Re: franny & zooey

Good to hear back from you, robbie -- no explanations are necessary, you know,
you've made it pretty clear what your life is like.

Anyway, this seems as good a place as any to start responding. Probably
better.

To me, there's no such thing as "trivial" meaning in a text, and in a sense
your argument keeps shifting ground here. First, you insist that a work is a
CRAFTED thing -- that a good author puts every word in place for a specific
reason, to generate a specific meaning. You say that intended meaning is what
is communicated through a text and that intended meaning is what readers
retrieve when they read.

So it simply doesn't make sense for you to say that Franny being an anonymous
college girl or Franny Glass in Salinger's mind, when he was writing the text,
is a matter of trivial detail. I don't see, given what you've said in the
past, how you can make this affirmation. In writing "Zooey," Salinger appears
to have been trying to rewrite "Franny." "Franny" with "Zooey" means one
thing, "Franny" apart from "Zooey" another. If "Franny" is crafted at all,
these differences are not trivial.

Or words are essentially meaningless unless, of course, they are being used to
express "great ideas."

I would agree that "Franny," with or without "Zooey," is a story about a young
girl's sense of alienation and probably yet another example of a recurring
theme in Salinger -- the disillusioned youth. But if I want to make anything
more than this quite banal and very undetailed and very obvious observation, I
think I'm going to run into trouble.

Salinger did more than describe a disillusioned youth. He created a memorable
character. Asking, "just who is this girl?" is a very reasonable thing to do
with this story -- something Salinger seems to want from his readers. If that
answer changes with Salinger's intent, and with different intertextual
references to Salinger's other fiction (namely "Zooey" and the whole Glass
saga), then meaning changes -- and changes from Salinger's original intent.

What you seem to do at the point where texts really come apart is hide behind a
"great ideas" paradigm that's irrelevant to the mass of literature produced
throughout most times and places -- or only tangentially relevant. You define
"great ideas" so narrowly that they wind up only being the ones you happen to,
quite idiosyncratically, identify across different cultures and their
literatures. Because you assume these ideas are timeless, you assume the author
saw them in the text pretty close to the way you do today.

What I'm looking for is a justification of these assumptions, and you point to
"the degree of sensibility" you feel with the text. What you're speaking of,
here, are your own emotional reactions to the text you're reading -- which is
perfectly valid, but again, may or may not say anything about the author. This
is why I say you're begging the question. You see your reaction and attribute
it to the author. Then call that reaction the product of "great ideas," one
that the author must hold.

Robbie, this just isn't a coherent argument for your position.

A reading strategy that's meaningful for only very select literature about very
select topics and representing very select ideas is pretty useless for most
reading out there, isn't it? What do you do with the Salingers, the Cheevers,
the Carvers, the Pynchons, then, when you can't read them the way you read
Homer?

Jim

PS -- a few side issues. When I said criticism isn't good for 50 years, that
statement doesn't have to go without exception to be true. It's not the type
of statement I would "intend" to be understood without exception. I believe
you when you say you've read criticism 2000 years old that's still useful to
you. In my original statement I listed Aristotle's _Poetics_ as a notable
exception. What I'm positing here is a general rule.

PPS -- I know who I am and who I can be, and I know that includes, at least at
times, Condescending Jackass. Never denied that. I know it better than you.
I know it from long experience, from a failed marriage, from the worst parts of
my older son's personality, from what friends and family and people online have
told me, and from my introduction to JD Salinger, actually -- a female friend
gave me a copy of _Franny and Zooey_ because she identified me with Lane and
Franny, somewhat, with my ex-wife. Very perceptive woman.

It doesn't bother me at all to admit this. Not quiver or tinge of hesitation.
I wish I could change it with a snap of the fingers, but suspect when I get to
Scottie's age I'll have either mellowed or become COMPLETELY unbearable. Only
time will tell.

But I also know what I'm reading and responding to. A good example would be
the side discussion of teaching philosophy -- one in which you presented "John
Q. Graduate Student" as an instructor in pretty derogatory language in your
original post. This was a response to a previous post I'd written describing a
philosophy class I'm teaching right now -- a post I didn't address to you at
all, actually. This was an unnecessary ad hominem, not part of the point of
our discussion much at all, and warranted the response it got from me.

Another good example would be how you're taking offense. I said you didn't
understand the meaning of your own words -- and you took offense at that.
Scottie posted essentially the same thing about me (in a separate and earlier
accusation that I was being condescending), but I didn't take offense. Not
only did I not take offense at his ad hominem, but I didn't disagree with it.
Yes, I probably did sound that way. Perhaps was even _being_ that way. He may
have even been right that I was being that way without even knowing it...which
would, of course, make it that much worse. My response, however, was again to
point out what I was responding to -- an article very personally hostile to
humanities studies and demonstrating a terrible ignorance about the field.

So when I said you didn't understand the meaning of your own words, no, I
didn't think you were an imbecile. I merely thought you were capable of sharing
the same faults as I.

Denying that seems pretty condescending to me.

This part of our discussion is BORING me. I really don't care who I offend if
they don't e-mail me directly and make it clear to me they're offended. I do
the same when others offend me (it's called honesty) and expect the same in
return. If I don't get it, I don't need these people. Screw em. Goodbye.
Life is Too Short to waste time on the Oversensitive.

"L. Manning Vines" wrote:

> Jim said:
> << Point was that his intention changed, though -- we can only say he
> "intended" it to be read as part of a larger unit "after the fact" of the
> original composition of Franny. >>
>
> It doesn't change Franny (I mean the story). Whatever extra stuff can be
> seen in the story in light of the whole saga seems to me to be not merely
> extra-textual, but largely trivial.
>
> And:
> << As I've been saying all along, then, "intent" is irrelevant and context
> is everything. >>
>
> Find a new context for Achilles' rage, then. Not the Catalog of Ships.
> Rage.
>
> -robbie
>
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Received on Sun Nov 10 22:17:06 2002