Subject: Oh, my prophetic soul: Muriel's Uncle!
From: Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Date: Fri Jan 28 2000 - 14:57:02 EST
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 - * Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message * UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
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