From: Bill J.
Category: Other
Date: 7/2/99
Time: 5:39:19 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.93
ALFRED CHESTER SEZ: "From *The Catcher* once came away charmed by the very things that appalled Holden: the night club, the theater, the pretentious sophisticates, the stupid office girls, the prep school, everything. It was all so precisely depicted that it gave one the pleasure of the miniature. You couldn't possibly be offended by it---even if you happened to be a stupid and pretentious nightclub...What once was the most moving scene in *The Catcher*---when Holden tries to explain his anguish over American civilization to the absurd girl he's with at Rockefeller Center---has now become flat and insufficient. The time for disgust over Cadillacs has passed and Holden's suffering does not seem interesting or real enough, enough *itself*, to make us separate it from its object, thereby turning the object into symbol and the suffering into our own. All his lament makes us want to do is prod him gently, wake him up, and say: nobody cares about Cadillacs any more...Yes, of course, *Seymour* is mannered and self-conscious and boring, but so were the other Glass pieces---and they were in addition dishonest, except for *Franny*---even though Salinger managed to keep these things hidden from his readers, if not from himself. What he says in *Seymour* is that he cannot live without Seymour, that he cannot give up writing about Seymour even though he *cannot* write about Seymour, that there is no Seymour and he must construct him piece by piece, feature by feature. And in the process of saying so, all the literary pretentions and affectations and mannerisms are knitted into a hair-shirt which he is going to wear because that is the Way he has chosen for himself. *Seymour* makes me think again of Aschenbach, this time in the confessional. Despite his makeup and dyed hair, he is confessing with all his heart and repenting with all his heart. His contrition is complete. Yet when he steps out of the church, where is he to go? All the waters of Venice flow back to his love. All of Salinger's roads lead back to Seymour, or to silence, or to both."