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Title: J. D. Salinger. Author(s) James E. Miller, Jr. Source: [|**//EXPLORING Novels.//**]Online Detroit: Gale, 2003. From //Student Resource Center - Bronze//. Document Type: Criticism  Bookmark: [|**Bookmark this Document**] Library Links: =J. D. Salinger=

An excerpt from //J. D. Salinger//, University of Minnesota Press, 1965, pp. 5–19. [ **In** the following excerpt, Miller credits //The **Catcher** in the **Rye** //'s intergenerational appeal to its accessibility and humor. ] Holden Caulfield, the fumbling adolescent nauseated by the grossness of the world's body, may be the characteristic hero of contemporary fiction and the modern world. There can be no doubt that for today's American youth, Holden is an embodiment of their secret terrors and their accumulated hostilities, their slender joys and their magnified agonies. In his persistent innocence and his blundering virtue, he may represent to the rest of the world an adolescent America uncertainly searching for the lost garden, suspicious of alien or intimate entanglements, reluctant to encounter the horrors of reality. No other writer since World War II has achieved the heights of popularity of J. D. (for Jerome David) Salinger. And his popularity has rested primarily on one hero, Holden Caulfield, and on one book, //The **Catcher** **in** the **Rye** //. //The **Catcher** **in** the **Rye** // is a deceptively simple, enormously rich book whose sources of appeal run in deep and complexly varied veins. The very young are likely to identify with Holden and to see the adult world in which he sojourns as completely phony and worthless; the book thus becomes a handbook for rebels and a guide to identification of squares. The older generation is likely to identify with some part of the society that is satirized, and to see Holden as a bright but sick boy whose psyche needs adjustment before he can, as he will, find his niche and settle down. Holden as ideal rebel or Holden as neurotic misfit—the evidence for either interpretation lies loosely on the surface of the novel. Beneath the surface lies the evidence for a more complicated as well as more convincing Holden than some of his admirers are willing to recognize. [A] skeleton of events in // **Catcher** // distorts the book considerably, and demonstrates how dependent it is on incidental detail, what might even be called plot irrelevancies, for its most moving and profound meanings. Such detail and such crucially relevant irrelevancies are woven into the book's very texture. Salinger is able to achieve this loose-seeming yet tightly woven structure through ingenious exploitation of his chosen point of view. Like Mark Twain in //Huckleberry Finn//, Salinger appears to have hit upon the perfect way of telling the tale—or of letting the tale tell itself. Holden speaks out in his own idiom, and although his clichés belong to us all, the intonation and gesture are his own—and they strike home. Moreover, Salinger carefully places Holden on the psychiatrist's couch in California, apparently on the way to some kind of recovery from his spiritual collapse (we learn on the opening page of the novel that D. B. may be driving him home the next month). This allows Holden a free play of mind around the events he recounts, enabling him to see them from a more objective perspective than he could possibly have had during their actual happening, and enabling him also to move back beyond those three critical days into his past in recollection of more distant excursions, encounters, and collisions that seem somehow to have a bearing on his predicament. This point of view results in the novel's marvelous richness of texture. As the Holden on his journey is re-created for us by the Holden on the psychiatrist's couch, we recognize that the journey is more than movement through space—it is a movement, also, from innocence to knowledge, from self-ignorance to self-awareness, from isolation to involvement.... [Holden] penetrates to his own deception and his own phoniness, and is one more step on the way to the kind of involved awareness that will enable him at the end, after he has finished reconstructing his tale, to say: "About all I know is, I sort of //miss// everybody I told about." This knowledge, though it is casually presented in the closing lines of the book, is a difficult, profound, and mature knowledge that lies at the novel's center of gravity. It involves both a recognition that there can be no self-monopoly of innocence and a discovery that there can be no shield from complicity. Holden's quest, then, may be stated in a number of ways. In one sense, his quest is a quest to preserve an innocence that is in peril of vanishing—the innocence of childhood, the spotless innocence of a self horrified at contamination in the ordinary and inevitable involvements of life. In another sense, the quest is a quest for an ideal but un-human love that will meet all demands but make none; a relationship so sensitively attuned that all means of communication, however subtle, will remain alertly open, and all the messages, in whatever language, will get through. Perhaps in its profoundest sense Holden's quest is a quest for identity, a search for the self—he does, for example, go through a number of guises, such as Rudolf Schmidt when he talks with his classmate's mother or Jim Steele when he is visited by the prostitute Sunny. But he remains, however he might wish to the contrary, Holden Caulfield, and the self he is led to discover is Holden's and none other. And that self he discovers is a human self and an involved self that cannot, finally, break what Hawthorne once called the "magnetic chain of humanity;" he cannot deny the love within him when he begins to miss all the people, "bastards" included, he has told about. Holden vacillates throughout // **Catcher** // between the imperative of involvement and revulsion at involvement, and the result is a dual series of compelling images that act as magnets that both attract and repel. He is driven first to make some connection; like Whitman's "Noiseless Patient Spider," Holden launches forth filament after filament, but his "gossamer thread" never catches anywhere—until at the end it catches Phoebe in an entangled web from which Holden is obligated to release her. At the same time that he is casting forth, out of the agony of his loneliness, the filaments spun from his soul, Holden is repelled to the point of nausea (he is frequently about to puke or vomit) by the fundamental physicality of the human predicament. This inescapable physicality is a phenomenon of all human relationships, all human situations, by their very nature of being human. It is this terrible knowledge to which Holden must reconcile himself. Even a casual relationship with a schoolmate is heavily colored and shaped by the individual's imprisonment in his physical identity.... It is in a context of this kind that Holden's attitude toward sex, that most intense form of all human involvement, must be placed in order to comprehend both the fascination and the fear that he feels at its invocation. This ambivalence is portrayed vividly in the episode in which Holden looks out of his New York hotel window and is confronted by a series of scenes of sexual tragicomedy ..., and comments: "The trouble was, that kind of junk is sort of fascinating to watch, even if you don't want it to be.... Sometimes I can think of //very// crumby stuff I wouldn't mind doing if the opportunity came up." The insight is penetrating, and the understanding is a step beyond wisdom. Just as one part of Holden drives him forward in his painful quest for some responsive relationship with people, in spite of the terror of the physical, another and deeper part urges his withdrawal and flight, and even the ultimate disengagement of death—the utter abandonment of physicality. A controlling image in this sequence is that of the abandoned ducks on the frozen lagoon in Central Park. Obviously Holden repeatedly sees his own plight symbolized by the forlorn and freezing ducks. Another image that recurs is Holden's dead brother Allie's baseball mitt, in which are inscribed the poems of Emily Dickinson (a poet whose dominant subject was death). Again and again, Holden (like Emily Dickinson) imagines his own death, as, for example, after the degrading incident with the hotel pimp and the prostitute:
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What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would've done it, too, if I'd been sure somebody'd cover me up as soon as I landed.

