Re: Salinger's world

Laughing Man (the_laughing_man@hotmail.com)
Wed, 11 Aug 1999 02:32:43 -0700 (PDT)

>     When the most protected of us can't escape at least
>     visual images of the violence & unspeakable squalor
>     that a very large number of our brothers & sisters
>     have to confront day in day out, isn't there something
>     frivolous about a young woman collapsing onto
>     a daybed because of spiritual self-doubt?  Does her creator
>     ever really escape the world of the Upper East Side
>     sophisticates who - this year - have taken up Zen,
>     or some non-vulgar version of Christianity but who -
>     next year - are quite as likely to go abroad with
>     the Peace Corps & - the year after that - may hunt
>     their salvation in cutting edge Art?

Bullseye, Scottie, or should I say Hamlet, prince of Denmark?

Were we not “a bunch of rich boys[/girls] with too much time on [our] 
hands”, would we be posting here, I wonder?

When I first recognized myself in the characters in JDS’s stories – and in 
many similar works of fiction and non-fiction - my better half, my Seymour, 
my of seven years older brother, accused me of turning into a real bourgeois 
character forgetting the larger picture, merely concentrating on the process 
of individualization and, hence, the problems of the rich. In those days he 
was *very* left wing, to put it mildly, and didn’t really approve of my 
sinking deep into the classics and “forgetting” about society. And my 
answer, was that the “revolution” has to start from the inside, from the 
awakened mind; we had to address “quality” as well as “quantity”. -A real 
Star Wars-moment, with Yours Truly starting to feel the power of the Dark 
Side. I could almost hear myself, speaking in the voice of James Earl Jones, 
saying “ So, you've accepted the truth”, my breathing problems enhanced 
every second. Without realizing it, I was using the rhetoric of the 
conservatives. (Now you see, the Laughing-Man-bag over my head is really a 
black one.)

Seriously (well, semi-seriously at least; more than that I cannot promise), 
isn’t what Mr Bowman is saying what has been said since the 60’s, that JDS 
is appealing to the “high brow” and “middle brow” audience alike, but not 
for the same reasons? Or do you [Scottie] really mean the stories 
themselves, and/or the characters in them, *are* indeed superficial?

If the characters were not as similar to real life sophisticates we all know 
(or perhaps even think we are), would they come alive as well as they do? 
Part of what fascinates me about them is really that: we cannot *really* be 
sure of what is superficial and what is not in ourselves and in others. Yet 
we have to try.

/TLM



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