Subject: George Will on Holden
Omlor@aol.com
Date: Sun Jul 01 2001 - 09:59:07 GMT
Hello everyone,
I'm sure most people have seen it by now, but I thought I'd mention that in
honor of CITR's 50th anniversary, George Will has written a column which
appeared in syndication today proclaiming Holden as the first of a "new
social type which subsequently has become familiar -- the American as whiner."
The column is a thoroughgoing slam at Holden and at the book and, in my
opinion, demonstrates a disctinct inability to understand either the
historical context of the book's composition (suggesting that Holden somehow
is suddenly changing things by declaring "reality a great disappointment" and
that Holden "helped teach America's youth how to pout" -- both of these are
historical howlers of course, and America's youth, like the world's youth,
thought and knew this long before Holden came around and the notion of
reality being a terrible disappointment being a new suggestion in 1951 could
only be offered by someone who has decided to conveniently ignore the history
of literature, both Ancient and Modern, entirely, going all the way back to
Plato and Cervantes, for instance) or the ideas in the book (comparing Holden
to Marlon Brando's Wild One or linking Holden to Will's despised "Sixties
adolescents" -- Will writes this nonsensical chain of cause and effect:
"Sixties adolescents, who were Holden's siblings, punctuated utterances,
often of unknowable meaning, with "you know"; today's lace their locutions
with swarms of "like." ).
In all, it is a mean spirited and intellectually shallow piece that is filled
with howlers such as the idea that Holden "pioneered a new fashion statement
with his baseball cap: 'I swung the old peak round to the back.' In case you
were wondering about the pedigree of that bit of contemporary infantilism."
Will compares Holden to Huck Finn claiming Huck "comes off better" because he
understood freedom "in the American way." Finally, we are told, "Holden was
-- is -- just as limited and tiresome as his vocabulary."
Why George Will seems to think that the vocabulary of a fictional character
somehow marks the beginning of an age of decline in America is, I think, no
mystery. Mr. Will has often worn his vocabulary as a self-congratulatory
badge of honor, as if he subscribed to some weird re-shaping of an old
schoolyard assumption about the relationship of the size of one's vocabulary
to one's potency or manliness. But that is another post or another essay for
another time. Here, I think, what we see is simply sloppy reading and
posturing about some mythical good old days before CITR, when American youth
did not "whine" about being disappointed with reality and did not use
colloquialisms in everyday conversation. Will actually suggests at one point
that "Holden, too, was a literary pioneer, inventing inarticulateness as a
token of adolescent 'sincerity.'" Not only is this bad literary history, it
also reveals a nostalgia for a time that never was, a classic symptom of Mr.
Will's writing and his politics.
That's all from me, the column is probably available somewhere on the web,
but I'm not sure where.
Bye for now,
--John
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