Salinger’s Children

One thing that distinguishes Salinger’s Nine Stories from the other collections we’re reading this semester is the number of children that appear on his pages—and not just as side-players, incidental members of the main character’s family, but as distinctive, individuated characters who often play a decisive role in the story. Anyone who has spent any time around young children will attest that Salinger has a remarkable ear for children’s speech and their idiosyncratic conversational rhythms. But these stories aren’t primarily concerned with the children’s world as such—rather, the children are presented as part of the adult world. He doesn’t tend to depict children among children, but children interacting with adults, and often the children influence the adult characters in profound and ambiguous ways.

Readers of Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye will recall the key role played by sixteen-year-old misanthrope Holden Caulfield’s younger sister, ten-year-old Phoebe, late in the novel. After Holden shrugs off every adult in his life as “phony” and not worth listening to, this little girl is able to get through to him, to challenge him to reassess some of his recent self-destructive tendencies. He talks about her as the least phony person he knows. Ironically, though, Phoebe comes off as more mature and level-headed than her older brother, as she asks him tough questions about his plans for the future and the fact that he’s royally screwing up his life, and she doesn’t let him off the hook when he offers his usual half-assed, whimsical answers. He might think he’s about to have some light and easy conversation with the little kid he loves most in the world, but that’s not what he gets.

So it’s too simple to say that children simply represent innocence in Salinger, although that is part of the picture. He definitely seems drawn to children’s lack of pretense, their sometimes uncomfortable honesty, their unself-consciousness (remember Ramona scratching herself while her mother keeps telling her to cut it out), the fact that they aren’t trying to impress anyone—and “innocence” is a part of this. There’s a sense, throughout the book, of the adult world as corrupt, self-absorbed, traumatized, and children often serve the role of dramatizing the gap between who these people are now, and what they might have been like not too long ago. When Eloise pauses in the doorway of Ramona’s room, after berating her quite harshly for “replacing” Jimmy Jimereeno with Mickey Mickereeno, she is suddenly overcome with emotion, and while her reaction is ambiguous, it seems to have something to do with suddenly seeing—and recoiling from—the nasty, embittered woman she has become: “I was a nice girl, . . . wasn’t I?” (56). Ramona’s imaginative play has forced the traumatized Eloise, who is still grieving the loss of her beloved Walt, to face the fact that her grief has changed her, made her jaded, ironic, and cynical. The story ends with her seeming to lament a lost innocence, to want affirmation of the “nice” person she once was.

Instead of viewing childhood as a necessary formative stage before “real life,” Salinger often seems to take the opposite view: children are more in touch with what’s “real” (ironically, even through imaginary friends), while adults have, for a range of reasons, compromised themselves, become artificial, materialistic, cynical, status-obsessed. Remember that the book opens with a Zen koan. A central aim in Zen spiritual practice is to achieve a “child’s mind” or “beginner’s mind,” and through many of his child characters Salinger seems to be exploring this idea in the very un-Zen milieu of postwar, privileged, northeastern white Americans. In the final story in the collection, a precocious child prodigy, Teddy, tells Bob Nicholson that he must empty his mind of logic and reason in order to truly understand anything and laments how hard it is to articulate this idea in midcentury America.

Consider the role of Sybil, in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” We are introduced to the story’s central character, the enigmatic and war-traumatized Seymour, through her perspective. She has reinterpreted his name as a sentence, “See more glass,” and she indeed seems to “see more” in him than just the erratic and potentially dangerous veteran described by Muriel’s mother. Salinger establishes the dynamic of a free-spirited child existing within an adult world that doesn’t really value them as individuals right away, as her mother absently applies “sun-tan oil” (a relic of the pre-sunscreen-conscious era) while talking to the woman next to her about a lovely silk handkerchief someone was wearing the other day. She speaks to Sybil mainly to get her to “hold still,” before prompting her to “run along and play” while she sneaks off to the bar for a Martini. “I’ll bring you the olive,” she says (15). Sybil seems completely unaffected by her mother: she more or less patiently endures the application of sun-tan oil before being “set loose” to run off on her own. Her mother isn’t the least bit interested in this “See more glass” stuff; she just wants that Martini.

