J.D.+Salinger's+Holden+and+Seymor+and+the+Spritural+Activist+Hero


 * "J. D. Salinger's Holden and Seymour and the Spiritual Activist Hero"**
 * Critic:** Helen Weinberg **Source:** //J. D. Salinger,// edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 63-79. **Criticism about:** J. D. Salinger (1919-), **also known as:** J(erome) D(avid) Salinger, Jerome David Salinger

[(essay date 1987) //In the following essay, Weinberg discusses post-Freudian criticism of Salinger's fiction and offers an analysis of Salinger's innovative literary techniques and the psychological and metaphysical motivations of his protagonists in// The Catcher in the Rye //and "Seymour: An Introduction."//] Mary McCarthy attacks J. D. Salinger's work as sentimental and narcissistic. One expects coolheadedness, tough-mindedness, from Miss McCarthy, and this is of course what she is giving her reader in assailing Salinger's sentimentality; but her view of his narcissism is not tough-minded. To criticize Salinger's work on psychological rather than literary grounds seems to me too arbitrary and simpleminded a method of judging his representation of reality. And it is on psychological grounds that Miss McCarthy's case against Salinger's oral-anal narcissism finally rests. As such it gives us a valid footnote on the Salinger hero but not, I think, a valid or full criticism of him. It would be a narrow psychology which did not make reference to the oral-anal narcissism possible in man; it would be a narrow literature, indeed, which had for its only hero the fully genital hero of Wilhelm Reich and D. H. Lawrence. On the other hand, other critics of Salinger overemphasize the Freudian validity of his insights. Gwynn and Blotner's book, while useful for its bibliography and general comment, is clumsy in its Freudian analysis of some of the stories. In **"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period,"** for example, it does the most shocking job of Freudian analysis possible in its insistence on the castration complex as centrally significant in that story. Blotner, Mary McCarthy, and all those who talk about Salinger's works as if they were case histories forget that we are all post-Freudian: Salinger, too, is post-Freudian, and to analyze him for his readers in Freudian terms is meaningless. Facile Freudian criticism of modern literature is no longer possible. Perhaps Freud's insights clarify great literary intuitions of the past. We may realize Hamlet's situation to a fuller extent if Hamlet is seen in the light of the Oedipal complex. However, today's literature is post-Freudian: it starts from Freud; it includes Freud; it leaps out of and away from Freud; it opposes itself to Freudian clichés along with a host of other sorts of inherited clichés. The post-Freudian novelist has been given what the post-Freudian critic or reader has been given. I think a modern novelist expects the reader to assume the Freudian ideas with him as part of the general intelligence which he brings to bear on (or which he opposes to) the reality that he presents in his novel. It is, in fact, on the basis of the recognition that the investigation of heroes with wonderfully varied psyches and an assortment of psychological differences which remain outside Freudian (or other established psychological) categories is possible in literature that I would find fault with much of the favorable and unfavorable criticism of Salinger. Salinger, as many new novelists do, explores possibilities outside normal behavior and outside the usual categories for abnormal behavior. Clearly, today's novelists are not psychological realists in any of the established ways. However, Salinger may attract critiques based on psychological categorizing from his admirers and detractors because he cheats, especially in his earlier work, on his own vision (a vision of goodness on the edge of madness) in order to structure a story according to external, formalized rules of the storytelling craft. I am not talking of the twenty stories of the apprentice period; these are experiments in storytelling in a number of styles: the styles of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Katherine Mansfield, and a little of the simple surprise-ending stuff of O. Henry. Nor do I find a conflict between vision and form in seven of the **//Nine Stories.//** All except **"Teddy"** and **"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period"** are formal studies of love and loneliness; all have the //New Yorker// tone as they make their understatements on the sweet and the sad in modern life. They are, no matter how successful of their kind (in the way, for example, that **"For Esmé--with Love and Squalor"** is successful), slight and ephemeral. They are informed by no special vision. **"Teddy"** and **"De Daumier-Smith"** are informed by a mystical vision of madness which provides the way to fullness of being otherwise unavailable in modern life. The vision in these two stories is just beginning to be defined and is, therefore, only contained in some conceptual form within the confines of the craftsmanlike story--the vision in not strong enough to conflict with the form or insist upon a form of its own. In **//The Catcher in the Rye//** the vision conflicts with the tight formalistic planning; in **"Seymour: An Introduction,"** the vision insists on finding its own form and thoroughly usurps the Salinger craftsmanship apparent in earlier work. The vision to which I have been referring should be perhaps more carefully defined before any detailed examination of **//The Catcher in the Rye//** and **"Seymour: An Introduction."** The emergent vision in the whole of Salinger's work is one of the potential of the spiritual self, and the elusiveness of that self, which is always ahead of the movement of the particular moment. He sees the inner self as potentially loving, compassionate, in touch with a human goodness that encompasses the mysteries of the world: in this sense, it is a vision of hope and carries with it a celebration of life. However, the full realization of the compassionate inner self is forever out of reach, because, as is seen in **"Seymour,"** the existential facts of life make the inner self one of the ineluctable mysteries. **"Seymour"** shows the self as unavailable, no matter how seriously sought, in metaphysical terms expressive of the vision at its fullest. **//Catcher//** shows the self as unavailable in social terms: the corruption and **phoniness** of society defeat the strivings for personal and spiritual freedom. But the visionary idea in **//Catcher//** is betrayed as much by the formal craft of storytelling and its rules, to which Salinger became addicted in his earliest work, as Holden is betrayed by society's insistence that he conform to its rules. But Salinger asks for the safety of conformity (as Holden does not) when he writes **//The Catcher in the Rye//** perhaps Salinger's inability to risk his vision here may be understood if the vision is seen as an edge-of-madness one which ultimately