paedophilia?
Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Sat, 27 Mar 1999 20:05:16 +0000
Andrew has raised the paedophile issue again.
Having recently watched the Salinger film in which
rather a lot was made of his preoccupation with
young people in both his fiction & his love affairs,
I'm tempted back to the topic - though it has been
discussed before.
The fact is, Salinger has produced no more than
a couple of characters older than say, 25 who were
other than marginal - Mr Antolini, Bessy, who else?
And that his schwerpunkt (as we Panzer generals like
to bark) is rather often a young child, usually a little
girl.
We are all, to some extent, paedophiliac since,
at the purely biological level, young people are simply
much more attractive than the old. Their hair is shinier,
their breath smells nicer & their skin has fewer spots.
Because less experienced, they are often seen (if often
wrongly) as more impressionable, less acute & thereby
less threatening. All these considerations play into
the emotional vulnerabilities of older people.
And, of course, at the far end of the normal spectrum
is the diagnosed paedophile who can't function sexually
at all except with someone he sees as wholly manipulable,
wholly unchallanging.
In Salinger's way of writing about young girls I don't,
myself, detect the underlying throb of the erotic that is
certainly present in the twelve year old Lolita. He appears
to be obsessed more with the idea of their unsullied,
saving goodness. His wise children are like personal versions
of the Christ Child who is going to lead us all to lie down
together whether we're lambs or lions.
I wonder, though, how much mileage can be squeezed from
a tankful of innocence? No matter how hardbitten some
of Phoebe's or Esme's utterances may sound that only adds,
somehow, to the soft focus, golden haze through which
we view them. Sadly, children are not like that. They're just
as ambiguous & complicated as grownups. They are no wiser
or freer of neurosis or less obsessed with self than adults.
Even if Salinger the writer is not a dirty old man in a raincoat
hanging around the playground, he seems to me to be a kind
of 'emotional' (as opposed to a 'sexual') paedophile. Writing
about idealised children is not so challenging as writing about
grown ups. You can just bring them in & their goodness will
not be questioned. A great 'Aaaah!' will roll through
the auditorium & nothing else will be demanded.
I was interested that Joyce Maynard mentioned one of
the things that Salinger seized on was the 'man's watch'
she was wearing in her original NY Times photograph.
It was an echo of Esme's watch - which she claimed not
to have registered until Salinger himself pointed it out.
Afterwards, she said she felt as if she were being loved
'not so much for myself' as for what she had come to
represent in Salinger's mind. In the same way, I suggest
his fictional little children are not real little children
that you could see him falling in love with - & having
difficulty with as they went their own contrary ways
even as he created them - so much as ikons he rather
carefully constructed to carry a particular significance.
I personally feel that the questions of moral behaviour,
goodness, spiritual growth (for those who believe in such
things) & so on must be worked through the whole
experience of being human - which entails growing up,
growing older, losing important things, facing death,
parenting children, & all the rest of it.
To depend on a simple, innocent, inarticulate figure
who represents salvation in some magical way -
seems to me to be a cop out.
Scottie B.