Re: holden caulfield vs therapist
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Sun, 13 Jun 1999 15:35:01 +1000
ME - your invitation to Texas is well-placed, I've always wanted to go
there since I saw Richard Linklater's `Slacker'. (thanks for visiting my
web page too, and apologies for it being so skew-whif!) I remember finding
a recipie for Banana Fish one time on the Internet so how's about we whip
up some of that and make a meal of it! (:
> Question: Does anyone know what happened to that Dr. Kevin Somebody of
the
> University of Florida or somewhere who built a web page inundated with
> Salinger quotes just to see if Salinger would send in the Big Dog
Attorneys to
> shut him down? The splash page showed the good doctor in the tub reading
> Catcher. It was really more an experiment in free speech on the
cyberwaves
> than an altar to JDS--maybe that is why so many of us didn't receive him
well
> during his brief stay at the Bananafish table. Remember?
Yeah, I remember him all right. I didn't like him much, his attitude seemed
very `let's wave a red flag in Salinger's face'.
By the way, I picked up the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century
Literature yesterday and, being in a bookshop and not wanting to get kicked
out (or to cough up $60 and buy it) I looked up Catcher, of course. The
potted-summary of the book provided an interesting angle on the Holden vs
Therapist debate: the writer suggested that Holden has actually written the
book as a sort of therapy - not necessarily to any one person, but just as
a cathartic gesture for himself. This would have to be the happy medium
between both factions of the argument - it puts me in mind of the approach
taken by my favourite pre-Catcher book (in the sense that it was my
favourite book until I found it) : `The Outsiders' by SE Hinton. Pretty
much from the outset it is earmarked as a proclaimation, no more, no less.
The narrator, Ponyboy, is not talking to any sort of assumed audience but
just out of a compulsion to tell - I especially like your reminder that
throughout the novel Holden desperately has to ask and tell people things,
just about whenever his with someone (many of whom are complete strangers).
When I write in my diary I tend to say `I can't believe I'm telling you
this' and things like that, but I'm only ever speaking to myself - or even
a kind of Fat Lady somewhere out there in readerland. The same could be
said for Buddy Glass telling us about Seymour - who exactly is `us'? Does
he really care? Perhaps that's also why Salinger decided to stop publishing
- he believed you don't necessarily *need* any listeners or readers when
you tell a story.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
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