Re: among the innocent
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Thu, 26 Aug 1999 10:11:56 -0400
At 7:11 AM +0100 on 8/26/1999, Scottie wrote:
> I'll have to read the Catcher again but the image I retain
> over the years of the essential Holden is not really that
> of the bully's victim.
I'm talking from memory too, so forgive any lapses....
Once Holden is out of Pencey, yes -- he turns into an urban creature,
essentially a loner. But at school, whether in real-time or in
remembered episodes, we see him taunted, beaten (by his roommate),
made to feel alienated by "Mr. Bourgeois" for having a nice pen and
good luggage. He's "ostracized" by the fencing team, of which he is
inexplicably the leader. He's lumped in with Ackley in a kind of
Loser's Lounge. And all that attitude, I think, colors his urban
adventure, where, for instance, he has his little run-in with Maurice.
> With his good quality luggage & the urbanity with which
> he orders drinks, he seems rather to belong with the crowd
> for whom he retains such contempt. But it's essentially
> the contempt of the snob for the canaille that seem everywhere
> to surround him: the people with no taste, the people with no
> imagination, the people who're impressed with money, the people
> totally without nobility.
I do agree with you here, absolutely.
Oddly, I just, after many years, watched the movie "Metropolitan,"
and highly recommend it to people in this forum. There's one young
Holdenish man from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks (he lives
on the West Side of Manhattan, not far from where Seymour shot
marbles) and he falls in with a crowd from the East Side (where the
Glasses live and where Sol Salinger moved his family upon attaining a
certain degree of success). He has a superficial hostility toward
the world of "high society," but he finds himself drawn to the group.
If anyone has read the Salinger books and wants to see captured on
film the closest thing to what Salinger was writing about, take a
look at that movie by Whit Stillman. It captures, too, what Scottie
said -- the attitude of contempt about the people around you, when
you gradually realize you're not so different.
> I don=92t think his despair is reaction to personal misfortune
> or victimisation. It's a simple recognition of the way things
>are:
> a recognition that the rest of the world seems either not to
>share
> or at least not to acknowledge.
Agreed. The difference, I think, is that he personalizes it -- he
takes on "the way things are" as if they were his burden, even to the
point of spending himself penniless and then pitying himself in
Phoebe's room. I don't think he's one of those boys in the articles
I mentioned. But I recognized slivers of him in them, and of them in
him.
> In this, I've always identified with him. And continue to do
>so.
Ah, so at least two of us have something in common here.... (With a
<*grin*>, knowing there are undoubtedly more.) The interesting thing
is that you and I have had varying amounts of time to grow away from
that identification, yet we have not. Which is why, I would argue,
Holden Caulfield continues to maintain a literary chokehold on his
category of archetype.
--tim