Re: Salinger and Nabokov / Flaubert's Parrot -Reply

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Tue, 01 Sep 1998 17:35:28 +1000

> 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