Re: franny & zooey

Jim said:
<< [. . .] it simply doesn't make sense for you to say that Franny being an
anonymous college girl or Franny Glass in Salinger's mind, when he was
writing the text, is a matter of trivial detail. I don't see, given what
you've said in the past, how you can make this affirmation. In writing
"Zooey," Salinger appears to have been trying to rewrite "Franny." "Franny"
with "Zooey" means one thing, "Franny" apart from "Zooey" another. If
"Franny" is crafted at all, these differences are not trivial.
[. . .]
I would agree that "Franny," with or without "Zooey," is a story about a
young girl's sense of alienation and probably yet another example of a
recurring theme in Salinger -- the disillusioned youth. But if I want to
make anything more than this quite banal and very undetailed and very
obvious observation, I think I'm going to run into trouble.

Salinger did more than describe a disillusioned youth. He created a
memorable character. Asking, "just who is this girl?" is a very reasonable
thing to do with this story -- something Salinger seems to want from his
readers. If that answer changes with Salinger's intent, and with different
intertextual references to Salinger's other fiction (namely "Zooey" and the
whole Glass saga), then meaning changes -- and changes from Salinger's
original intent. >>

I think that I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but it's not at all
clear to me how "Zooey" can have changed "Franny." Salinger did create a
memorable character. It is very reasonable to ask just who she is. We can
even think of the second story, I suppose, as a sequel to the first, and we
can say that it gives new details and information. But the substance of
the first story isn't changed. Nothing that wasn't IN the first story
before is IN it now. The second story might give us some hints at what the
author was getting at, and we can use these hints to look more closely at
the first story. If it seems that the hints are inconsistent with the first
story, then it doesn't seem to me that the first story has been changed, but
quite the contrary. We see that the authorial intent has changed -- our
capacity to see this is further and, I think, incontrovertible evidence that
we have SOME access to it -- but the story remains the same, and we have
good cause to say that the two stories aren't quite consistent, that we have
two different Frannies.

If we think we see some subtle hint of something in the first story, but
we're not sure of it, we might say that something in the second story that
precludes it tells us where the author was going and take that as cause to
trash the idea when dealing with the first story. If that subtle hint in
the first story is just too powerful for that, if it's too clearly THERE,
then we might say that the author changed his mind about something, that he
tried to take back what was already out and that in some important way we
have two Frannies.

I'm not sure what's at stake in this. You seem to pointing pretty
enthusiastically at it like my suggestions are plainly inconsistent with
this, but I don't see how they are.

We read "Franny" and become acquainted with a young woman in some sort of
crisis. We might see and learn some things about such crises (depending, of
course, on how substantive the story is) through reading it sensitively and
thoughtfully. It might be that the young woman of the same name in the
later story has a crisis that is utterly different, and then we can say that
Salinger changed his mind somewhere and is trying to sneak it by us. It
might be that the young woman and the crisis are the same, and that both
stories compliment each other and suggest better ways to read each other.
But I am not seeing how, in any case, the substance of one is changed by
that of the other. The crisis in the first story is solidly IN the story,
and if the second story is consistent with it, if it is some sort of true
sequel, then it might shed new light on the details of the first precisely
because it gives a fuller view of what the author is getting at. If what
the second story is giving is not a clearer and more detailed view of what
the author was getting at, but a view of something different entirely, then
we've got a different girl and a different crisis and we might just as well
read the first story alone.

Perhaps the difficulty we're having is that you're including details of plot
in a way that I am excluding them. Given part of a story (we can only ever
have part, in some way or other) we can always invent innumerably many
external details, perhaps very many which are equally plausible. We can
invent different backgrounds and different futures for the characters, we
can make them profound and pivotal, and we might make many that seem equally
likely. This is the sort of thing that the greater Glass saga does to
"Franny": it takes one backstory and runs with it. But if anything more
fleshy and substantive than these things (I'm having a hard time describing
it, of course) is in the story, anything about your condition and mine,
anything thematic and substantive, (how much this sort of thing is in the
story in question might be debated) it can't be changed by the sequel.

I don't think you need to reserve your exploration of Franny's angst
strictly to the superficial and banal. Perhaps nothing of it will be
certain. But if it's IN the text (you've not yet argued that meaning cannot
be) then you should be able to talk persuasively about it. And if "Zooey"
precludes it utterly, then we might have a good case that the girl in that
story is a different girl entirely, that the authorial intent changed
between the stories, and that the author's attempt to convince us otherwise
doesn't succeed.

Jim said:
<< You define "great ideas" so narrowly that they wind up only being the
ones you happen to, quite idiosyncratically, identify across different
cultures and their literatures. Because you assume these ideas are timeless,
you assume the author saw them in the text pretty close to the way you do
today.