involves the writer as much as his subject--a curious phenomenon demonstrated in **"Seymour,"** a story in which Buddy Glass, the writer-narrator of the story, becomes temporarily a madman while trying to capture the essence of a ghost's existential madness. In **//The Catcher in the Rye,//** Salinger gives us an open, innocent, protean hero who lives, antisocially, on the periphery of conventional sanity--a modern rebel and existential hero, in fact. And he places this hero in a closed, corrupt, highly structured society, the alleys and byways of which become the ground of his exploration during his journey of adventure, his dark night of the soul during which he wanders through New York City. We would wish to find out, through the representation of this adventure, what can be existentially discovered in such a situation. It would seem that Salinger, along with other contemporary American novelists, such as Malamud in //A New Life// and Bellow in //Henderson the Rain King,// would somehow wish to show the subjective truths of the particularized but protean hero in an open-ended situation. But the overzealous craftsman in Salinger closes the situation: he makes a structure of Holden's "open" character and puts it against the structure of society, thereby intrinsically denying Holden's inner character, his self, at the same time as he sets it in motion in its primal openness, innocence, and claim to authentic discovery. The closed, literary, prestructured character of Holden is embodied in the archetypal figure of Christ, the incongruously ironic hero who, according to Northrop Frye, appears increasingly innocent the more he is punished by society. He is the innocent victim. The archetypal pattern would not of itself suffice to make Holden a closed, labeled hero; it is the enunciating of this pattern in the details of the story that too tightly restricts the movements of the hero. The significance of Holden's dark wandering, full of temptations encountered; the Christmas season setting; Holden's clearly symbolic wish to be the catcher in the rye (that is, the pastoral Jesus figure, a shepherd in the rye field who would save the innocence and purity of the small children, who make up the Salinger "flock," from the fall, the cliff, the dangers beyond the field). These things overwhelm Holden's becomingness with too rigid a pattern of being, and the being is essentially labeled Jesus. If the suffering in Holden's becomingness merely pointed to an archetypal pattern of the incongruously ironic figure, Holden's particularity would not be restricted by the literary device; but in Salinger's structuring, the archetype rules, and we are given a formula for ideal being rather than an urgent existence. We know the end, and in knowing it, we lose the process. Holden's definition of ideal being is made in response to Phoebe's demand that he name something he would like to be. "'Like a scientist. Or a lawyer or something.'" It is at this time that Holden verbalizes his choice, a choice against society, and describes his dream of ideality--his wish to be the catcher in the rye--which he will finally achieve in that concluding moment of the narrative action, when he sees that staying with Phoebe is the meaningful gesture he can make, the gesture which "saves" Phoebe, and, fulfilling the Jesus-pattern, puts him into society's hands to be "crucified." The artistry of this; the sense of wholeness achieved in what appears on the surface to be random observations of an adolescent boy; the final paradox--these things evoke in us an admiration for Salinger's craftsmanship and, more than that, for his ability to create a novel, totally modern in its questions, within the context of older novelistic conventions. But it is just exactly those modern questions which cannot be answered when they are enclosed in the traditions, novelistic or religious, of the past. Holden's questioning of his society makes an insistent claim to fresh insight; it promises more: it promises to shape, through the process of the hero's adventure, something new, if only a new formulation of the question. It is this claim to modern insight which is forfeited when Salinger fails to take the risks his material demands and to strive for the new forms which might make the material manifest. In his later work, the Glass family stories, and especially in **"Seymour,"** even though he very apparently uses Zen ideas, which are after all also given ideas, I think Salinger is a truer artist and is beginning to take the risks his material demands. Seymour, for example, is allowed to be a hero in process, not one imprisoned by a special given literary, mythic, or social idea. Seymour uses all ideas available to this experience; they do not use him. In so doing he shapes his fictive world; Salinger allows him to do this. And it is a risky business, as is attested by the almost unanimously adverse comment on this story. If "warring impulses of the soul distend the shape of Salinger's fiction," as Ihab Hassan suggests, the distended shape is honest and no charge of literary **phoniness** may be leveled at it. While Seymour is the story's hero, who must finally be isolated and discussed, Buddy as narrator has almost as primary a function in the tale as Seymour; for this is as much a story of the process of storytelling as it is a capturing of the process of a saint's life in New York City. It is as if when Salinger risks himself in telling Seymour's story fully he must tell his own, through Buddy. (I do not think he is being coy or cute, as some critics have suggested, when he gives to Buddy biographical data that belong to himself. Rather I think he is honestly attempting to meet the demands made on him by his tale.) That he must tell his own story as the writer seems very suitable on this occasion when his craft is broken by his vision and he searches for new forms that may encompass the largeness and strangeness of the vision. The story is governed by a sense of breakthrough and experiment. If significant function in the narrative is equally shared by narrator and hero, the story becomes an exemplification of the relationship between the writer and his material; since it is a story, one might say it is, patently, the relationship between the writer and his material. That is always true; here, however, this truth is overt and functional rather than a simple fact of all storytelling. The story is prefaced by two comments on the act of writing, one by Kafka, one by Kierkegaard. The quotation from Kafka, used as an epigraph for **"Seymour,"** is: The actors by their presence always convince me, to my horror, that most of what I've written about them until now is false. It is false because I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this, too, becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not hit off the real actors loudly and correctly, but loses itself dully in this love that never will be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it is protecting this ability from exercising itself.