What seems to set Seymour apart in this story—aside from his paleness and his propensity to wear his hotel bathrobe on the beach—is his total engagement with Sybil, on her level. Some in class and on the blogs have mentioned feeling uneasy throughout the scene where they’re together, and this suspicion toward Seymour is built into the story from the start: you’re thinking like Muriel’s paranoid, hysterical mother, seeing him as a dangerous “crazy” person. And perhaps it’s a measure of our own loss of innocence that when we see a grown man interacting with a child like this, we assume the worst. But the scene Salinger provides is actually quite innocent, and in light of the story’s abrupt ending, quite poignant. What we actually get in the scene with Sybil is not a predatory monster or dangerous psychotic but a witty eccentric who doesn’t seem to care about “adult” concerns and seems quite jaded with the privileged, materialistic life he leads. As he brushes off questions about Muriel’s whereabouts with a satirical crack about how she might be off “having her hair dyed mink” (17), we note how he associates adulthood with artificiality and self-indulgence. Seymour, at the very least, seems disillusioned with the life of luxury and leisure his postwar existence affords. The setting is an elite Florida beachfront hotel, but he doesn’t seem to be having fun there the way the other adults do, playing the piano in the lobby and joking around with Sybil and Sharon Lipschutz.

And it seems clear that Sybil prefers Seymour’s company to her mother’s—she doesn’t care how eccentric and weird he looks, sitting on the beach in his bathrobe. He engages her at her level, sometimes making jokes that go a little over her head, but silly enough that she can appreciate the playful tone (“Olive and wax. I never go anyplace without ’em” [21]). He seemingly improvises a fanciful story about “bananafish” and their habits while wading out into the water with Sybil, and she quickly picks up on the game and plays along (“I just saw one” [24]). The bananafish story is not a happy one, though—“They lead a very tragic life” (23), overindulging in the thing they think they want (bananas) until they die. Not exactly The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Seymour seems to be communicating something here, but it’s not at all clear what, at the time. In retrospect, it’s possible to read this bananafish story as a parable, even a kind of suicide note. Seymour may be expressing his own disillusionment with adult life, with the materialistic overindulgence that has followed the war. His same ironical sense of humor suddenly turns paranoid and nasty in the elevator with the woman. Whatever is going on with Seymour—and he remains enigmatic throughout the story—it seems clear that this brief episode with Sybil is decisive, and seems to represent a significant moment of human connection, perhaps the kind of thing he can no longer achieve among the adults who now populate his world. Sybil accepts his fantastical, alternate reality without skipping a beat; she believes in bananafish. I’m not sure exactly what it means, but it seems that her claim to have seen a bananafish with six bananas in its mouth (24) seems decisive to him. He ends their little swim and immediately returns to the hotel. There’s no sentimentality in Sybil, either—she runs off  “without regret in the direction of the hotel” (25).

In the opening story, Sybil is unable to “save” the traumatized veteran, and her role in the story remains ambiguous and open to interpretation; it even seems that she “inspires” Seymour’s final act, in some unintended way. But in “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” a story that is widely considered to be a very personal one for Salinger, the D-Day veteran who experienced a debilitating nervous breakdown after the war and who remained profoundly out of step with and even hostile toward mainstream American culture for the rest of his life, we see a much more restorative role played by a child. The story’s “before and after” structure, with the wartime trauma passed over in silence, turns our attention to Esmé and her role—she promises that she’ll write a letter to the narrator, and he promises to write a story for her in turn. She’s another precocious Salinger child, who seems both wise beyond her years and innocent at the same time. It’s not as if she is “naturally” compassionate; indeed, she’s consciously working on her compassion. He gets her letter at a point where he is unable to function like a human being. His “faculties” are not “intact.” The simple but profound gesture of giving him her dead father’s watch serves to connect with him in a way that Clay’s clumsy efforts at conversation do not. It seems to make him able to “sleep,” and the story ends in a hopeful tone that is reinforced by the comparatively “healthy” narrator who opens the story, talking about Esmé’s wedding invitation. The end of the story is in the beginning, and the story we read is, self-reflexively, the story the narrator promises to write for Esmé. It stands as Salinger’s most straightforward treatment of the trope of a child helping an adult, and Esmé remains one of Salinger’s most beloved and memorable characters. But we see here a paradigm for Salinger’s treatment of children in his work: her precocity, lack of pretension, emotional intelligence, and simple, unsolicited compassion provides the narrator—and the author?—with something he seems unable to find in the adult world.

“Fabula” and “Sjuzet”: Or, We Need Some Good English Words for This Theoretical Distinction

The other day in class, after going over your Short Story assignment, I briefly introduced a useful pair of concepts drawn from Russian Formalist criticism, which revolutionized how literary scholars conceived and talked about narrative in the early half of the twentieth century: fabula and sjuzet. These are often loosely translated into English as “story” and “plot”—terms which are so close in meaning that the distinction nearly gets lost. I will attempt a more detailed and hopefully clearer summary here; you may consult Wikipedia for a more complete account.

