Subject: RE: no laughing, please, I'm an American
From: Jive Monkey (monkey_jive@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 20:37:48 EDT
mom?
From: "Micaela" <mbombard@middlebury.edu>
Reply-To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
To: <bananafish@roughdraft.org>
Subject: RE: no laughing, please, I'm an American
Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 19:53:12 -0400
dad?
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-bananafish@roughdraft.org
[mailto:owner-bananafish@roughdraft.org]On Behalf Of Jive Monkey
Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2002 7:33 PM
To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
Subject: Re: no laughing, please, I'm an American
Yes.
I think academic types in general fail to see the joke. My favorite
Salinger story, now that I've gotten over teen angst, is "Raise High the
Roof Beam." May that little man live forever!
But, there is symbolism out there, sometimes. Just not in dad's work.
Seymour and feet? He has a fetish. That red hat? It's a cool hat.
No more symbolism! No more deeper meaning!
Ahem. So, why the hell is there a list at all?
"His standard of comportment for sitting in the rear seat of cars-cars in
motion, cars stationary, and even, one couldn't help imagining, cars that
were driven off bridges into rivers-seemed to be fixed. It was wonderfully
simple. You just sat very erect, maintaining a clearance of four or five
inches between your top hat and the roof, and you stared ferociously ahead
at the windshield. If Death-who was out there all the time, possibly sitting
on the hood-if Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in
after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him,
ferociously but quietly. Chances were, you could take your cigar with you,
if it was a clear Havana."
love,
guilty
From: "Robert Bowman" <rbowman@indigo.ie>
Reply-To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
To: <bananafish@roughdraft.org>
Subject: no laughing, please, I'm an American
Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 13:04:35 +0100
Why do Americans find it so hard to see the joke?
Or is it just Americans who write to listservs?
I belong to three 'literary' lists - those for Jane Austen,
Hemingway & Salinger (& also, at one time, Trollope)
- where the great majority of contributors have been,
at least from where I'm sitting, Transatlantic.
Austen wrote highly contrived, romantic stories about
young women catching husbands - but all of them in
a wonderfully elegant, satiric style where the humour is
what raises the whole enterprise from the trivial to the level
of genius. But on Austen-L all you ever read are endless
technical discussions of the old English inheritance laws
or solemn, po-faced agonisings over the deep moral dilemmas
of her light hearted heroines.
Same with Hemingway, whose every second line was an ironic
joke. (He himself once remarked to the effect that though we
are all growing out of the common earth, the people he cherished
the most were those where the soil had been liberally fertilised
with jokes.) But how many laughs on Heming-L? Nary a one.
Only a grim hunt for symbolic fish or a lot of balls about the tragedy
of the corrida - or recipes for rum cocktails.
And what about us here?
I wonder is the problem that most Yanks come to Salinger during
their school years? Is it possible that Holden is embraced &
identified
with by readers who, as adolescents, are at the most intensely
self-regarding period of their lives - a period when they are least
capable of laughing at themselves?
I was almost thirty when I first encountered Holden. I was
absolutely ravished by the book: by its hilarity, its wildness,
its irreverence, its freedom. I was remembering how it had
been for myself fifteen years earlier - &, ruefully, how in many
ways it still was.
But it never occurred to me for one moment that this was
some kind of poignant tragedy about the tender sensitivity
& evanescence of youth. Which is how it's usually treated
hereabouts.
Even when we come to the Glasses (& thank God the Kingdom
has, in Robbie, at least one other upright man of wisdom)
although those dreadful caring eyes are beginning to fill with tears,
there still remains a good deal of the Marx Brothers - from Bessie
to that marvellous little old bloke with the top hat in the taxi.
I can't put my finger on it, but in one of the recent pieces about
Salinger one critic, himself an American, made the point that,
in 'literature', humour is something Americans have never taken
seriously. That's certainly how these lists feel to an outsider.
It's like being back in some Victorian classroom where only
the worthy, the serious & the edifiying is truly acceptable.
Scottie B.
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