Re: The Faqs

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:00:29 +1100 

Guys ... I respect the idea of a FAQ - we especially need one to allay the
tide of `Hey S. has a new book out called Hapworth something, what happened
to it ???' But as far as setting out the various theories about Seymour's
suicide - isn't this kind of like giving people standing outside a movie a
big fat book with everything that happens in the movie delineated
shot-by-shot? Isn't it detracting from what we join this list for in the
first place - to discuss what *we* believe to have happened? Apart from
anything, there *are* no right or wrong answers. It just seems a bit
throwing-baby-out-with-bathwatery.

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

> 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
> 
> 
>