The tone of levity betrays just how deep the suicidal impulse is lodged—to surge again on later occasions dangerously near to the surface. Holden's fascinated interest in the Museum of Natural History, particularly in those human scenes (a squaw, an Eskimo) statically preserved behind glass, where nobody moves and nothing changes, no matter how many times you come back—this intense interest is clearly related in some subterranean way to his deepest instincts. On one level, //The **Catcher** **in** the **Rye** // may be read as a story of death and rebirth. It is symbolically relevant that the time of year is deep winter: it is the time of Christmas, a season of expiration and parturition. Holden is fated, at the critical age of sixteen years, to fall from innocence, to experience the death of the old self and to arise a new Holden to confront the world afresh— much like Ishmael and his symbolic immersion and resurrection at the end of //Moby Dick//. The metaphor of the fall is sounded again and again in the closing pages of the novel. Holden himself introduces it, when talking with Phoebe, **in** his vision of himself as the **catcher** in the **rye**. His own stance at the edge of the cliff, is, in fact, precarious; ironically he is unable to prevent his own imminent fall. Mr. Antolini sounds the warning for Holden, directly and fervently, when he tells him that he is heading for "a terrible, terrible fall".... It is only a short while after this warning that Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini patting him on the head, abandons in panic this last refuge open to him, and starts to run—or fall—again. The precise motives behind Mr. Antolini's odd, but very human, gesture are obscure, as Holden himself comes shortly to realize: his patting Holden's head is, in its context, certainly a suggestive physical act; but it is also, surely, an act of profound, human, non-sexual affection, a gesture of the spirit as much as of the hand. Mr. Antolini's motives (he has been drinking) are no doubt muddled in his own mind. But Holden's shrinking back in horror from this physical touch, his immediate assumption that Mr. Antolini is a "flit" on the make, betrays his revulsion at the inevitable mixture of the dark and the light in any human act—a mixture inevitable because of the inescapable //physicality// of the human condition. It is from this level of lofty innocence that Holden is doomed to fall. At Phoebe's school, he rubs out one obscenity only to be confronted with another, scratched deeply into the wall. He decides, "If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even //half// the `Fuck You' signs in the world. It's impossible." Holden is thus close to realizing the futility of any attempt to be a **catcher** **in** the **rye** : the kids cannot, in the world as it is, be shielded from the crazy cliff. While waiting at the Metropolitan Museum for Phoebe, Holden descends into the Egyptian tomb, where he finds it "nice and peaceful"—until he notices the obscenity, once more, scrawled in red crayon, "under the glass part of the wall." He then imagines his own tombstone, displaying under his own name the revolting words of the obscenity. At this point, Holden's horror and his dream, his revulsion at the world and his of death, come together in the image of his tombstone and he finds himself confronting the critical moment of decision—life or death; the world with all its obscenities or suicide with all its denials. The image of the tombstone bearing the obscenity suggests that suicide itself would be a kind of ultimate capitulation to the terrible physicality of life, an ironic involvement of the flesh at the very moment of abdication of the flesh. Death thus becomes not a gesture of defiance but of surrender. Holden feels both nausea and faintness, and he actually passes out momentarily, and falls to the floor, a final fall that marks the end of the descent. When he arises, he feels better; the crisis is past, the choice for life symbolically made, the slow ascent begun. Phoebe's spontaneous generosity expressed in her willingness to run away with him confirms his decision to stay, to become involved, and to rejoin the human race! In the closing pages of the novel, as he watches Phoebe, in her blue coat, go around and around on the carrousel, Holden becomes afraid that as she grabs for the gold ring, she will fall, but he restrains himself:

