Re: ZOOEYCAM
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Mon, 01 Mar 1999 13:37:19 +1100
Excising your letter of offending sports references (which mean absolutely
nada to me; I don't even follow sports in my own country let alone yours)
Jim wrote:
> One thing we may want to consider is that
> Salinger wasn't raised a Zen Buddhist, he started studying it as an adult
Yes ... but in a way that probably exacerbated his interest more than if he
had have been raised a Buddhist. Some of the best capturings of a foreign
lifestyle or place (eg Kafka's `Amerika', Lasse Halstrom's `What's Eating
Gilbert Grape') have been done by people for whom it's utterly foreign and
exotic. The goldfish can't draw a picture of his own bowl.
> Was Catcher written before or after Salinger's involvement with
> Zen?
Consensus says that Salinger first got interested in Zen and Ramakrishna
straight after the war, or even during or before it, as a Ramakrishna
centre was established near his neighbourhood. Either way - yes, his Zen
interest was way pre-Catcher and I think very much reflected in the book -
I think he found in the simplicity and apparent non-linear/non-logical
quality of Zen the perfect solution to the structure of his book. As for
Zen influences in other books - I don't believe it's necessarily the ones
with the most thematic congruency to Zen which are structured in the most
Zen like way - for example the subject of Teddy is obviously a rumination
on Zen, but the structure doesn't seem to me very Zen at all. De-Daumier
however seems emblematic of Salinger's entree into the intellectual and
emotional processes of the discipline, the spareness of Zen meeting
headlong with the jocular tone, literally `East Meets West' (love that
story ... why doesn't anyone else? Beats the heck out of `Down at the
Dingy')
> The question to ask would be, "If I had no knowledge of
> Zen principles, would I be able to deduce them from the text?" I think
> the answer is a Big yes with Teddy -- it's almost didactic in nature,
> virtually Zen propoganda -- and a no with Catcher.
Well, you could also work the other way too. You could say `how much does
this text make sense without the knowledge of Zen?'. Many things in Catcher
made a lot more sense when I looked on it from the Zen angle - it enriched
it for me but I guess it wasn't really essential, just handy. Whole chunks
of Shakespeare are lost to us because we have lost the topical references
in time but he still does OK out of it (: But think how much richer these
plays would be if we *did* know them.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest