Subject: Re: Chabon on The Swimmer
Wompprat@aol.com
Date: Tue Oct 10 2000 - 19:01:11 GMT
I was not familiar with "Graham's old post" but the wording of the message
brings to mind certain images from Franny and Z..(.i apologize if i
overexplain myself not being familiar with what has and has not been
discussed) "...It was just hideous. I was at a swimming pool somewhere, and a
whole bunch of people kept making me dive for a can of Medaglia d'Oro coffee
that was at the bottom. Every time I came up, they'd make me go down again. I
was crying, and I kept saying to everybody, 'You have your bathing suits on,
why don't you go diving, too?', but they'd all just laugh and make these
incredibly snide remarks, and down I'd go again...these two girls in my
dorm...had a big oar, and they kept trying to hit me with it every time I'd
surface". I ventured to guess that pool, the water in it, etc, represent the
knowledge about the world she is trying to find, blah, blah, blah, but when
as she wants people like Lane fail to empathize with her to "come swimming"
with her, they won't. Yet if she tries to abandon the idea altogether, the
brutality of the world and the people in it, like the girls with the oar,
push her back into the water, keeping her from forgetting what she knows.
This also calls to mind the image of Buddy, who describes himself as in a
"old one-piece Jantzen bathing suit" giving the grand tour of the works...
Correlation? Allusion? Cooincidence? My having too much spare time?
Kathrine
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