ABSTRACT
The need of the moment is for a start toward a historical account of how the word-baiters and silence-mongerers came to be what they are, a survey of the cultural facts underlying bookish assertions that human speech is valueless. Few things are plainer in J. D. Salinger's fiction than his desire that his complaint against non-literary or pseudo-literary wordmongers be understood as a religious gesture, a protest against selfishness and for organic existence. The villainous wordmongers—brisk, manipulative, self-confident, exactly rendered managers—are characters of apparent power. The writer asserts through his hero that if he as writer cannot be competent and responsible, if he as writer cannot be a man of power, then power does not exist: the word-mongering false elite should admit its futility and subside. The modern writer who damns the word, the modern technician or scientist who trusts it "within limits," are both conditioned by general history and by the history of literacy itself.
