Re: Salinger's world

erespess@inil.com
Wed, 11 Aug 1999 12:13:40 -0400

>>     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 =ECa bunch of rich boys[/girls] with too much time on [our]
>hands=EE, would we be posting here, I wonder?

bingo.  i think you both have some brilliant points here.

the following quote from bell hooks (taken from her book *FEMINIST THEORY:
from margin to center*),very clearly addresses that differences in
experience create different world views about society's problems.  although
it deals specifically with feminism, it seems very fitting in the context
of this salinger's world thread.

"Specific problems and dilemmas of leisure class white housewives were real
concerns that merited consideration and change but they were not the
pressing political concerns of masses of women.  Masses of women were
concerned about economic survival, ethnic and racial discrimination, etc."

in speaking of a particular author, betty friedan, hooks explains that when
friedan stated women wanted more than their husbands, their children and
their houses, "she did not discuss who would be called in to take care of
the children and maintain the home if women more like herself were freed
from their house labor...she did not speak of the needs of women without
men, without children, without homes... nor did she move beyond her own
life experience to acquire an expanded perspective on the lives of women in
the united states.  I say this not to to discredit her work.  It remains a
useful discussion of the impact of sexist discrimination on a select group
of women.  Examined from a different perspective, it can also be seen as a
case study of narcissism, insensitivity, sentimentality, and
self-indulgence which reaches its peak when Friedan, in a chapter titled
'Progressive Dehumanization,' makes a comparison between the psychological
effects of isolation on white housewives and the impact of confinement on
the self-concept of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps."

in the same way, i don't see anything inherently wrong with beleiving that
in your life "people are phonies".  the dangerous thing is when we lose
sight of this being only one problem in very vast world of arguably more
pressing problems.

>Seriously (well, semi-seriously at least; more than that I cannot promise),
>isn=EDt what Mr Bowman is saying what has been said since the 60=EDs, that =
JDS
>is appealing to the =EChigh brow=EE and =ECmiddle brow=EE 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 kno=
w
>(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.

my feeling on this is that if salinger had implied that his characters
somehow had it worse than everyone else because of their "real" problems,
then his writing would seem superficial and self-indulgent.  personally
though, i have never gotten the feeling that salinger intended to portray
his characters in that light.  they seem to be concerned with their own
difficulties, but not above others' difficulties.  i have not read much of
salinger's work outside of his widely published books, so if his work
published in magazines did lean in that direction, i haven't read it.

elizabeth