But maybe originality is overrated--not to mention a myth--and the reason why J.D. Salinger's lone novel continues to sell in excess of 250,000 copies a year well over a half-century after its publication is because there is nothing original about its premise: a teenager hates his life. Holden Caulfield's is the common voice of adolescent dissatisfaction, distilled down to its purest and most impotent rage. Sometimes you don't need to read something original--sometimes you just need to know you're not alone, that there's someone else out there who understands.
Or Holden Caulfield is just a total spoiled brat, an epitome of unexamined privilege so devoid of real problems that he has to invent some to justify his narcissism, selfishness, and general dickishness. Such, increasingly, has been the summation of a growing number of folks, in the surprisingly burgeoning sub-genre of Catcher in the Rye re-reads.
These various responses, in fact, had me a tad trepidous to re-read Catcher myself. Even after Salinger's death in 2011, I couldn't quite bring myself to revisit Holden. Some cherished childhood memories are best left in the past, I figured.
But then last week at the airport, disaster struck: I lost the book I was reading (Vol. 4 of In Search of Lost Time--and boy, if there could ever be two more differing approaches towards remembering childhood than Proust and Salinger!). Begrudgingly, like an amateur, I sauntered over to the Airport Bookstore & Minimart to find a replacement. Amidst all those paint-by-numbers spy thrillers, hackneyed romances, formulaic fantasies, flavor-of-the-week best-sellers, cash-grab celebrity bios, petulant political screeds, insipid self-help books, and insidious Get-Rich-Quick schemes, I felt a sort of nausea fill the pit of my stomach.
That is, I was put in just the right mindset to re-read Catcher...which is why it startled me to find the book on the shelf! What strange company for Caulfield to be keeping! How ironic to be so surrounded by "such a bunch of phonies," as Holden might say! It almost felt like some secret joke perpetrated by an irate bookstore employee. I couldn't resist--I bought a copy. Just finished it this afternoon.
Let's get something out of the way first: Holden Caulfield is indeed insufferable. His critics are right. But what his critics miss is that he is insufferable in the exact same way all teenagers are insufferable. That is an incredibly rare feet--in most film, TV, and fiction, teenagers are idealized, articulate, a fantasy of what we liked to imagine we were like at that age, rather than a reflection of what we were actually like. Ferris Bueller is who we wanted to be; but Holden Caulfield is who we actually were. I suspect that much of the adult backlash against Holden is sheer resentment, for reminding us of how embarrassing we all sounded in our teens, which we've spent most our adulthood trying to forget.
But here's the other thing about Holden: he's also self-aware! Multiple times throughout the novel, Holden mentions how he himself is a phony, duplicitous, inconsistent, and terrible. Pay attention for those moments if you choose to re-read it. Indeed, I dare say that a huge source of Holden's frustration and anger is his growing awareness--which, as a true teenager, he still lacks the vocabulary to fully express--that he is in fact inextricably complicit with the phoniness of the world!
And that I think is why the novel continues to resonate even today: because we all feel that same rage at our own inescapable complicity. Our clothing is sewn by children in third-world sweatshops; our food harvested by exploited immigrant labor; our rubber comes from African and Malaysian slave plantations; our electronics from nightmarish Tawainese factories, built with rare-earth minerals mined by Afghan child slaves; our diamonds from genocidal warlords; our gasoline from hyper-destructive industries; our high standard of living from ruthless corporations; and so on and so forth. In America, we are all spoiled, petulant, narcissistic brats, people who burn away all our many opportunities and invent problems to justify our misery--Holden, at least, is aware that he does so. He is also one of the few characters in fiction who actively tries to disavow all his unearned privilege--and even fails as he tries. The problem of privilege runs deep.
But then, his anger is not solely rooted in societal injustice, is it; early in the novel, we learn his brother Allie had recently died of leukemia. Holden's grief, then, is of a kind with Prince Hamlet's--they are both morose, brooding jerks precisely because they are both grieving. Grief has a funny way of stripping away our filters, dropping our defenses, making nothing feel like it matters anymore. Holden isn't just the archetype for the raging teenager; he is also that of the grieving brother.
Nor do I bring up Hamlet arbitrarily (well, besides their shared spaces on every High School syllabi ever); a couple years ago I argued that Hamlet can be read as a Christmas play. Remember that the latter takes place in the winter months; the ghost appears "against that season...Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated;" and that for centuries, the telling of ghost stories was a holiday tradition. As I pointed out back then, it is no coincidence that Dicken's A Christmas Carol is first and foremost a ghost story, that Joyce's "The Dead" takes place at a Christmas party, that Andy Williams' 1963 hit "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" boasts "There'll be scary ghost stories..." Up till two short generations ago, the dead were as much a part of Christmas as the trees and mistletoe.
And like Shakespeare's Hamlet, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (and I suspect this point isn't emphasized nearly enough) can also be read as a Christmas novel. It, too, takes place in late December; Holden gets depressed at one point when he sees some men swearing as they put up a municipal Christmas Tree; his younger sister Phoebe is playing the lead in a Christmas pageant; she lends Holden some of her gift-buying money; and as had happened for centuries of Christmases, a ghost haunts the proceedings, that of the late Allie Caulfield.
I perhaps read The Catcher in the Rye a little too early in the season--it is really a Christmas story. More precisely, it is a Christmas ghost story, in the same tradition as Dickens, Joyce, and Shakespeare. Though a self-proclaimed "kind of an atheist," Holden nevertheless possesses Christ's same absolute impatience for "phonies"--or as the Savior put it, "Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" (Matt. 23:13). The novel's title even comes from Holden's dream of catching kids-at-play from falling off a cliff--that is, Holden wishes to be a savior to little children, "for of such is the kingdom of God." Despite all its casual blasphemy, this text is permeated with desire for a Christ.
I may need to add Catcher to the thin list of books I re-read every Christmas, the books that actually remind me of the "reason for the season"--namely, that because we are all, like Holden, such prodigal sons, because we are all selfish, wasteful, despicable phonies (and that never more so than during Christmas), we are all in need of a Savior more desperately than ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment