Re: Teddy = parts of Seymour ?
Sundeep Dougal (holden@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in)
Sun, 19 Sep 1999 18:44:18 +0530
> Sunny wrote:
> > I can just see this: But what is the essential core of S:AI but an
> > ideality construed as a presence?
>
> I think this is the conclusion I was coming to when I wrote that
> Buddy/Salinger is implying that all of his characters are based on
Seymour:
> Seymour is simply a physicalisation of all the many things Salinger
is
> striving for in his life and fiction (you said it in a lot nicer way
than I
> did though).
I have to admit here that I just picked a friend's parodying of
Derrida in a spoof on how it would probably read if he were to do a
"job' on Urdu poetry. So thank you Will and Jim and Scottie and
Camille and others -- I'd convey your appreciation to the original
author, my friend Philip Nikoleyav who's a Russian based at Harvard
and dabbles in translations of Urdu poetry. I did not have to even
change very many words in that, and used it almost verbatim. I mean, I
may well have picked a random excerpt from the Po Mo Generator,
couldn't I, with similar results. That just happened to be handy. But
proves many a point about interpretation and obscurantist writing.
I am sort of feeling like a patient etherized upon a table, and to
attempt to address the overwhelming question. . .is way beyond me
right now as it would require looking up too many tedious arguments of
insidious intent... but I do wish to make a couple of points. I think
Scottie's messages have already dealt with them, but perhaps I need to
do some spelling out, resisting all impulse to indulge in
facetiousness myself.
This "Inverted Forest" reference in the vedantic or upanishdic lit.,
or even in English translations of various other "Hindoo" mythologies
and such is not something I have been unaware of. I am not sure though
if I have seen it in other Salinger related writing. In fact one of
the reasons I put off that long-abandoned FAQ entry on the "Inverted
Forest" was this.
And of course it has to be borne in mind that these darned voluminous
writings cover or can be said to cover almost everything under the sun
and beyond. The "nationalist" historians, or the "loony fringe" as
others refer to them charitably, are forever trying to "prove" that
this or that Veda, major or minor Upanishads, some of which are better
instances of "magic realism" than anything written since, Marquez &
co. notwithstanding, has references to nuclear weapons, interstellar
spacecrafts, satellites... or as one observer pointed out recently,
even Coke or Pepsi, in an effort to prove the greatness of that
civilisation. I do not intend to sound as if to diminish the
importance of those writings as records of philosophical, sociological
or cultural evolution, but the point I was trying to make may well be
clearer from the following illustration:
Say, you end up writing a line somewhere about, "doing something and
also not doing something". Later, you find that the Chinese also had a
concept of "Wu wei" which roughly translates to that. So you smile,
shake your head, make all sorts of "connections", or maybe marvel at
the fundamental interconnectedness of life, the universe and
everything. It is possible that your interest is piqued and maybe as
a result you end up reading on it, and maybe even end up as a disciple
of that religion. But couldn't someone coming across your usage end up
concluding that it was definitely an allusion to Wu Wei?
And then try to read your innocuous story looking with that
"examiner's bias"? It is just that which I wanted to articulate as a
caution in my posts of yesterday. Needless to say that you may well
have been interested in reading up on the same religion, but it is
possible is it not, that you had not come across this concept before?
Or even if you had, does your using that phrase necessarily makes your
writing as profound, insightful, meaningful, allegorical and all those
goodly things as that religion is alleged to be? And so on...
As a conversational speculative theory, yeah, it is interesting that
maybe reading Eliot (who dabbled enough in the exotic mumbo-jumbo that
he understood of the "Hindoo" scriptures, particularly in Burnt Nortan
and so on), or the reference to Wasteland may well have spurred his
interest in the Vedanta. Or fuelled it. Which is all right for all the
gossipy tidbits that we all enjoy so much. But, so?
In my own obsessive periods which sometimes remind me of that
reference to (maybe) Zooey once getting over an unhappy love affair by
translating the Mundaka Upanishad into classical Greek -- which I have
often happily speculated is perhaps a riff from JDS' personal
experience (oh not into classical Greek, and it may well have been his
first failed marriage)-- I have read up some of the Vedic lit., some
of the authors JDS mentions, and of course it is no surprise to
sometimes come across a phrase, a term, a theme even that would remind
one of something one found echoing somewhere in JDS. But isn't that
true of all writing?
A JDS biographer, or those like us, may very legitimately want to
enquire into when exactly the former became interested in "Vedanta",
and for all his painstaking sleuthing, it _is_ of course possible that
what Hamilton offers as tentative conclusions may need to be
corrected, but _even_ from _that_ perspective, from what little I
remember, without looking up any of the known documented details, or
the story itself, it seems to me that there is NOTHING else apart from
what I, when I am being cutesy, call the LSD syndrome (cf: the furore
over Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds).
Much as I like the Alsen book, it is to my mind, just one
interpretative theory. Which is what it perhaps aspires to be.
Besides, what relevance it has on a reading of his fiction is really
something which eludes me completely. Now, if in "Inverted Forest" we
find a pronounced parallel that echoes some Vedantic thought (which
actually should not be too difficult for any one with any, as Derrida
would perhaps say, imagi/Nation, to "prove" as the Vedantic thought
can be about almost anything)...But then, all reading experiences
maybe are different and get enhanced or diminished depending upon our
personal inclinations. Why, I know people who find all Woody Allen
movies and books repulsive now.
Of course I quite agree that the Inverted Forest is an interesting
story. And for all that it is worth, let me also once again put on
record how I have always been amazed that De Maurier Smith did make me
laugh out loud, almost hysterically when I first read it and it _is_
perhaps my favourite in the _Nine_.
Sonny