Re: Teddy = parts of Seymour ?
William Hochman (wh14@is9.nyu.edu)
Sat, 18 Sep 1999 09:54:09 -0400 (EDT)
ahhhhhhhh sonny, I'm gonna have to slap myself silly to get rid of this
grin. Beautiful derridean word dancing...as I took this hour to read the
last 110 messages sitting snuggly in my nyu account, I kept on thinking
that we seem to be overlooking the fact that salinger wrote fiction (his
only published non-fiction after school may have been his own blurbs in
his last two books, a tribute to whit burnett, and a letter to the
nypost). What he says is one story may or may not make a fact of
it...there's no lack of fiction's ability to lie it's way to the
truth...it's as easy as being fooled into thinking paper and ink are
words, ideas, feeling, alive. BTW, I'm gearing back up to "Salinger's
Readers." I have one more essay committed and then I'm ready to put the
puppy in me to rest and get to some Salinger howling.
By way of nothing except an excellent little book on bhakti yoga I happen
to possess, I read swami vivekananda on Madhura today:
"All the different kinds of love which we see in the world, and with which
we are more or less playing mereely, have God as the one goal; but
unfortunately, man does not know the infinite ocean into which the mighty
river of love is constantly flowing, and so foolishly, he often tries to
direct it to little dolls of human beings."
Seemed like "An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls," will
ps I wanted to close with "love" but let the clever in me try to get the
last word in...instead I prefer to be Charles-like with this sudden last
kiss!
On Sat, 18 Sep 1999, Sundeep Dougal wrote:
> > Granted, I might have missed what Camille and Jim are referring to.
> Will,
> > Sonny, Tim--please set us all straight.
>
> Far be it from me to set anything straight, but I do think it helps if
> one remembers that we are dealing with fiction, that Seymour is a
> fictional character, as is Buddy, and that in S:AI in particular, JDS
> is having one huge ball, and playing with his critics, and generally
> indulging himself, as has been pointed out in various commentaries
> (cf: all those cracks about rumors, 6 months as a recluse and so on).
> Death of the author, or texts without contexts, intertextuality,
> narratorial voices or identities and their submergence, po mo
> deconstruction...I mean, it could be well be argued, couldn't it, that
> the whole thing is a Zen koan or something (I dreamed I was a
> butterfly...)
>
> Or, Derrida, anyone?
>
> I can just see this: But what is the essential core of S:AI but an
> ideality construed as a presence? The next questions we should ask is
> what is the precise locus, the material receptacle of this presence.
> But since an ideality can never be captured, only tentatively
> indicated, by the gross materiality of the sign, it operates in
> textual discourse in the form of a trace whose function is
> transcendent, in that it relies on a presumed metaphysics of presence.
> The reliance on the transcendental rather than the material in
> determining the role of the presence, pre-sense or pre-sceince should
> not be taken as evidence against, but as a confirmation of, my claim,
> for the generally understood purpose of counting the "dynamic" and
> "static" presence is consistent with the traditional functions of the
> transcendental presence vis a vis a presumptive presence. It is
> therefore consistent with the presumed primacy of speech over writing
> that it necessary to a metaphysics of presence. A sign denotes,
> de-notes, points to a presence, pre-sense, that is, that which
> antecedes its material expression in language. The sign, the allusion,
> the reference, simulates but also contradicts, negates (and thus,
> might we say, parodies) the ideal structure that it implies.
>
>
> By and by, pretty soon you'll see that there is no Seymour (you will
> 'see more' and know there is nothing left to see. More is less. Or
> less is more. The state of see-more-ness) there'll be a lot of
> left-minded people who'll believe it. Man, perhaps I should write that
> book. I'll call it _Or See More. Or Less: Deconstructive Readings in
> the Salinger Canon_.
>
>
>
>
>