Catcher In The Rye Research Paper
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The Catcher in the Rye : An American Koan
Joseph Dewey
America, it appears, is in the uneasy twilight of the Age of the Novel. Even the most ardent readers—and the most dedicated English teachers—acknowledge that. Given the sheer reach that visual tech- nologies have achieved in just fifty years—film, advertising, televi- sion, video games, and, supremely, the Internet—the act (and art) of reading the printed word has been gracelessly shuffled off to the mar- gins. Americans are now pixel-fed and image-fat. Novels themselves seem bulky, impractical, clumsy, ink pressed on paper fast becoming like Morse code and cathedral radios, rotary phones and print newspa- pers, quaint relics of ways we use to communicate. And serious litera- ture—those …show more content…
novels that challenge willing, alert readers to interact with characters and symbols to formulate compelling themes—has been all but relegated to the protective hothouse of the classroom. Airport ter- minals,beaches, living rooms, bedrooms, park benches—there readers indulge the serious trivia of low-octane mass-market entertainments: complicated whodunits, edgy political thrillers, breezy romances, fu- turistic sci-fisagas,multivolumefantasy epicsabout wizardsand drag- ons, gothic vampire tales. Save those infrequent titles deemed Oprah-worthy, serious fiction never receives the lavish hype routinely accordedthemostinconsequentialnewfilmsorrealitytelevisionshows. Landmark novels momentarily stir heady excitement among a narrow coterie of professional readers and then promptly, utterly sink into the heavy tomb dust of library shelves. In America,in the twenty-first cen- tury, serious fiction has lost its clout, its cultural privilege. When cultural historians come to chronicle these end days of the American novel, they will most assuredly mark July 16, 1951, as the novel’s last hurrah. On that day, Little, Brown, with little fanfare, re- leased J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a slender, unprepossess- ing novel, barely two hundred pages, centered on a confused and de-
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pressed sixteen-year-old kid named Holden Caulfield, who, after flunking out of prep school (for the third time), delays returning home to his family’s swanky Central Park townhouse to wander the streets of New York City for three days. In the process, he struggles to come to terms not only with his academic failure but with the death, three years earlier, of his younger brother, Allie, from leukemia. It is not an easy adjustment. Indeed, by novel’s end, we learn Holden has been institu- tionalized at a psychiatric facility near Hollywood, where his older brother works as a screenwriter. On its surface, the novel was yet another coming-of-age narrative in which a sensitive and traumatized adolescent must negotiate the diffi- cult threshold into adulthood. If the genre was conventional, however, the book was anything but. Holden told his own story. And that voice—at once smart-alecky and vulnerable, worldly-wise and engag- ingly naive—touched a generation of readers, mostly under twenty-five, in a tectonic way that novels today simply don’t. Holden spoke in the syllable-crisp pitch-perfect immediacy of colloquialisms, the click and rhythm of clichés laced with swear words. Holden sounded real. AndAmericanteens,borntoolatetoshareintheeuphoria of World War II and compelled rather to adjust to the anxieties of the ColdWarandimminentatomicapocalypse,foundinHoldenCaulfielda friend who shared their discontent with authority, their anger over the middle-class status quo, their frustration with conventional measures of success, their angst over their own futures. Unlike the polite and re- strained child-heroes of the serious fiction of an earlier time, Holden reflected a hipper sensibility—he chain-smoked, he drank Scotch and soda, he talked back to his teachers, he rejected the expectations of ca- reer ambition, he declined to commiteffort to school, he swore with re- markable agility, he mocked Christians, he obsessed over sex. Within the free energy field of the early 1950s—an edgy kinetics that included the leather jacket-tight jeans movies of James Dean and Marlon Brando, Allen Ginsberg’s tormented “Howl,” Jack Kerouac’s epical peregrinations, Jackson Pollock’s splatter canvasses, John Coltrane’s
4 Critical Insights shattered melodies, Lenny Bruce’s incendiary performance pieces, and, supremely, rock and roll’s raucous rhythms—Holden Caulfield gave a voice to a generation in rebellion. The Catcher in the Rye quickly becamethe book every twenty-something had to read. Despite mixed reviews from the establishment press (who simply didn’t “get” Holden), the novel dominated best-seller lists and stayed there for more than a year. Indeed, in this twilight of the Age of the Novel, the book has never been out of print. Thus—it appears, for the last time—a work of serious fiction simul- taneously realigned the dynamics of American fiction and the dynam- ics of American culture. Holden helped incite the younger generation amid the narcoleptic calm of Eisenhower’s America to upend conven- tions, defy authority, and, in the process, attend to the suddenly serious business of reconsidering the very premise of their own lives and the nature of their own identities. Not surprisingly, perhaps inevitably, The Catcher in the Rye was quickly perceived to be a dangerous work, a work from which kids needed to be protected, second only to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (a work to which it is often compared) as the most frequently banned book in the American liter- ary canon. Since 1951, Holden has been blamed for virtually every ex- pression of adolescent rebellion. Swearing, the use of recreational pharmaceuticals, dropping out of school, premarital sex, underage drinking—they are all cool because of Holden. Holden has been read into the DNA for every angry white male rock music icon from Jerry Lee Lewis to Eminem, Bob Dylan to Kurt Cobain. Holden’s strident antiauthoritarianism and his uncompromising sense of honesty have been seen at the heart of the civil disobedience of the social and politi- cal upheavals in the 1960s. But far more problematically, parents and teachers, child psychologists, and guidance counselors have long blamed Holden, given his obsession with death (his own and others), for the gothic sensibility among teenagers and the dark appeal of sui- cide. The novel routinely comesup in any roundtable convened to con- sider the implications of some heinous act of violence perpetrated by a
