The Faqs
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Mon, 09 Nov 1998 13:14:52 -0500 (EST)
Sonny and I (mostly Sonny) are finishing up a new draft of the FAQ. It
features a new section with advice for new list members (posting
etiquette, mostly) and a few new entries. I have prepared one on
Seymour's suicide. Since the matter is open to interpretation, we plan to
include some alternative explanations. If you have one you would like us
to include, fit it into an appropriate length (I figure this one is about
as long as is reasonable) and send it along.
This topic has flooded the list several times in the past 2+ years, and
the intention here is neither to renew nor contain the issue. Since I
have pitched my tent rather close the the bank, though, I am prepared for
the worst.
"Why did Seymour kill himself?"
The reason for Seymour's suicide has two basic components: the spiritual
depravity of the world around him, and his struggle with his own
spiritual shortcomings. The spiritual problem of the outside world is
mostly a matter of material greed, especially in the west, while his own
spiritual problem is more a matter of intellectual greed (or
"intellectual treasure"--see "Zooey").
In addressing the suicide, we should distinguish between "See More Glass"
and Seymour Glass because they are slightly different characters. Or, if
you like, they are the same character in different stages of development.
Whatever the case, the "reasons" for the suicide shift slightly in
emphasis as the character changes. Buddy himself seems to admit this in
_S:AI_ when he confesses that the Seymour of "Bananafish" ("See-More")
resembles Buddy more than the real Seymour. That is, Buddy apologizes for
having imposed his own erroneous interpretation of Seymour's suicide in
the early story ("Bfish") as he tries to set the record straight in the
later work ("Teddy" and the Glass saga).
Part of setting straight that record is the story "Teddy," which Buddy
also mentions (though not by name). "Teddy" is a retelling and an
explanation of "Bananafish" from a later perspective. Of course, it's a
distinctive story in its own right with or without "Bfish," but the
parallels and connections are striking: the two are published in the
same magazine precisely 5 years apart, to the issue; the one opens _Nine
Stories_ while the other closes it; both are about the death of an
intellectually and spiritually advanced American male; both deaths are
tragic, but not as far as the protagonist in either case is concerned;
both involve water and a prophetic, slightly nasty young girl; etc.
"Teddy" re-tells "Bfish" by stating explicitly what "Bananafish" attempts
to symbolize via clever metonymy: the apples in the Eden myth are full of
"knowledge and intellectual stuff," which, if pursued with too much zeal,
can prevent spiritual development. In the earlier story, apples are
disguised as bananas, apparently so as not to injure the reader with
overly-blunt symbols. As the soul progresses, it unlearns the
"differences" that people--particularly westerners and especially
Americans--understand via the apple/banana. See-More has realized that he
cannot get rid of enough apple-banana to make any further spiritual
progress in this life, so, rather than waste time, he commits suicide.
He is the bananafish who cannot escape the hole and achieve oneness with
God, so he has to start over again.
But the anti-materialism in the story also has to be considered.
Salinger, perhaps still a little reluctant in 1948 to abandon
anti-materialism, an early preoccupation of his, in favor of simple
anti-'intellectual-treasurism,' leaves threads of the former sticking out
of the story all over the place. Muriel ("material?"), like her mother,
is shallow, fashion-conscious, and unwilling to learn German in order to
read delicate, world-weary poets like Rilke. Sybil's reference to the
greedy tigers in "Little Black Sambo" and her connection to Eliot's
"Wasteland" also suggest a problem with material preoccupation/spiritual
neglect. These strains of anti-materialism in the story complicate the
suicide because they suggest that Seymour is opting out of a world that is
too materially inclined for him, instead of one in which he himself is
responsible for his own unhappines and spiritual depravity. Both sets of
circumstances--Seymour's own intellectual greed along with the general
material greed by which he is surrounded--surely contribute to his
suicide, but Buddy's later qualifications and the story "Teddy" highlight
the "intellectual greed" reading.
In summary: The reasons for Seymour's suicide are muddled in
"Bananafish," with several different factors coming into play. As
Buddy-Salinger thinks more about the character of Seymour between 1948
and 1953, he changes his interpretation a bit to favor a vision of
Seymour troubled by his own spiritual shortcomings (the result of too
much intellectual treasure) as much as by the shortcomings of the people
and the world around him. It would be easy enough to write off the
"intellectual treasure" approach to "Bananafish" altogether, making it
exclusively a later revision by Salinger-Buddy, and making "Bananafish"
a story about a man mortally wary of material pursuits in the west,
except that the central symbol of "Bananafish" is a metonymic substitution
for the Edenic apple. Thus, the apple, the intellectual treasure, is a
component all along, beginning as simple "genius" in Joe Varioni and
Raymond Ford and progressing through the Seymours and on into Teddy, by
which time, as Zooey nicely reminds us, Salinger's geniuses have figured
out how to be unsmart.
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu