Subject: Re: John Romano
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliabaader@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Oct 16 2001 - 10:55:05 GMT
--- Paul Miller <phm@midsouth.rr.com> wrote:
> Here is a 1979 N Y Times article on Salinger's work by John Romano.
> He makes a couple of mistakes of fact, but it is an interesting read.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/13/specials/salinger-song.html
Agreed. Thanks for the link, Paul. (I'm very very far behind in all
things; sorry to answer this in such an untimely manner.)
Perhaps the most thought-provoking part of the article was the
following:
"In fact, it's mainly as a study of what Holden calls his "madman
stuff"--his neuroses, the limitations of his understanding, his deep
disorders of feeling--that Salinger's first novel endures in interest.
The point we miss when thinking of him only as giving the phonies hell
on our behalf is that Holden doesn't truly judge the world: the good and
the bad alike depress him. This is just what he's told in one of the
novel's best scenes by his little sister Phoebe. Because Phoebe is
another Salinger Wise-Child, a forerunner of the Glasses, she might be
expected to share her brother's world-wounded sensibility. Instead, she
accuses him: "You don't like anything that's happening."
"'Sure, I do,' he answers. 'Don't say that.'
"But when Phoebe challenges him to "name one thing" he likes, Holden
fails: "The trouble was, I couldn't concentrate too hot. Sometimes it's
hard to concentrate."
"This seems to me one of those arresting moments when a writer bravely
elects to put in question the very point of view on which, by and large,
he has staked his art. Such questioning of its own visionary standpoint
is not the least of the reasons why, in the end, "The Catcher in the
Rye" is so noble and honest a piece of work. And it's odd that its
self-criticism eluded such antagonistic critics as Mr. Kazin and Mary
McCarthy; especially odd because so much of their own work has gone into
questioning, as Salinger does in "Catcher," the naive American myth of
the holy innocent, the self-centered seer."
I've been rereading Mark Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN recently, and I keep
thinking that the parallels between Holden and Huck are so obvious,
especially in this. The holy innocent, the self-centered seer. At the
center of both novels is that implied criticism of the protagonist.
Huck because much as he hates both dishonesty and sentimentality, he's a
sucker for it as soon as it appears in the form of his best friend Tom
Sawyer, and Holden for exactly the same reasons, except that he's
willing to accept sentimentality when it comes in the form of a girl
named Jane or a kid named Phoebe.
It almost makes me think that both Twain and Salinger are perhaps making
the observation that everybody's a huckster and a phoney, even the seers
who hate it so.
So what kind of bearing does that have on my reading of the books? If
that's true and still we're allowed to love Holden and Huck, does that
mean that we have only to know anybody else in the world like we know
them in order to see that both everybody and nobody is a phoney?
Trapped by the mores of the society in which a person lives, if one
adheres to their social conscience, it makes them into a bit of a phoney
by both Holden's and Huck's definition. It is the true heart -- like
Phoebe's, or Jane's, or Jim's -- that survives.
I suppose that one could call this kind of world view sentimentality in
extremis, but I don't know if that's true, either. It seems more like
realism to me. Everybody's ugly and flawed, but they have the ability
to be good -- tabular rasa -- if taken away from the society which
corrupts them. Holden taking Sally away to his cabin in the woods, Huck
and Jim on the river.
Something to consider, anyway.
Regards,
Cecilia.
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