Subject: Re: where is thy sting?
From: Will Hochman (Hochman@scsu.ctstateu.edu)
Date: Thu Sep 28 2000 - 19:19:22 GMT
Continuing a a thread of Death & Salinger, I'd have to add some
thoughts about Ray Ford ("Inverted Forest") since it may have been
likely that such a character would die. It's probably better for
young, successful poets to die than life alcoholic lives and Salinger
was probably seeing that archetype all over his literary world and
may have decided to "invert" the cliche a bit...Ford hitches up with
Bunny to continue the tryany of his dead mother and to discontinue
the grace of Corrine. He's not going to write anything more, not
with Bunny as his "muse," and it's just a matter of time before she
or the bottle does him in...but Salinger doesn't kill him and leaves
him for us to see the wrong turn in his life, to see the end of
talent and the void before death....the horrific sense of underlying
dissolution that Scottie describes is not Ford's dying, but his
living without poetry and grace! Maybe in the same way, killing
Seymour is grace. As Scottie imagines:
"That that fatal, self-conscious theatricality turns
them from figures of potential tragedy silently confronting
the awful propositions of life - into gabby cases of delayed
adolescence."
Sometimes it may be easy to think that Salinger's readers are
delaying adolescence...one critic wrote a piece called "Salinger's
Case of Arrested Development" but I don't think it's as simple as
grow up and stop whining about how hard it is to grow up...nor do I
think it's as simple as die so you don't have to...I tend to reach
out to William Blake and imagine Salinger's sense of innocence and
adolescense have moments of brilliance where we do catch a few
glimmers of something holy and human in the refracted views of youth
and death...
will
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