Catcher Paper
blah b b blah (jrovira@juno.com)
Fri, 12 Mar 1999 22:34:54 -0500 (EST)
This is the paper I wrote for that alumni college class I'm taking on
Catcher in two weeks. Enjoy or be tortured :)
Jim
Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye: A Section Man's Experience
Through my reading of J.D. Salinger and about him I've come to
the conclusion that Salinger's personal philosophy has been erected in
direct opposition to what is traditionally understood in Western society
as rational thought forms. The "enemy" (not really an enemy, but more an
object of pity) in his short story "Teddy" are "apple-eaters" (partakers
of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of . . .), Nine Stories opens with
a quotation from a Zen koan, and his withdrawal from public life seems to
have taken place with no small criticism of professional critics, a
disdain for which seems best expressed by the dedication of his last
publicly released book -- Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters and
Seymour: An Introduction, "If there is an amateur reader still left in
the world -- or anybody who just reads and runs -- I ask him or her, with
untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book
four ways with my wife and children."
So I've decided to write this paper about Salinger's only
published novel with some deference to the author's stated preferences,
and write it from the point of view of my personal experience of
Salinger's fiction. It's going to be hard for me because I'm a born
"apple-eater," perhaps even infected with a good bit of Lewis's mountain
apple, the "enemy," one devoted to rational thought and, worst of all, an
English major and a former section man at that. But I have two things
going for me. First, my reading of Salinger criticism and book reviews
has been painfully minimal. I've only read Warren French's J.D. Salinger
Revisited, and a book review of Hapworth when rumor had it the longish
short story may be reprinted in book form. Next (and this is probably
the more important factor and the beginning of my experience with
Salinger), my introduction to Salinger's fiction was outside the context
of an academic setting. I didn't even start out reading The Catcher in
the Rye in High School, seemingly an American literary teenage rite of
passage.
Don't get me wrong. I am still and always will be an apple
eater, and small chunks of half chewed apple are bound to splatter the
page as I speak. Hopefully, they'll only be small chunks.
I was introduced to Salinger as, ostensibly, an adult. I was an
already accomplished apple eater between the ages of 21 and 25 when a
female friend (I think she was in her mid 30s at the time) gave me her
copy of Franny and Zooey to read. I read the book, of course, I read
everything I was given at the time, then filed it under "Literature I've
Read and Enjoyed but Haven't Begun to Understand the Significance Of."
Not being one to deny myself any teenage rite of passage, even a literary
one, I finally got around to reading The Catcher in the Rye sometime
around March of 1997. I can't say I hadn't read any portion of it until
that point. I read the opening page in an Expository Writing class at
Rollins College probably two years before; the teacher used it to
demonstrate the uniqueness of Holden's voice. I remember being both put
off and intrigued by it; despite his solipsism his unique, honest voice
was powerfully effective.
So I didn't get around to reading Catcher until after I graduated
college, but when I did I was taken in. Once I passed the fifty page
mark I couldn't put the book down. I think I read it in two days; I
specifically remember reading it in the waiting room of my Dentist's
office. After finishing Catcher I reread Franny and Zooey then quickly
finished off the remaining two collections of Salinger's published
fiction. By that time I had become an avowed Salingerphile. I
subscribed to the J.D. Salinger listserve Bananafish and later started a
J.D. Salinger online reading group for AOL. Interest in the reading
group faded after we read Catcher and I ended it, but I'm still
subscribed to the listserve to this day. Each Internet listserve has its
own unique personality; of all the listserves I've subscribed to,
Bananafish has the most diverse audience but the tightest community,
members at times seem bound to one another through Salinger as religious
devotees are bound to one another through a common experience.
Before I begin my apple infested approach to Catcher, I need to
talk about Franny and Zooey first. Of all Salinger's writing, it had the
most direct personal effect on me and has influenced my reading of
Salinger's other fiction. Franny, like Holden Caulfield, has problems
dealing with "phonies" and "phoniness" to the point that she becomes
disturbed emotionally and cut off from society in a self-imposed exile
(the temptation to draw parallels to the author's own life here is
virtually irresistible). "Phoniness" is a word we'll explore in more
detail later, but for now it seems to be a word describing people who are
inconsiderate, vain, status-oriented, selfish and usually successful
intellectually or financially. Franny's perception of the phoniness of
the world around her, including her own, as well as the emptiness of her
relationships grows to the point where she can't see anything else and
can't cope any longer. In part, her estrangement from herself is her
most difficult problem. She's an actress by trade and there, above all
else, she's confronted with the vanity and phoniness of the world. So
she's given up acting, but can't reconcile herself to her decision. In
the end her brother Zooey, calling "in disguise" as their older brother
and mentor Buddy, leads her to the realization that in serving the
phonies, the banal, and the vain (the fat lady) she is indeed serving her
highest ideals, serving Christ.