What I'm looking for is a justification of these assumptions, and you point
to "the degree of sensibility" you feel with the text. What you're speaking
of, here, are your own emotional reactions to the text you're reading --
which is perfectly valid, but again, may or may not say anything about the
author. >>

It is slightly inflammatory and entirely false that I identify certain
"ideas" (for lack of a better word) across different cultures, as you say,
idiosyncratically. You and the majority of the people you read and the
majority of your academic community might not agree with it -- you and yours
might even say that there is no truth but that which is determined
arbitrarily by a culture -- but this fact does not render what I'm saying
here to the unique isolation and marginalization of idiosyncrasy. I in fact
make no claim of originality in anything that I've said here. I know very
well that people much cleverer than I have said it elsewhere and have said
it more eloquently, and that some people even cleverer believe it but
haven't said it because they'd rather be doing more enjoyable and productive
things.

There are peculiarities of time and culture recorded in literature. When we
encounter them, they tend to be a bit strange, sometimes downright baffling,
until somebody gives some reasonable conjecture concerning a missing context
that renders it sensible. It seems to me that cultural idiosyncrasies will
appear to be just that to somebody outside of the given culture. It seems
very improbable to me (not, I suppose, utterly impossible, but so improbable
that frequent occurrence is impossible) that something in literature that
seems very profound to me, something that moves me or touches me deeply, can
have been significant to those inside the culture that produced it only in
some wholly different way. There simply aren't so many things that seem
profoundly meaningful to me. For tangentially related interests, I have in
my life gone through hundreds if not thousands of phrases and sentences and
even many paragraphs that were generated by very sophisticated computer
software. Lots of good, solid English, but never any substance. I don't
doubt that I'd come across King Lear eventually if I had an infinity of time
and nerves, but with what time and nerves I do have I found no such thing.
The residence of meaning -- not even to deal with the additional difficulty
of profundity -- in language is just too damn complicated, too precarious.

It seems to me too damn unlikely that Homer could say something that was
profound to his original hearers that would then be profound in an entirely
different and unrelated way to me. I can imagine being wrong about this,
just as I can imagine being wrong about my belief that men have really
walked on the Moon, or that Mozambique really does exist, or that the earth
really does revolve around the sun. But it will take much more of an
argument, it will take some serious and reasonable explanation of some of
the problems I see (and have mentioned) before my imagining in order to
strive for intellectual honesty and openness can make the transition into
being persuaded.

The big problem I see and have continually pushed is, I have thought, a
plain one, logically or philosophically or whatever you prefer. If
substantial meaning can exist in a text wholly independently from the
author, it seems to me that we must face the problem of where the meaning
comes from. I think you've lightly pushed the idea that it comes from the
reader, but if we accept this then we must face the problem of not being
able to find such meanings in arbitrarily generated texts, or frequently
even in deliberately but poorly constructed texts. It seems to me that
asserting that readers supply meaning that is wholly apart from authors does
necessarily push the authors to the margins, and this makes it difficult for
me to understand the distinction between good and bad authors, good and bad
books. It seems to me that the way we all treat books (necessarily and
rightly) assumes that meaning (or profundity or whathaveyou) resides IN
them. If we didn't assume this, it seems to me, we would have no standard
against which to judge interpretations, all meaning would be supplied by the
reader, the author's very existence as a thinking being rather than a
machine would be quite irrelevant, no reading would be more or less correct
or incorrect than any other, and no book should be better or worse than any
other. If, on the other hand, meaning does reside in the text itself, it
seems to me that we must account for how it got there. It seems to me that
it must either be inserted by the author deliberately, inserted by the
author somewhat but not quite deliberately by means of some other related
deliberate insertion, or else by pure chance. In the case of the latter, I
see no reason why we shouldn't occasionally find randomly-generated texts or
texts written by imbeciles to be profoundly meaningful.

I've pushed the above throughout this conversation, and I don't think
anybody's even lifted a finger to respond to it. If you don't think that
maintaining your side of the discussion requires that you respond to it,
then there must be some profound misunderstanding between us because I've
been thinking that you've been saying something quite different from what
you actually have been. If you for some other reason don't respond to it,
I'll politely bow out of this because it's the crux for me, it's really all
I'm saying, and I'd rather not keep repeating it. It does seem to me that
if we continue without earnestly facing these things we'll very soon be left
with very little but so much hot-air, empty assertions, and sophistry.

Jim said:
<< What do you do with the Salingers, the Cheevers, the Carvers, the
Pynchons, then, when you can't read them the way you read Homer? >>

Not speaking of any of the names you specifically cite, if I can't read an
author in a way that is even remotely like the way I read Homer, I read with
glee where the author delights me (I mean very literally, where the author
delights me), but with the notion that he isn't really so great.

