Subject: Re: Oh, my prophetic soul: Muriel's Uncle!
From: citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Date: Fri Jan 28 2000 - 16:32:48 EST
Matt's post (which I joyfully include in its entirety below, and, I must
confess, it shames me) is from a "seven- or eight-inch-thick stack of what
appeared to be--and were--shirt cardboards."
Thank you.
--Bruce
-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Kozusko <mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu>
To: bananafish@roughdraft.org <bananafish@roughdraft.org>
Date: Friday, January 28, 2000 11:54 AM
Subject: Oh, my prophetic soul: Muriel's Uncle!
>
>RHRBC is all about Seymour, and Seymour is all about blank sheets of
>paper by way of explanation. In Glass affairs, the only people who
>know anything are those who appear to know nothing; the only people
>who can offer information are those who appear to be indifferent to
>information. This makes Muriel's Uncle the most conspicuous person in
>RHRBC.
>
>For the length of six stories, Seymour has been telling Buddy, and by
>proxy, us, that we're looking in the wrong places. The whole cast of
>RHRBC is searching New York City for an errant groom who doesn't know
>the meaning or value of people, of love, of marriage. What's really
>going on, of course, is that the search party doesn't know the meaning
>of people, love, marriage, and so they'll go on riding around
>Manhattan in cabs, looking for the shell of a man whose substance is
>sitting in the car with them, between the Matron of Honor and the
>door, underneath a silk hat.
>
>Let us not forget, if deciphering Seymour is our business, that the
>Glass family meta-narrative is silence: "...the rest is silence." By
>the time the taxi in RHRBC rolls along, the more industrious half of
>Salinger's readers are discovering the trick of unlearning
>differences, which, at the level of the Salinger story, means looking
>under rocks, in ashtrays, at the bottoms of empty pitchers of Tom
>Collinses...reading the writing not on page or even on the wall, but
>on the mirror in the bathroom.
>
>Blank pieces of paper and mirrors are similar, equally curious sorts
>of palimpsests. The traces of what has been written and then effaced
>are silence, in the first case, and the reader himself, in the
>second. Either way, what you find in the writing is not what you
>expected to find--not platitudes, not answers, and certainly not
>directions. You find that answers don't come from words, and they
>don't come from other people. You're left staring at nothing on the
>one hand, and nothing but your own image on the other. What a thing
>to reflect on.
>
>--
>Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu
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