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.