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J.D.Salinger
was here.
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The
laying of the most recent tombstone, the ideal
burial of a new character, has taken place in a context
way beyond the limits of the extraordinary. We are aware
that we should simply make a report of the event, not to
face the unspeakable with our poor rhetoric: but there we
are, our rhetoric is poor, and we give in to enthusiasm.
We buried Seymour Glass.
Seymour, the universal poet, the spontaneously
enlightened, the unaware saint (what's befitting
for any poet, enlightened, saint), the genius of
everyday life where nobody's a genius, 31-years-old
suicide in the hotel room of his honeymoon:
J.D. Salinger's imaginary myth is now resting in our wood. |
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From last Friday, a perfect day for bananafish, we have a place
where we can bring flowers to
Seymour, at last; and the first have been laid down by Salinger himself
.
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The thrill of a visit to Seymour’s tomb would
have
quenched our thirst, and a distant blessing of his author
would have by far exceeded our desires. How can we tell
about the presence of Salinger, living icon of himself,
depiction of the undepictable writer, directly from the
empyrean of the draftsmen of the Absolute Book?
J. D. Salinger is maybe the most renowned and
paradigmatic name among the crowd of authors sacrificed
to the "Bartleby Syndrome", as it's been named by Enrique
Vila-Matas: the maze of those that write a few books and
then give up writing, of those that never even begin
writing, those that utter a final "no".
Still, his "great denial" does not debar him from
the names
of published literature: he’s The Writer, and words that
already met ink and paper had to face other people’s
questions, despite of him.
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We're not going to ask ourselves the reason of
this unexpected, and also for us unbelievable
presence. Who never did dream of questioning the author and
his characters, of torturing them,
forcing them to speak? But whoever loved Salinger and Seymour
knows how futile itis to wonder
about Seymour's suicide, Salinger's hermitage. Idle, shallow
talk, disrespectful: for many, maybe
even blasphemous. So "Thank god, it's not our responsibility
to answer that one".
But we do know that, comforted by the absence of reporters,
cameras or any kind of machinery,
Salinger has willingly buried Seymour with us.
And once more, his presence at the funeral rites
has been a non-presence, just the way Seymour
is absent from his stories. So here we are: if we don't want
to betray him, we have to tell what really
happened: it wasn't Salinger standing before Seymour's
gravestone, but Buddy Glass.
As Saigyo said:
What it is I know not
But with the gratitude
My tears fall |
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