Taps for The Catcher in the Rye and His Moral World

J.D. Salinger used skaz to give readers of Catcher in the Rye  the illusion of the spontaneous speech of a Pency preppy sickened by his transition to adulthood in the post-war years that gave birth to the phoney 50's.  Salinger's oft-celebrated "narrative voice" helped popularize his novel among a generation of  would-be hip schooteachers who assigned it to their crummy students.  In today's postindustrial American culture, many of the products that carry the Williams-Sonoma moniker rely on applied graphics that are pulled from the look and feel of another era to impute  "character" to the brand.  But just as Holden Caufield failed in his heroic quest to use the familiar spaces of his New York City as imaginiary places of healing, so too does Catcher in the Rye now fail the postmodern test of performativity vis-a-vis the hegemonic symbolic-moral regime of the therapeutic worldview. What works with buyers of consumables doesn't work with readers raised in the therapeutic ethos.  The Catcher in the Rye is a vanishing icon.   

Robert McCrum in the secret history of JD Salinger gets it right.  J.D. Salinger's hero doesn't need prozac; he needs to be heard as an avatar of the experience and the inner lives of those World War II combat infrantyman who found themselves demobilized among civilians who did not ask and soldiers who did not write: one of death's men.

 Tacent satis laudant.

Inner Directeds Are Like Pagans Today

 Blogging creates the itch to scratch the lacunae of self realization

My post of  Friday, January 29, 2010 , "A Counteractant to the Anodyne of my My Middle-Range Concepts" wherin I listed my "big four"  taken-for-granted operational concepts, has left me itching for a gestalt. 

Ever since I posted it, I've realized something is missing. Finding myself in a beleaguered position in my evaluation of  the tenor of the ascendant  socio-political ideology in power in Washington DC today, I now comprehend that my "big four" should mirror the "big five" trophy animals celebrated in Safari lore. Hence, let me herein augment my list to include the concepts of inner directed vs. outer directed cultural types.  Obviously, I now realize, my itch has been occasioned  by my affiliation with the first type, an existential existence seemingly similar to the last pagan in the classical world  who heard the words, "Tell them the Great Pan is Dead." 
\
"... Great God, I'd rather be

A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,

And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

A Counteractant to the Anodyne of My Middle-Range Concepts

What socio - cultural theories of the middle range constitute your taken-for-granted analytic "iron-cage" of at- hand conceptual tools?  For me the big four are (1) Robert Merton's manifest and latent functions and dysfunction, (2) ethnoscience's emic and etic  levels of analysis, (3) the paradigmatic analysis of  binary oppositions,  and  (4) Max Weber's  methodology of “ideal type” (Idealtypus) and “rationalization thesis.”

Thanks to the blog Paralipomena (2), whose posting  " Has the theory of the Protestant work ethic just collapsed?"  reproduces Damian Thompson's article of the same name in the Telegraph,  I now have a hot-off-the grill empirical study to serve as a temporary counteractant to the anodyne of idealism as manifest in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  Now let me see if I can appreciate the latent function of Mr. Thompson's squibb.

Two Takes on Andrew Lange's Suicide

Dontcha just love the Higher Ed worldview that translates the suicide of Andrew Lange into news of increased "counseling " jobs at CalTech.  Equally affecting is  Higher Ed's subtext that juxtaposes self-murder with the supposed raison de vivre of one million dollars in prize money.

... lost in time like tears in the rain

Andrew Lange let us see that the universe is flat. In his end, he showed how despite a self  that comprehends time behind and time before a man can self-determine his place in the cosmos by choosing his time to die.  In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius has words fit for this great cosmologist.  

You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgement, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.

Altogether the interval is small between birth and death; and consider how much trouble, and in company with sort of people and in what feeble body this interval is laboriously passed. Do not then consider life is a thing of any value. For look to the immensity of time behind thee, and to the time which is before thee, another boundless space. In this infinity then what is the difference between him who lives three days and him who lives three generations?