bit by bit, piece by piece . . .
oz (craig.king@cwcom.net)
Tue, 15 Sep 1998 21:59:32 +0100
hello . . .
on the subject of those little things ingrained in our minds. an old
chap i knew once told me that for him goodness had nothing to do
with the grand heroic gesture but the seemingly insignificant
humble acts from day to day, that, taken together over a lifetime,
form a life of selflessness and perhaps this was the ideal . . .
as analogy: those little objects (a cigarette on the side of the bath,
a folded letter, etc.), written subtly and with no grand significance,
taken together, perhaps create a form that has no obvious
significance unless taken as whole. aside from the dialogue and
ideas floating through, ooh, how about franny/zooey (well i am re-
reading it. again), there's for me this underlying form for the objects
that has everything to do with their integrity and nothing to do with
their individual grand significance. many writers do this but again
there's something about salinger that makes this form more vivid,
more subtle than any other i can think of. it's more than
verisimilitude, more than an affecting attention to detail. with the
numerous references to buddhism/christ in f & z, i think it's the
relation between these ideas within the tale and the objects that
compose it's peculiar world in the telling that mean so much to
me, that make it and take it one step further. . .
anyone have a feeling on this?
ck