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young maladjusted misfit. Fans of the novel have included Mark Da- vid Chapman, who shot John Lennon four times in the back; John Hinckley, Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan outside a Washington hotel to impress a film actress; and Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who wreaked the havoc at Columbine High School. Quite simply, no other work of American serious fiction in the last half century has achieved such reach. And given that Salinger’s novel has never been translated into film (Salinger had been angered by a film adaptation of one of his early short stories and resisted numerous lucrative offers to bring Catcher to the big screen), Holden has existed entirely as words, as ink pressed on paper. We get little physical de- scription of him, save his unusual height and his patch of prematurely gray hair. He is conjured entirely by language. Imagine that. The most notable and engaging adolescent characters of the last generation (many of them intriguing avatars of Holden)—Dawson Leery, Kevin Arnold, Richie Cunningham, Hannah Montana, Bart Simpson, Luke Skywalker, BenjaminBraddock, and, of course, acluster of Disney an- imations, most notably Simba and Ariel—have achieved their consid- erable cultural impress entirely through visual presentation, through film and television. And even those few landmark adolescent charac- ters first introduced in books have had their presentations inalterably defined (and simplified) by movies. We see Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter or Elijah Wood’s Frodo Baggins or Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen. But we read Holden, happily seduced by the verbal suction of that mesmerizing voice. It is an understatement to say that Holden has intrigued readers, ea- ger and determined to do what readers of serious fiction have been do- ing fornearly fivecenturies:gathertextualevidencetoconstruct acon- sistent reading of an engaging character. Readers have asked, Who is Holden Caulfield? The results have been curious. Holden is the proto- type hippie, an antieverything nonconformist, a perspicacious outsider who irreverently skewers the hypocrisies and shallowness of postwar America. Holden is a spoiled whiner, an arrogant slacker, a
6 Critical Insights smart-alecky (and not terribly bright) child of privilege who, given all the advantages of wealth, cannot find his way to maturity or responsi- bility. Holden is a complex con man, a moral chameleon, a shallow, su- perficial phony, a compulsive liar and an inveterate fraud who assumes identities with casual ease to mock teachers, friends, strangers—and us, the readers. Holden is a victim, traumatized by the hammer stroke of mortality, haunted by the death of his younger brother and by the suicide of a kid in prep school who jumped out a window in a turtle- neck he had just borrowed from Holden. Holden is a tragic romantic, gentle and naive, who wants what every dreamer since Quixote has wanted, the impossible, to protect the tenderhearted from the painful realities of this sad and imperfect world. Holden is a raging latter-day prophet, indicting his era’s mercenary capitalism, its soulless consum- erism, its competitive acquisitiveness, and, supremely, its moral shal- lowness. Holden is a lost heart yearning for love. Estranged from his parents, shuffled off to a succession of boarding schools, he reaches out again and again—to strangers on trains and in bars, to old class- mates and former teachers. Holden, a virgin, is deeply conflicted (like most sixteen-year-olds) by the idea of physical intimacy, confused about his own sexual identity; the socially awkward Holden needs the reassuring stability of love in acold and hostile world. Holden isatext- book sociopath, at sixteen already committed to an institution, a sim- mering misanthrope, a lunatic fringer, hostile, mocking, menacing, mean-spirited, given to explosive fits of violence, and who, tormented by private demons, refers to the odd deer-hunting hat he sports as his “people shooting” hat. You get the idea. This is a singularly contentious record of readings, one in irresolvable conflict with itself. This is not to dismiss the con- siderable body of articulate and careful explications engendered by The Catcher in the Rye—after a half century an accumulation of more than three hundred separate readings—but rather to suggest that such abundant effort has left Holden Caulfield undefined, voiding the very contract upon which reading fiction has always rested. Take Charles
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Dickens’s David Copperfield or Oliver Twist, both classic com- ing-of-age novels that Holden invokes (and mocks). As traditional re- alistic novels, both are sustained by the emotional energy generated between and among the characters (we are engaged by the unfolding action) and between the reader and the main character (we are engaged by a character we recognize, a character that we feel we “know”). In turn, our responsibility has been to define that main character, to fix our sympathies. Main characters are designed to yield only two read- ings—you either like themor you don’t, they are perceived either sym- pathetically or ironically. Indeed, virtually any primary character in any serious novel in the realist tradition is intended to be clarified by the reader into an agreeable consistency. The reader gathers evidence from the narrative—significant moments, telling symbols, revealing quotes, critical decisions—and makes the case, one way or the other: hero or villain. But Holden presents a dilemma. He is at once a good guy and a bad guy, a saint and a provocateur, a prophet and a sociopath, a romantic and a cynic. If he frets over the fate of the ducks in Central Park during the winter, he as well fantasizes about riding an atomic bomb down into the crowded sidewalks of Manhattan. He is and he is not—he is/is not. It is not that Holden is ironic or ambiguous or that he is some sort of Rorschach inkblot that readers are free to define as they “see.” Rather, Holden resists analysis, defies definition. Any single reading of Holden—and all of those listed above have been articulated in pub- lished readings of Catcher—is valid only if a generous body of evi- dence from the text is ignored. Holden violates the assumptions upon which, for centuries, we have erected our understanding of the act of reading itself. Unless, of course, consistency was never the point. Either Salinger is a remarkably inept writer—unable to construct a consistent charac- ter—or he is up to something vastly different. What if The Catcher in the Rye was conceived as something other than a traditional novel and Holden Caulfield as something other than a traditional character?
8 Critical Insights
What has been lost amid the passionate disputations centered on defin- ing Holden—identifying with him, loathing him, sympathizing with him,excusing him,blaming him,analyzing him,counseling him,diag- nosing him, fixing him, judging him—is the obvious: Holden Caul- field is not real, he is not a friend nor is he a fiend, he is not a “he” at all. “He” is an it, a textual event, a construction, a word chord, a ventrilo- quist act conducted by a writer-authority. The question we should ask isnot Who isHolden Caulfield? but rather,WhatisHolden Caulfield? What he is, is the creation of a traumatized thirty-something World War II veteran, a disquieted soul at once profoundly lonely and deeply spiritual, named Jerome David Salinger. Of course, as anyone familiar with the odd biography of Salinger knows, therein is a problem. Al- though he lived more than ninety years, Salinger never shared much insight into his life, much less into his writing processes. His decision shortly after Catcher’s publication to reject the coaxing lure of celeb- rity rendered him for a half century an intriguing absence. Salinger never granted a professional interview, never worked the lucrative lec- ture circuit, never appeared on television, never wrote an autobiogra- phy, never taught fiction at a university. But an understanding of Salinger would be central to any approach to Catcher that does not in- dulge Holden-mania. Holden Caulfield was not created by some foul-mouthed slacker kid addled by hormones, indifferent to school, and terrified by the prospects of growing up. Rather, he was deftly, subtly fashioned by a grown man who, by his early thirties, had been appalled by what the world had shown him: the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression, the dark brutalities of field combat in World War II, the horrific inhumanity of the Nazi concentration camps, the paranoid hysteria of the early Cold War, and the wonderland logic of mutual assured destruction. Salinger was of the troubled generation that had witnessed firsthand the failure, the hypocrisies, the corruption, the venality of Western civ- ilization and its most dominant expressions: Judeo-Christianity, En- lightenment science, and consumer capitalism. For them, Christianity
