Subject: The Actors by their Presence
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliaann@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jun 01 2000 - 01:14:14 GMT
Greetings, 'fishes,
I'm writing this message partly to prove to poor Paul (who is apparently
having email anxiety) that the list is in working order and partly
because... well, that's the only reason, really.
But I'm thinking that maybe I'll manufacture something right now, to put
Paul's mind at ease that the list is still alive and well, if a little
sleepy.
Well, it's not really manufactured, as it was on my mind when the discussion
arose recently on Seymour's suicide in "A Perfect Day For Bananafish". I
was thinking about how it isn't until "Seymour: An Introduction" that Buddy
steps in and really changes his story, that we get the new picture, the
fuller, completely different reason for Seymour's actions. So I pulled out
my copy of S:AI and found something that I'd forgotten about on the very
first page:
"The actors by their presence always convince me, to my horror, that most of
what I've written about them until now is false. It is false because I
write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this,
too, becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not
hit off the real actors loudly and correctly but loses itself dully in this
love that will never be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it
is protecting the actors by preventing this ability from exercising itself."
Salinger quoting Kafka. It was a pleasure to even think about, let alone to
transcribe.
So for those who asked me about my earlier message, when I stated that
Bananafish is Buddy's first, gut answer to why Seymour did it, this (and the
following quote from old Soren, which I shan't transcribe today, though it
is no less lovely) seems to be Buddy's answer to the question.
What he'd written before was false, and it is up to him, in this story, to
set the record straight. But we can't even trust what he puts down here,
either, for when he "write[s] it down, this, too becomes false" and we have
to wait for each installment on the Seymour story to get the whole picture.
For this is only the Introduction.
Sigh.
So we trust instead what has come from Seymour's own hand, and that is his
last haiku, where he couldn't stand to have an innocent *look* at him with
all-seeing eyes.
With that I must say goodnight, Mrs. Calabash.
Regards,
Cecilia.
(Oh, and tonight my four year old nephew informed me that I had fish feet.
"Does that mean that they're floppy or stinky?" I asked, trying to catch his
logic. No, he said to me. There's a bunch of fish inside of your feet,
swimming around. "What color are they?" I asked next, finding this terribly
fascinating. He studied my feet seriously for a moment, pointed to the
right one and told me that the fish inside of that foot are blue. Inside of
my left foot, though, they are yellow, he said, nodding his head. I can
hardly stand how great that is.)
________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Jun 01 2000 - 09:45:26 GMT