J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [172]
From the beginning, Buddy warns of a narration that will be long and unwieldy, often digressing to visit subjects he finds interesting. A foretaste of the unrestrained nature of his text is offered when he presents readers with a bouquet of parentheses. By speaking through Buddy, Salinger sought to blaze a trail of innovation into new literary territory. Through the story’s narration, style, and subject matter, he discarded many rules of construction and embarked in a direction as yet unexplored. No other work that Salinger penned stands in such direct contrast to the dogma of The New Yorker against “writer-consciousness” as does “Seymour,” which expressly violates every tenet of authorship that Salinger had been taught. Yet it is within this seemingly chaotic construction that Salinger’s philosophy comes to a final clarity.
As a work “Seymour” has an enigmatic liquid quality. Its parts flow and counterflow simultaneously, like diverse currents in a stream. While the novella can be loosely divided into a number of sections, each with its own narrative thrust, there are always countercurrents flowing beneath the surface, enhancing the meaning of each topic that Buddy addresses. This makes any review of “Seymour—an Introduction” precarious, as it’s often the unseen undertow that carries readers through.
The novella begins with two preambles, quotations by Franz Kafka and Søren Kierkegaard, as well as a personal foreword by Buddy himself. The opening quotations address the relationship between an author and his works. They express the love between a fiction writer and his characters and explain the power of that love to determine the direction of an author’s writing. Buddy then addresses readers directly, calling them “bird-watchers” and accusing them of imbuing his authorship and private life with fantastic qualities they do not contain. This line of thought melts into the story’s second section, through which Buddy denounces critics and their methods of analysis and the Beat Generation for their spiritual blindness. The flow between sections is seamless, deftly sewn together by Buddy’s abhorrence of intellectual rather than spiritual analysis of his works as he condemns those who attempt to dissect his stories intellectually as “a peerage of tin ears.”
In the third section of “Seymour,” Buddy offers his thoughts about presenting the story as a biographical sketch. This is perhaps the coyest section of the novella. It introduces the story as not only a biographical glimpse of Seymour Glass but also of Buddy and, through Buddy, of J. D. Salinger. Its placement in the story is tinged with sarcasm as it inevitably perks up the ear of even the most lethargic of bird-watchers when Buddy references his past works, each of which is familiar to Salinger readers.
Section four is a lengthy analysis of Seymour’s poetry, highly influenced by Japanese and Chinese verse. In this portion Salinger reiterates his conviction that poetry represents spirituality—a belief he has held since “The Inverted Forest.” He repeats the dogma that true poetry is the result of divine inspiration, stating, “the true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.” Through Buddy Glass, then, Salinger again equates the quality of poetry to spiritual perfection, calling Seymour not only a true poet but also perhaps the greatest of poets. This alerts readers to Seymour’s saintliness and aligns him with the most suffering of God seekers.
Seymour Glass was not perfect. Buddy quickly establishes his brother’s humanity in the story’s fifth section, which recounts Seymour and Buddy’s vaudevillian heritage. Within this section are a number of symbolic memories, including of Zozo the clown, Gallagher and Glass, and Buddy’s recollection of Seymour riding the handlebars of Joe Jackson’s nickel-plated bicycle, one of the most hauntingly beautiful