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was far too driven by its certainty that right and wrong are definable, that good and evil are quantifiable, and too obsessed with the competi- tive pilgrimage to the afterlife. Christianity divided society, separated nations and cultures, made bloodshed logical, even inevitable. For them, science, determined to reject the spiritual as a valid plane of ex- perience, committed to explanation and definition, dwelled too con- tentedly in the empirical realm of material fact, smugly certain that the universe would inevitably be domesticated, its vastness mapped into clarity. And capitalism? For them, it relentlessly pushed the privilege of possessions, too certain that the accumulation of stuff and the ambi- tious (and fiercely competitive) pursuit of wealth justified itself, despite creating a troubling chasm between a handful of the wealthy and all the rest. For Salinger (as well as other East Coast college-educated liberals in his generation), Christianity, science, and capitalism simply did not work. Each, in turn, is tested in Catcher. Holden’s precocious younger sister, Phoebe, for instance, embodies the best—and the worst—of Judeo-Christianity. Produced by the same disturbing family circum- stances that have unsettled Holden—distant parents, an upscale life- style of cold materialism, and the death of a brother from can- cer—Phoebe is strong and clearheaded. In the novel’s close, Phoebe, in her offer to accompany Holden in his foolish plans to head out West, calls his bluff as a way to compel him to acknowledge that he must re- join the responsibilities of living in a difficult, hazardous now. Phoebe is determined to fix her brother, to put his pieces back together (when Holden accidentally breaks a 45 record he has bought for Phoebe, she insists that he give her the bag with the pieces). Phoebe’s loving concern is familiar love-thy-neighbor Judeo-Christian rhetoric. But here Phoebe does not sustain admiration—like some caricature of Jesus the healer, she comes across as a bossy control freak (she claims she can control her own body temperature), an egomaniac (her school notebooks are decorated with columns of her own signature), an intrusive, steamrolling busybody (she sports elephants on her paja-
10 Critical Insights mas) who cannot endure mystery (in her spare time she writes detec- tive fiction) and who lives too easily in a world of cause and effect, good and evil. And, in the end, Holden cannot be healed anyway, can- not be fixed. At one point, Holden says that of all the characters in the Bible he most sympathizes with the man afflicted by demons re- counted in Mark 5. The man has long lived on the outskirts of a village in Gergesa, left to roam amid the broken tombs in the cemetery, shriek- ing in his madness, cutting himself with jagged stones. Jesus, ever the busybody, takes a moment to cast out the demons. But when the man tries to follow Jesus, Jesus tells him no. The man is left behind, healed, yes, but now an outcast. Jesus has moved on and the villagers still look upon the man with understandable wariness. Christian caring, then, is tender cruelty. Perhaps the most genuine gesture to help Holden comes from his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who gives Holden a place to sleep his last night in Manhattan. Mr. Antolini cautions Holden that he is heading for a painful fall and counsels him to find his place in this most imperfect world and to turn that spiritual anguish into great art—perhaps the best advice Holden receives. But when Holden wakes up the following morning to discover Mr. Antolini stroking his hair, Holden overreacts, assumes the teacher is making a homosexual pass, and summarily bolts. Again and again gestures of love, gestures of compassion, fail. For all of Jesus’ rhetoric, then, the Christian world resists cleansing. In the novel’s harrowing closing pages, Holden struggles to erase the obscenities scrawled on the walls of his sister’s elementary school, but even as he erases one “Fuck you” he finds another. If Christian compassion fails, science does little better. Holden’s brother invests his faith in therapy, real doctors in real hospitals. It is the stuff of the Hollywood screenplays D. B. churns out—a (melo)dra- matic recovery, a feel-good last-reel recovery through the rigorous ap- plication of medical attention. D. B. has placed his troubled little brother in an institution on the outskirts of Hollywood where medical science will “help” Holden through administering therapeutic rest and
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rehabilitation centered largely on Holden’s talking his way through his considerable anxieties. But the more Holden “confides,” the more we see he evades. He dodges any sort of honest confrontation with his troubled past, refuses to be straightforward, and never actually opens up about the most critical emotional crises of his life. He obfuscates, digresses, teases, and taunts his listener—indeed, given the numerous times he lies, we are never really sure how much of what he confesses actually happened. And capitalism? It fares little better than science or Christianity. Money and privilege—Holden’s father is an influential attorney—have given little to Holden. And as he walks amid the garish holiday displays and the throngs of weary shoppers at Christmastime, we are reminded how the crass materialism of capitalism is a measure of the spiritual bankruptcy of Judeo-Christianity. If Western civilization, then, is deemed soulless, mercenary, cor- rupt, spiritually rotten, where do you turn? Living amid the heady ar- tistic environs of New York City and attending Columbia University in the late 1940s (the time that Catcher was being written), Salinger, like other Greenwich Village intellectuals, found in the powerful persua- sion of Eastern thought, particularly Zen Buddhism, aprofound conso- lation, a way out of the wasteland despair over Western civilization’s evident failures. In a world intent on coming apart at every nail, Bud- dhism, with its emphasis on individual spiritual development, offered a compelling rationale for letting go, for achieving an inner balance and maintaining the integrity of a private sense of wholeness and spiri- tual wellness. Like the phalanx of free-spirited Manhattan writers and avant-garde poets, hip jazz musicians, coffeehouse philosophers, and experimental painters known collectively as the Beats, Salinger studied with care the argument of Zen Buddhism and responded to its striking simplicity, its emphasis on interior exploration as the way to spiritual peace amid great suffering, and its advocacy of intuitive med- itation and the rich expression of silence as central in the search for en- lightenment. Against the suffocating materialism and economic anxi- eties of consumer capitalism, against the barbaric irony of civilized
12 Critical Insights war, against the apocalyptic implications of science’s atomicage, Bud- dhism offered a signal consolation, a spiritual awakening that accords the seeker a resilient interior equanimity amid the distracting universe of chaos and noise.
