What Kind of People Read the Catcher in the Rye
He'south Non Holden!
The one big mistake people make about Salinger and Catcher in the Rye.
J.D. Salinger, who is the subject of a new volume and flick, pictured during the liberation of Paris in 1944.
Photo courtesy Weinstein Company
I didn't want to write this piece. I've got Salinger fatigue, and I bet you practise too. Merely it ever happens. Salinger controversies (like Nabokov controversies) keep pullin' me back in.
Here I thought I'd addressed all the necessary Salinger questions a few months ago when I discovered the newly donated Salinger letters at the Morgan Library and wrote about Salinger's obsession with Vedantism and the price his fiction paid for his flight into what I called "spiritual self-medication." I argued that that "spiritual cocky-medication," then necessary to save his mind from wartime horrors, stole his soul in a fashion—or in any case blimp his later prose with undigested mystical didactism. Certainly the later on Glass family stories suffered for centering on the insufferable Seymour, the purported "holy man" and Vedantic sage, with whom I finally was so fed upwards I called him a "mystical windbag."
Only the new Salinger book and moving-picture show have pulled me back in, because they both perpetuate a fundamental mistake about The Catcher in the Rye, a error worth correcting.
Now at that place is much to adore near the reportorial coup of the book and film: the revelation that earlier his expiry, Salinger had scheduled five new books for publication in the years between 2015 and 2020. If this proves to be true, as managing director Shane Salerno and co-writer David Shields assure us information technology is, it would be exciting. Of course we take to take the give-and-take of the ii "split up and independent" bearding sources Salerno and Shields cite. Which is why the Salinger estate should abandon the completely unnecessary silence they've maintained till now, and so far neither confirming nor denying the written report about the new works. Come on guys, the Silent Author is expressionless. Nobody wants to play your reindeer games anymore.
I can't say I feel the same enthusiasm nearly the book'southward sketchier "revelation": That Salinger'due south psyche was distorted by his alleged shame over the alleged fact that he had only one testicle. Maybe my lack of enthusiasm for this "scoop" has been influenced past having to bargain with persistent ludicrous attempts to "explain" Adolf Hitler past ways of the dubious 1-testicle theory.
Withal, if you're a Salinger fan, the 700-page book is worth the read. And strangely the 700 pages seemed to get by faster than the ii-hour movie, which has been unnecessarily padded with all sorts of gimmicks plainly designed to make it more Cineplex friendly. And a bombastic musical score that sometimes makes it hard to take seriously. The film does leave out the sketchy i-testicle theory, you lot take to say that for information technology, merely it as well—compared to the book—slights the crucial Vedanta connection, declining to devote sufficient fourth dimension to investigate or examine the nature of the particular rabbit hole of mysticism Salinger slipped into. Information technology'due south probably the virtually important attribute of his later life—and work, alas. Ane matter I liked in the film that I first thought was a blunder: showing a "re-enactment" of Salinger typing on a typewriter with no paper in it at times turned out to be—someone connected with the film assured me—a deliberate metaphor. The sound of one manus borer. (I should note that the book and motion-picture show both reproduce the cover of my 1997 Esquire story on my journey into Salinger land, and the book cites a section of my New York Times Book Review assessment of Salinger'south daughter's memoir.)
But ane thing the book and the picture show have in common that must exist dealt with is a big fault about The Catcher in the Rye. I didn't pay much attention to Catcher in my recent piece because I was focused on the reverence for Salinger's Drinking glass family stories. And considering, allow's face information technology, The Catcher in the Rye has not lacked for attention.
Merely I was shocked to come across the recrudescence (gotta love that give-and-take!) of an simple fault near the fashion to read that book—whether you like information technology or not. A mistake about how to read any work of literature.
A mistake to be found in much of the commentary as well: that Salinger and Holden are the same. The idea is that Holden Caulfield is a pure uncritical expression of Salinger himself and that the book should be read as a simplistic working out of his wartime rage against the globe—which we're meant to share. It's what a number of intelligent people I've spoken to accept come abroad from the film feeling, something it sought to import with its hokey reenactment of Salinger fleeing like Holden into the mean streets after an editor called Holden "crazy."
In Salinger (the book) co-writer David Shields (who has written novels) opens an entire affiliate called "Assassins"—devoted to Mark David Chapman and a couple of other psychopathic idiots who take taken Holdenesque rage confronting phonies to horrific conclusions—by challenge that this is the "wrong" interpretation of the novel, this identification of Holden and Salinger.
And yet at that place it is on page 259, some 200 pages before, presented every bit the large reveal of all the authors' reporting on Salinger'southward inner torment. The co-writers selection up from a reported conversation in which Salinger (like any number of novelists) spoke of his character, Holden, to a friend, as if Holden actually existed.
Aha, the authors about loftier five each other: proof!
"What was at that place not to understand?" they inquire. "Holden did be. He was J.D. Salinger."
Um, no. Exercise I take to say the obvious? I feel like I'm telling a child almost Santa Claus. Or a 17-year-old (Holden's age and the historic period across which anyone should know this): Holden does not exist! Holden is a fictional graphic symbol in a novel by J.D. Salinger. And J.D. Salinger was a gifted 30-ish writer whose accomplishment in the novel was precisely the ability to distinguish and distance himself from Holden'south over-the-tiptop, hysterically polarized division of the globe into pure and impure people. To observe it with beautiful verisimilitude, to sympathize with its agog romanticism to an extent, but not to endorse its hysteria equally his own.
Affiche courtesy Weinstein Company
It's a mistake that whatsoever freshman English major should be able to avoid: disruptive the author of a work with the fiction—and characters—he creates. Not that there'southward never any relation, but 1 should exist able to read a work, to let it to speak for itself in complex ways, to recognize it may contain conflicting points of view, without having to mind-read its expressionless author or map his life into his work in a simplistic way. Or reduce the work to a unmarried betoken of view. The best novels resist reduction.
That's what fiction is about isn't it, you know? Creating "characters" who may exist different in some respects from the author? Characters who are not always spokespuppets, characters who sometimes may actually correspond different perspectives, perspectives that can be critiqued past the perspectives of other characters in the volume. In fact the disharmonize of multiple perspectives is one of the things that often make literature different from, richer than most mere memoirs.
Information technology's just so pointless to reduce the entire novel to some equation: S equals Holden minus ane you-know-what. And it emphasizes the impairment that biographical criticism can practice to our power to encounter a writer'south work. It'due south a reading that diminishes the achievement of the book drastically. Makes it seem to exist a novel that would entreatment only to those 17 or under. And by the way, if you haven't read it since yous were 17, I'd advise you reread it now. You'll appreciate but how different information technology seems to you as an developed, something lost apparently not just on the Salinger authors and Mark David Chapman but on many who haven't read it since adolescence.
Since the betoken is so of import—the point that the novel contains different points of view from Holden's, and contains its ain critique of Holden's betoken of view—I will make explicit a couple of those alien points of view J.D. Salinger (you know, the writer) conspicuously inserted, practically waving red flags for all simply those blinded by misapplied biographical criticism to see.
I am not the kickoff to indicate these out, of course. They have been obvious to only every intelligent reader and critic. But it's worth reiterating them, since the motion-picture show, and book, and even some commentators on both seem to be getting things confused.
one) Kickoff, if you haven't recognized how totally over-the-top Holden's condemnation of everyone but himself (and some nuns) for existence phony is (and if so yous are humour-deprived yous can't see how even Holden makes fun of himself for his ridiculous over-the-topness) you will notice, two-thirds of the mode through the volume, an absolutely key passage in a scene with Holden's former teacher, Mr. Antolini.
Aye, the scene has its ambiguities, just sometimes an ambiguous character can be seen speaking an unambiguous truth. Or at the very to the lowest degree offer an alternate perspective, from exterior rather than inside the protagonist'due south head. So when Antolini tells Holden he'south "riding for a terrible, terrible fall," it's not merely the communication of some judgmental phony adult. It's sharp-eyed and compassionate, and extremely sagacious about what'south wrong with Holden's simplistic blackness-and-white hate-the-phonies attitude. Antolini nails precisely where the "fall" is going to state Holden:
"It could be the kind [of fall] where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everyone who comes in looking equally if he might have played football in college. Then once more, you may pick up but enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a surreptitious betwixt he and I'."
Exactly! This is the corrective or at least conflicting betoken of view to the reader's natural trend to identify with such a mannerly phonation as Holden'southward. In Franny and Zooey, a similar (if more sentimentalized and religiously didactic) perspective rescues Franny (another Holden type who hates insensitive people a fleck also much) from her oversensitive nervous breakdown. The advice Seymour gave to the bottom Spectacles: to always remember of "the Fatty Lady"—the anonymous prole listener to the Glass family radio quiz show out in the sticks—equally Jesus Himself. Stop thinking you're meliorate than anybody.
ii) And then there's the point of view of Phoebe, Holden'south idolized younger sis. She doesn't join his compassion political party. She's truly a wise kid who sees he's suffering but has little patience with his self-righteous fecklessness and lack of concern for how information technology will affect those who dearest him. She's the one to whom Holden tells his k "catcher in the rye" fantasy. The one he gins upwards from misquoting the Robert Burns verse form "If a trunk catch a body comin' through the rye." Almost how he imagined himself in a field full of kids playing virtually "some crazy cliff" where his job was to catch them before they fell off. (The autumn he was heading for, you could say.)
