Subject: RE: yellow peril
From: Zack Wyatt (zwyatt@stanford.edu)
Date: Fri May 25 2001 - 02:01:03 GMT
>From Scottie B:
> > 1) Salinger is even less original & more of a plagiarist than
> > many trusting souls feared.
I wouldn't agree exactly, either. Salinger didn't just rehash the plots of
the other sources. He altered them to produce a new story with his own
meaning. Thanks for the Princeton C.L. praise -- but it's misplaced. I'm a
computer scientist major and Cecilia was the one who noticed LAUGHING BOY
first.
>From Cecilia:
> I think the Chief amused a busload of boys
> by putting his own spin on things that he was exposed to every day.
I really like this idea. John's own serial story playing off of and
diverging from the stories he's reading would be a brilliant way for
Salinger to incorporate (and explain) the other sources...but there's one
possible problem...
The narrator of "The Laughing Man" gives the date as 1928. Fitzgerald
published "The Diamond" in 1922 so Gedsudski could've been exposed to that.
However, La Farge published LAUGHING BOY in 1929 and "The Shadow" didn't
begin until 1930. This effectively makes it impossible for Gedsudski to
have read those two sources (the most prevalent ones at that) before he
started telling his own serial story.
Either
- Salinger made a mistake and put 1928 when he meant to put a later date...
- Scottie B. is right and Jung's archetypes are at work in a huge way...
- or Gedsudski is pulling a huge "rare quixotic gesture" (Ihab Hassan) and
his stories just so happen to predate the stories that explain them...
or...
The narrator of the story (writing post-1939 based on the date of one of the
beautiful girls) is embellishing Gedsudski's serials with references to
other sources to provide his own meaning. If the narrator is Buddy Glass
(proposed before, noted by Cecilia to myself), it seems like he might be
'pulling a bananafish story'* and trying to add his own insight into events.
- Zack
p.s. I came across a paper by James Finn Cotter in the Winter 1989 volume of
Papers on Language and Literature. It is mainly about how the poetry of
Rainer Maria Rilke (the German poet Seymour tries to get Muriel to read)
might alter one's interpretation of Seymour's suicide. What is relevant,
though, is that Cotter goes through Rilke's book of poems ("The Voices: Nine
Pages with a Titlepage") and talks about how Salinger seems to match each
story of "Nine Stories" with one of Rilke's poems. "The Laughing Man" is
matched with a poem entitled "The Song of the Dwarf," written from the
perspective of a distressed dwarf questioning why God created him.
Now I know why Omba the lovable dwarf is there. Though the full significance
still isn't clear.
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