[Bananafish] F&Z Bathroom info

[Esme Four]

Dear D, 

You may want to see "Zooey's Bathroom in Every
Detail," an April 26, 2006 article in the New York
Times about an installation in a Manhattan window.
Though the deeper concept of the artist's installation
is possibly more reminiscent of a moment in
"DeDaumier-Smith's Blue Period" (if you look at it in
the right light...>) (see "Twice-
Blessed Enamel Flowers: Reality in Contomporary
Fiction" in a book called _The Climate of Faith in
Modern Literature_for some the critical insights you
ask for but based on "DeDaumier-Smith's Blue Period."
I think the author, Paul Elmen, is stretching but I
guess I'm still chewing this critical gum) (pun
intended or not).

This really doesn't answer your question or satisfy
your literary curiousity. Just for beginners, I'm
thinking  of the bathroom scenes in Catcher like
Holden talking with Stradlater, Holden recovering from
Maurice and Sunny's visit in a bath for an hour,
Holden standing on the radiator in the bathroom of the
Wicker Bar, the scene in Radio City Music Hall where
the woman next to Holden is crying over a movie and
not letting her son go to the bathroom. But I don't
think there's any brilliant critical insight so much
as the simple idea that bathroom are a place we can
privately retreat to ourselves. I think the bathroom
scene in Zooey is so powerful because mom Glass has
little aprehension about invading her children's
innerspaces--the tension of a mother in a room with
her full grown, naked son is contasted so nicely with
the intelligence of their dialogue. So I guess my less
imaginatively critical point about bathrooms in
Salinger City is that they are useful parts of several
key scenes thoughout his work.  It's funny, but as I
write this now I think that Salinger is smart to use
bathrooms because he wants intimacy to be felt (as it
would naturally be among family members) by readers
NOT needing critical ideas to mediate and understand
the author's words. I'd better stop here. It sounds
like fiction is one illusion piled on another and
another and another...

With love and squalor,

Esmé4



 
____________________________________________________________________________________
Sponsored Link

Degrees online in as fast as 1 Yr - MBA, Bachelor's, Master's, Associate
Click now to apply http://yahoo.degrees.info