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The Fiction of J.D. Salinger

Gwynn and Blotner with Faulkner at the University of Virginia

MLA Citation:

Gwynn, Frederick L. and Joseph L. Blotner. The Fiction of J.D. Salinger. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958. Print.

Frederick Gwynn and Joseph Blotner’s slender volume of commentary addresses the bulk of Salinger’s oeuvre. The body of the book is divided into three convenient sections and seven sections in total comprise the work.

First Paragraph:

“For the future historian, the most significant fact about American literary culture of the Post-War period may be that whereas young readers of the Inter-War period knew intimately the work of a goodly number of coeval writers (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, for example), the only Post-War fiction unanimously approved by contemporary literate American youth consists of about five hundred pages by Jerome David Salinger.”

Summary:

The Fiction of J. D. Salinger (library copy)
The Fiction of J. D. Salinger (library copy)

Introduction

The introductory section details the prevailing critical responses to Salinger’s work. They briefly describe the critical stance of critics Heiserman and Miler, David Stevenson, Ihab Hassan, Leslie Fiedler, Donald Barr, William Wiegand, and Maxwell Geismar, though they do not engage with their theoretical stances in the introduction.

Gwynn and Blotner also identify “For Esme-With Love and Squalor” the “high point of Salinger’s art” (for more information, see the “For Esme…” readers guide).

The Long Debut: The Apprentice Period (1940-1948)

This section discusses the twenty or so stories that appeared largely in magazines such as Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, but also in a handful of others such as Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping). Gwynn and Blotner describe these  as being of five types, “The Short Short Stories,” “The Lonely Girl Characterizations,” “The Destroyed Artist Melodramas,” “The Marriage in Wartime Group,” and “The Caulfield Stories.”

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“The Holy Refusal”: A Vedantic Interpretation of J.D. Salinger’s Silence

MLA Citation:

Pattanaik, Dipti R. “”The Holy Refusal”: A Vedantic Interpretation of J.D. Salinger’s Silence.” MELUS23.2 (1998). JSTOR. Web. 25 Nov. 2010. <http://www.jstor.org/pss/468015>.

First Paragraph:

“The silence of J.D. Salinger continues to be an enigma.  That a successful writer should cease to publish at the height of his glory not only defeats our everyday notions about success, it also baffles the serious students of Salinger’s work and life.”

Summary

Pattanaik cites biographer Ian Hamilton and Salinger scholars Warren French and James Lundquist trying to sort out the reasons Salinger may have gone into seclusion.  He also cites Ihab Hassan’s The Dismemberment of Orpheus as a place where “a more rigorous analysis of Salinger’s refusal to publish his works and make himself public…”

Pattanaik attempts to use “the Eastern religions and mystic Catholicism” to find an answer to his question.  He ultimately comes to the conclusion that Salinger’s silence is a result of the author’s attempt at “right living” and that it is all explainable through his characters.

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On Burning, Saving, and Stealing Letters

MLA Citation:

Jolly, Margaretta. “On Burning, Saving and Stealing Letters.”  New Formations.  London: Summer 2009., Iss. 67;  pg. 25, 11 pgs

First Paragraph:

forthcoming

Summary:

While dedicated primarily to feminist autobiography, Jolly’s article does not deal at length with Salinger’s letters, but does mention them in elucidating her larger points about the negotiation involved in the author/subject relationship.  In the section entitled, “Stealing Letters: The Ethics of Epistolary Research” Jolly writes,

“The key negotiation takes place over how and whether the private should be publicized, in which the balance of power becomes a central question. But there are special ethical challenges involved for letters, for here there is also the relationship between the correspondents (or their inheritors) themselves to be negotiated.”

And that, “biographers like Ian Hamilton and Diane Middlebrook, who tracked down unpublished letters of J.D.  Salinger and Ted Hughes in university libraries, find themselves up against the financial and psychological demands of immensely influential literary estates.”

She goes on to suggest,

“[r]ecent theory on the ethics of life writing pushes us to rethink privacy as the effect of relationships.  The question is not so much the protection of an absolute form of privacy but of understanding and respecting the kind of contract or sociability each form of address presupposes. But how do we apply this to the publication of letters, which themselves owe their existence to relationship?”

Thus, Jolly’s article contains on the barest mention of the Ian Hamilton/J. D. Salinger contreversy but does a good job in what it seeks to do, which is to discuss the status of literary letter writing and its appropriation, specifically within a feminist framework.