Old Can of Worms, Anybody?
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Wed, 23 Sep 1998 02:03:48 -0400
XCRUSHx@aol.com wrote:
> When we enter the world.
> we are young and innocent. it is not until we start eating bananas that we
> entrap ourselves in a web of intellect from which we can't escape - it
> ultimately kills us. Just as Salinger spelled out in Teddy. Is this just
> common sense that everyone accepts?
I read "Teddy" as a rewriting of B-fish. The parallels are
remarkable--"Teddy" published 5 years to-the-day after "Bfish,"
retelling the genius-seer-saint story from Salinger's broadening eastern
philosophy perspective... "Applefish" would have been too simple for a
clever writer, but Teddy, as you say, spells it out, rather
unceremoniously, with his reference to the Eden story. Nobody's done
much with this, though I have a paper ready for Will's first Salinger
conference.
Bananas-as-knowledge is not something that everyone accepts,
though--another popular approach reads the banana problem as material
consumption. Here, bananas aren't knowledge, but material goods. Makes
sense, given Muriel's backrgound and the anti-materialism stains running
through the early fiction, but ultimately, I think Seymour's problem is
different. He's the bananafish, after all.
The story is ultimately about two different problems--Muriel's problem
with worldly, concrete (material) preoccupations, and Seymour's problem
with worldly but abstract (intellectual) greed (Zooey later points out
that pursuit of knowledge or even spiritual treasure can be bad).
It's one of my favorite stories in the collection, but I still say it's
a sloppy mess of a narrative. Those two strains pull apart from each
other, tearing the story in half. Delicate balance, my ass. Salinger
isn't quite sure what he wants to do with the story, so he does a little
of everything and spends much of the rest of his career explaining
himself--rewriting "Bfish."
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu