Bookslut, via Gawker(About the Catcher in the Rye)

So, I found this article the other day on Bookslut via Gawker, as you can see from what this post is called. How very bloggy of me. This was good timing for me, as I had just had a long conversation about the Catcher in the Rye with my brother the Duck. He finished it a few days ago; it is one of the required reading books for the AP English class that he is going to start in a week. Now, my brother Connor loved The Catcher in the Rye; I liked it a lot. The Duck didn’t like it one bit.

His attitude was similar Anne Trubek’s; he didn’t so much complain about what’s going on in the book itself, as say that he just didn’t see what all the fuss was about. “If Salinger needed to acknowledge Dickens in 1951, today any new adolescent coming-of-age-tale must go through ‘all that Holden Caufield crap’”. Trubeck also points out the peculiar cultural entrenchment of Catcher in the Rye that we see from its current role as a touchstone: every book has to be the Catcher in the Rye for the beekeeping set, or the Catcher in the Rye met with the NEC Manual. The enshrinement of the Catcher in the Rye now seems unwarranted and unnecessary. The problem that Trubeck points out is that the original reason for enshrinement was relatability, and that relatability is totally diachronic – it is a function of history – and as such, we are no longer impressed with how much Salinger appears to understand us readers. What could relate to Holden in us changed; but we were stuck with his book on our syllabi nevertheless.

I think that the problem with Trubeck’s reading – and with the Duck’s – is that, having pinpointed a legitimate problem in the cultural fact of the Catcher in the Rye, they overlook a fact of the Catcher in the Rye in each of its readers’ biographies. At first, the book is indeed alluring for its relatability, but it does not stay so, or at least did not for me. Rather, Holden quickly loses his cache as a figure to whom I might relate, and becomes instead someone about whom I care, in the same way that I care about people without particularly relating to them, like Priam or Charles Bovary or Simon Dedalus. The reading my brother offers doesn’t allow for a reassessment of Holden once the fuss has died down in his reader’s mind; his primary function seems to him to be one of relating to people (affecting them in his malaise, anyway) and his mission seems to have not been quite as accomplished as has been trumpeted. But if his mission and function come to seem, as I think they should, as unconnected from anything the reception of the novel has occasioned, we see that Holden is just a sad, confused dude: not a hero, but a character from a novel.

“In the 19th century,” says Trubeck, “a bildungsroman showed the growing maturity and self-awareness of a young person.” She goes on to add that this remains “more or less true.” I think that what is less true about this is exactly what makes Holden compelling just when we no longer recognize our current selves in him: Holden exactly fails to become the hero of a nineteenth century bildungsroman, he exactly fails to become mature or self-aware. One of the things the Duck hated about the novel was that, at its end, Holden just goes off to do it all again, at a different prep school. I think that in that failure to grow, we can see in Holden a fixed portrait of a kind of hyperdeveloped childhood. He isn’t necessarily someone to whom we can relate; the proper reaction to this novel is no longer to identify with Holden and feel both you and he are part of a zeitgeist. He is just there, like all of our favorites in fiction, to be cared about.

That, anyway, is why I think we should still read the Catcher in the Rye.

I'll Get You, Carnivalesque

So the other day I went out to the ballpark, to see the Buffalo Bisons take on the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, in support of which latter my father owns a hat. I went with my brother Connor, my sister Elizabeth, my brother the Duck, and the Duck's friend Nate. I drank two beers and ate one bag of peanuts, and, naturally, I brought a book. The book I brought was Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Francois Rabelais. I figured that I could bang through a chapter or two about giants during, I guess, a pitching change, or the seventh inning stretch. So far, so what you'd expect. However, I left my book -- through a combination of jiggered and rejiggered seating arrangements and plain old negligence -- at the ballpark. Dammit.

Now, I should say that I have left books places before, or lost them forever. It took me three Signet Classics versions (and one Bantam, which my well-meaning mother bought for me but which had names transliterated totally differently) to get through Dostoevsky's the Idiot. I still can't find Brideshead Revisited or Brave New World, both of which I finished in the Lockport Public Library's copies. Once, I found my copy of Walden, on a sustenance break from my diligent search, in our refrigerator. So the quick pang -- where's my book? -- followed by slow acceptance -- huh, I need a new Idiot -- is an experience with which I am familiar.

I should also say that, at the time I was in the Dunn Tire Park mens' room and reading about Panurge the knave's haggling with shepherds, Rabelais wasn't exactly lighting my carnival on fire. I brought it partly because I figured that it would require less strenuous attention than Bend Sinister, which I was also reading at the time. I had described at one point my reading through the Gargantua book as a trudge, and when one of my friends said that few trudges were worth it, could defend the book only as a trudge with occasional fart jokes.

Nevertheless, on the 190, I realized suddenly and crushingly -- I had left Gargantua and Pantagruel under the seat. It might've hit harder because I knew exactly where it had been left -- it wasn't going to show up in the refrigerator -- and I knew that it was not going to be a particularly easy book to recoup. I kept imagining a bitter member of the grounds crew seeing the book next to a pile of peanut shells and throwing it vindictively into his dustbin. Sad, sad.

But -- and weirdest -- I didn't even particularly miss my commodity, for all that I am unemployed and that the MA Screech translation I had been using runs an extortionary twenty US dollars. Instead, I missed Pantagruel the sometimes giant and his preposterous, sometimes gigantic crew. I mean, these guys are not especially endearing, or even always separable guys -- earlier in this post I typed "novel" for what Gargantua and Pantagruel is and replaced it with "book" just because the characters sitting around and changing shapes and telling scholastic jokes seem, still, to fall short of the kind of fullness of characters that I associate with the novel. But I missed them intently. More than like, I missed Pierre Bezhukov when I had to do a problem set for Macro instead of reading about him in Petersburg, more than I missed even Kinbote when I finished my thesis. I think I missed Panurge, the "mad word-spinner", in particular, more than I miss most of the people with whom I lived my senior year of college.

The entire ride home, I whirligigged between waning woeful, on account of my lost book and missing Rabelaisian friends, and waxing joyous, on account of the fact that I just missed my book so much. It was a sort of base level mopiness -- and, my poor carmates will attest, that I was thoroughly and basely mopey -- with a commentary emotion of pride, that I had managed to successfully get so upset about something so theoretically minute, the opposite, really, of the way in which I felt bad about not feeling bad about most natural disasters.

I don't know what this means, as usual, because I don't tend to know what anything means, but like our old friend Briony Tallis, I am confident that what's happened to me at least means something. I don't think, for example, that it taught me to appreciate books more. I think I appreciated books just fine already. I think rather what it suggested to me was the way in which books can work just like people, a proof of George Eliot's claim that "art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot." Now I know how much some giants mean to me, surely an ampliative experience beyond the bounds of my normal personal lot.