Subject: Like More to Wolsey...
From: Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@english.uga.edu)
Date: Sat May 20 2000 - 17:19:22 GMT
Scottie Bowman wrote:
> Let us have a little more of your thoughts
> on the inadequacy of A Perfect Day as a short story.'
Why, certainly, chaplain. Someday, you know, the flock will be yours.
This robe, this crook, and this heavy, heavy burden.
Usually, at this point in the discussion, headless fish wrapped in brown
paper begin to arrive in the morning mail and hits at the _Anarchist's
Cookbook_ website increase by about 15%. Switchboards over at the
Harold/Ober Litigation Offices come to life. Interns pore over libel
texts with highlighters ready. But a duty is a duty.
"Bananafish" works toward one primary effect right from the opening
scene. Information about Seymour is carefully chosen, and Seymour
himself is carefully crafted, so that by the time we reach the
conclusion, we are ready for the protagonist to do something unpleasant
in his hotel room. This we have been through before, but briefly: open
your copies of _Nine Stories_ to the final page of "Bananafish" and note
the sequence and syntax of the final paragraph. Both the language and
the protagonist are deliberate, methodical. Seymour, the scent of
calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover in his nose, arrives at 507:
"he glanced at the girl ... went over to one of the pieces of luggage,
opened it, and ... took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He
released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the
piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed,
looked at the girl, amimed the pistol, and fired a bullet ..." Fired a
bullet where? The implication is perfectly clear: "into her skull";
"through her abdomen"; etc. But of course, the bullet goes "through his
right temple," and the reader sets about trying to figure out where he
went wrong. The materialistic bananafish isn't Muriel? Seymour is the
glutton? How can this be? The clues all pointed exactly in the other
direction!
And yet, this isn't the typical reaction to the story's end at all. The
typical reaction is something more like, "hmm." Pretty consistently
now, less than half of the first-time readers I have polled have counted
on Seymour shooting Muriel. Most of them either don't know what's
supposed to happen or think he's going to shoot himself. For this
reason, primarily, I think the story's shock effect succeeds at only a
fraction of its potential. Thus, a "failed" short story. "Well, Matt,
maybe you're just wrong about the 'intended' effect of the ending." But
you see, if I'm wrong, then I'm all the more right. The fact that we
don't swallow the bait so easily--or that we don't necessarily all agree
that it's bait to begin with--rather supports what I claim to see here.
Even so, consider the subtle details: "aimed the pistol" ... you don't
*aim* a pistol at your own head; you "point" it. "Aiming" is what you
do with a gun when you're going to shoot something besides your own
head. We are lead deliberately down a worn path toward a very
particular conclusion, but only a portion of us ever manage to get
there. Our Jewish-Irish Walden Pond tour guide seems to know where he's
going, but most of us are off dragging our bumpy hairless legs through
the plots of poison oak.
Themes. What is the story's theme? The spiritual depravity of the West
in the 20th century? Certainly. Gluttony, materialism, the relative
value of goods and knowledge, the implicit desirability of Rilke over
magazine articles, the cultural currency of Bannerman's "Little Black
Sambo" ... the innocence of chilren? The wrong-ness of
psychonanalysts? The right-ness of them? The seved deadly sins?
Nirvana? The color yellow? Who really knows? Don't take this last
question as a reflection of my affiliations with certain insidious
literary theories of the past 30 years. It's a straigh question. What
is the story about? Is it Seymour, or Muriel? The protagonist or the
world he lives in? In hindsight, I always want to make the story about
Seymour and his spiritual progression from incarnation to incarnation,
bananas reappearing as apples in "Teddy" and a prophet-poet protagonist
returning as Teddy himself. But it's hard to say either way.
Perhaps "Bananafish" is written on the boundary between two sets of
themes, contiguous at the outset but eventually divergent. Its "animus"
is confused--either very brilliantly, or very clumsily. I suggest the
latter.
-- Wolsey
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