Subject: Re: an article on Holden in the NY'er magazine
From: Paul Miller (phm@midsouth.rr.com)
Date: Wed Sep 26 2001 - 19:24:08 GMT
[He wasn't trying to expose the spiritual poverty of a conformist culture;
he was writing a story about a boy whose little brother has died. Holden,
after all, isn't unhappy because he sees that people are phonies; he sees
that people are phonies because he is unhappy. What makes his view of other
people so cutting and his disappointment so unappeasable is the same thing
that makes Hamlet's feelings so cutting and unappeasable: his grief. Holden
is meant, it's true, to be a kind of intuitive moral genius. (So,
presumably, is Hamlet.) But his sense that everything is worthless is just
the normal feeling people have when someone they love dies. Life starts to
seem a pathetically transparent attempt to trick them into forgetting about
death; they lose their taste for it.]
This is an excellent point and one I have never fully given it's due weight
in understanding Catcher. I mean I knew he was grieving for Allie I just
never asked myself what was Holden like before Allie's death?
[its reception as some sort of important cultural statement didn't happen
until the mid-fifties, when people started talking about "alienation" and
"conformity" and "the youth culture"—the time of "Howl" and "Rebel Without a
Cause" and Elvis Presley's first records. It is as a hero of that culture
that Holden Caulfield has survived. But "The Catcher in the Rye" is not a
novel of the nineteen-fifties; it's a novel of the nineteen-forties. And it
is not a celebration of youth. It is a book about loss and a world gone
wrong.]
Seeing the novel through the lens of what was happening in the 50s made the
book popular. I think the original 1940s story got at least somewhat lost or
misinterpreted, again nice insight by Menand.
["Zooey" and "Seymour" are exhibitionistic because the emotional current
driving the characters has become unmoored from anything that has actually
happened to them. They are not thrown into a state of higher intensity by
trauma or by grief.]
The loss of mooring is something I have felt about these stories, stories
that reflect Salinger's own loss of mooring.
[In "Franny," Franny Glass's spiritual crisis is a kind of screen shielding
the rather mundane circumstance that she has been made pregnant by a man who
she realizes will remain, all his life, a pompous English major.]
This just isn't supported by the text, but we have hashed this one out in
the fishbowl before.
[The book that seems, in some ways, closest to Salinger's is Plath's.]
This is an excellent read if there is someone here who hasn't read it yet.
[he tells his story from a sanatorium (where he has gone because of a fear
that he has t.b.), not a mental hospital. The brutality of the world makes
him sick.]
OK this just doesn't make any sense. If he has gone in for fear that he has
TB how is it that the brutality of the world gave him TB? Where does Holden
say he is in a sanatorium because of TB? The text just doesn't support
Menand's conclusion here.
[But, whether or not the emotion, (nostalgia of youth culture), is
spurious, people have it. It is the romantic certainty, which all these
books seduce you with, that somehow, somewhere, something was taken away
from you, and you cannot get it back. Once, you did ride a carrousel. It
seemed as though it would last forever.]
Well theres more to Catcher than the nostalgia of youth. Menand's insight on
the grieving Holden and that griefs responsibility for his world view during
his madman days in New York is helpful to me in shifting my view of the
novel somewhat and it's nice to know you can still see old and familiar
things freshly. With a caveat or two I think this is an excellent piece on
Catcher.
Paul
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