Re: Seymour's Suicide -- Bruce...
AntiUtopia@aol.com
Sun, 10 Oct 1999 08:21:40 -0400 (EDT)
I can see how some would theorize that telling One Story is what every writer
does. I don't think that's true, but I do think many writers do so. The
most intelligent thing I've read was some Shakespeare critcism in which the
critic said that a writer's work does trace an emotional biography, even
though it's largely speculative to draw correspondences between a writer's
life and his fiction.
I think what happens is that so long as writers are in the same place
emotionally, they write from that same place. When they move on, their
writing moves on. I think Salinger spent a lot of time writing the same
story, and Joyce did as well, but I think it's more true of Salinger than of
Joyce. I think Joyce began to write different stories about the same
subject.
Anyway, I give Esme that priviliged position because it seems to pose the
problem as clearly as any other story and, above all, provide a resolution.
The character is writing from an emotionally healthy and stable place, a
position of happiness of some sort. We're led outside and beyond the problem
to an epiphany, and then well past the epiphany to wholeness. There is an
epiphany in DDSBP, but I don't see DDS moving that far past the point from
which he was writing. There's an epiphany in Franny, but we're not at a
vantage point far enough past the epiphany to see what she made of it.
And there's something about how For Esme is written that draws the reader
into the epiphany more successfully than the other stories. This part of my
judgment is far more subjective and there's a lot of room for personal
preference here, but that's how it worked for me.
Jim