The experience of reading Catcher, specifically frustrations over defining Holden, shifts dramatically if we factor in Salinger’s bur- geoning interest in Buddhism. The problem, of course, is that contem- porary Americans have little interest in spiritual complexities. Evan- gelical Protestantism, Christian Catholicism, Judaism, Islamism, even atheism—all are simplified into T-shirt slogans and bumper stickers. Zen Buddhism is no exception. Enjoy the Ride; Less Is More; Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff . . . It’s All Small Stuff; It’s All Fun and Games and Then Someone Loses an I; Meditation—It’s Not What You Think!; Be Mindful; See the (insert any noun); be the (insert the same noun). Indeed, the mention of Zen Buddhism to a contemporary audi- ence is likely to be associated with feng shui templates for interior re- decorating using elaborate gardening layouts and tumbling water; or paramilitary martial arts academies in strip malls where suburban kids are drilled with concepts of mentaltoughness; or low-key exercise reg- imens in which, to soothing instrumental music with gauzy sound ef- fects such as rain or ocean waves and glass wind chimes, practitioners assume pretzel-like positions on floor mats; or the power motivation bromidesofknockoffZenmastersfromNBAcoachPhilJacksontoca- ble news spiritual healer Deepak Chopra. The profound wisdom litera- ture of centuries of Buddhism has been simplified, popularized as the wit and wisdom of a succession of pop-culture icons, the Tao of Pooh or Mr. Spock, Eric Cartman or Dwight Schrute. Buddhism’s rich sense of paradox, its celebration of insight, the Zen moment, has long been a punch line for comedians who, in exaggerated broken “Oriental” syn- tax, offer nonsensical phrases that inevitably
begin “Confucius say.” OrBuddhism hasbeen appropriated asthefuzzy feel-good wisdomde- livered with appropriate inscrutability and unshakable calm by a series offaux-senseicharactersinscoresoftelevision seriesand films,froma
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succession of character actors in the role of detective Charlie Chan to tight-lipped martial arts actors from Chuck Norris to David Carradine, fromgnomicwisdom-spouting charactersfromtheJedimasterYodato Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid to the giant anthropomorphic sewer rat Master Splinter in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But the impact of Buddhism in energizing the avant-garde underground of New York City of the late 1940s was profound, and Salinger, we know, was par- ticularly engaged by its argument. Not only are there abundant refer- ences to the vocabulary and rich imagery of Buddhism in Catcher but also the handful of cryptic stories Salinger would publish in the decade after Catcher confirmed his serious interest. Catcher itself is the work of a man, at once deeply spiritual (his father was Jewish, his mother Catholic) and deeply dissatisfied with his materialist culture, who had found in Zen Buddhism the consolation of spiritual discipline. For Salinger and his troubled generation, Zen Buddhism freed the mind. Indeed, Zen Buddhism has no designated deity to pray to, no scriptures to study, no rituals to attend, no formal teachings to learn. Rather, it seeks to stretch the mind to the point where it grasps its own limits.These occasions for meditation center on a kind of story called a koan, the meaning of which, unlike traditional narrative parables, can- not be apprehended by thought or analysis; indeed, the argument of a koan cannot be reconstructed through discussion or lecture. Koans are entirely private experiences. Novitiates to the Buddhist tradition are given these perplexing stories to focus their meditations. From a West- ern perspective, koans can seem silly—of the nearly two thousand koans compiled in Buddhist tradition, most Westerners know only the one that ponders the sound of one hand clapping. But the intention of koans is to confound logic and in turn to ignite illumination, what Bud- dhists term a satori. Koans are not themselves the source of enlighten- ment; rather, they are the call to insight, like a knock at the door or the ring of a telephone. That intuitive moment of illumination is a pro- foundly private moment that comes, by all accounts, only from the rig- orous application of the intellect until its very processes give way, a
14 Critical Insights moment that cannot be forced, cannot even be earned, cannot be shared, indeed cannot even be articulated. Thus the satori runs counter to the expectations of Christian tradition, which sees the moment of spiritual awakening as a public moment, a saving moment when the absurd universe suddenly coheres, suddenly makes sense. Which brings us back to Holden. Shifting the focus away from Holden and positioning the reader at the center of the narrative experi- ence defines a far different, and far more ambitious, novel. If the novel takes place not among the characters or between Holden and the reader but rather between Salinger and the reader, then Salinger becomes the sensei, the teacher, who has subtly created the conditions in which and through which we readers may teach ourselves. We are reluctant, of course, students often are. As good Western readers, at once smugly clever and joylessly analytical, we seek a good story, a sympathetic character, a handy symbol or two, a tidy lesson. But Salinger wants nothing less than to enlarge the vision of the readers, to change not so much the conditions of our lives—that would be grossly inappropriate from a Buddhist perspective—but rather our perceptions of those con- ditions. Whatever epiphany Holden apparently achieves is left decid- edly (deliberately) problematic—he has numerous opportunities in the closing pages, in the museum, in his conversation with Phoebe, at the park watching the carousel in the rain, later in the California hospital bed. Is he redeemed? Is he doomed? Is he sick? Is he on the mend? It’s not that we do not know, it’s that we cannot know. But now shift to the reader. As with all wisdomliterature, the reader, not the character, is invited to learn. Holden is a complex riddle, a puz- zling contradiction, a paradoxical multireality that refuses to conform to the expectations of logic and rationality. We dutifully consider the evidence that Salinger so carefully orchestrates in his narrative. We re- alizethat frustration until (and here is where the illumination comesin) we glimpse the far more profound truth that Salinger seeks to teach, that fact cannot lead to clarity, that reality itself does not abide by the cloying imperatives of logic, that the mind needs to be roused to the re-
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ality of its own limits. Unlike Christianity or science or capitalism, Buddhism celebrates that moment of frustration when we grasp how ungraspable, how wonderfully elusive the material cosmos is. It is a moment of bracing, breathlessly expansive awareness. In executing a koan, Salinger uses The Catcher in the Rye as a spiritual exercise that rewards patience, concentration, discipline, and focus. We are not to define Holden—we are to ponder him. Thus like Melville’s elusive white whale, Hawthorne’s ornate scar- let letter, Fitzgerald’s shadowy gangster Jimmy Gatz, all literary pro- genitors of Holden Caulfield, Holden is less a textual event and more a daring, defiant refutation of the dreary Western imperative to put faith in the intellect. Holden is dangerously/wonderfully undefinable, a hi- eroglyph, a conundrum that opens the reader to the terrifying/exhila- rating energy of possibility. What is Holden? Apattern emerges. He is a confrontational pacifist, an uncommunicative confidant, a lonely egomaniac, a humble braggart, a loving sociopath, a sophisticated in- nocent, a caring homophobe, an authentic phony, an honest liar, a friendly loner, a spiritual atheist, a rebellious conformist, a pragmatic idealist, a compassionate misanthrope, a loving misogynist, a likable cad, a wandering paralytic, a Marxist capitalist, a hopeful manic- depressive, a moribund joker, a metaphysical existentialist, a selfless narcissist, an impotent savior, an erotic virgin, an egomaniac with an inferiority complex, a noble soul uncomplicated by a conscience. Pause to consider each yin-yang construction, how each construction defies reason, how each makes irony ironic—clear sight and insight are suddenly not the same thing. The more you think, the more confused you are, the wiser you become. The less you understand, the more you see. If contemplating Holden seems suspiciously eggheaded and irre- deemably impractical compared to the far more efficient process of ex- tracting symbols and coining themes, that is exactly why Salinger wants so earnestly for us to engage this character. For Salinger, it is the faith in analysis that has spiraled Western civilization into its cata-
16 Critical Insights strophic dead end. It is thus not so much ironic as appropriate that this last grand expression of the serious novel in American culture, the last American novel to find a wide and deep place in American culture, would so audaciously and so confidently reject its own genre. But Salinger is returning the novel to its beginnings—to what invented sto- ries did long before they so pleasantly distracted readers with plot and character, symbol and theme. In its beginnings, narrative offered the complex rejuvenation of wisdom. As a latter-day exemplum of such a narrative,Catcherisindeed adangerous book. Butnot becauseHolden smokes or swears or disrespects teachers or because he hires a prosti- tute or mocks Jesus’disciples or even because he fantasizes about kill- ing people. It is dangerous because what Salinger counsels runs so completely counter to the relentless materialism, the superficial cer- tainties, and the aggressive pursuit of the trivial that define Western culture. Salinger offers the difficult gift of an Eastern perception. If we can achieve that satori, if the didactic construction that is Holden can lead us to the intuitive embrace of paradox, an insight beyond lan- guage, beyond logic, then we are presented with a viable avenue to what so completely eludes the tormented and haunted Holden—spiritual contentment amid the obscenities of an inscrutable universe.