 * Nationality:** American
 * "Seymour,"** a long short story, a plotless narrative, details the events, occasions, and gestures of a unique sort of activist; for Seymour, though a situational man in the world (one who responds to occasions rather than inventing them), is an activist of the spirit. In secular situations, he invents his spirit, but he does not invent the situation for the sake of his spirit, or spiritual self, as one might say spiritual activist heroes of other novels do. Given a situation, he transcends it: he does not reject it or change it. Thus, the story of Seymour depends less on his acts and more on his gestures and words, which become significant as the true outward clues to his inner activity. He is the poet or the saint, as Buddy Glass, the writer-narrator, tells us. But Buddy does not merely tell this, as Salinger tells us Holden is the catcher in the rye: he tries to show this, to prove it. In the process of trying to prove Seymour's saintliness, Buddy is afflicted by delirium, mania, chills, and fever which indicate the strain of the task of making manifest in worldly terms the spiritual activity of a living man, dead at the time of the storytelling, a ghost in fact. Buddy is haunted and, therefore, like the Ancient Mariner, somehow compelled to tell the tale. (There is a Gothic-horror quality about this. Perhaps when Salinger first thought of writing a series of stories about the Glass family, he thought in terms of a modern Gothic tale of a dead brother's ghost. However, Salinger's vision is here more metaphysical than Gothic, and there is, I think, no significant horror for the reader.)

Kafka is saying that the characters of a writer, once created, have a presence, a reality, in the world, which belongs to them, not to the writer, and that the writer respects this and protects it even from his own craft, which is perhaps mechanical and falsifies the truth the characters have assumed by their viable presence. Kafka's sense of his characters, created by his art but belonging, once there, to the reality of existence, is illustrated in his own work in which the spiritual and secular levels are inextricably joined, creating a thick unity that has seduced scholars and critics to try to separate the parts in order to see what might make such a substantial yet curiously elusive wholeness. Perhaps Salinger is so seduced, but rather than write a critical essay, he brings his question to his own storytelling. He has, until **"Seymour,"** postponed the question, although one sees him working with it in the three earlier long stories about the Glass family, **"Franny,"** **"Zooey,"** and **"Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,"** in which he has, some of the time, permitted his vision to overwhelm simple storytelling techniques, thus encouraging the personae of his characters to emerge more convincingly than they have in the early stories and **//Catcher.//** The epigraph from Kierkegaard reads: It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred, for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, "No, I will not be erased, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer."

