[Bananafish] Realistic

[Yocum, Daniel R Civ USAF AFSPC 21 CES/CEOE]

I ran across something in my rambling readings, the point was made that
many contemporary readers did not object to candor or presence of clear
reality in modern literature what the problem was a lack of clear
idealism.  This seems to be a point (or line of demarcation) between
Jerome's uncollected and current in print stories.

 

Some of the uncollected stuff has been left where it lies because it was
reworked in Catcher but the rest fit nicely in with the rest of the mid
20th century modern fiction but lacked no soul, no spirit until Catcher.
You had a kid on his way to manhood who stood for something, who caught
hold of an ideal, not just an awareness and dread of the vague, ever so
gray negatives but a real honest to goodness Ideal, namely; the loss of
innocence, the Phony and false world of the compromised adults.  We see
it right off the bat with his visit to his old Teacher.   He roams
through a Don Quixote maze getting a hold of this Ideal, catches
glimpses of it with his time with the nuns and the lack of it with his
pimp run in and near molestation.  He becomes the Catcher in the end
through the aid of Innocence named Phoebe.  Catcher is the first shot
across the bows of the then current Modern literary fashion.

 

The departure from the Vogue to the a return of the Ideal in story is
epitomized in the Superlative Horse named Seymour and His exceptional
stable mates.  It seems Jerry welded the keen cinematic objective
observational narrative of the moderns with the timeless and classic
story component of the Ideal, something that Flannery O'Connor and few
others stumbled upon about the same time as well.

 

What?

 

Daniel

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