the hobgoblin of mean minds


Subject: the hobgoblin of mean minds
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Thu Oct 12 2000 - 04:35:18 GMT


    '... Same name, different bloke ...'

    '... now what do you mean by that? ...'

    The same thing, I believe, as others when they write
    about the dangers of trying to make all the components
    of the Glass saga consistent with each other.

    I'm unfamiliar with the chronology of their publication
    but the different stories must have emerged over quite
    a period of time. I suspect that Salinger has had a number
    - perhaps, like many writers,quite a small number - of core
    ideas, personalities, themes, to which he has to return
    repeatedly to capture them with ever greater clarity.
    If they are vital enough to give life to a body of work,
    they will also have the tendency to develop & change between
    his visits. The artist himself is developing - so that one is left
    then with quite a fluid picture - maturing ideas being worked
    on by a maturing writer.

    The underlying themes may remain essentially unchanged:
    the inexplicable suicide, the eccentrically gifted family, the saving
    grace of the innocent child, & so on. But new aspects & truths
    will have emerged after twenty years so that the later versions can
    only be cramped & shackled by attempts to make them fit all
    the given details of the earlier.

    I doubt if the artist is as concerned with making his creation
    consistent as, say, the scholar-detective in finding oversights
    & incoherencies. He is too excited by his latest insight.

    Scottie B.

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