The Catcher in the Rye : An American Koan
Joseph Dewey
America, it appears, is in the uneasy twilight of the Age of the Novel. Even the most ardent readers—and the most dedicated English teachers—acknowledge that. Given the sheer reach that visual tech- nologies have achieved in just fifty years—film, advertising, televi- sion, video games, and, supremely, the Internet—the act (and art) of reading the printed word has been gracelessly shuffled off to the mar- gins. Americans are now pixel-fed and image-fat. Novels themselves seem bulky, impractical, clumsy, ink pressed on paper fast becoming like Morse code and cathedral radios, rotary phones and print newspa- pers, quaint relics of ways we use to communicate. And serious litera- ture—those …show more content…
novels that challenge willing, alert readers to interact with characters and symbols to formulate compelling themes—has been all but relegated to the protective hothouse of the classroom. Airport ter- minals,beaches, living rooms, bedrooms, park benches—there readers indulge the serious trivia of low-octane mass-market entertainments: complicated whodunits, edgy political thrillers, breezy romances, fu- turistic sci-fisagas,multivolumefantasy epicsabout wizardsand drag- ons, gothic vampire tales. Save those infrequent titles deemed Oprah-worthy, serious fiction never receives the lavish hype routinely accordedthemostinconsequentialnewfilmsorrealitytelevisionshows. Landmark novels momentarily stir heady excitement among a narrow coterie of professional readers and then promptly, utterly sink into the heavy tomb dust of library shelves. In America,in the twenty-first cen- tury, serious fiction has lost its clout, its cultural privilege. When cultural historians come to chronicle these end days of the American novel, they will most assuredly mark July 16, 1951, as the novel’s last hurrah. On that day, Little, Brown, with little fanfare, re- leased J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a slender, unprepossess- ing novel, barely two hundred pages, centered on a confused and de-
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pressed sixteen-year-old kid named Holden Caulfield, who, after flunking out of prep school (for the third time), delays returning home to his family’s swanky Central Park townhouse to wander the streets of New York City for three days. In the process, he struggles to come to terms not only with his academic failure but with the death, three years earlier, of his younger brother, Allie, from leukemia. It is not an easy adjustment. Indeed, by novel’s end, we learn Holden has been institu- tionalized at a psychiatric facility near Hollywood, where his older brother works as a screenwriter. On its surface, the novel was yet another coming-of-age narrative in which a sensitive and traumatized adolescent must negotiate the diffi- cult threshold into adulthood. If the genre was conventional, however, the book was anything but. Holden told his own story. And that voice—at once smart-alecky and vulnerable, worldly-wise and engag- ingly naive—touched a generation of readers, mostly under twenty-five, in a tectonic way that novels today simply don’t. Holden spoke in the syllable-crisp pitch-perfect immediacy of colloquialisms, the click and rhythm of clichés laced with swear words. Holden sounded real. AndAmericanteens,borntoolatetoshareintheeuphoria of World War II and compelled rather to adjust to the anxieties of the ColdWarandimminentatomicapocalypse,foundinHoldenCaulfielda friend who shared their discontent with authority, their anger over the middle-class status quo, their frustration with conventional measures of success, their angst over their own futures. Unlike the polite and re- strained child-heroes of the serious fiction of an earlier time, Holden reflected a hipper sensibility—he chain-smoked, he drank Scotch and soda, he talked back to his teachers, he rejected the expectations of ca- reer ambition, he declined to commiteffort to school, he swore with re- markable agility, he mocked Christians, he obsessed over sex. Within the free energy field of the early 1950s—an edgy kinetics that included the leather jacket-tight jeans movies of James Dean and Marlon Brando, Allen Ginsberg’s tormented “Howl,” Jack Kerouac’s epical peregrinations, Jackson Pollock’s splatter canvasses, John Coltrane’s
4 Critical Insights shattered melodies, Lenny Bruce’s incendiary performance pieces, and, supremely, rock and roll’s raucous rhythms—Holden Caulfield gave a voice to a generation in rebellion. The Catcher in the Rye quickly becamethe book every twenty-something had to read. Despite mixed reviews from the establishment press (who simply didn’t “get” Holden), the novel dominated best-seller lists and stayed there for more than a year. Indeed, in this twilight of the Age of the Novel, the book has never been out of print. Thus—it appears, for the last time—a work of serious fiction simul- taneously realigned the dynamics of American fiction and the dynam- ics of American culture. Holden helped incite the younger generation amid the narcoleptic calm of Eisenhower’s America to upend conven- tions, defy authority, and, in the process, attend to the suddenly serious business of reconsidering the very premise of their own lives and the nature of their own identities. Not surprisingly, perhaps inevitably, The Catcher in the Rye was quickly perceived to be a dangerous work, a work from which kids needed to be protected, second only to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (a work to which it is often compared) as the most frequently banned book in the American liter- ary canon. Since 1951, Holden has been blamed for virtually every ex- pression of adolescent rebellion. Swearing, the use of recreational pharmaceuticals, dropping out of school, premarital sex, underage drinking—they are all cool because of Holden. Holden has been read into the DNA for every angry white male rock music icon from Jerry Lee Lewis to Eminem, Bob Dylan to Kurt Cobain. Holden’s strident antiauthoritarianism and his uncompromising sense of honesty have been seen at the heart of the civil disobedience of the social and politi- cal upheavals in the 1960s. But far more problematically, parents and teachers, child psychologists, and guidance counselors have long blamed Holden, given his obsession with death (his own and others), for the gothic sensibility among teenagers and the dark appeal of sui- cide. The novel routinely comesup in any roundtable convened to con- sider the implications of some heinous act of violence perpetrated by a
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young maladjusted misfit. Fans of the novel have included Mark Da- vid Chapman, who shot John Lennon four times in the back; John Hinckley, Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan outside a Washington hotel to impress a film actress; and Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who wreaked the havoc at Columbine High School. Quite simply, no other work of American serious fiction in the last half century has achieved such reach. And given that Salinger’s novel has never been translated into film (Salinger had been angered by a film adaptation of one of his early short stories and resisted numerous lucrative offers to bring Catcher to the big screen), Holden has existed entirely as words, as ink pressed on paper. We get little physical de- scription of him, save his unusual height and his patch of prematurely gray hair. He is conjured entirely by language. Imagine that. The most notable and engaging adolescent characters of the last generation (many of them intriguing avatars of Holden)—Dawson Leery, Kevin Arnold, Richie Cunningham, Hannah Montana, Bart Simpson, Luke Skywalker, BenjaminBraddock, and, of course, acluster of Disney an- imations, most notably Simba and Ariel—have achieved their consid- erable cultural impress entirely through visual presentation, through film and television. And even those few landmark adolescent charac- ters first introduced in books have had their presentations inalterably defined (and simplified) by movies. We see Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter or Elijah Wood’s Frodo Baggins or Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen. But we read Holden, happily seduced by the verbal suction of that mesmerizing voice. It is an understatement to say that Holden has intrigued readers, ea- ger and determined to do what readers of serious fiction have been do- ing fornearly fivecenturies:gathertextualevidencetoconstruct acon- sistent reading of an engaging character. Readers have asked, Who is Holden Caulfield? The results have been curious. Holden is the proto- type hippie, an antieverything nonconformist, a perspicacious outsider who irreverently skewers the hypocrisies and shallowness of postwar America. Holden is a spoiled whiner, an arrogant slacker, a
6 Critical Insights smart-alecky (and not terribly bright) child of privilege who, given all the advantages of wealth, cannot find his way to maturity or responsi- bility. Holden is a complex con man, a moral chameleon, a shallow, su- perficial phony, a compulsive liar and an inveterate fraud who assumes identities with casual ease to mock teachers, friends, strangers—and us, the readers. Holden is a victim, traumatized by the hammer stroke of mortality, haunted by the death of his younger brother and by the suicide of a kid in prep school who jumped out a window in a turtle- neck he had just borrowed from Holden. Holden is a tragic romantic, gentle and naive, who wants what every dreamer since Quixote has wanted, the impossible, to protect the tenderhearted from the painful realities of this sad and imperfect world. Holden is a raging latter-day prophet, indicting his era’s mercenary capitalism, its soulless consum- erism, its competitive acquisitiveness, and, supremely, its moral shal- lowness. Holden is a lost heart yearning for love. Estranged from his parents, shuffled off to a succession of boarding schools, he reaches out again and again—to strangers on trains and in bars, to old class- mates and former teachers. Holden, a virgin, is deeply conflicted (like most sixteen-year-olds) by the idea of physical intimacy, confused about his own sexual identity; the socially awkward Holden needs the reassuring stability of love in acold and hostile world. Holden isatext- book sociopath, at sixteen already committed to an institution, a sim- mering misanthrope, a lunatic fringer, hostile, mocking, menacing, mean-spirited, given to explosive fits of violence, and who, tormented by private demons, refers to the odd deer-hunting hat he sports as his “people shooting” hat. You get the idea. This is a singularly contentious record of readings, one in irresolvable conflict with itself. This is not to dismiss the con- siderable body of articulate and careful explications engendered by The Catcher in the Rye—after a half century an accumulation of more than three hundred separate readings—but rather to suggest that such abundant effort has left Holden Caulfield undefined, voiding the very contract upon which reading fiction has always rested. Take Charles
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Dickens’s David Copperfield or Oliver Twist, both classic com- ing-of-age novels that Holden invokes (and mocks). As traditional re- alistic novels, both are sustained by the emotional energy generated between and among the characters (we are engaged by the unfolding action) and between the reader and the main character (we are engaged by a character we recognize, a character that we feel we “know”). In turn, our responsibility has been to define that main character, to fix our sympathies. Main characters are designed to yield only two read- ings—you either like themor you don’t, they are perceived either sym- pathetically or ironically. Indeed, virtually any primary character in any serious novel in the realist tradition is intended to be clarified by the reader into an agreeable consistency. The reader gathers evidence from the narrative—significant moments, telling symbols, revealing quotes, critical decisions—and makes the case, one way or the other: hero or villain. But Holden presents a dilemma. He is at once a good guy and a bad guy, a saint and a provocateur, a prophet and a sociopath, a romantic and a cynic. If he frets over the fate of the ducks in Central Park during the winter, he as well fantasizes about riding an atomic bomb down into the crowded sidewalks of Manhattan. He is and he is not—he is/is not. It is not that Holden is ironic or ambiguous or that he is some sort of Rorschach inkblot that readers are free to define as they “see.” Rather, Holden resists analysis, defies definition. Any single reading of Holden—and all of those listed above have been articulated in pub- lished readings of Catcher—is valid only if a generous body of evi- dence from the text is ignored. Holden violates the assumptions upon which, for centuries, we have erected our understanding of the act of reading itself. Unless, of course, consistency was never the point. Either Salinger is a remarkably inept writer—unable to construct a consistent charac- ter—or he is up to something vastly different. What if The Catcher in the Rye was conceived as something other than a traditional novel and Holden Caulfield as something other than a traditional character?
8 Critical Insights
What has been lost amid the passionate disputations centered on defin- ing Holden—identifying with him, loathing him, sympathizing with him,excusing him,blaming him,analyzing him,counseling him,diag- nosing him, fixing him, judging him—is the obvious: Holden Caul- field is not real, he is not a friend nor is he a fiend, he is not a “he” at all. “He” is an it, a textual event, a construction, a word chord, a ventrilo- quist act conducted by a writer-authority. The question we should ask isnot Who isHolden Caulfield? but rather,WhatisHolden Caulfield? What he is, is the creation of a traumatized thirty-something World War II veteran, a disquieted soul at once profoundly lonely and deeply spiritual, named Jerome David Salinger. Of course, as anyone familiar with the odd biography of Salinger knows, therein is a problem. Al- though he lived more than ninety years, Salinger never shared much insight into his life, much less into his writing processes. His decision shortly after Catcher’s publication to reject the coaxing lure of celeb- rity rendered him for a half century an intriguing absence. Salinger never granted a professional interview, never worked the lucrative lec- ture circuit, never appeared on television, never wrote an autobiogra- phy, never taught fiction at a university. But an understanding of Salinger would be central to any approach to Catcher that does not in- dulge Holden-mania. Holden Caulfield was not created by some foul-mouthed slacker kid addled by hormones, indifferent to school, and terrified by the prospects of growing up. Rather, he was deftly, subtly fashioned by a grown man who, by his early thirties, had been appalled by what the world had shown him: the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression, the dark brutalities of field combat in World War II, the horrific inhumanity of the Nazi concentration camps, the paranoid hysteria of the early Cold War, and the wonderland logic of mutual assured destruction. Salinger was of the troubled generation that had witnessed firsthand the failure, the hypocrisies, the corruption, the venality of Western civ- ilization and its most dominant expressions: Judeo-Christianity, En- lightenment science, and consumer capitalism. For them, Christianity
