Subject: RE: Reference to JDS by Paul Thomas Anderson
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu May 09 2002 - 18:03:44 EDT
Will said:
<< Robbie, I think you are comparing apples and oranges...granted, both
Holden and Zooey are Salinger characters, but Holden is a narrator of
a novel and Zooey is a re-occuring character in several long short
stories. <. . .> I just don't see how pitting Salinger's characters against
each other makes your case as well as some of the other things you've said.
>>
I did not mean to be pitting characters against each other, exactly; and I
wasn't meaning to speak specifically of Zooey. I was using Zooey as a
particular to say something of the general: I had in mind the Glass family,
perhaps with a few exceptions for a few minor characters. And I was making
the comparison to Holden at the prompting of another (I think Micaela began
the thread). The comparison seems reasonable enough to me, and perhaps even
inevitable. I wouldn't think of it in terms of pitting characters against
one another.
It was suggested that the Glass family saga appeals to a narrower audience
than Catcher, and a proposed explanation was that the former appeals to a
higher caliber (or at least less sophomoric) mind -- coupled with the tacit
assumption that the majority of minds are of this lesser sort. This
explanation does not seem to me true. It seems to me, in fact, that Catcher
does a fine job of speaking to a general human condition, while the Glass
saga speaks to a very specific class. I would suppose this to be a likelier
explanation for the narrower appeal of the Glass saga. I don't want this
sentiment confused with the suggestion that literary merit can be judged
according to popularity: I certainly do not take this to be the case. I
only wanted to counter the suggestion that the Glass saga is for smarter
people with the suggestion that it may in some ways be more superficial.
-robbie
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