Blue_Period_Is_a_Time_of_Sadness

14 November, 2010 Blue Period is a Time of Sadness The narrator of “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is a nineteen year old, who has just returned to New York from Paris after nine years abroad, three months after the death of his mother. He notices in a Quebec newspaper for a post of the correspondence art school in Montreal. The school is merely the second floor of a tenement building. “One large room and a tiny, boltless latrine,” the narrator recalls, “were all there was to Les Amis des Vieux Maitres itself.” As for personnel, the narrator quickly realizes he is the only employee, along with M. Yoshoto and his wife “Mme”. The next day, work begins. The narrator finds that his duty is to translate Yoshoto’s corrections of students’ artwork from French to English. What is more, like “many a really good artist, M. Yoshoto taught drawing not a whit better than it’s taught by a so-so artist who has a nice flair for teaching.” Somewhat crestfallen by what appears to be his job, the narrator wonders if perhaps Yoshoto knows he has been lying through his teeth and is punishing him with this demeaning work. His heart sinking to new lows, the narrator opens up a third student’s envelope. Her name is Sister Irma, as she explains in her questionnaire, which accompanies the artwork, she has had no formal training in drawing, and is only diving into it because she was asked to teach the class. She encloses six samples of her work – and the narrator immediately feels he has stumbled upon a true, and rare, talent. Bubbling with new found enthusiasm, the narrator resists announcing his discovery to Yoshoto, for fear that Irma’s art might be taken away from him, and stashes away her envelope so that he may work on it on his own time that night – which he does, until four in the morning. He asks her to mail him all her previous work, and writes that the “days will be insufferable” until her envelope arrives. Unfortunately, the envelope doesn’t arrive. A few days later, M. Yoshoto hands the narrator a letter from the convent. The letter informs Yoshoto that “Father Zimmermann, through circumstances outside his control, was forced to alter his decision to allow Sister Irma to study at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres.” That evening, he writes a second letter to Sister Irma, inquiring if he by any chance he said something “obnoxious or irreverent” in his first letter. He follows that query by writing: “If you do not learn a few more rudiments of the profession, you will only be a very, very interesting artist the rest of your life instead of a great one. This is terrible, in my opinion. Do you realize how grave the situation is'” He then writes letters to his other students, reinstating them. We jump ahead in time, to learn that “Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres closed down less than a week later, for being improperly licensed.” “Blue Period” had three symbols that Salinger used in his writing: teeth, religious imagery, and chairs. The first symbol in “Blue Period” is teeth. Having had my wisdom teeth removed for real, unlike the dream jean had, I know the feeling of the dentist office and how it could be a bit of a nightmare. Jean has two intense experiences outside the display window of the orthopedic appliance shop that is underneath Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres. There is a lot of symbolism in those scenes, because they are very important to Jean's character. The following moment in "Blue Period" strikes us as peculiar: “Three late afternoons a week I spent in a dentist's chair, where, within a period of a few months, I had eight teeth extracted, three of them front ones.” (132) Unless Jean was also fitted with false teeth, this would have striking implications for his appearance, though he never mentions the tooth issue again. This is one of the moments that makes some readers think the story itself is a dream. In 1953, when this story was published, Sigmund Freud's “The Interpretation of Dreams” had been around for quite some time, and would have been part of the writing of a young intellectual like Salinger. Freud belittles the fact that such dreams indicate anxiety over "the death of a connection." Salinger is probably playing with both of these ideas, once again blending humor and sadness. Freud aside, we look at some other interpretations of the losing-teeth dream. These interpretations seem rather valid because Salinger was most likely aware of at least some of these occurrences. One could use them to get a possible deeper meaning to the story. According to the Dream Moods website, losing teeth is extremely common in dreams. These kinds of dreams usually indicate a feeling of powerlessness and insecurity in some aspect of your life. We can see how this would apply to Jean – the death of his mother has left him feeling powerless. Looking at this moment as a dream helps us open up symbolic possibilities, which some readers and critics will roundly reject. Some might suggest that such a reading causes us to neglect the obvious, the literal meaning of the scene. If one gets too caught up in the symbolism, one may not see the real implications of the scene. If his dental work is real, then on top of losing his mother, being a smart artsy kid, leaving Paris, and being friendless – Jean doesn't have any front teeth. Whether you take it symbolically or literally, a quick look at lost teeth gives us more insight into Jean. Before I move onto another body part, I want to ask you a question: is it significant that Jean's dentist and the priest for whom Sister Irma is substitute teaching are both named Zimmerman' Absolutely, one such as Salinger would definitely relate the two together because of their relationships with Jean. Religion is always on Jean's mind – he is a Salinger wonder-kid of a character. My definition of religion is: the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices: a world council of religion. As a person that doesn’t have a lot of religious beliefs, I couldn’t relate with Jean. I thought it was interesting that Jean told the Yoshotos that he is "a student of Buddhism”. There is some indication that he did so because he assumed the Yoshotos were Buddhists, and that if he'd know they were Presbyterians he would have said he was a student of Presbyterianism. He also claims to be an "evil-minded monk" of an unknown religion. Sister Irma is, of course, Catholic. Jean is seems particularly concerned with the crucifixion of Christ, which, he thinks, is the subject of the painting by Sister Irma with which he is impressed. For Christians, Christ is the ultimate martyr. As we'll see in a moment Jean doesn't want to be a martyr. This might be why he's more interested in the Mary Magdalene figure in Sister Irma's painting. He seems to identify more with Mary, a kind of outcast accepted by Christ, than with Christ himself. He wants to be loved and accepted more than he wants to be a religious leader, or saint. Jean doesn't want us to think of his experience as a mystical experience; that much is clear. But, let's break down the potentially confusing statement in the parenthesis. "Sortie" means "attack." St. Francis de Assisi devoted his life to helping lepers and other "outcasts." His mode of "attack" was to remain constant and vigilant in his work. A "Sunday leper-kisser" on the other hand, empathizes with lepers and outcasts, but isn't prepared to devote his or her life to their aid and care. The difference between the two is not just vertical, but horizontal, therefore total. The two groups, according to Jean, are worlds apart. Jean seems to identify himself as belonging to this latter variety. He wants us to understand that his experience was a personal spiritual experience. It helped his deal with his mother's death, and helped him learn to be a kinder person. It wasn't a message from god telling him to follow a certain religion or to bring that religion to others. If anything, the message is universal and simple: don't be so hard on people, including yourself. So, if his experience isn't wrapped up in a specific religion, and if it wasn't mystical, then why, does he write, "Everybody is a nun" in his diary after the experience' If you read Salinger’s novel, you probably thought about the dentist chair at some point. So, we can already assume that chairs are linked to pain and anxiety. Before we hear about the dentist chair, we hear that Jean couldn't get a seat on the bus because it was so crowded. The companion moment is the whole musical chairs business. “One afternoon, a week or so later, as I was coming out of the Ritz Hotel it seemed to me that all the seats from all the buses in New York had been unscrewed and taken out and set up in the street, where a monstrous game of Musical Chairs was in full swing.” Beyond the fact that chairs are important for sitting on and experiencing dental work' In his essay titled "Salinger's De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," Mike Tierce argues that Jean likes chairs more than the average guy. Having a seat makes him feel secure. Not having one makes him feel insecure. Like everything in the story, this is comic and tragic at the same time. The scene also ascribes much power to the imagination. Jean imagines the streets to be empty, and all of a sudden, he's alone. At this point, Jean can only see his own pain. In his mind the rest of the world is a having a huge party, playing musical chairs in the streets. He bends over backwards to reassure the Yoshotos that he is fine with a chairless bedroom, even though, as we find out later that he desperately wants a chair. He thinks that by adopting cultural habits of the Yoshotos he can somehow belong with them. He isn't experimenting here to see if he wants a chair or not. Just before he goes to bed after his epiphany he seems to give up this self-denial. As a result, writing becomes easier for him: “Before going to bed for the night, I wrote letters to my four just-expelled students, reinstating them. I said a mistake had been made in the administration department. Actually, the letters seemed to write themselves. It may have had something to do with the fact that, before sitting down to write, I'd brought a chair up from downstairs.” Notice also that he is experiencing ease of being nice, too. If this all sounds a little preachy and silly to you, you could argue that sometimes chairs are just chairs. In this case, Salinger might be using the chair as a parody of too-too serious discussions of symbolism. Perhaps he's throwing the chair out there as bait, and watching gleefully when we take it.