad to express the smaller subtleties and complexities of the
universe. I believe that through his capitalization, Salinger in effect
is trying to defeat this conundrum of the narrowness of words by turning
them into entities or concepts.
P.S. I'm new to Bananafish (I'm an Australian student at Sydney
University) so please give me a Warm Welcome and a late-blooming bunch
of parentheses. (:
Camille