By Abigail Cheever
The epithet "phony" used to be omnipresent through the postwar interval within the usa. It was once a simple appellation for many who seemed cynically to comply to codes of habit for social approbation or development. but Holly Golightly "isn't a phony simply because she's a true phony," says her agent in Breakfast at Tiffany's. In exploring this comment, Abigail Cheever examines the ways that social effect was once notion to deform contributors in midcentury American tradition. How may somebody either be and never be herself even as? the reply lies within the period's advanced angle towards social effect. If being genuine implies that one's performative self is based on one's genuine self, to be a true phony is to lack an genuine self as some degree of reference--to lack a self that's self sufficient of the social international. in line with Cheever, Holly Golightly "is like a phony in that her ideals are completely in keeping with social norms, yet she is actual insofar as these ideals are all she has."Real Phonies starts within the postwar interval to ascertain the twinned phenomena of phoniness and authenticity around the moment half the 20 th century--from youngsters like Holly Golightly and Holden Caulfield to activities brokers like Jerry Maguire. Countering the severe assumption that, with the emergence of postmodernity, the appropriate of "authentic self" disappeared, Cheever argues that trouble with the authenticity of folks proliferated through the earlier half-century regardless of an important ambiguity over what that self may possibly glance like.Cheever's research is dependent round 5 key sorts of characters: children, the insane, serial killers, and the figures of the assimilated Jew and the "company man." particularly, she unearths a preoccupation in those works now not rather a lot with faked conformity yet with the scary suggestion of genuine uniformity--the thought that Holly, and others like her, may perhaps each one really be kind of like all people else.
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Additional info for Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post-World War II America
Example text
But contrary to his wishes, Holden’s inability to win does not render life not a game — the nature of games is that someone must lose — and no one else will quit playing just because Holden says stop. Consequently all his attempts not to act, not to play the game on ethical grounds (it is not fair), only look as if he is playing badly. What Holden imagines as a principled refusal to participate, his teacher, and the larger culture in which he moves more generally, views only as poor sportsmanship.
Holden’s situation is having no outside position from which he can register his objections, and it is a problem of which he is acutely aware. Although the solution he stumbles upon looks naïve, it constitutes an active choice of the type central to Sartrean existential philosophy’s version of the ethical life. Holden decides: I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend to be one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any of those goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me.
It motivates his desire to be “the catcher in the rye”: the only “big kid” amid thousands of “little kids” whose job it is “to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff ” (173) — that is, if they start to grow up. . ” (172). It is a good question. Since phoniness for Holden constitutes deception for social advancement, and complete self-knowledge is impossible, then any contact with the social runs the risk of inauthenticity. The result is a profound anxiety about motive — about whether one’s actions stem from authentic impulses, or whether they are the product of external influences.