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.