Again, this is an enunciation of the writer's creation as having a life of its own, once on the page, once there, even if there by error or accident. Again the material of the work defeats the techniques for its control: a presence once created cannot be dispelled. The fact of Seymour-as-ghost works as well on this level of the story, which depends upon the dialogue between the writer and his material, as it does on the level of the fictive hero's "simple" story, where saintliness, mysticism, and ghostliness interoperate in a diversity of situation. Seymour, whose death Buddy has depicted in **"Perfect Day for Bananafish,"** must be confronted as a Kafkan "actor" or a Kierkegaardian "clerical error" that achieves presence as he is acknowledged by his creator, the writer. On the level of the writer's awareness, Seymour's ghostliness is interchangeable with this sort of artistic presence, and Buddy, the writer, struggles with it in chills and fever, reminiscent of Kierkegaard's //Fear and Trembling.// Curiously, Buddy the writer recognizes the urgent reality of his actor as Kierkegaard would have the reader know the immediacy of the Abraham and Isaac story and of all stories. But Salinger makes visible, or conscious, this "immediacy" in his story through his creation of a double for himself, Buddy Glass. It is possible to say that in some way Seymour is also Buddy's double; he is after all his brother, his sharer of a youthful bedroom and of ideas. Buddy is a writer of prose and Seymour is a poet. Both strive to catch and hold for a moment the continuum of poetry they sense flowing through all life. Buddy considers Seymour to have been a true poet although he is unable, finally, to say how or why. (Buddy's failure to say how or why Seymour is a true poet seems appropriate: the mystery of Seymour's poetry remains ultimately inexplicable.) Seymour is to Buddy as Buddy is to Salinger. If there is indeed a series of doubles here, as there seems to be, then the comment on the creative act and on the immediacy of the created actors (the living relationship between writer and fictive character) is very special and complex. The comment is also singularly modern in its insistence on the dynamics of the creative act itself, and on the creative juggling of the //is// and //is-not// of the two realities: the world's and the work's. This is the literary juggling of what might in the past have been called reality and appearance--but in the past the question has been which, indeed, is which. The **"Seymour"** story does not give us an ironic picture of a reality controverted by a reality. It comes to no ironic conclusions in areas of necessity, worked through probabilities and the final exhaustion of all possibilities. The novelty of this story is that it is an inconclusive presentation of probabilities which remain probabilities and of possibilities, always open: the story is without ironic undertones. In his total willingness to suspend judgments, conclusions, answers, and finalities, ironic or not, Salinger achieves two things with the story: uncompromised openness and an affirmation of constant flux. He has, furthermore, erased aesthetic boundaries and aesthetic distance (his own and, with that, the reader's); by determining to recreate experience as experience-in-process and at the same time focusing on the difficulty in the task and the unknowability of reality, he has established spontaneity through seeming chaos (rather than making order out of chaos as is the case in most traditional storytelling). The term "seeming chaos" is used not to suggest that the chaos is accidental but to suggest that the seemingness of this quality is intentionally apparent in the work in which it occurs. A surface chaos is intentional, or, more than that, it is a necessary manifestation on the formal level of the story of the conflict between craft and powerful material. Chaos, never in the history of art and literature considered a formal criterion, becomes in much modern American literature a new dynamic form, reflecting the actual conflict between an outworn traditional form and a new content. The new content, the powerful material, is that of the spirit of man, loosed from its conventional motivations and social modes in literature, art, and religious institutions, but still present to be contended with, accounted for, encountered. If in new literature, madness seems to be the clearer cause for disorder than is spiritual longing, this may be seen as a proof of the struggle with spiritual material that the writer or the hero of the narrative (in the case of **"Seymour"** both, or all three, if we count the very important Buddy) gives himself to irrationally while half-knowing as he begins that the answers he seeks are by their very nature inaccessible: it is the spiritual adventure that exists in reality which engrosses him; there is no easy conclusion, goal, or answer. The writer knows this and his hero knows this. The task is precipitous since madness is the risk. This risk is clearly indicated in the chaos of such experimental literary work where the destruction of aesthetic limitations, definitions, and aesthetic distance result from the implicit madness (or the choice to live on the edge-of-madness, as Leslie Fiedler has designated the modern spirit-tracking impulse). Paradoxically, this sort of literature confirms the older aesthetic idea of art as orderly and sane by presenting the reverse of that idea. Perhaps this is the reason that the new activist novel appears to be an anti-art novel, or an anti-novel. In a simpler sense the new novel may be called anti-art because it tries to come closer to life by imitating its literal surface and also by asking metaphysical questions about what is below the surface. Literal reality and serious philosophical questions, combined with the breaking down of aesthetic distance, it may be argued, however, are peculiarly novelistic since the novel has always been extra-literary; it has functioned since the eighteenth century in England as a place for direct commentary on life. When it has not been a commentary on life, it has been a comment on manners. However, the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel contained this commentary within clear aesthetic limits or literary conventions. The comment in the new American novel is often referential, unconventional, and uncontained, hence overwhelming, in the work, to the point that the novel often is philosophical more than novelistic in its first commitment, and sometimes prophetic in its final tone. To weigh an older form against the new, and to