At 8:56 PM -0500 on 11/28/1999, you wrote:
> So be it. I shall contribute (as I wince in fear of being shot down).
Good ideas don't get shot down as much as shot at (or embraced)!
> I see
> most (if not all) of Salinger's works as a view between the relationships of
> people.
That's right -- one of the few published remarks about his work cites
him as saying, "I almost always write about [very young people]" (the
brackets are mine because I don't have the quote in front of me, and
may be paraphrasing.
> In CITR, we see how Holden despises how people treat each other. In
> RHTRBC we see how Seymour and Muriel's relationship affects others
> (especially in the limousine). So on and so on.
Holden, as his sister says, doesn't like anything. And I think, at
that age, Holden doesn't like Holden, either. Although I have the
kind of odd personality that would make me attracted to his
friendship. I more or less like eccentrics.
> In A Perfect Day, Muriel's and Seymour's relationship is put under the
> microscope (in the first have with the telephone conversation). The most
> prevalent thing, however, in A Perfect Day (I think) is how different Muriel
> is from Seymour. She sort of represents the more conformed (normal?) section
> of society.
I think (thought, still think, will think) that M. represents a
certain slice of New York life that Salinger, at least, finds
distasteful: the upper-crust people who turn their noses up at people
"below" them. (Consider M's remark about the class of people at
their resort this year.) Some of it sounds like anti-Semitism,
especially when JDS characterizes them. I don't think of it as that,
though; I think the negativity comes more from the whole "us and
them" issue. In JDS, for instance, it's Selena's family servant
serving tennis balls at the table, fresh from the can ("Just Before
the War with the Eskimos"), which is nicely placed on the
evolutionary tree above Philip Roth's "Goodbye Columbus," in which
the Holden-y character Neil imagines that the rich family he is
staying with has a tree in the back that drops sporting goods
equipment rather than leaves, and that buckets of fresh fruit arrive
in the basement refrigerator to be engorged upon.
I know that Jim thought, in an earlier message, that I was saying
there was something bad or wrong about Muriel. It's not that. It's
only that I've seen more than enough daughters of privilege who
expect the world handed to them. The saddest part is when they screw
up, being amidst the means but not knowing how to play the game.
Then they get ostracized from all directions. It's not Muriel; it is
Muriel's archetype that irritates me so.
> We then see Seymour (eccentric, enlightened) (cursed by the
> enlightenment?) relating with Sybil (innocent). Even though Sybil is young,
> she is still eccentric (simply due to the fact of her being a small child).
Eccentric, I don't know. Just-a-child? I think that's it more than
anything else.
> Muriel is the only one that has normal relations with other people, she might
> be (in fact), a generic product of society which Seymour is anything but.
> That is why, I think, that people sometimes look down upon Muriel.
>Oh well...
I don't know how "normal" I'd rate Muriel's relations, but then I
don't know how I'd rate my own, which are much more eccentric and
unfriendly.
In the end, it's those damned nails, I think. I can't stomach the
presence of women like Muriel, with their nails and their "the world
can wait for me" attitudes and their self-help articles ("Sex Can Be
Fun -- or Hell"). I can't help wondering whether the Seymour of
1948, who smells the rich-ness (purposely hyphenated) of that hotel
room, wonders whether he's made a deal with the devil. And these
things are not mutually exclusive: you can hate the circumstances and
still love the person, and although it's not until later stories that
we learn more about Muriel, certainly this Muriel, with her obsession
with clothes and nails, is one to possibly drive an unstable fellow
over the edge, no matter how he feels about her more tender moments.
--tim