Right about now I should, if I were going to be not only honest
but thorough, describe in some detail Salinger's relationship with,
interest in, and study of Eastern religions. A Zen koan was already
mentioned, in "Teddy" Vedic beliefs and teachings are referred to with
some conviction, and Franny and Zooey seems to very strongly rely on the
Bhagavad Gita despite the obvious reference to Matthew 26 at the end.
But I don't want to work on this that hard. And I don't know what value
it may have for my point. The temptation would be to ask, "Is Salinger
simply reiterating the teachings of Eastern religions here or is this
Salinger himself?" It would be further tempting to try to comb one
influence out from the other as we read Salinger's fiction. But I think
that's entirely the wrong route. I think Salinger found something which
spoke to a value system he already held when he began his study of
Eastern religions. So the answer to the "either/or" question presented
above would have to be "Yes."
After rereading Franny and Zooey I think I better understand what
my friend was trying to communicate to me ten years ago. Parts of
Franny's letter to her boyfriend Lane sound like almost verbatim
repetitions of statements my wife has made to me in the past about "not
analyzing everything, (especially me)" and Franny's disgust with
"phoniness" mirrors my own, especially at that stage of my life. Franny
and Zooey is a story (are stories) about living with ideals in a world
that violates them constantly. More importantly, it's about living with
ideals when you're perceptive enough to see how your own life is a
violation of what you hold most dear in so many ways. I approached The
Catcher in the Rye with this mind set and it has served me well, for many
of the themes explored in Franny and Zooey are reflected in Catcher.
I'm not going to develop a comparison between Franny and Zooey and
Catcher beyond just saying that both works seem to me to have at their
centers characters who are frustrated idealists having trouble coping
with society. And that the protagonists in both stories withdraw from
society as a result. I first saw this character type developed in Franny
and Zooey, and noticing it there helped me understand it in Catcher.
I need to start out talking about Catcher in full section man
form, however. **I** need to start talking about Catcher in full section
man form. I **need** to start talking about Catcher in full section man
form. And that means talking about the "facts" of the book. Not the
history of the book, per se; not the controversies and attempts to ban,
or the bizarre attraction of the book to at least one pair of well known
killers (Mel Gibson's Conspiracy Theory got some good mileage out of
this, using this fact as a means of tempting the audience to think like
Mel Gibson's character), but the facts as they stand between the covers.
Where Holden is and who he is. What he's doing while he's writing the
book, and when he's writing it. What exactly are the events that he's
narrating. For the book is consciously written from a standpoint some
months after the events described within it. Where is Holden when he's
writing, and who is he writing to? The narrative facts are the basis for
the narrative's meaning; so, to me, the facts are always the place to
start. Beyond that, trusting a commentator to delve beneath the surface
of a narrative without understanding the surface is like trusting a
mechanic to fix your transmission when he can't figure out where to put
in the key. So let's start from the top.
Page one. Opening line. It sounds like the narrative is an
answer to a question. What's the question? What is it that
"I/he-she-them/you" presumably really wants to hear about? (I'm asking
this assuming that the opening line is somehow more than just a
rhetorical device used in normal conversation. The thing is, even as a
rhetorical device used in normal conversation, it's still a response to a
question). Holden assumes a full answer would require an extensive
autobiographical account, "all that David Copperfield kind of crap." He
decides against giving one for pretty good reasons -- he doesn't feel
like it, it's boring, and his parents wouldn't like it. Instead, he
decides to tell us "about this madman stuff that happened to me around
last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here
and take it easy." Since Holden later tells us his brother D.B. lives
nearby in Hollywood and visits him "practically every week end," we can
safely assume Holden is somewhere in Southern California.
Prior to going out to California, Holden was a student at Pencey
Prep School in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. He lives in New York city, and
the narrative covers the time Holden spent from his last day at Pencey
Prep until he returned to his home in New York. The narrative begins
about three in the afternoon the Saturday "of the big game," the last
game of the High School football season. Because of a fight with his
roommate (and a number of other factors), Holden decides to leave the
school late Saturday night, perhaps even very early Sunday morning. He's
been kicked out of school for failing four out of five of his subjects
(English being the exception), and doesn't want to upset his parents. So
since he isn't due home until Wednesday and has some money, he decides to
"take a room in a hotel in New York -- some very inexpensive hotel and
all -- and just take it easy ‘till Wednesday." Holden doesn't make it to
Wednesday for reasons I may get to later, depending on what I feel like
writing about. He comes home Monday. The narrative spans Saturday
afternoon to Monday afternoon.