call the old "art" and the new "anti-art" is perhaps a merely confusing and misleading comparison, and surely it is an inappropriate stringency. Anti-art is a new form of art; the anti-novel is a new form of novel. It is only necessary to take note of the anti-art (or, here specifically, the anti-novel) idea as such in order to discuss new formalities in the apparent chaos, or "formal discontinuity as a perceptual mode," as one critic recently put it. And it is an interesting fact that the most energetic mainstream in art continues by feeding on all that which traditional art formerly denied. There is inherent in this the demand for reevaluation on all levels. The "formal discontinuity" of Salinger's story **"Seymour"** is such a reevaluation. Its distended form is part of that reevaluation, as is the substance of the story dealing with the narrator's conflict with his material. Because Salinger is very aware of what he does here, this story becomes important to the conscious examination of story and novel forms in a way that William Burroughs' fragmentized novel //Naked Lunch// does not. //Naked Lunch,// however, participates just as much in a new formal use of chaos as a constant element as **"Seymour"** does. It may be more important than **"Seymour"** because it antedates that story, and in its naturally sprawling, totally undisciplined, drug-addicted way it exists as the ultimate in anti-novel chaos. Yet it is a novel; it is a novel in which the vision of the writer has "destructively" usurped his craft. But the vision is real and powerful; it is so powerful that the serious reader cannot read for any length of time in the book without becoming terrified by the imagery. This, I think, is the reason the book is unreadable. The reason is not the one often given, that is, that the fragmentary pieces of the novel are incoherent to the point of meaninglessness. Incoherent the novel often is, but through this incoherence comes the terrible vision of man's helplessness (man as the naked lunch at the end of the fork) so vivid as to be unreadable, certainly unreadable in any concentrated period of reading time. Burroughs starts where Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" ends--with the horror. He stays always inside the horror, never at a distance from it. And unlike the suggested Gothic horror of **"Seymour,"** the horror of //Naked Lunch// is felt. Since, unintentionally or intentionally, Burroughs and Salinger dispose of formal distance and the consequent literary structures for their material in //Naked Lunch// and **"Seymour,"** they make language //qua// language do most of the work in their narratives. One is almost tempted to say that it is all done with language. As if language by itself were the last, as it was the first, instrument of the writer. The vision is the language and the form is the language: there is in these writers a linear, fluid verbal surface, a slangy, inventive, witty argot with its own vitality. Burroughs' nonsense lines are as much a part of this rich verbalism as his sensible lines. Sense and nonsense work together. (Having invented a word, Burroughs will give in parentheses, in a solemn dictionary like way, its definition. For example, when listing the activities of "adolescent hoodlums ... of all nations" he says they "throw ... candiru into swimming pools," and in parentheses he defines the candiru, which is a product of his imagination: "the candiru is a small eel-like fish or worm about one-quarter inch through and two inches long patronizing certain rivers of ill-repute in the Greater Amazon Basin.") Burroughs' words add up; they multiply themselves: they become an inundation, a flow that covers the surface, washing away rational conjectures. Salinger is not so entirely lost inside his vision or its language as Burroughs is; one must, after all, acknowledge that //Naked Lunch// was largely written when Burroughs was in a drug-addicted state and, therefore, immersed in his private vision and its own language. But that fluid, all-pervasive verbalism, so often noticed in Holden's speech in **//The Catcher in the Rye,//** expands in **"Seymour."** Buddy talks and talks: the story is a talkathon. Jokes, witticisms, slang, colloquialisms, aphorisms--the stream of language is torrential. Buddy talks compulsively to the reader as if he might lose the ghost of his hero entirely if he permitted a moment of silence. Through the crack of silence, nothingness might enter. It has been suggested that the verbal flood in **"Seymour"** is the ultimate exploration of civilized sound, which marks an attempt to exhaust that sound and come finally to a Zen silence. This judgment seems strained to me because, while Salinger is committed to a Zen idea for the saintly character of Seymour, he does not seem to be so committed for himself as a writer. A modern novelist like Jack Kerouac suggests a Zen ideal for the writer himself when he indulges in automatic writing for its own sake in a way that even Burroughs does not. Certainly Salinger nowhere implies that automatic writing is his aim. Buddy, who is a writer, feels cursed by his inability to cope with his saintly brother as hero. Any seeming automatism in the writing of Buddy, and implicitly of Salinger, is not purposeful but rather imposed by the material. The compulsive and automatic talking of Buddy is artfully viewed as a disease, the artist's disease, a "seizure." Art--albeit a new art--is Salinger's undeniable aim, not Zen silence. Buddy's confrontation with the ghost of his saintly brother has two significant themes: Buddy's theme, the writer and his material, deals with the process of storytelling; the other, Seymour's theme, the saint in the material world, explores the process of saintly and "poetic" living. ("Poetic" adds a new dimension which will be taken up later. I might mention here, however, that Seymour-as-poet is more overtly discussed by Buddy than Seymour-as-saint, though poet and saint overlap; their activities would seem to be, in **"Seymour,"** synonymous. The emphasis on Seymour-as-poet in the secondary theme, Seymour's, complements the primary theme, Buddy's.) I have already investigated the theme of the writer and his material. To look at the story as it exists on its simplest level, the level which embodies Seymour's theme, one must look at the character created as its hero and at the all-but-plotless plot. Who is Seymour? How does he act? What does he do? Is there a semblance of plot through which the character of the hero is revealed in a series of coherently, causally related moves or acts? There would appear