Phoebe responds with acerbic impatience to this fantasy of chivalrous grandiosity by drily correcting the quotation he derives it from. (It's "If a body meet a torso," not "grab.") She'due south not buying it. Neither is Salinger. If Salinger seems to weight the signal of view of any character in the volume it'south non Holden, information technology'due south Phoebe.
3) Similarly, the fact that Salinger chosen the book The Catcher in the Rye does non mean he endorses Holden's fantasy. No matter how Mark David Chapman read it, the book is not meant to be taken every bit advice on how to hate phonies and salvage all the innocents in the globe from terrible, terrible people like John Lennon.
4) There's also the fact that Holden is undergoing a nervous breakdown (he writes the book from some rehab-like facility) and that his emotional life has non recovered from the loss of his little brother Allie to childhood cancer. And and then his point of view on the world derives from (justifiably) disordered thinking. One shouldn't take him as a guru. Indeed, if I had 1 criticism to make of Catcher, which is otherwise a work of art exquisitely poised betwixt romantic affidavit and realistic critique of Holden, information technology is that this dead-child MacGuffin is a kind of over-obvious literary thumb on the scales that is actually unnecessary, makes it too much a sob story. The reader should be able to glean that this is if not an unreliable narrator, an unstable narrator, fifty-fifty without that detail.
5) Did I mention humor? Let me mention information technology once again. What makes the book so keen, what makes Holden's cocky-pity tolerable, even enjoyable in a way, is simply how funny he tin can exist almost himself as much equally or more than most others. He's almost always onto his own game. Which suggests (since as I've tried to signal out Holden isn't existent) we can aspect this sense of humor to J.D. Salinger. Information technology'southward something purely delightful and something oftentimes frightfully absent in afterwards Glass stories no matter how much he strains. Information technology'southward besides something sadly missing from the new Salinger book and film. But it was there in one case and you take to accept a center of rock non to laugh at it.
I should say that—setting some reservations about the cinematic hyping of the melodrama, and that mistake most Catcher aside—I similar Shane Salerno'due south obsessiveness, I don't notice it offensive that he cared that much most a author he loved. And one must pay tribute to his doggedness and perseverance—and its payoff. He found the respond (if, as I hope, his sources are right) to the question we all take; volition there be more Salinger work? And some of the new stuff, including a counterintelligence officeholder's diary and a Earth War II thriller, sounds truly intriguing.
And a bang-up relief! It almost sounds as if Salinger plant a way to escape the Glass family trap (the trapped family Glass?) by writing explicitly about his wartime experiences.
And I will say there is one revelation overlooked by most reviewers that I loved almost the new Salinger volume. When I was in loftier school I wrote a super earnest column in my high school newspaper protesting the cancellation of a now long-forgotten sitcom chosen "It'south a Human's World" subsequently but a scattering of episodes. I wasn't sure why it struck me but it was about iii kids living on a houseboat with their father and it was funny in a subtle way. It wasn't similar other sitcoms.
Then I discovered in the new Salinger book—an example of some of the great reporting to be found there—that the creator of that serial, Peter Tewksbury, was influenced and obsessed by Salinger, sent him several reels of the evidence, showed upwardly at his firm, and even got invited in by Salinger, who liked the show and then much he agreed to work on a movie script with Tewksbury. (This tale refutes the fable that Salinger had an iron-clad opposition to any film version of his stories since the early on fiasco of My Foolish Heart, a silly film adaptation of the "Uncle Wiggly" story.)
Indeed the Tewksbury project got as far as casting. That's right: Salinger was ready to allow a film to be made of one of his most cute brusque stories, "For Esmé With Love and Squalor," to be directed by Tewksbury. They had a script! Mainly Salinger's own words. The just hitch was that Salinger wanted to be the ane to cast Esmé. And Tewksbury—in what I experience is a heartbreaking mistake—decided he couldn't work with Salinger's selection.
This, it seems to me, is the great reveal of the book, the route not taken. It seems tragically foolish for Tewksbury not to have gone alee, rolled the dice, taken the chance. Who knows, could have been a disaster, but could have portended something wonderful. I could have told you that from my high school newspaper editorial. I was 17.
Source: https://slate.com/culture/2013/09/interpreting-catcher-in-the-rye-the-one-big-mistake-people-make.html
0 Response to "What Kind of People Read the Catcher in the Rye"
Post a Comment