> I am having a great deal of difficulty trying to decide as to whether or not > the author, particularily JDS (among others), actually needs a reader. > It would appear to me that Salinger needs very little to compliment or > comprehend his world of Glass (his false azure, possibly). That is a conundrum that puzzles me, too. I guess what it all comes down to is what you believe writing's purpose to be. To me, it is a communication, and a communication requires two sides, the sender and the receiver. However, the `message' is always different for each party, it is nearly impossible to be interpreted by each side in the same way. Perhaps Salinger is afraid of our interpretations; our ability to add to a text which he wants to claim wholly as his own. Perhaps he believes (as, unfathomably enough, plenty of people I've worked with in the theatre believe) that an audience is just a perfunctory viewer of an artist's search for meaning. > An author like Nabokov, on the other hand, actively integrates his > audience into his mental and literal labyrinthine. ... which, in both theatre and prose, I really like. In a lot of my plays I've worked especially hard to plant little things that the audience will enjoy unravelling. I like being talked to as Buddy talks to me in S:AI, and as Humbert Humbert does in `Lolita'. I also like things like David Lynch's film `Lost Highway', where the audience is basically given a host of disparate clues and can assemble them in any way they wish to form a narrative personal to them (this is something you could also say about `Pale Fire'). I was looking at the Hassan's list of Modern and Postmodern features again today (someone posted a bit about it a little while ago) and one thing jumped out at me: `Interpretation/Reading' (Modernism) and `Against Interpretation/Misreading'. Does Salinger encourage interpretation or not? Something like `Teddy' definitely does, but was it intended as such? Likewise the Glass stories can be seen as a series of jigsaw puzzle pieces whose gaps we must fill - or is it just like this because Salinger hasn't published the other puzzle pieces? Does Salinger want his works seen as `literary cubism'? I get very confused with something like S:AI when the narrator is actually bemoaning the fact that he cannot communicate with his reader, when we know that *any* furtive missives we slip under Mr Salinger's gate are likely to be physically and metaphorically shredded and buried by his guard dog. All of this very much represents another postmodern portent: Indeterminacy (: Camille verona_beach@geocities.com @ THE ARTS HOLE www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442 THE INVERTED FOREST www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest