A Section Man's Experience of
The Catcher in the Rye
by Jim Rovira
J.D. Salinger
Through my reading of J.D. Salinger and about him
I've come to the conclusion that Salinger erected his
personal philosophy 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 disdain for professional critics, a
disdain seemingly 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 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, 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.
Instead, 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, back then I read everything
I was given, 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
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 for a class exercise. I
remember being both put off and intrigued by it; despite
Holden's 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 an individual
personality; of all the listserves I've subscribed to,
Bananafish has the most diverse audience but the tightest
community; Salinger is a common experience binding the
members together in a manner similar to the union between
religious devotees.
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 I'll just say it's 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.
But 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. My guess is that Salinger
found something that spoke to an already deeply held value
system 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 the two works
beyond just saying that both works seem to be written about
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. 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. 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. 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 late 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 out of pretense or for 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 don't think 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. To put it as bluntly as
possibly, Ackley is a moron for not considering that someone
else is going to be laying their head upon a pillow he's
squeezing his pimples into. He sees only "out from"
his own point of view, and is unable to see himself from the
point of view of others. 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 Yous" off every wall in New York.
It wasn't just disturbing to him that someone wrote that on
the wall (that, particularly, some moron wrote that on the
wall). It was disturbing to him that little kids walking
through the museum would see it. Yes, Holden does misquote
the Burns poem that provided the title of the novel. For that
matter, it's the misquote itself that provides the title. But
he did it because he heard a child misquoting the poem 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 the unpleasant side of the people 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 Holden's concluding thoughts are,
"They don't hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe
they're secretly all terrific whistlers or something. Who the
hell knows? Not me." Holden's thoughts here are a blip
of light in a very dark account because he's 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
cannot 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 New York in
a self-imposed exile and never returning home. Again, Holden
is writing this account 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 person. 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. He's started missing
everybody. He doesn't want to run away from 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 too) 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 my 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...
Jim Rovira can be reached at JRovira@juno.com
Click here to go to the
official Bananafish homepage:
http://slf.gweep.net/~sfoskett/jds/index.html
or here to join the Bananafish
mailing list to discuss the works of J.D. Salinger:
http://www.nyu.edu/acf/staff/oconnort/JDS/bananafish.welcome.html
