This post is about canonicity. The question of whether the works of the late 20th Century American author J.D. Salinger belong in the literature canon, Carles reveals, is a meaningless question if not an intentionally misleading and distracting one. The question Salinger's novel must make us consider is the politics of the canon itself and the identity investments that have been made by those who have made it their duty to police it.
Obviously reading novels is no longer the axiomatic locus of enculteration for youth, an idea Carles gently but pointedly mocks: "We must judge books by their covers in the modern world because of the rapid production output of the information economy," he notes, pointing out that cultural consumption for display and for show has by and large trumped earlier modes of consumption that supplied solace, instruction or even escape. Literature is now no more than a "brand extension," Carles suggests, and in those terms, the canon is a repository of dead trademarks, inefficiently leveraged as they are shackled to the anti-marketing ideologies of the academy. "I am not sure if ‘the brand’ of the book was very marketable," Carles proclaims, suggesting that the means of judging a work have dramatically shifted, that a fair appraisal must take into account the mediation of the market and of the media itself. "Catcher in the Rye should have been re-made/adapted into a modern alt tween flick/MTV series in order to see if the elements of the story truly stood the test of time.’" The new canons are unfolding before our eyes, perhaps, each on everyone's screen, in the programming we choose to extricate from the long and short tails.
Carles's analysis of the novel centers on the narratological mode: "Holden Caulfield seemed like he was a ’snarky’ bro." He then contextualizes the issue of the protagonist's defiantly univocality within the problematic of technology, which has endorsed a disseminated and decentralized heteroglossia, epitomized by the open discourses of the internet sphere: "Unfortunately, they didn’t have blogs back then, so he wasn’t able to become a snarkblogger and escape from society by ’sitting at home on his laptop and commenting abt how sillie stuff/people are.’"
Technology is implicated in the discourse of freedom and the freedom of discourse. The negation that Salinger sought to express or condemn in Holden Caulfield is rendered indeterminate in the passage of historical time and radically destabilized by the transmission through many vectors of subjective responses to the novel's interpolation of subjectivity. Many voices, one voice? Who speaks the speaker? Can Holden's "voice" be decoded by readers now familiar with a much different and instantaneous projection of negativity and resistance, of "angst" as such transsubstantiated in the consumerist cauldron of online self-fashioning. Or does he speak a self-consuming discourse whose skepticism undercuts its own legitimacy -- complaints about complainers cancelling themselves out,as they do in today's online welter of opinion, conveniently nullifying dissent in a chorus of rejectionism.
To quote French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser, "The idea of a 'pure and simple' non-overdetermined contradiction is, as Engels said of the economist turn of phrase, 'meaningless, abstract, senseless.' That it can serve as a pedagogical model, or rather that it did serve as a polemical and pedagogical instrument at a certain point in history does not fix its destiny for all time." Carles implicitly refers to this passage when he raises the question of whether Salinger's lasting influence may be supplanted by children's writer R.L. Stine, the author of the popular "Goosebumps" series of novels.
Carles suggests that online sociability may be destroying the ability to maintain a canon's impermeability: "Do yall think that books will play an important role in carving the ‘alternative spirit of tomorrow’? Or will most tweens just chill on the internet forever?" That is, will the sharing imperative of online presence banish the "alternative" spirit, which the humanist canon sought to reify and dignify as the transcendent respect for the uniqueness of every individual, from the world of the future. Has Salinger's death heralded the beginning of the post-humanist age in earnest?
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