Re: I luv Holden
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Thu, 02 Jul 1998 11:04:47 +1000
> "Salinger made SO much fun of Holden. I don't
> think the reader was meant to really take Holden seriously at all. Look
> at how much of a fool he's made out to be. Salinger doesn't have a very
> high opinion of him at all."
> So what do you think? Not my own primary reaction, but it definitely has
> some grains of truth...
Ohhhh boy. I think this interpretation is a real shame, tantamount to
Salinger abusing his own Inner Allie - who you could see as being Holden.
True, Salinger did once say that Holden was himself as a young man, but we
have to be careful with things like that, as I have already emphasised. The
only way I can make the interpretation your friend offers work is by
comparing it to another situation that I was in. I wrote a play about
teenage life which was a big hit, won awards etc. I toured it around small
country towns and the like, and kids would come up to us practically with
tears in their eyes saying `I can't believe it. This is the best thing that
ever happened to us. Someone actually *cares* about how we feel!' Then, we
put on a production at a trendy inner city theatre and pulled audiences
full of cynical inner city types. And in this case, the laughs were all in
different places and it made me sick at heart, because they were laughing
*at* the characters, not with them, as the teenagers were. They saw it as
kitsch, a kind of `I can't believe we were like that once'. This made me
so sad, because the worst thing anyone can do is forget they were a child
once. I can't figure out whether this is your friend's problem or
Salinger's but I suspect that it's your friend's. I really, really hope
that JDS wasn't laughing at Holden, and I think with equal conviction that
he wasn't, because it would invalidate the whole exercise, really.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442