Re: Teddy

Camille Scaysbrook (the_globe@hotmail.com)
Sat, 08 May 1999 22:02:25 -0700 (PDT) 

Sean wrote:
>Are there any others out there who felt a slight sense of satisfaction
when
>the little stinker cracks his head open in the bottom of the swimming
pool?

(: Absolutely. I've never been a big fan of Teddy, it's Salinger a la
Celestine Bloody Prophecies (: I think it illustrates a path that Salinger 
would later take but in a far more effective and less proselitysing way - 
the Glass stories are *all* about religion, whether or not the word is ever 
mentioned, whereas Teddy shoves the goddamn word down your throat (Teddy's a 
fine one to advocate vomiting the apple, as he is calmly feeding us little 
translucent Granny Smith slices one by one). And Salinger/Buddy appears to 
agree when he describes the story which is obviously `Teddy' as `totally 
uneffective' (or words to that effect, haven't got S:AI at hand). After all, 
the very essence of Buddhism is non-preachiness; the idea of `satori', of 
spontaneous enlightenment with no obvious cause. I know that I, for one, 
felt a lot more enlightened by Buddy and Seymour's story of the Davega 
bicycle than Teddy and his orange peels.

What *does* interest me about `Teddy' is Buddy's assertion that he wrote the 
story himself, and based the character of Teddy on Seymour. So what we have 
is a fictional character based on a fictional character - and, in another 
sense we have Salinger in a very sneaky way validating his younger `preachy' 
self. The same thing is evident when he also has Buddy claim authorship for 
`Bananafish' and admit that the Seymour of that story is in essence a 
`fictional' version of Seymour who is more like Buddy than the `real' 
Seymour. He can `erase' his earlier vision and replace it with an updated, 
supposedly more authentic one - the Seymour of S:AI and the like. In the 
same way the Holden Caulfield of `I'm Crazy' or even any of the Vincent 
Caulfield stories was supplanted by a different and superior one.


Which must be why he doesn't want us reading those magazine stories.

It's all about building personal mythology, huh?

Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest


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