Glass go
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Wed, 23 Sep 1998 11:20:53 -0400 (EDT)
My apologies to the participants in the recent colloquy on "Teddy" and
"Bfish." I've been getting some very strange things from my news server
for a couple of days, and now my mail server. I'm getting some mail a
few days late.
gpaterso@richmond.edu wrote:
> I would not go as
> far as to say that Teddy McArdle was simply a rehash or a reincarnation of
> Seymour Glass.[...]
Rehash and reincarnation are distinctly different, and "Teddy" *is* a
rehashing of "Bfish" (a certain few of us, after all, are privy to
authorial intent). The final story in the collection is a rewriting, by
way of explanation, of an earlier story that, after 3+ years of casual
to moderate exposure to Vedanta (alongside, presumably, other sects) and
1+ years of intense exposure to the same, Salinger himself has finally
understood, or reunderstood.
Why would Salinger kill Seymour immediately if he planned to write about
him for the next twenty years? Because there is no such thing as a
living Seymour. It can't be any more simple than that. The first thing
Salinger does to Seymour characters from Joe Varioni to Raymond Ford to
Allie is kill them. The only work after they're dead.
> ...hardly something we would expect
> to hear from Seymour...
There are at least two entirely different Seymours from "Bfish" to
"Hapworth." Seymour cannot be talked of as if he were a stable and
static entity who doesn't change over the course of the Glass
chronicle. He derives from Joe Varioni and Raymond Ford and Allie and
Vincent Caulfield and the "Holden" of "Furlough" and "This Sandwich,"
each of whom is a slight tweaking of the artist-seer-saint character.
Seymour is the final incarnation (in the published work), but he starts a
bit closer to his more secular predecessors before metamorhposing into the
Seymour we all know and love and etc.
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu