Hermeneutics

I suspect I enjoy reading about books more than I enjoy reading books themselves. Thumbing through hermeneutical works gives me a sense of voyeuristic laziness. A book about another book—if it’s any good—does the hard part of thinking for the reader, and leaves us with the pleasant task of filling in the gaps ourselves. It’s like taking a guided tour of Hell while Virgil shields us from the fires with a panel of heat-filtering Plexiglas.

By reading Ominous Whoosh, I can savour the haunted air of Twin Peaks without actually setting foot on ghost-infested grounds. Elden Ring lore-videos decode and re-encode an otherwise arcane game for me. House of Leaves has a similar appeal—while not explicitly hermeneutical, it’s technically a book about another book (about another book).

In J. D. Salinger’s Seymour, an Introduction, we read about the titular poet’s works, but never the poems themselves.

The next-to-last poem is about a young married woman and mother who is plainly having what it refers to here in my old marriage manual as an extramarital love affair. Seymour doesn’t describe her, but she comes into the poem just when that cornet of his is doing something extraordinarily effective, and I see her as a terribly pretty girl, moderately intelligent, immoderately unhappy, and not unlikely living a block or two away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She comes home very late one night from a tryst—in my mind, bleary and lipstick-smeared—to find a balloon on her bedspread. Someone has simply left it there. The poet doesn’t say, but it can’t be anything but a large, inflated toy-balloon, probably green, like Central Park in spring.

Is this better than reading the poem? It might well be. Salinger continues:

The other poem, the last one in the collection, is about a young suburban widower who sits down on his patch of lawn one night, implicitly in his pajamas and robe, to look at the full moon. A bored white cat, clearly a member of his household, comes up to him and rolls over, and he lets her bite his left hand as he looks at the moon.

Lest I forget: there’s a Stack Exchange devoted entirely to biblical hermeneutics.