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was far too driven by its certainty that right and wrong are definable, that good and evil are quantifiable, and too obsessed with the competi- tive pilgrimage to the afterlife. Christianity divided society, separated nations and cultures, made bloodshed logical, even inevitable. For them, science, determined to reject the spiritual as a valid plane of ex- perience, committed to explanation and definition, dwelled too con- tentedly in the empirical realm of material fact, smugly certain that the universe would inevitably be domesticated, its vastness mapped into clarity. And capitalism? For them, it relentlessly pushed the privilege of possessions, too certain that the accumulation of stuff and the ambi- tious (and fiercely competitive) pursuit of wealth justified itself, despite creating a troubling chasm between a handful of the wealthy and all the rest. For Salinger (as well as other East Coast college-educated liberals in his generation), Christianity, science, and capitalism simply did not work. Each, in turn, is tested in Catcher. Holden’s precocious younger sister, Phoebe, for instance, embodies the best—and the worst—of Judeo-Christianity. Produced by the same disturbing family circum- stances that have unsettled Holden—distant parents, an upscale life- style of cold materialism, and the death of a brother from can- cer—Phoebe is strong and clearheaded. In the novel’s close, Phoebe, in her offer to accompany Holden in his foolish plans to head out West, calls his bluff as a way to compel him to acknowledge that he must re- join the responsibilities of living in a difficult, hazardous now. Phoebe is determined to fix her brother, to put his pieces back together (when Holden accidentally breaks a 45 record he has bought for Phoebe, she insists that he give her the bag with the pieces). Phoebe’s loving concern is familiar love-thy-neighbor Judeo-Christian rhetoric. But here Phoebe does not sustain admiration—like some caricature of Jesus the healer, she comes across as a bossy control freak (she claims she can control her own body temperature), an egomaniac (her school notebooks are decorated with columns of her own signature), an intrusive, steamrolling busybody (she sports elephants on her paja-
10 Critical Insights mas) who cannot endure mystery (in her spare time she writes detec- tive fiction) and who lives too easily in a world of cause and effect, good and evil. And, in the end, Holden cannot be healed anyway, can- not be fixed. At one point, Holden says that of all the characters in the Bible he most sympathizes with the man afflicted by demons re- counted in Mark 5. The man has long lived on the outskirts of a village in Gergesa, left to roam amid the broken tombs in the cemetery, shriek- ing in his madness, cutting himself with jagged stones. Jesus, ever the busybody, takes a moment to cast out the demons. But when the man tries to follow Jesus, Jesus tells him no. The man is left behind, healed, yes, but now an outcast. Jesus has moved on and the villagers still look upon the man with understandable wariness. Christian caring, then, is tender cruelty. Perhaps the most genuine gesture to help Holden comes from his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who gives Holden a place to sleep his last night in Manhattan. Mr. Antolini cautions Holden that he is heading for a painful fall and counsels him to find his place in this most imperfect world and to turn that spiritual anguish into great art—perhaps the best advice Holden receives. But when Holden wakes up the following morning to discover Mr. Antolini stroking his hair, Holden overreacts, assumes the teacher is making a homosexual pass, and summarily bolts. Again and again gestures of love, gestures of compassion, fail. For all of Jesus’ rhetoric, then, the Christian world resists cleansing. In the novel’s harrowing closing pages, Holden struggles to erase the obscenities scrawled on the walls of his sister’s elementary school, but even as he erases one “Fuck you” he finds another. If Christian compassion fails, science does little better. Holden’s brother invests his faith in therapy, real doctors in real hospitals. It is the stuff of the Hollywood screenplays D. B. churns out—a (melo)dra- matic recovery, a feel-good last-reel recovery through the rigorous ap- plication of medical attention. D. B. has placed his troubled little brother in an institution on the outskirts of Hollywood where medical science will “help” Holden through administering therapeutic rest and
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rehabilitation centered largely on Holden’s talking his way through his considerable anxieties. But the more Holden “confides,” the more we see he evades. He dodges any sort of honest confrontation with his troubled past, refuses to be straightforward, and never actually opens up about the most critical emotional crises of his life. He obfuscates, digresses, teases, and taunts his listener—indeed, given the numerous times he lies, we are never really sure how much of what he confesses actually happened. And capitalism? It fares little better than science or Christianity. Money and privilege—Holden’s father is an influential attorney—have given little to Holden. And as he walks amid the garish holiday displays and the throngs of weary shoppers at Christmastime, we are reminded how the crass materialism of capitalism is a measure of the spiritual bankruptcy of Judeo-Christianity. If Western civilization, then, is deemed soulless, mercenary, cor- rupt, spiritually rotten, where do you turn? Living amid the heady ar- tistic environs of New York City and attending Columbia University in the late 1940s (the time that Catcher was being written), Salinger, like other Greenwich Village intellectuals, found in the powerful persua- sion of Eastern thought, particularly Zen Buddhism, aprofound conso- lation, a way out of the wasteland despair over Western civilization’s evident failures. In a world intent on coming apart at every nail, Bud- dhism, with its emphasis on individual spiritual development, offered a compelling rationale for letting go, for achieving an inner balance and maintaining the integrity of a private sense of wholeness and spiri- tual wellness. Like the phalanx of free-spirited Manhattan writers and avant-garde poets, hip jazz musicians, coffeehouse philosophers, and experimental painters known collectively as the Beats, Salinger studied with care the argument of Zen Buddhism and responded to its striking simplicity, its emphasis on interior exploration as the way to spiritual peace amid great suffering, and its advocacy of intuitive med- itation and the rich expression of silence as central in the search for en- lightenment. Against the suffocating materialism and economic anxi- eties of consumer capitalism, against the barbaric irony of civilized
12 Critical Insights war, against the apocalyptic implications of science’s atomicage, Bud- dhism offered a signal consolation, a spiritual awakening that accords the seeker a resilient interior equanimity amid the distracting universe of chaos and noise.