to be no true plot in this essayish confession of a writer; however, there are a group of episodes, seemingly disconnected, which exist in a significant relationship to one another under the surface of the work. These are Seymour's episodes; Seymour is the hero after all, and we are in fact introduced to him as it is Salinger's avowed intention in the title of the piece that we be. The events or episodes which make up the plot are hidden in among Buddy's digressive comments on writing and his descriptions of Seymour. The references to Seymour first emerge subtly (as later the episodes, told in anecdotal form, will come in quietly and unobtrusively) during the course of Buddy's discussion of the Kierkegaard and Kafka quotations which introduce the story. Kierkegaard and Kafka are two of Buddy's four favorite Sick Men and Great Artists. The other two are Van Gogh and Seymour. Thus Seymour gets on the page; then, in quick succession, this hero goes from Sick Man, to Seer, to Muktah (or Mystic), to Saint, to God-seeker, to Fool, to Poet. All these titles or roles given to Seymour are worked into the fabric of Buddy's discourse on writing, the first section of the total work. In the second section of the work, Buddy discusses the poet and his poetry; the poet is Seymour. There are four anecdotes told. These deal with Seymour as a boy of eight, when he brought the right coat for each guest in his parents' living room to the person to whom it belonged without having foreknowledge of the ownership of the coat; as a boy of eleven, when he first discovered poetry books in the library; as a boy of fourteen, when he constantly jotted down poems wherever he was; as an older boy, when he tried to find a poetry form for his "un-Western" vision. There is also mention of his suicide, after which was found one of four poems paraphrased by Buddy. This second section, focusing on the poet and his poetry, ends with a depiction of the literary scene in America, complete with Buddy's amusing concession that critics are not fools because Seymour had said that Christ meant that there were no fools when He said "call no man Fool." In connection with literary gossip, Buddy paraphrases the fourth Seymour poem about a wise old man who, dying, would rather eavesdrop on gossiping in the courtyard than listen to the learned talk in his room. In the first section we have met Seymour and learned of his several "heroic" roles; in the second section, we have seen him as mystic and poet, heard him talk as saint and poet. In the third section, we have the history of the family which has produced this hero. The family ancestry includes a juggling Polish Jewish clown, an Irish tramp, and Les and Bess, the father and mother who were vaudeville stars. Seymour as poet becomes Seymour as juggler of experience: deep personal experience is balanced with autobiographical experience in his haiku-like poems--that is, while the poems are intensely personal, they are not factually autobiographical: a remarkable feat which Buddy finds a juggling feat. The fourth section returns to literature, with the emphasis directly on Buddy's writing rather than on Seymour's poetry; however, Seymour is now very much in the piece, and it is on his comments about Buddy's stories that the fourth section concentrates. This section is a new start in a way: at the very beginning of the story we have had Buddy's comments on writing and writers, leading to Seymour's appraisal of him as prose writer. An intricate twist, this return is properly introduced by Buddy's declaration that he has been away from the story and the reader, suffering from acute hepatitis, for nine weeks. He takes us back to the beginning, when he announced his manic happiness to have been an artist's seizure, a compulsion to speak. Perhaps, he says now, he was only liverish; what brings him from his literal sickness now to re-encounter Seymour is an old note of Seymour's, dealing with a 1940 story of Buddy's. The story goes from this note to others until the sum of Seymour's critical thoughts on writing is finally revealed: writing is a religious activity. It is necessary, therefore, to write one's heart out. Writing the heart out is more important, more germinal to the writer, than writing a masterpiece. "'I want your //loot,//'" not some neat formulized tricks, Seymour tells the young story writer, Buddy. "'Trust your heart,'" he adds. By way of bolstering these critical insights and dicta of Seymour to Buddy, there are more episodes, anecdotally told, involving Seymour and Buddy as adults. Without the reader's noticing, Seymour has grown up. There are, in the fourth section, fewer tales of his childhood, more tales of his mature activity and thought. However, childlikeness pervades his personality. Adulthood does not change the nature of his innocence. The last and most important section of the story might be called Seymour as corporeal being. Since this story is about Seymour, who was almost all spirit in life, and is literally all spirit at the time of writing, this fifth and last section, which takes more than one-third of the story's 137 pages, is an attempt on Buddy's part to keep Seymour on the page, to give him material being, in "life" and in literature, the dual task of Buddy the brother and Buddy the writer. As Buddy goes through the specifics of describing Seymour's earthly appearance, there is a paradoxical intensifying of Seymour's otherworldliness. The random list, a device of many contemporary American novelists, makes its appearance in this section as an element of structure. Nose, wrists, hair, hands, teeth--all of these fall into line, but without apparent order. One physical aspect grows out of a story about another. The organization is linear, not gestalt, and Buddy makes a special point of repudiating cubist theories of art that might be applied to his attempt to see the parts of Seymour at the same time that he sees the whole of Seymour, to see a point in time in Seymour's life at the same time that he sees all of Seymour's life. Buddy says, always keeping his focus on Seymour and Seymour's thoughts, even while discussing his own ideas of prose writing: It wouldn't worry [Seymour] a very great deal, I think, if after due consultation with my instincts I elected to use some sort of literary Cubism to present his face. For that matter, it wouldn't worry him at all if I wrote the rest of this exclusively in lower-case letters--if my instincts advised it. I wouldn't //mind// some form of Cubism here, but every last one of my instincts tells me to put up a good, lower-middle-class fight against it.