At your suggestions and assertions that authorial intent is inaccessible or
irrelevant, I invited you before to provide some social or cultural context
that changes profoundly Achilles' Rage. I carefully said, Not the Catalog
of Ships. But Rage. The invitation still stands. What I'm asking for, I
think, is a persuasive argument that Rage meant something different than it
means now. You mentioned before how the influence of Christianity changed
everything, that we care now more about charity and mercy and all that and
the Greeks were more concerned with cojones. There is certainly truth to
this, but the Iliad has evidence of very mixed feelings about its hero, and
a room full of people today shows the very same evidence. The popular moral
system to lay over the events is certainly different for us than for Homer's
original audience, but it seems to me that the rage itself, the experience
of it and our feelings about it, aside from judgments based upon systematic
cultural standards, hasn't really changed. One of my biggest claims in
this, perhaps the biggest (only one other of them might contend), is that
the rage in men, the fire in the belly, hasn't changed in three millennia.
While it's hard for me to imagine even that we have entirely new ways of
seeing it (even the "new" Christian morality had many earlier Greek echoes),
the different ways of seeing it have waxed and waned in popularity. The
popular judgments then might not be the popular judgments now. But the
bottom line, that fire itself, is still the same.

This is perhaps a silly and quite sentimental way of putting it, but since
it approximates what I mean, and since it's familiar to all of us, I'll
quote an old song:

This day and age we're living in
Gives cause for apprehension
With speed and new invention
And things like fourth dimension
Yet we get a trifle weary
With Mr. Einstein's theory
So we must get down to earth at times
Relax relieve the tension
And no matter what the progress
Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed
You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by
And when two lovers woo
They still say, "I love you"
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by
Moonlight and love songs
Never out of date
Hearts full of passion
Jealousy and hate
Woman needs man
And man must have his mate
That no one can deny
Well, it's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by
Oh yes, the world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by

I think all of this might even be tied to the earlier talk of the modern
divide between the sciences and humanities. While I do still disagree, I
think that I might be able to see how one might see things as you suggest
they are if nurtured with and nurturing the divide, but I'm really not sure
I can imagine at all a person on your side of things who has intensively
studied math and science, treating them AS humanities (and as the obnoxious
web article that started this mess made clear, some of the people most
critical of what you've been talking about are math/science people, even
those who DON'T treat them as humanities). I have countless examples
jumping out in my head, but the biggest one -- perhaps because it so
profound and perhaps because I am even now immersed in it -- is Isaac
Newton's Principia Mathematica. It is certainly one of the most influential
books ever written (I don't doubt on par with the Bible, I shit you not) and
at the same time one of the most unread. It is very difficult -- John Locke
reportedly went to Newton for help at understanding the central argument --
and most people who learn about it do so through many degrees of separation.
Regardless, in it Newton essentially invents modern physics, and much of
modern science, as he develops a quite new and extraordinary and beautiful
and fascinating way of looking at the world. There is a moment -- a
staggering, breath-taking, for some almost tear-inducing moment -- when
Newton demonstrates that the force that impels an apple off a tree and down
to the ground is the very same that is required to keep the moon in orbit
around the earth. Contrary to what most people believe or would expect,
contrary to what you would think by opening most translations, Newton didn't
really write this book in the symbols of mathematics. It is largely a
mathematical work, surely, and there's lots of math in it (he might have
largely invented the calculus for it), but it's written quite simply in the
symbols of Latin, in an ordinary (well, dead, but otherwise ordinary)
language. The book is not like the cold and sterile books that came after
it and that interpret it and that expand upon it. It contains and
encourages philosophy, perhaps to some extent even theology. It is a work
that, however mathematical, is created firmly to sit amongst the humanities.

I read this book very similarly in many important respects to how I read
Homer. But in this book, the hand and mind of the author are not easily
doubted. Otherwise, it seems, we wouldn't be able to make it work, we
wouldn't have been able to use it to put men on the moon.

It might not apply well or at all, perhaps it applies only by analogy, but
studying a book like Newton's makes it very hard for me to doubt that the
meaning of the author can be accessible to me.

Jim said:
<< When I said criticism isn't good for 50 years, that statement doesn't
have to go without exception to be true. It's not the type of statement I
would "intend" to be understood without exception. I believe you when you
say you've read criticism 2000 years old that's still useful to you. In my
original statement I listed Aristotle's _Poetics_ as a notable exception.
What I'm positing here is a general rule. >>

You didn't quite list the Poetics as an exception. You said: "I don't think
there's any out there [lit. crit.] that's good for more than 50 years --
perhaps the closest is Aristotle's Poetics, but that's the sole example I
can think of." Your calling it the sole example sounds like you mean that
it is an exception, but your saying that you don't think there's any out
there and that the Poetics is "perhaps the closest" sounds most like you
think that none of it is good after fifty years and that Aristotle came
closer than anyone else (still failing, apparently). It sounded to me at
the time like you would say that it's all bad after fifty years, but hedged
a little -- a little -- for Aristotle.

