Re: if the elevator operators are arch-enemies

Wait a minute... just to get back to Scottie's earlier post for a minute -- wouldn't the belief that some people are mediocre, or indeed a belief in a mediocre majority, conflict with principles of nondiscrimination?

If there are other college students on the list, I'd also be curious to know if y'all inhabit, temporarily at least, universes in which the beauty in things that are truthful and/or human is obscured by an unshakable faith in external mediocrity?
or perhaps internal invincibility?

Scottie -- Is this necessarily true of most adolescents?
"What little boys do NOT attribute to their antagonists is 'mediocrity'. That's a concept that only appears with the insecurities of adolescence."

>From my experience, there is a significant contingent of parents and educators that, consciously or not, reinforce the idea to adolescents that their antagonists are irrefutable, that there is a hierarchy that must observed, that life is played by the rules to cite CITR. Is it a less meaningful version of Holden's search to see antagonists as mediocre, if only to affirm that what <i>onself</i> have chosen must be right?

clinging madly to faith in oneself, when there is a sinking suspicion of wrongness or collapse of invincibility...

I'd also want to know what Salinger thinks of the narrator in "The Laughing Man," but alas, it's hard to know.

luke

-------Original Message-------
From: Scottie Bowman <rbowman@indigo.ie>
Sent: 08/03/03 09:07 AM
To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
Subject: Re: if the elevator operators are arch-enemies

>
>
    I think it must, as ever, be the extremely high saccherine
    content that puts my teeth on edge.

    When writing about young children, it's almost impossible
    to avoid, on the one hand, condescension; or, on the other,
    sentimental idealisation. Only the greatest writers - ? Tolstoy,
    Dickens? - have ever managed it. Salinger cloyingly embraces
    both.

    Most little boys at some time or other fantasise themselves
    as secret agents, finger-pistoling teachers, mothers & sisters
    & perhaps even accompanied by a canine partner. Nothing droll
    or unusual about that. What little boys do NOT attribute
    to their antagonists is 'mediocrity'. That's a concept that only
    appears with the insecurities of adolescence.

    Remember, the narrator is actually drooling affectionately over
    the nine year old version of HIMSELF. He is dismissing what
    he (now in his ?twenty-ninth? year) thinks of as the great mediocre
    majority - the words put retrospectively into his own lisping,
lovable,
    ickle mouss. That's what makes its arrogance especially embarrassing.

    Scottie B.

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Received on Sun Aug 3 16:25:09 2003