Subject: Seymour's death - another view
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Tue May 23 2000 - 15:56:01 GMT
I asked my analyst son, Mark, to submit his own
reaction to Matt's view of A Perfect Day - having
myself already confessed to the theft of one of his insights.
(Off the record & behind his back, I might mention also
that he has had considerable experience of treating soldiers
with post traumatic conditions following their survival from
some of the particular horrors of special service operations.
Whence, I imagine, his suggestions regarding the post-war
Seymour/JDS.)
Scottie B.
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Matt comments on "Bananafish": “The story’s shock effect
succeeds at only a fraction of its potential. Thus, a “failed”
short story.”
Matt’s argument, as I understand it, is that, to be successful,
the story should lead us to expect that Seymour is going
to shoot Muriel. It fails, he argues, because it doesn’t lead
us to expect this. And therefore, it doesn’t shock us when,
in fact, Seymour does not shoot Muriel but shoots himself instead.
Thus, if I read him correctly, Matt sees the basic, intended,
tension within the story as that between the possibility
Seymour will do violence to Muriel and the possibility
he will do violence to himself.
Matt is surely right that few if any readers are particularly
surprised by the fact that Seymour kills himself rather
than his wife. But I would submit that it is not really
this alternative that gives the story its fascination.
The "shock" in the story comes from the two contrasting
portrayals we have of Seymour. In his interaction with
the little girl Sybil on the beach, Seymour is portrayed
as a generous-hearted man back from the war, full of love
and tenderness for what is vulnerable, fresh, new. His final
act is a complete contradiction of this: he behaves with
stunning destructive hatred towards his wife.
Seymour’s suicide is not simply the expression of a man
who is tired of life. If that were the case, he could have
ended things by swimming out to sea, for instance.
His death would have looked like a bathing accident.
In that case, the minimum amount of pain would have been
caused to his wife, his family etc. Such an ending would
have been a noble departure from a world he felt had
become meaningless to him. Such an ending would have
been entirely compatible with the man we see playing with Sybil.
Instead, Seymour chooses to end his life in the meanest
possible way. He “sat down on the unoccupied twin bed,
looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet
through his right temple.” That "aim" is carefully chosen
- this is a suicide aimed at Muriel.
In the physical sense, Seymour's violence is directed at himself
rather than Muriel. But he acts so as to inflict as much
collateral injury on her as possible.
This then is how the story actually ends: the girl is woken
from her afternoon nap by the sound of the gunshot to find
herself covered in the remains of her husband.
She is going to live with this moment for the rest of her life,
just as Seymour intends. If the police don’t accuse her of murdering
her husband, she will certainly do so herself.
This is how Seymour himself sees her role in his death.
He blames Muriel for his suicide and wants to leave her
with the guilt of it. Of course, this is one of the most destructive
things one human being can do to another.
What really drives Seymour to suicide? It is not his marriage.
Nor is it the fact that he is one of the few people on the planet
smart enough to understand Rilke. What destroys Seymour
are the things he has experienced in the war and the fact
that he has returned to a world in which no one understands
those experiences. This is the meaning of the sudden explosion
of violence into a world of sunny surfaces.
"Bananafish" is a story about war neurosis. Seymour hates
himself, because of what he has been through in combat.
In his suicide he acts out that self-condemnation, not just
by destroying himself, but by doing so in a way that makes
manifest the poisonous cruelty he feels himself to be filled with.
The "shock" in "Bananafish" is that a man of such noble
sentiment can act also with such savage resentment and cruelty.
The shock indeed is so strong that most of us deny for
as long as possible that this is what the story is actually about
- being aware of it only through the fascination it exerts.
And this is what makes it, pace Matt, unequivocally a masterpiece.
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