“Fabula” (or “story”) refers to the sequence of events, actions, spoken words, and circumstances that comprise the “raw material” of a story—the “stuff that happened” apart from any narrative representation of these events. We imagine a “God’s-eye” view of the world that could reconstruct every significant feature of an event without altering or distorting it in any way. The fabula, however, turns out to be a theoretical construction: no such account, of any event, exists. Once something happens, it immediately slips into the past, and our only way of accessing it takes the form of narrative—whether a memory, an anecdote, a diary entry, a police report, court testimony, journalism, or historical writing, we have no access to “events themselves” apart from some form of narrative. We can never access the “real story,” and any narrative, theoretically, is an approximation.

The “sjuzet” (or “plot”) represents the artificial linguistic construction that seeks to represent the story in words: an author shapes and interprets the “events themselves” in all kinds of ways when he or she builds a narrative from experience. (And even fictional writing not based on direct experience posits or imagines a fabula that must be given written form.) An author plots or arranges that raw material according to linguistic and cultural conventions of narrative. A well-told story might create a strong impression of accuracy, reliability, of access to the “events themselves”—in fiction, we call this “realism.” But a relentlessly “realistic” rendering of a narrative (without a lot of personal, editorial commentary or obvious speculation; employing the “omniscient” third-person voice—think of Hemingway's style in “Hills Like White Elephants”) is still as much of an artificial construction as a more obviously “fictionalized” account. In either case, we have nothing but the narrative to go on, no finally “real” version of the story against which to gauge its accuracy. Evidence can bolster an account of events, and we might reasonably gauge the accuracy of a narrative in all kinds of ways, when it really matters (as in courtroom testimony, where a sjuzet always is subject to critical scrutiny and burdens of proof). But even the most scrupulously “objective,” fact-based narrative is, fundamentally, a linguistic construction.

Does this distinction make sense? Does it seem obvious? The important insight to grasp, I think, has to do with the constructed nature of any narrative. The fabula does not exist, except in so far as it has been given shape in a sjuzet. We can’t conveniently step outside of language and access “the events themselves”; once they’ve occurred, “events” only take shape as part of a narrative (or else they are forgotten and disappear). We are indeed “trapped in language,” with no access to some extralinguistic reality, as some of the poststructuralist followers of the Russian Formalists might have put it.

The study of fiction—and especially short fiction, which has to do more in a compact space—repeatedly bumps us up against these limitations of language. We are only reading sjuzets in this course. For some of these narratives, there may indeed have been “real” people, settings, and a sequence of events on which they are based—but that doesn’t matter much to us as readers of a short story. I don’t see this “limitation” as a cause for despair, and I don’t feel especially “trapped in language.” But it does mean that we have to accustom ourselves to ambiguity, to the fact that short stories often end without clear resolution—questions remain, and continue to point us outside the apparent bounds of what the author has chosen to include. We have these wonderfully rich and ambiguous stories to work with, and while they prompt us to imaginatively reconstruct a hypothetical fabula as we read (they seem to point toward an external reality where certain things happened at a certain time to certain people), we do not despair (usually) of never getting access to “the real story.” There is no real story, apart from the constructed, written narrative.

Some writers will try to relentlessly hide the constructed nature of their narratives, to create the illusion of unfiltered reality being presented directly to the reader. But Tim O’Brien constantly draws attention to the constructedness of his stories, the theoretical fabula-sjuzet divide, from the very start of this book (its dedication page, its epigraph, and its explicit identification as “a work of fiction” on the title page), O’Brien compels us to recognize both that we are reading an account of real stuff that happened to real people in a real war (we take these stories as a reflection of actual wartime experience, written by an eyewitness and participant), and that he, as the author, is constantly shaping, reshaping, altering, and adding to that real stuff (“making stuff up” in order to produce short stories, or works of fiction). Even when his fictions use a character’s “real name” (as far as we know), or refer to the author/narrator himself as “Tim O’Brien,” we are still fully aware that the events (often controversial and morally ambiguous) cannot be accessed outside of the stories we are reading. To call these “fiction” is not to say that they are phony, imagined, or false—indeed, O’Brien is adamant that “truth” can be achieved through fiction, even especially through the invention and alteration of the factual bases for a story.

Think of how often the “same” stories appear in various forms throughout this collection. Near the end of “Spin,” early in the book, we get the following brief exchange between Kiowa and a silent “Tim”:

                        A red clay trail outside the village of My Khe.

                        A hand grenade.

                        A slim, dead, dainty young man of about twenty.

