A WORD AND A THING IN THE SYSTEM OF J. D. SALINGER’S POETICS OF SILENCE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17072/2037-6681-2018-1-117-124Keywords:
J. D. Salinger, poetics of silence, alienation, existentialism, man and thing, word and thing.Abstract
The present paper deals with the phenomenon of silence in J. D. Salinger’s prose. The research covers a wide range of Salinger’s works, with the main attention given to the novel The Catcher in the Rye. The peculiarities of silence are represented through relationships of two equally important categories in Salinger’s artistic world: “a word” and “a thing”. This question has not been sufficiently studied by specialists, so the author focuses her attention on the new, vital problem. The correlation of the categories under consideration is obvious: with the growth of the material world, the importance of the word decreases; and vice versa, with the desire of characters to preserve “the genuine” word, the connection with the outer space disappears. Salinger’s attention to the opposition “material – spiritual”, “outside – inner” is clarified in the paper based on the philosophical and existential positions of the writer. It is important to emphasize that the process of alienation is typical of the mid-20th century bourgeois society with its consumption values. Losing the spiritual guiding lines, a person loses his inner core and, as a consequence, becomes an object of the outer space. In this connection, Salinger’s characters are perceived as mechanically as a thing. Under the circumstances, the word in Salinger’s texts is also perceived as an inanimate object. The main aspiration of Salinger’s characters is the desire to protect their own word from the outer, depersonalizing world, to stop its turning into a thing. They feel the meaninglessness of the word during small talk, they literally touch the hollowness of the word, its outer, material form being the only one. That is why they become silent, seek salvation in their inner, speechless reclusion. The author comes to the conclusion that the correlation of “a thing” and “a word” in Salinger’s texts determines the main features of his poetics of silence.References
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