Re: an atheist speaks . . .
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Mon, 21 Sep 1998 10:28:27 +1000
> Yeah, of all Salinger's stories I think Teddy is the most clearly
> influenced by Eastern thought.
The thing that interests me most about Teddy is not the fact that it's a
successful story (which I don't think it is and Buddy/Salinger says as
much) but the fact that in S:AI Buddy tells us about how he wrote it in a
sort of imitation of Seymour's story. There's always been that `is Teddy a
reincarnation of Seymour' business, and it's easy to see `Teddy' as a sort
of inversion/partner to `A Perfect Day for Bananafish' - but what I believe
is happening is that one is an adaptation of the other. Teddy is *based* on
Seymour, and the events in `Teddy' can be sort of seen as an artistic
distillation of Seymour's honey moon - I mean `artistic' in the sense of
authorial decision and alteration. We could imagine an author thinking
`hmm, a nice little girl called Sybil. Well, that's no fun. Let's make her
a horrible little girl called Booper. And we better make the hero a kid
too, because people might get the wrong idea if he's an adult. Why not make
him her sister ...' etc etc. It fascinates me that the story is constructed
within the apparent reality of the Glass world, it's like a meta-text that
doesn't announce itself as a meta text.
Another thought - how does Buddy know all the things that he describes in
Bananafish? How much of it is conjecture and guesswork? That could be a
very telling thing - you can get a lot out of the fact that while Seymour
may never have kissed Sybil's foot, Buddy at least sees him as being
capable of doing such. Is Bananafish Buddy's attempt to rationalise
Seymour's suicide - if it is he didn't do a great job, did he? (: But maybe
*that* was his point - to mystify it, to complexify and obscure it - which
in a way amounts to the same thing - to lend meaning to an apparently
irrational act.