Re: Salinger turns to the Dark Side
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Sat, 26 Jun 1999 10:53:33 +1000
Yes, Scottie, that's partially what I meant, but not wholly. By a `vacuum'
I mean a total lack of engagement with critical discourse and, further than
that, a disengagement with life and literature itself, other than one's
own. I fell victim to it as a playwright when I stopped acting - my plays
seemed brilliant on the page, clever and twisty and turny - but on the
stage they were hopelessly inadequate. In disconnecting myself from the
wellspring I had re-connected myself to an inferior one, a self-fulfilling,
but therefore self-dirtying one which just recycles and recycles, getting
muddier and cloudier all the way. And the further one becomes enmeshed in
this quagmire, the harder it becomes to admit to oneself it *is* a
quagmire, and so many pages of mud-stained rubbish isn't neglected
brilliance. It's very easy to be at the top of your game when you see
yourself as the only player.
In reading that biography of Vladimir Nabokov, I came across a clinical
description of narcissism which seemed to ring very true for Salinger. It
is not self-love, but the inability to reconcile the fact that one is not
the centre of the world (in Freudian terms, you could say it's an inability
to escape from the all-pervading affection of the mother). It manifests
itself in an inability to handle change (one of the main themes of
`Catcher') and the compulsion to create little self-exclusive worlds of
which one is the master.
I'm not saying the writer isn't alone in his mind. I'm also not saying that
this vacuum can send up works of unspeakable brilliance, giving the artist
his or her perfect space where they can work on their unique vision without
interference. But it does offer up also an enormous amount of crap from
people who have spent the weeks it took to compose it convincing themselves
they are misunderstood geniuses.
Perhaps when Salinger blew off those kids who wrote the article about him
in their local paper, he permanently disconnected his mind from the world,
too. One of the most noticeable traits of his later fiction is the fact
that in the end he seems to be talking to only one person - himself. He's
the absolute paradigm of the vacuum writer.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest
> I'm not altogether clear what Camille means by
> the vacuum in which she sees Salinger working
> in his later days.
>
> I presume she doesn't mean the withdrawal to
> the house in the woods or his refusal to engage
> in public discourse. That, in one form or another,
> is the choice of most artists. Among such good writers
> as I've known personally, most were at great pains
> to avoid the bar/lit. party/chat show circuit -
> while the pubs of London & Dublin are filled
> with grand talkers & socialisers, all of them on the point
> of leaving for home to start their great novel.
>
> Nor do I believe (despite the unpopularity of this view
> on the list) that there can be any dialogue - within
> the proper meaning of the word - between an artist
> & his audience. The creation of good new stuff takes
> place, after all, way far out beyond that point where
> the readers have so far ventured. The writer is not only
> alone in his study, he must also resign himself to being
> alone in his mind.
>
> Having said all that, I DO have sympathy with Camille's
> view that there is something claustrophobic, self-regarding,
> solipsistic, about Salinger's later writing. As she says,
> the feeling is rather strong that one is eavesdropping:
> on someone playing by (or with) himself in an empty room -
> almost as though one had caught him admiring his own body
> in the mirror.
>
> Scottie B.