Buddy, as usual, puts down the literary label, whether Freudian or cubist or other, before it comes up. He is being, above all else, honest, as Seymour would have him be. (Alfred Chester notes //Salinger's// honesty in writing this story; he calls it "courageous" and suggests its honesty be compared to the dishonesty of earlier Salinger stories. Salinger, through Buddy, keeps his effort at honesty in the foreground.) Sticking to his linear organization of this final section, Salinger allows Buddy to leap from physical feature to physical feature until he lands in the description of the essence of Seymour's physicality--Seymour's inexplicable athletic prowess--based on a formlessness which for anyone but Seymour would have led to a loss of control in games such as tennis, Ping-Pong, stoopball, pocket pool, and curb marbles. The curb marbles anecdote, set in a time-suspended moment on a New York City sidewalk, is the appropriate climax of the whole story; it is not a climax in the usual sense of the culmination and coming together of several strands of action in a story but rather in the sense of the high moment (perhaps to be compared to Joyce's epiphany, although epiphany, as Joyce defines and exploits it, is even more a mysteriously poetic, organic, and final revelatory moment) when the reader feels that he at last has "the loot"--Salinger's loot, Buddy's loot, and Seymour's loot: the metaphysical loot of the story which goes beyond the story. And the reader gets to his point not with a sense of consummation and conclusion but with a sense of a meaningful respite in a continuum that extends outside the story and past its final sentences. The curb marbles episode is, again, anecdotal and tells of a ten-year-old Seymour, a figure coming into the field of marble-playing through the shadows of a city dusk ("his face shadowed, dimmed out"--that physical face which Buddy has just gone to great trouble to capture, pin down on the page, piece by piece, returns for this scene to immateriality); he sees the game that Buddy, a boy of eight, is playing with a friend, and advises Buddy on his playing. Two things Seymour says at this time stand out particularly: "'Could you try not aiming so much?'" and "'If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck.'" Seymour walks toward the two marble players; and Buddy quickly breaks up the game. Several pages later, just before the last pages of the story, Buddy interprets Seymour's advice: When he was coaching me, from the curbstone across the street, to quit aiming my marble at Ira Yankauer's--and he was ten, please remember--I believe he was instinctively getting at something very close in spirit to the sort of instructions a master archer in Japan will give when he forbids a willful new student to aim his arrows at the target; that is, when the archery master permits, as it were, Aiming but no aiming.

Buddy goes on from here to disclaim the wish to make a one-to-one relationship between Seymour's instruction and Zen instruction. He insists that he himself is Zenless though interested in the classical Zen writings; that Zen is in disrepute because it has been dirtied by popularizers who make of Zen detachment "an invitation to spiritual disinterestedness"; that pure Zen will survive however. But the comparison between Seymour and the Zen archery teacher stands, and Seymour's Zenfulness, as opposed to Buddy's Zenlessness, stands. The heart of the curb marbles anecdote is the sense of formlessness as value; deliberate formal aiming corrupts because it be tokens a belief that one may or may not hit his target. Formlessness assumes that one naturally, intuitively, instinctively hits the target. The arrow is made for the bull's-eye, the thrown marble for the stationary marble. The man attuned to the game, the true player, stands between the two--arrow and bull's-eye, marble and marble. He can best be an intermediary by shunning formal, external, given rules or forms for the game, by simply playing. In life, as in games, the Seymour-hero goes, without method, rule, or external form, from "one little piece of Holy Ground to the next." In life, which is a meta-game, formlessness is still the rule (or nonrule). (In spite of Buddy's insistence on his own Zenlessness, he has adopted Seymour's nonrule formlessness for this story, the implication being that he must since Seymour is its hero and the story shapes itself in acquiescence to the hero and his gestures and acts.) It is because Seymour makes of life a meta-game that excludes worldly social and ethical rules of conduct and depends instead upon a formlessness in responses which are dictated by an awareness and "feel" for any particular situation that I call him a spiritual hero. Since Salinger, through the narration of Buddy, explores possible formula types, or archetypes, for Seymour (Sick Man, Poet, Mystic, Saint) and is forced always beyond each of these by the nature of his hero, he is finally committed to a description of Seymour's existential being, unformulated and loose, as it confronts the thick and secular world. The question posed (more posed than answered) by Seymour's behavior is the question of what is spirit in the modern world, on the street, released from religious institutions? How does the spirit function, act, and move? Seymour's existential being is to be understood as a cipher for spirituality. (The initial S. is sometimes used by Buddy to stand for Seymour and seems more of an indication of the nature of the hero as cipher that it does a mere abbreviation of the name.) Buddy's strenuous effort to capture the material substance of his brother Seymour is an inverse way of showing us that this is impossible and of proving Seymour's existence to have been almost wholly a matter of spirituality, not physicality. Seymour does not live in a secular world but redefines the world of things in his own terms so that he goes from one piece of holy ground to the next. It is not necessary for him to rebel against the secular as it is found in the community (the village in //The Castle//), for he does not recognize the community. He sees only individuals and