revelation
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Tue, 08 Sep 1998 21:13:30 +0000
I had, obviously, forgotten the actual reference to Honore
in the Blue Period story - a story read very many years ago
& never re-read. So I went back through it, giving it my best.
And you know, as I read, it came to me in a great shaft of heavenly
light why Salinger stopped publishing. He had simply come to
the end of his particular road. That style - all those lists, all
those endearing asides, those great solid wodges of roguishly
subdividing clauses, the droll ruminations, the agonising
self-modifications (all of which got much worse in his late stories)
- that style had nowhere to go except endlessly outwards into a
kind of monstrous coral.
Or cancer. The body survives only so long as the culling of
the cells outstrips their tendency to multiply. In the same way,
the survival of a piece of literature depends on the same merciless
cleansing.
Even without Joyce to tell us, one can recognise the obsessive
compulsive as a strong element in Salinger. That probably ensures
he will never be able to stop writing. But I suspect his tragedy is
a realisation quite early on that all he had to offer now were more
lists, more particulars, more jokes lying broken backed from being
made to carry too much weight.
Scottie B.