Teddy is much more than stained Glass.

gpaterso@richmond.edu
Sun, 20 Sep 1998 22:31:57 -0400

In response to Camille's comments:

> 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...

I haven't read all of "S:aI" (I'd rather swallow nails than read a hundred
pages of the adult form of Buddy Glass) so I would beg to differ with this
interpretation of "Teddy".  I would agree that "Bananafish" and "Teddy" act
as sort of a pair of bookends for the Nine Stories, but I would not go as
far as to say that Teddy McArdle was simply a rehash or a reincarnation of
Seymour Glass.  I'm not saying this simply on some nit-picky technicality of
dates (because Teddy would already have been about eight years old when
Seymour died) but because I believe they are two very different characters.
Seymour cannot seem to cope with adult life because everyone around him is
so appallingly phony: Muriel and Mrs. Fedder, Sybil's parents, even Sybil
herself.  He knows the principle of enlightenment -- namely, that it is
achieved through innocence -- but he cannot seem to believe in it without
guidance.  He needs a true innocent beside him (Sharon Lipschutz perhaps)
to bolster his confidence in his own ideals.  When Sybil utterly fails him,
and he has nothing to go back to save for his poisonous wife, he feels as if
he has died long before the bullet goes through his right temple.  Teddy, on
the other hand, needs no such reinforcement; he is in full contact with the
powers that be and is able to completely distance himself from the lethal
influences of his deplorable parents and the self-centered "scientists" who
would poke and probe him ad nauseam.  Teddy's view of the world is totally
objective, nearly emotionless (except for a required sense of compassion
for his fellow humans), and devoid of materialist aims.  Even the physical
descriptions of Seymour and Teddy are quite different -- Teddy has gone so
far as to abandon the effort of keeping up even minimal outward cleanliness
because he knows the extent of his current incarnation's irrelevance.
Seymour dies because he wants to, and thus feels he has to; Teddy dies
because he merely knows that circumstances beyond his control will cause his
death, and he might as well not even try to stop it.  "It is pointless even
to mention it" he notes in his journal -- hardly something we would expect
to hear from Seymour.  Likewise, the supporting cast is also vastly
different: Booper has none of the crippling effect on Teddy that Sybil does
on Seymour; the McArdles cannot hope to exert the same force over Teddy that
Muriel apparently does on Seymour; and one could hardly claim that Nickolson
(Isn't that his name?) is in any way related to Sybil in terms of role in
their respective stories.  The two stories may come at opposite ends of the
book, and the two protagonists may be on the same spiritual quests, but I
would not go so far as to say that one is a mere reiteration of another.

Of course, I could be wrong.  :)  I'm not one to discount my critics.

> ...too, because people might get the wrong idea if he's an adult. Why not
make
> him her sister ...' etc etc.

If you make Teddy Booper's sister, people might get a wrong idea after all...
:)


________________________________________________________

 G.H.G.A.Paterson  (804)662-3737  gpaterso@richmond.edu
________________________________________________________