he sees only one group, the family group. The family is so thoroughly released from everyday concerns (in spite of the Glass parents' concern when Waker gives away his new Davega bicycle) and its members are so much more spiritual descendants of clowns and hoboes than they are New Yorkers that Seymour's willing and intimate involvement with them puts no strain on his secularly ignorant spirituality. As has been said, Seymour makes of life a spiritual meta-game, in which the only code is formlessness. The object of the game seems to be that the man be an intermediary between one concreteness and another for the sake of an undefined but absolute spirit. In the guise of poet, for example, Seymour, writing his own brand of double haiku, brings the red balloon, or the old wise man, or the widower to language. He makes himself a passive connection between the thing-in-life and the language. The double haiku, invented by Seymour, represents the loosening of an already "formless" form, the Japanese haiku, which restrains the poem only in number of lines and syllables. The only reason he looks for a form at all is so that he may write poems that will be understood by his favorite librarian. He does need a form in order to communicate, but he finds only a tenuous one, as a gesture of love. In the passive, innocent, mediating role that Seymour plays as a primary stance in his life meta-game (the corollary roles to this total one are those of mystic, poet, teacher, et cetera), love is not a commitment but a natural, effortless gesture. Seymour overcomes alienation and nothingness, those twin curses of modern life, by turning alienation into the necessary solitary independence of the saintly and spiritual man and by turning nothingness into a formlessness to be celebrated. The modern traumas are grist for his particular mill. "To unlearn the illusory differences: this is what for Salinger it means //to be as a child.// And the Glasses, we remember, are in this sense children, holy innocents still at twenty or thirty or forty." If Seymour is in the serene state of being of a child, free of the illusory differences of worldliness, he is in a state of lyrical freedom which K. partially achieves in what Paul Goodman calls "manic responses in abnormal states of consciousness" and finds in four particular lyrical passages in //The Castle:// the walk through the snowy night with Barnabas; the encounter with Frieda under the bar; the wait for Klamm in the snow; the bedroom scene with the castle official, Bürgel. Goodman also speaks of the "turmoil of conflicting plots" in //The Castle:// "[The conflicting plots] are in two sets: K.'s purpose and the high authorities; and the village, Frieda ... --and this turmoil is so managed and so kept in motion by the protagonist's character ... that it can never come to an end." But, he says, the lyrical passages interrupt the turmoil and hold the possibility of a resolution. The protagonist is "watchful, willful, and stubborn," and Goodman contends that the "pattern of the book ... is to exhaust him and carry him away with the satisfaction that comes with finally giving in." He adds: "We must envisage a resolution passage in the ending not unlike the four just quoted, but with one important difference: it is not manic. ... it is an open-eyed view of the actual scene and //therefore// spontaneous and unwilled." This finding from an analysis of the structure of //The Castle// is very ingenious, but I do not think the abnormal lyric passages necessarily point to a consummation in the grace of a lyrical resolution. Grace, through access to the castle, may be that toward which K. strives, but his existence as hero depends upon the process of striving; he is watchful and willful, aware and active. That his story ends without resolution, without a true conclusion, seems appropriate to the full realization of his character, his existence. Seymour, on the other hand, is constantly in this state of formless lyrical freedom and grace and not abnormally or manically so. He is never so because he is drunk, sleepy, or involved in sexual fantasy, as is K. in the lyrical passages Goodman cites. The striving for the castle is Buddy's Buddy becomes the Kafkan hero, and Seymour is his castle. Shall we ask ourselves of Seymour, as we do of the castle, is he diabolic or divine? And does it matter? To the story //qua// story I think it does not matter. The definition of spirit lies as much in the process of attempting its capture in language as it does in the description of Seymour which finally evolves, and the twofold structure of the **"Seymour"** story rests on the process of description as well as on the ultimate description. Spirit may be diabolic or divine in the modern world. It is sought for itself. It would seem not to matter very much in which direction the spiritual activist goes in the modern world, up, down, sideways, in circles, so long as he goes, //moves// Erich Heller, after discussing the modern loss of "the relation between mundane and transcendental reality," with the transcendental, or spiritual, losing its validity in a positivistic-scientific time and the mundane "becoming more 'really' real than before," says that by Kafka's time "reality has been all but completely sealed off against any transcendental intrusion" and that, therefore, in Kafka's world the "heroes struggle in vain for spiritual survival." He continues, "Thus [Kafka's] creations are symbolic, for they are infused with ... negative transcendence." It is because K. does //not// gain the castle (or finally give in to the lyrical state of consciousness which Goodman speaks of) and because Buddy remains Zenless and cannot firmly capture the essential nature of Seymour's existence that K. and Buddy both seem to be literary heroes created in the terms of the most honest modernist vision of the spiritual quest, and its inevitable failure.
 * Source:** Helen Weinberg, "J. D. Salinger's Holden and Seymour and the Spiritual Activist Hero," in //J. D. Salinger,// edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 63-79.
 * Source Database:** Contemporary Literary Criticism