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

J J R (jrovira@juno.com)
Thu, 03 Sep 1998 18:54:49 -0400 (EDT) 

heh, Oh Boy, I get to restart. . . THEORY WARS. . . 

Not that long ago on a continent far, far away young Camille Scaysbrook
and her happy band of intentionalists started raiding texts for real
people.  As if you could fit a person in a book!  She thought texts. .
.ha ha. . .and their meaning. . .ha ha. . .were actually dependent upon
what One person thought about it, namely, the author.

See. . .  

>Yes, that is true, but I guess my question is - are the pieces we 
>*don't*
>see intentional gaps or simply things that Salinger has locked away in 
>his
>safe? 

It Doesn't Matter, Camille :)  Ok, there may be thousands upon thousands
of pages of Glass Family Chronicles locked in a safe somewhere, but
ultimately we have to approach the texts we have and get our information
from them, not from anywhere else.  Let's pretend Salinger finally
decided to tell the Entire Western Reading World to go kiss off in the
most rude way possbile.   Let's say he did it by reading the worst
criticism, the stupidest theories he could find, and wriitng them into
unpublished Glass family chronicles.  Let's say we find out for certain
that Franny was pregnant and that Seymour really was a pedophile who had
abused all the younger Glass children, starting with Buddy.  Let's say
Holden really was a latent homosexual and Catcher is really the
outworking of the angst he felt at living a torn existence (Right now,
some of you are saying, yeah, I can see that. . . :) ).  Let's say Mrs.
Glass was really a feminist activist, and Zooey's disrepect stemmed from
his knowledge of the fact. Let's say Walt died in WW2 because he had too
sympathetic a view toward the Communists, even though they were our
allies at the time (the tension was always there).  Let's say he actually
became a Marxist himself and was killed by his own troops, while Waker
finally abandoned his monkdom for Islam.  

It wouldn't prove anything, because those still aren't the characters
Salinger wrote in his currently published work.  

Let's be more realistic.  Let's just say Salinger's talent declined, or
his feeling toward his characters changed, so he started writing them
differently for that reason.  We'll all have a lot of fun playing
Intertext and developing theories and whatnot, but it still won't change
the nature of the characters in the texts we have.

Fictional characters, when well written, have an existence independent of
their creators over time.  Any time you start creating things, you always
run the risk of having em run amok :)

Jim

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