Subject: Re: BANANAFISH digest 10
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Sun Jun 15 1997 - 20:10:32 GMT
To respond to a couple of messages in one economical swoop....
>> I wonder how many lives _The Catcher in the Rye_ has saved already, and
>> how many it could have saved, if the right people had read it at the right
>> time. I don't think I would be dead if I had never read it, but my life
>> would certainly be different.
I think it had a significant subtle influence on me, but one part of that
influence was unusual. It seems strange to me, now. It seemed odd back
when I first read the book, but of course I didn't have the perspective I
have now.
I attended a high school in New York that was pretty competitive, and that
by my senior year had clearly stratified into layers. There were the kids
who were going to work in the family business or trade. There were a few
Einsteins who would turn out to be evil or benevolent geniuses one day.
There were some unfocused students (like me). And there was the group that
was heading out to the world of the Ivy League, and who were clearly on a
faster track of life than I was on.
I had made friends with one of the "boy most likely" guys, who was heading
off to Yale, and who was already beginning to dress differently and to
distance himself from New York in a strange way that I can't really
describe. Toward the end of our senior year I asked him what he thought of
this novel that had seized my imagination a year or two earlier, which was,
of course, Catcher. (Incredibly, this fellow and I seem to be the only
people in the U.S. who did not have The Catcher in the Rye assigned as
school reading. At the very early stage when I became aware of the book, I
thought it was a boy's book about sports, that a "catcher in the rye" meant
something to do with being an unseasoned athlete, a rookie, a greenhorn.)
To my extreme surprise, the "boy most likely" not only hadn't read it; he
had not ever heard of Salinger. So I loaned him my paperback copy, and he
hurled himself into the task of reading it as seriously as he had
approached getting into a good school. But: he never gave it back to me,
and he never told me what he thought of it. I don't know what happened to
the book, but I imagined that either he took it very seriously and carried
it up to New Haven and beyond, or that he tossed it aside the way he tossed
off his New York roots.
I never found the answer, and in a sense don't really want to know, in much
the same way I have never attended any reunion of any kind for any school
I've ever attended.
But the book changed my life, certainly. It helped me tell myself that
even though I wasn't going off to an Ivy League school, I still had a lot
that I could make of myself. And I don't say that in a way intended to
offend anyone at one of the Ivy schools. It's more along the lines of
framing my reference to the book in the world I lived in.
>The thing about Catcher is, it's great to know you're not the only
>person ever to feel completely like shit, but at the end, what happens
>to Holden? He compromises, he's gotta go back to school, back into the
>phony, crappy, ugly world.
But his voice, his unwillingness to unthinkingly walk into adulthood (like
the guys who want to talk about how many miles to the gallon their cars
get), stays with you, and is an example you can apply to your life, if you
feel that you yourself are at the bottom of some barrel or another.
>It doesn't make you feel 'Yes, I can change things! Life CAN be great.'
>It just makes you feel that no matter how hard to try to reject it,
>you're still a part of humanity, you start 'missing' people. It's not
>going to go away, or get any better.
"It" may not go away. But the book suggests that, like Holden himself, you
can eventually be a different person ... with a different point of view
than you had before ... and perhaps that you will be better prepared to
deal with the circumstances that come your way.
>And as for suicide, if you're going to kill yourself, you're going to
>kill yourself. You're not going to harbour a wish to survive because of
>a fictional character from a book set in the fifties (?) who, in the
>end, is STILL getting harrassed about whether or not he's going to apply
>himself at school.
I guess the question we all have to face, in some way, is: how are we going
to react to those pressures? Are we going to let them define us, or are we
going to strike out on our own and define ourselves on our terms? That's
the valuable part I took away from the book -- that it was fine for me to
be an individual who had ideas that didn't quite fit the surroundings I
came from.
In fact, I have always thought Vonnegut spoke most convincingly of suicide.
Once he described his family's disposition regarding suicide and he offered
an example like this:
Q: What's X + Y +Z divided by A?
A: I think I'll just kill myself instead.
... his point being that for some people, suicide is always on the short
list of available options. And it takes a lot of effort to unlearn such an
option.
>But that's just my two cents, just little me, no college degree, no
>thesis, just MTV and a bottle of coke...
... and as good a person as any to offer an opinion on this! None of us
has a degree or any other touchstone that allows us to interpret the book
better than anyone else. Even if I learned nothing else from Salinger,
that alone was worth the price of admission.
--tim o'connor
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