I trust from your tone here, though, that you either didn't mean it that way
and I was mislead by imprecise words, or that you did mean it that way but
only casually, and upon further reflection corrected yourself.

In either case, I still object. I don't think it can be posited, even as a
general rule. The Poetics is not the only example I can think of. I hold
quite firmly, on the basis of quite a list of ancient and early and late
pre-modern and early-modern texts, that good criticism is good criticism is
good criticism, that it goes untainted by time, holding up better even than
the pyramids.

Jim said:
<< I know who I am and who I can be, and I know that includes, at least at
times, Condescending Jackass.
[. . . .]
But I also know what I'm reading and responding to. A good example would be
the side discussion of teaching philosophy -- one in which you presented
"John Q. Graduate Student" as an instructor in pretty derogatory language in
your original post. This was a response to a previous post I'd written
describing a philosophy class I'm teaching right now -- a post I didn't
address to you at all, actually. This was an unnecessary ad hominem, not
part of the point of our discussion much at all, and warranted the response
it got from me. >>

I remembered it a little differently, so I went back and looked at the
original post. I mentioned a "Prof. Knowitall" but clearly in the context
of the author of an unspecified philosophy text-book, clearly not referring
to you, and not, I think, ad hominem. I also said that taking an intro. to
philosophy class usually means listening to "some Ph.D. candidate talk about
Kant. . . ." I do see how that can be taken as offensive, and I apologize
for that. I certainly did not intend for it to be ad hominem, or offensive,
and took it to be a general statement of fact. I did includ the possibility
that said teacher could be particularly good, and that in this case there
could be worthwhile discussion (leaving implicit that, then, the whole
endeavor could be beneficial, while maintaining my suggestion that it is
nevertheless not the ideal).

This was in, as you say, a side discussion, but it was part of that which
concerned the split between the sciences and humanities, which I was a part
of, and which I think is very important and close to me, and which I think
is in some ways not a side discussion at all, but perhaps tied fundamentally
to all of this. And my response had above it a quotation from you which,
contrary to what you say here, was directed quite explicitly at me (""The
liberal arts education you describe is alive and well and thriving only in
universities where the humanities are still respected.").

I admit (and have admitted) that I have been rude to you. I do and have
apologized for this. You admit likewise (and do not apologize or make any
gesture of good will) and maintain firmly that I am rude and that you are so
in response. If you want to maintain it, if, as you say, this talk is
boring to you, fine. I think (and know very certainly that I am not alone
in thinking) that quite the opposite is true. But if this seems wrong to
you and bores you, don't ever acknowledge it and I'll never mention it
again.

Jim also said:
<< Another good example would be how you're taking offense. I said you
didn't understand the meaning of your own words -- and you took offense at
that.
[. . .]
So when I said you didn't understand the meaning of your own words, no, I
didn't think you were an imbecile. I merely thought you were capable of
sharing the same faults as I.

Denying that seems pretty condescending to me. >>

You never asserted that I am capable of sharing the same faults as you (you
certainly never needed to), and I never denied it. You told me plainly, and
not generally as a rule for everyone but specifically me in reference to a
specific thing, that I do not understand my own words. There's certainly a
sophistic tangle that we can hide this in to make it look a little more
innocuous, saying that it's always true of everyone, that it's impossible to
keep tabs on every inflection and connotation, but I really don't believe
that's what you meant at the time. I took you to be presuming knowledge of
what I was saying while presuming that I was ignorant of it. I called it
condescending, because I think that's quite literally what it was. You did
not say that there's some way of hearing my words that it doesn't look like
I'm taking into account; you did not indicate wonder over whether I saw some
difficulty in my words that you saw; you did not simply point out a
complication that perhaps I was overlooking. You said that I don't
understand my own words (presuming, of course, that you do understand them).
It seemed condescending to me at the time, and now that I've looked over it
several weeks later, it still appears to me that way. I've looked over it
very carefully and as objectively as I can and I do not believe that the
condescension in those words was in response to an immediately previous
affront, and I do believe that if you did not mean to be condescending with
those words you misspoke.

I am saying this because I believe that you are being unfair to me. If you
would like to take it off-list, feel free to do that. If it bores you, feel
free to ignore it and I won't bring it up again.

-robbie
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Received on Mon Dec 2 03:10:13 2002