Subject: Re: Jesus/fat lady and dying
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Tue Nov 21 2000 - 05:23:42 GMT
I'm not altogether clear whether Suzanne's fat lady
is a heroic figure still nourishing hope, even in her
evidently hopeless situation - or a tragic figure who
has been somehow induced to abandon that same hope
& who demands thereby the best, loving efforts of the rest
of us.
At all events, she seems to be moving away a little from
what I'd always accepted as the standard interpretation -
the fat lady as the hidden Jesus, the god whom we serve
directly each time we attend to 'one of the least of these
my brethren.'
It raises in my mind the question: why did Salinger not stick
within the Christian tradition? Wasn't it rich enough for him?
Why flirt briefly with the figure of Jesus & an obscure Christian
mystic before hiking off into Zen & other Eastern practices
with their chi-chi concepts & categories? A religious minded
boy with a Jewish father & a greatly loved Irish (Catholic?)
mother surely had plenty of God material ready to hand
without hitting the trail to Tibet.
The titanic Western Christian tradition seems to have been
more than enough to engage similarly disposed intellectuals
of his day. To set against the Eliots, Mauriacs, Greenes, Waughs,
Solhzenitsins & so on, who remained obsessed with the Christ
figure, we have only a handful of lightweight gurus like Huxley
& Isherwood who settled in California to ingest mescalin &
mix with the other modish hopheads.
Could it be that Salinger was really more interested in the chic
than the true?
Scottie B.
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