Hyakujo's Geese, Amban's Doughnuts and Rilke's Carrousel: Sources East and West for Salinger's Catcher
1997; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoZen koans are supra-logical spiritual projects meant to be worked on fulltime. Even when the monk is not formally meditating, the koan continues to resonate from the hinterlands of consciousness, suffusing every thought, word and deed with its impenetrable mystery. So, as Hoiden Caulfieid dutifully attends to the wisdom dispensed to him by his history teacher Mr. Spencer upon his dismissal from Pency Prep, in the back of his mind an odd question lingers and asserts itself: I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park . . . wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over.1 Hoiden, of course, knows nothing of Zen, but Salinger wants the reader to think of him as working on a koan. The matter of the Central Park ducks, silly though it be on the surface, is to bedevil Hoiden throughout his lost Christmas weekend in New York City and, like a good koan, will not leave him alone until he comes to terms with the central problem of his life, that is, with his socalled life koan, which the ducks symbolize. Although the topic of Zen in Salinger's writings has often been addressed, coverage has been limited primarily to the fiction collected and published subsequent to The Catcher in The Rye fiction in which the Zen theme is explicit.2 Among those few commentators who have searched for traces of Zen in Catcher in particular,3 one finds interesting speculation as well as enlightening discussion of Buddhism in the broad generic sense, but not a single unequivocal reference to the unique SinoJapanese form of Buddhism known as Zen. This is especially mystifying in the case of Rosen,, ninety percent of whose monograph is devoted to the topic. Alsen, perhaps the most authoritative voice on the subject of
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