                        Kiowa saying, “No choice, Tim. What else could you do?”

                        Kiowa saying, “Right?”

                        Kiowa saying, “Talk to me.”   (36)

And yet “Tim” doesn’t “talk” here—not yet. We might be able to surmise something about the situation, but we have not yet heard “the story.” We “get” this passage much more clearly on a second reading. Not until “The Man I Killed” do we get further elaboration of this earlier sketch (with the repetition of key phrases, like the “dainty” qualities of the dead man), but at this point, the focus is primarily on the moments just after the man has been killed, as the narrator (“Tim”) tries to deal with the horror of what he’s done. And then, in the next story (“Ambush”), he finally recounts the act of killing itself (in an imagined response to his daughter’s question about whether he killed anyone in the war). It takes “Tim O’Brien” multiple attempts to “talk”—to turn this set of actions and events into a “story”—and indeed the book almost seems to avoid certain subjects at first, as if the author would really rather not get into some of these stories. And yet he comments that the effort it takes to confront this stuff is largely “why [he] keep[s] writing war stories” (125). The same set of now-familiar elements are revisited yet again in “Good Form,” even as this short fragment calls the now-established “facts” of the story into question (“twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough” [171]). The book continually circles around stories it wants to tell, as if wondering how to tell them.

The “story” of the man he killed (or didn’t) is “told” in various forms—often repeating key images and motifs—throughout this book, and the same is true of other stories (Kiowa’s gruesome demise, for example). This is a book that is centrally about people trying to make sense of their experience, to turn the chaos and absurdity of war into a coherent and meaningful narrative. But O’Brien continually reminds us that this is an artificial and subjective process. The “real story” continues to exist in a theoretical plain outside narrative. We know “stuff happened,” and these arrangements of words are an effort to make that stuff real, to allow it to be communicated to someone else, to approximate the lived experience, “how it felt.” 

While a more straightforward, chronological account of the shooting of the young man with the dainty wrists in one conventional narrative might seem like a more effective way to create the illusion of reality (more of a direct reflection of how things actually happened), in fact, this odd “circling around” of the story generates a unique confidence in the truth of what is being conveyed: with each attempt to tell the story, our conviction that there is a story to tell (that something happened, and that it very much matters to the person telling it) is strengthened.

So, as readers of short fiction this semester, we will continually attend to the creative choices an author has made to shape his or her sjuzet: the narrative point of view, the structure, the chronological sequence, the beginning and end. As writers of short fiction yourselves, who are basing your work at least in part on real stuff, you will be thinking about fabula and sjuzet all the time, whether you use these arcane Russian words or not. There are infinite ways to shape your story, and as the author, you need to make a number of consequential decisions about how that theoretical set of events and actions will be constructed in narrative form.

The Inmates Running the Asylum (or, Student Discussion Leading)

Once each quarter, you will have a chance to take the wheel and steer our class discussions in whatever direction you deem interesting, relevant, and appropriate. In a group of three, you will be responsible for opening up and guiding a conversation about the story or stories that are assigned for that day. You will be expected to cover 30 minutes of the class period, but if the conversation is rolling and you don't want to stop, you will be permitted to go longer. Typically, these end up filling the whole period--once the class gets going, conversations develop their own momentum.

Your group should get together, either in person or virtually, through a Google Doc, and plan out what you want to cover in your discussion. Figure out what are the most important or interesting aspects of the story and how you might frame questions that will lead the class toward thinking productively about these aspects. You might use a typical day of class under my leadership as an example: an initial focus on voice, point of view, and narrative structure can be a good way to open up more general ideas. You can structure the class period however you'd like: assign a short in-class writing prompt, break the class into small groups for discussion, use the board or the projector or laptops--whatever will facilitate a productive and insightful discussion. Try to call on your students in the order in which they raise their hand (which is not easy, I can attest), and as I said in class, treat me like just another student: if my hand is raised, I want to comment as part of the discussion, and I should not be given priority over other students (nor, however, should I be made to wait longer than other students!).

The schedule for presentations in the first quarter is available here. (It will also be posted in the classroom.) If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. And I'd always be glad to discuss strategy with your group in advance of your big day in the front of the room.

Welcome to the Short Story Experience

With the new semester (and new year) already more than a week old, I should be just about done rambling incessantly about all the stuff you'll be doing this semester and we can finally get down to talking about some short fiction. Without further ado, I'll provide here some links to the crucial documents I distributed last week: The Course Description, the Third Quarter Syllabus, and the guidelines for the Notebooks, Blogs, and Short Essays.