Re: gary lane, 'the duino elegies', death haiku

um, excuse me, Kim, but what are you doing talking about Salinger Here?

Seriously, that's pretty interesting. I don't think it necessarily had to
be a subconscious borrowing on Salinger's part, though, do you?

Jim

Kim Johnson wrote:

> i recently read an interesting essay by gary lane
> about 'a perfect day for bananafish'. in it he
> submits that the book of german poems seymour sent
> muriel is 'the duino elegies'. this seems right to
> me. (notice that salinger nowhere refers to a german
> poet; in fact rilke was born in prague, then part of
> the austro-hungarian empire. as for the question of
> whether it could be some other 20th century poet
> writing in german prior to 1948, one would be hard
> pressed to nominate someone else. besides, rilke
> receives mention in 'the stranger', 'the inverted
> forest', and, most importantly, for this post, in
> 'franny'.) gary lane attempts to illuminate parts of
> 'bananafish' using the 'elegies' as a torchlight. i'm
> not sure i was convinced that they provide the key to
> the enigmas of the story. but it was welcoming to see
> someone attempt to utilize the book in question which
> was obviously on seymour's mind as they drove down to
> florida.
>
> i referred to 'franny' above. the thing that struck
> me is the thought that salinger himself would have
> re-read 'franny' before writing 'zooey'. (there had
> been a hiatus of 2 years between stories, with 'raise
> high' inbetween.) in 'franny' there is a direct
> reference to the fourth duino elegy. in 'zooey'
> salinger adds one new piece of information regarding
> seymour's suicide. he says that seymour wrote a haiku
> on the blotter of the hotel desk, in japanese. he
> translates it as 'the little girl on the plane/who
> turned her doll's head around/to look at me'. this
> elegy (which gary lane also refers to), is often
> called the doll elegy in rilke criticism. in the elegy
> there is some dense symbolism which critics fight
> over. but the interesting thing to note is that in a
> crucial passage rilke writes: 'when i feel like it, to
> wait before the puppet stage,--no, rather/gaze so
> intensely on it that at last,/to upweigh my gaze, an
> angel has to come,/and play a part there, snatching up
> the husks./angel and doll! then there's at last a
> play./then there unites what we continually/part by
> our being there.' my creaky post merely wants to
> suggest that salinger subconsiously remembered the
> fourth elegy when he wrote seymour's death poem. that
> the poem's setting in a plane could denote the angelic
> realm, with the little girl standing in for the angel.
> angel and doll are united, and allows: 'then at
> last/can spring from our own turning years the
> cycle/of the whole event. over and above us/there's
> then the angel playing.'
>
> i don't think the suicide can be explained by the
> poem, but i do find it gives thought that salinger
> added it after the fact.
>
> kim
>
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Received on Wed Sep 25 13:32:05 2002