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MORE WAKE

This op-ed in the NYT yesterday says more about the Salinger situation.

The Pre-Post Modernist

We unpacked Salinger when I went to college. My profs were into exactly what this guy talks about.

Before, I mentioned that reading him was like being drunk. Drunk on words and descriptions.

For Catcher:

The narrative is in a style the Russians call skaz, a nice word with echoes of jazz and scat in it, which uses the repetitions and redundancies of ordinary speech to produce an effect of sincerity and authenticity — and humor: “The thing is, most of the time when you’re coming pretty close to doing it with a girl ... she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don’t. I can’t help it. You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they’re just scared as hell, or whether they’re just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame’ll be on you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping. The trouble is, I get to feeling sorry for them. I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn’t any brains. I don’t know. They tell me to stop, so I stop.”

It looks easy, but it isn’t.

More about the Glass family writing.

It can be hard going but there is a bond that is created the reader in an entirely different way than Catcher.

The nearest equivalent to this saga in earlier literature is perhaps the 18th-century antinovel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” by Laurence Sterne. There is the same minutely close observation of the social dynamics of family life, the same apparent disregard for conventional narrative structure, the same teasing hints that the fictional narrator is a persona for the real author, the same delicate balance of sentiment and irony, and the same humorous running commentary on the activities of writing and reading.

So, I loved Shandy. No wonder.

And so, on and on.

The writer makes the point that Salinger got up the noses of critics and so they tend to dismiss the work. But for such a small corpus, its impact on modern literature is astounding.

OK. One more thing and then I am done.

The NYT also wrote a small editorial about Salinger's choice to withdraw from the world.

LIsten.

Oh! That is another point. With Salinger you listen to the words that you read.

Now. Listen.

Appreciations

There was a purity in Mr. Salinger’s separation from the world, whatever its motives, whatever his character. His half-century of solitude and silence was a creative act in itself, requiring extraordinary force of will.

This is the core truth that readers — and writers, too — often struggle with. Beneath the riches of the creative life, and hidden well away from the claims we place upon the writers we care for, there is still the one life, the ordinary life, to be lived. Mr. Salinger chose to live his in a way that only he and his immediate family could observe. It is as telling a silence as the blank spaces between his sentences.

In this celebrity world, this time of endless, shameless self promotion, Salinger is a standout.

He is Buddy who went off into the woods and wrote about his family and then stopped because enough had been said.

And that goes for us. Enough has been said.

Labels: books, heroes