Re: Salinger and Nabokov / Flaubert's Parrot -Reply -Reply
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Mon, 07 Sep 1998 10:09:51 +1000
> I was referring to the assumptions behind the ONE post I replied to, not
> to your belief system overall :)
This is what puzzles me. I can't see at all how you managed to interpret
what I said as my advocating the idea that Salinger draws his characters
from life. In fact, I said quite the contrary - that he creates an
alternate little Salinger universe where his characters actually move
around between texts.
> << But as I said, my question lies in JDS's intention.>>
>
> My point was that JDS's intention is irrelevant. If all you want to ask
> is, "What is JD's intention for the Glass family epics? Is he done with
> them, has he written more, what's going on?" well, that's fine. I'd like
> to know that myself. But the way you were writing your post--it sounded
> like this intention might actually impact the meaning of the text. That
> was the point at which I disagreed.
Well, I don't know about that. I think any writer's intention is crucial to
know if you're to understand certain texts - I don't see how a writer's
intention *can't* affect its meaning. Someone asked me to interpret Camus'
`Myth of Sisyphus' the other day and I couldn't make head or tail of it
until I learned about Camus' existentialism. The Crucible makes a lot more
sense if you know about McCarthyism. The CITR all comes together when you
learn about JDS's explorations in Zen Buddhism, and so on. A lot of texts
are politically motivated, and in fact mean almost nothing without full
knowledge of the author's intention. In the case of JDS I simply mean that
to us, the Glass stories may be complete, but perhaps it's not what JDS
originally *intended*. I think maybe originally he wanted to tell us all
about the Glasses, but instead he decided to leave it a mystery to us.
This, I think, would affect our reading of the texts we do have.
> << But this also means that they take on an independent existence outside
> of their actual text>>
>
> Now, that's where I disagree with you :) It just seems silly, and is
> factually incorrect.
But how can you say that ??? What else is this list than an extension of
exactly that nature? How can you say someone like Franny does not have a
life outside Salinger's texts when we're always asking whether she was
pregnant or not? This is exactly what I meant when I was talking about the
book as text - as shared experience between author and reader, and reader
and reader. Think of something like Robin Hood. Has anybody actually read
the book of Robin Hood, the original legends? Possibly not. The same could
be said about the works of Mallory. Yet we all know who Robin Hood or King
Arthur is, we know what kind of people they are and how they'd react in
certain situations. I don't meant there's a real Seymour out there any more
than a real Robin Hood, but I mean that between us, all the readers of
Seymour, we carry a collective perception of him which allows him to live
outside the words we found him in.
> Seymour "really" exists only in the words written
> to represent him, and those words provide the fantasy of him being real,
> living a real life outside the words, but he really doesn't. We can only
> take what we have and project outwards to create what's not there
> explicitly, but this will be much like shining a light through a lens.
Yes, and this is what I mean. With his books and his characters, Salinger
has handed us a lens. When we shine our own particular light through it -
when hundreds of us do - in front of us on the wall is a huge illuminated
three dimensional Seymour. So what is the effect of not having all the
lenses at our disposal; what if half of them are locked away in JDS's safe.
We see an incomplete Seymour on the wall. True, this Seymour will have gaps
in him - any person does. But that is the fun of life - filling in the gaps
for our selves to make My Seymour as opposed to Your Seymour or even
Salinger's Seymour.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
THE INVERTED FOREST
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