The phrase, "had to come out here and take it easy" points to the
possibility that Holden is staying in some kind of an institution. More
evidence is on page 5, "I'm quite a heavy smoker, for one thing -- that
is, I used to be. They made me cut it out." Wherever he is, he's been
forced to quit smoking. And then, "That's also how I practically got
t.b. and came out here for all these goddam checkups and stuff." So he's
been forced to quit smoking and is receiving medical attention wherever
he is. Then at the end of the book, "A lot of people, especially this
one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I'm going to
apply myself when I go back to school next September." So, he's been
forced to quit smoking, he's receiving medical attention, and is being
interviewed by a number of people, at least one of them being a
psychoanalyst. If I was going to form a hypothesis about the "facts"
behind the book, I'd say the book is written in response to a question
asked by someone caring for Holden at a Southern California institution
(probably some kind of sanitarium), presumably for the sake of his lung
problems. "What did you do to yourself, boy?" I considered briefly that
Holden may have been writing the account for his brother D.B, but
references to him in the third person in chapters 1 and 26 eliminate that
possibility for me, especially this line in the first chapter, "I mean
that's all I told D.B. about, and he's my brother and all." The book we
know as The Catcher in the Rye is, within the context of the novel,
Holden's second telling of the events contained within the book, D.B.
getting the first telling probably when Holden arrived in California.
How old is Holden? He says in chapter two, "I was sixteen then
[during the events being narrated], and I'm seventeen now. . .". The
events of the novel took place after the end of the first semester of his
junior year at Pencey Prep, in December. D.B. is supposed to be taking
Holden home "next month maybe," but he's still anticipating going back to
school "next September" (chapter 26). So September still sounds a little
ways off. It may be that the time Holden would normally have spent in
school from January to May or June was spent in an institution in
California.
See? I told you I was a section man.
"I don't know what you're even talking about," old Sally said.
You jump from one--" (131).
Who is Holden? I mentioned the honesty of his voice earlier, let
me talk about his voice again now. Catcher is a narrative journal
written in the first person. Holden tends to talk in loops. He'll start
in on a subject that's relevant to the main narrative stream, then a
detail will remind him of something else, and he'll talk about that for
awhile. He even digresses from his digressions sometimes. But he always
returns to the main narrative stream. The word "anyway" opens a
paragraph three times in the first chapter and is found in the middle of
at least one, each time signifying a return to the main narrative after a
digression. What's interesting is that Holden specifically talks about
this habit in a positive light during his conversation with Mr. Antolini.
"Oh, I don't know. That digression business got on my nerves. I
don't know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses.
It's more interesting and all" (183). It's a technique that earned
Richard Kinsella a "D+" in Oral Expression, it's a habit that annoyed or
scared Sally Hayes, but it's the way Holden thinks and likes to think.
What does this habit signify? I think it's a sign that the speaker is
doing what he's doing for love, not for pretense or formality's sake.
"It didn't have much to do with the farm -- I admit it -- but it was
nice." Or, more to the point, "What I think is, you're supposed to leave
somebody alone if he's at least being interesting and he's getting all
excited about something. I like it when somebody gets excited about
something." Within the context of an Oral Expression class, this
experience would denote the loss of a sense of self and absorption in the
subject at hand.
This quality of loss of self in a task is upheld and praised in
at least one other vignette in Catcher (and as one person on Bananafish
pointed out to me, the novel is episodic in nature). Holden is
describing the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall and in his
opinion, "The thing Jesus really would've liked would be the guy that
plays the kettle drums in the orchestra. . .He only gets a chance to bang
them a couple of times during a whole piece, but he never looks bored
when he isn't doing it. Then when he does bang them, he does it so nice
and sweet, with this nervous expression on his face" (138). Holden --
and the rest of his family, for that matter -- is attracted to the kettle
drum player because of the self-effacement he displays by handling a
relatively small part with the utmost seriousness. It's a sign of
humility and love for the task at hand. If I were going to emphasize one
thing in this whole paragraph, though, the emphasis would be on loss of
self rather than task at hand. It doesn't matter what "instrument"is
used to achieve the loss of self. The goal is what's important.
Understanding what's being positively affirmed (even though this
rarely comes through in the novel) makes it easier to understand the
nature of the phoniness that is the object of Holden's continuous
derision. If loss of self is appealing, the phonies are full of
themselves. The word "phony" by itself refers to insincerity, but this
insincerity comes from a very specific source. Whether it was
Stradlater's vain self-absorption, Mr. Ossenburger's self-satisfied
chapel speech, or Lillian Simmons' self-serving social graces Holden was
confronted with self everywhere he turned. When Holden saw a person
inflating self through pretense and vanity he labeled them a "phony." So
it's not just insincerity. It's insincerity springing out of a desire to
shore up an empty self, a self whose poverty originates from absorption
in the self and a lack of concern for others. A lack of concern, for
that matter, not only for other people, but for anything "other," any
task, any ideal, any belief.
Holden's other favorite derisive term is "morons." The word
"morons" obviously denotes stupidity of some kind, but Holden is
concerned with a particular kind of stupidity. Ackley is the model for
the moron in Catcher. I'm not sure if the term is directly applied to
Ackley at any point in the narrative, but when it is used it seems to be
used for characters displaying Ackley-like characteristics. At one point
in the narrative Ackley comes into Holden's dorm room, and "instead of
sitting on the arm of Stradlater's chair, he laid down on my bed, with
his face right on my pillow and all. He started talking in this very
monotonous voice, and picking at all his pimples. I dropped about a
thousand hints, but I couldn't get rid of him" (37). Ackley earns the
honor of being the paradigmatic moron not for his obviously unpleasant
characteristics but for his stubborn lack of awareness of the effects of
his actions upon others. He sees only "out from" his own point of view,
and is unable to see himself from the point of view of another. He
damages others as a result, but not necessarily out of deliberate malice.
It's more out of stupid insensitivity. In this case, as with "phonies,"
the root of the problem lay in the fact that others do not really exist
for the failed self.
So a world of morons and phonies is the world Holden inhabits.
It's no wonder he has problems, and even less surprise that Phoebe's
specific question to Holden was whether or not there was anyone he liked
or anything he wanted to do. Holden's answer was that he wanted to "be a
catcher in the rye," a sentinel standing guard over children playing in a
rye field, presumably to keep them from going over the edge and falling
into a phony, moronic adulthood. This isn't too different from Holden's
desire to rub all the "Fuck You"s off every wall in New York. Yes,
Holden does misquote the poem. But he did it because he heard a child
misquoting it not long before. If the world were divided neatly between
the morons and the sincere, however, Holden may be capable of some kind
of simplified integration. He'd simply like very few people and shoot
paper clips at everyone who came in to use the copier at the office. But
Holden's too deep for that.
To further complicate matters, Holden awareness isn't limited to
how unpleasant the world is around him. Holden's also aware that, on a
level deeper than his annoyance, he cares for the people that are making
him so miserable. That may be the source of what he calls his
"cowardice" throughout the novel, but it comes through consciously and
clearly at the end, "About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told
about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance." Holden comes
closest to self-awareness of his outlook in his meditations on Harris
Macklin. He initially sees Harris as one of the millions of guys "that
always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam
cars. . .that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf. .
.that are very mean. . .that never read books. . .that are very boring"
(123). But then he remembers how great a whistler Harris was, and at the
end of his thoughts Holden says, "They don't hurt anybody, most of them,
and maybe they're secretly all terrific whistlers or something. Who the
hell knows? Not me." This is a blip of light in a very dark account
because Holden is willing to consider, for just a moment, that the
majority of the world's morons and phonies may have depths he cannot
fathom, something human that's been suppressed for some reason he can't
see.
As he loses hold of this awareness he moves further and further
into isolation and finally wants to completely escape society. Phoebe,
his sister, the child, catches him in the end and keeps him from leaving
and never returning home. Holden is writing this account, again, well
after the events being narrated. Since the narrative frame of mind
doesn't appear to differ from the frame of mind of the protagonist,
Holden's writing the account of Catcher from a point of view not too
dissimilar from the one he had in December when the events of the novel
took place. It's not enough to observe that the narrator and protagonist
are the same people. Similar novels have been written in which the
narrator's point of view (or frame of mind) changes due to fact of his or
her narrating. C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces is probably the best
example I can think of. So I don't think it can be said that Holden has
escaped his dilemma. But I think we have been held out some hope for
Holden. He's started missing everybody. He doesn't want to escape them
anymore.
This paper was supposed to be about "experiencing fiction" and
I've written mostly dry analysis. The dry analysis was, in my case,
experiencing fiction. I'm an apple eater, remember? And I'm just as
aware of the self-satisfied tone at the beginning as you are. It's not
that I've made some intelligent observations, it's that I was watching
myself make intelligent observations and enjoying it. Just like the
Lunts with their acting. Now that I've confronted my phoniness (and if I
felt like getting into it I've been a moron plenty of times myself) what
am I going to do with it? Probably nothing. I am what I am. But if I
know what I am maybe I can live with others being who they are. It's not
about the world not living up to my expectations, or about myself not
living up to my expectations, but it's about living with the failure to
live up to expectations. And it's about finding love and acceptance
within the context of that failure.
That usually starts with being willing to give it yourself. If a
body meet a body coming through the rye. . .
"The written word is a power of such magnitude that only pedants would
try to reduce it to rules. Or the French."
--F.K.
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