The experience of reading Catcher, specifically frustrations over defining Holden, shifts dramatically if we factor in Salinger’s bur- geoning interest in Buddhism. The problem, of course, is that contem- porary Americans have little interest in spiritual complexities. Evan- gelical Protestantism, Christian Catholicism, Judaism, Islamism, even atheism—all are simplified into T-shirt slogans and bumper stickers. Zen Buddhism is no exception. Enjoy the Ride; Less Is More; Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff . . . It’s All Small Stuff; It’s All Fun and Games and Then Someone Loses an I; Meditation—It’s Not What You Think!; Be Mindful; See the (insert any noun); be the (insert the same noun). Indeed, the mention of Zen Buddhism to a contemporary audi- ence is likely to be associated with feng shui templates for interior re- decorating using elaborate gardening layouts and tumbling water; or paramilitary martial arts academies in strip malls where suburban kids are drilled with concepts of mentaltoughness; or low-key exercise reg- imens in which, to soothing instrumental music with gauzy sound ef- fects such as rain or ocean waves and glass wind chimes, practitioners assume pretzel-like positions on floor mats; or the power motivation bromidesofknockoffZenmastersfromNBAcoachPhilJacksontoca- ble news spiritual healer Deepak Chopra. The profound wisdom litera- ture of centuries of Buddhism has been simplified, popularized as the wit and wisdom of a succession of pop-culture icons, the Tao of Pooh or Mr. Spock, Eric Cartman or Dwight Schrute. Buddhism’s rich sense of paradox, its celebration of insight, the Zen moment, has long been a punch line for comedians who, in exaggerated broken “Oriental” syn- tax, offer nonsensical phrases that inevitably
begin “Confucius say.” OrBuddhism hasbeen appropriated asthefuzzy feel-good wisdomde- livered with appropriate inscrutability and unshakable calm by a series offaux-senseicharactersinscoresoftelevision seriesand films,froma
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succession of character actors in the role of detective Charlie Chan to tight-lipped martial arts actors from Chuck Norris to David Carradine, fromgnomicwisdom-spouting charactersfromtheJedimasterYodato Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid to the giant anthropomorphic sewer rat Master Splinter in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But the impact of Buddhism in energizing the avant-garde underground of New York City of the late 1940s was profound, and Salinger, we know, was par- ticularly engaged by its argument. Not only are there abundant refer- ences to the vocabulary and rich imagery of Buddhism in Catcher but also the handful of cryptic stories Salinger would publish in the decade after Catcher confirmed his serious interest. Catcher itself is the work of a man, at once deeply spiritual (his father was Jewish, his mother Catholic) and deeply dissatisfied with his materialist culture, who had found in Zen Buddhism the consolation of spiritual discipline. For Salinger and his troubled generation, Zen Buddhism freed the mind. Indeed, Zen Buddhism has no designated deity to pray to, no scriptures to study, no rituals to attend, no formal teachings to learn. Rather, it seeks to stretch the mind to the point where it grasps its own limits.These occasions for meditation center on a kind of story called a koan, the meaning of which, unlike traditional narrative parables, can- not be apprehended by thought or analysis; indeed, the argument of a koan cannot be reconstructed through discussion or lecture. Koans are entirely private experiences. Novitiates to the Buddhist tradition are given these perplexing stories to focus their meditations. From a West- ern perspective, koans can seem silly—of the nearly two thousand koans compiled in Buddhist tradition, most Westerners know only the one that ponders the sound of one hand clapping. But the intention of koans is to confound logic and in turn to ignite illumination, what Bud- dhists term a satori. Koans are not themselves the source of enlighten- ment; rather, they are the call to insight, like a knock at the door or the ring of a telephone. That intuitive moment of illumination is a pro- foundly private moment that comes, by all accounts, only from the rig- orous application of the intellect until its very processes give way, a
14 Critical Insights moment that cannot be forced, cannot even be earned, cannot be shared, indeed cannot even be articulated. Thus the satori runs counter to the expectations of Christian tradition, which sees the moment of spiritual awakening as a public moment, a saving moment when the absurd universe suddenly coheres, suddenly makes sense. Which brings us back to Holden. Shifting the focus away from Holden and positioning the reader at the center of the narrative experi- ence defines a far different, and far more ambitious, novel. If the novel takes place not among the characters or between Holden and the reader but rather between Salinger and the reader, then Salinger becomes the sensei, the teacher, who has subtly created the conditions in which and through which we readers may teach ourselves. We are reluctant, of course, students often are. As good Western readers, at once smugly clever and joylessly analytical, we seek a good story, a sympathetic character, a handy symbol or two, a tidy lesson. But Salinger wants nothing less than to enlarge the vision of the readers, to change not so much the conditions of our lives—that would be grossly inappropriate from a Buddhist perspective—but rather our perceptions of those con- ditions. Whatever epiphany Holden apparently achieves is left decid- edly (deliberately) problematic—he has numerous opportunities in the closing pages, in the museum, in his conversation with Phoebe, at the park watching the carousel in the rain, later in the California hospital bed. Is he redeemed? Is he doomed? Is he sick? Is he on the mend? It’s not that we do not know, it’s that we cannot know. But now shift to the reader. As with all wisdomliterature, the reader, not the character, is invited to learn. Holden is a complex riddle, a puz- zling contradiction, a paradoxical multireality that refuses to conform to the expectations of logic and rationality. We dutifully consider the evidence that Salinger so carefully orchestrates in his narrative. We re- alizethat frustration until (and here is where the illumination comesin) we glimpse the far more profound truth that Salinger seeks to teach, that fact cannot lead to clarity, that reality itself does not abide by the cloying imperatives of logic, that the mind needs to be roused to the re-
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ality of its own limits. Unlike Christianity or science or capitalism, Buddhism celebrates that moment of frustration when we grasp how ungraspable, how wonderfully elusive the material cosmos is. It is a moment of bracing, breathlessly expansive awareness. In executing a koan, Salinger uses The Catcher in the Rye as a spiritual exercise that rewards patience, concentration, discipline, and focus. We are not to define Holden—we are to ponder him. Thus like Melville’s elusive white whale, Hawthorne’s ornate scar- let letter, Fitzgerald’s shadowy gangster Jimmy Gatz, all literary pro- genitors of Holden Caulfield, Holden is less a textual event and more a daring, defiant refutation of the dreary Western imperative to put faith in the intellect. Holden is dangerously/wonderfully undefinable, a hi- eroglyph, a conundrum that opens the reader to the terrifying/exhila- rating energy of possibility. What is Holden? Apattern emerges. He is a confrontational pacifist, an uncommunicative confidant, a lonely egomaniac, a humble braggart, a loving sociopath, a sophisticated in- nocent, a caring homophobe, an authentic phony, an honest liar, a friendly loner, a spiritual atheist, a rebellious conformist, a pragmatic idealist, a compassionate misanthrope, a loving misogynist, a likable cad, a wandering paralytic, a Marxist capitalist, a hopeful manic- depressive, a moribund joker, a metaphysical existentialist, a selfless narcissist, an impotent savior, an erotic virgin, an egomaniac with an inferiority complex, a noble soul uncomplicated by a conscience. Pause to consider each yin-yang construction, how each construction defies reason, how each makes irony ironic—clear sight and insight are suddenly not the same thing. The more you think, the more confused you are, the wiser you become. The less you understand, the more you see. If contemplating Holden seems suspiciously eggheaded and irre- deemably impractical compared to the far more efficient process of ex- tracting symbols and coining themes, that is exactly why Salinger wants so earnestly for us to engage this character. For Salinger, it is the faith in analysis that has spiraled Western civilization into its cata-
16 Critical Insights strophic dead end. It is thus not so much ironic as appropriate that this last grand expression of the serious novel in American culture, the last American novel to find a wide and deep place in American culture, would so audaciously and so confidently reject its own genre. But Salinger is returning the novel to its beginnings—to what invented sto- ries did long before they so pleasantly distracted readers with plot and character, symbol and theme. In its beginnings, narrative offered the complex rejuvenation of wisdom. As a latter-day exemplum of such a narrative,Catcherisindeed adangerous book. Butnot becauseHolden smokes or swears or disrespects teachers or because he hires a prosti- tute or mocks Jesus’disciples or even because he fantasizes about kill- ing people. It is dangerous because what Salinger counsels runs so completely counter to the relentless materialism, the superficial cer- tainties, and the aggressive pursuit of the trivial that define Western culture. Salinger offers the difficult gift of an Eastern perception. If we can achieve that satori, if the didactic construction that is Holden can lead us to the intuitive embrace of paradox, an insight beyond lan- guage, beyond logic, then we are presented with a viable avenue to what so completely eludes the tormented and haunted Holden—spiritual contentment amid the obscenities of an inscrutable universe.