Re: Holden and Mr Antolini
Brendan McKennedy (suburbantourist@hotmail.com)
Thu, 16 Apr 1998 22:07:04 -0700 (PDT)
>I'm glad you brought this up because it's something I've wanted to
>address for ages. Has anyone ever noticed the strong undercurrent of
>pedophilia and child abuse that pervades TCIR ? To me it's a real
>untapped vein, and one that's potentially a lot richer than the
>`clinically depressed' one.
We had this discussion, Camille, sometime around last December, soon
after I arrived--but I'd love it to come into action again. It's a sort
of issue that never really comes to any closure.
My sense of the story is that it is *not* pedophilia, but a very
different type of affection between adults and children. I believe that
there is a gray plane between sexual abuse and the paternal hug. In our
culture, though (notice how "our culture" includes Australia...I'm kind
of shooting broadly here), the danger to children is too great to allow
any gray plane.
In an anthropology class, we discussed a traditional African culture in
which young men, as a puberty rite, must swallow the semen of the adult
males, in order to be able, by their reckoning, to produce their own
semen. These boys grow up to function without any problem in their
culture.
I don't think there was any semen-swallowing going on between Holden and
Mr Antolini--my point is that Abuse is a culturally and sometimes
subculturally-defined term, and it seems to me that Salinger's
protagonists are a sub-sub-culture who define all social/ethical
guidelines and judgements by their own, very unique, subjectivity. I
don't think we can judge Antolini's action or Holden's reaction by our
own social laws. It is the conflict between status quo and individual
morality that forms the major conflict in Catcher, after all.
Brendan
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