The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them.

Gone now is the dream of being the **catcher** **in** the **rye**. Whether in the fields of **rye**, or on the circular carrousel, children must eventually fall, as Holden has fallen. Holden can be happy—"so damn happy"— now in the knowledge that Phoebe is held by the magic and endless circle of the carrousel in a suspended state of perfect and impenetrable innocence; and his happiness can be intensified and rendered poignant in the mature awareness that the state is momentary, that the music will stop and the magic circle break, that the fall, finally, cannot be stayed. For all its seriousness, // **Catcher** **in** the **Rye** // is one of the funniest books in American literature, and much has been said relating its humor to the native American tradition, and particularly to Mark Twain's //Huckleberry Finn//. Perhaps of equal importance with its connections to the past is the role of // **Catcher** // in the development of the post-World War II "black" humor, the humor that has occasional elements of irresponsibility, cruelty, despair, and insanity. Examples are Wright Morris' //Ceremony in Lone Tree// (1960), Joseph Heller's //Catch-22// (1961), and Ken Kesey's //One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest// (1962). One small episode in // **Catcher** // will suggest its place in this new direction of contemporary American humor. After leaving the Antolini apartment, as Holden is wandering in a daze about the streets, he comes upon a small vignette that seems to sum up the weird incongruities of modern life as he has encountered it:

I passed these two guys that were unloading this big Christmas tree off a truck. One guy kept saying to the other guy, `Hold the sonuvabitch //up//! Hold it //up//, for Chrissake!' It certainly was a gorgeous way to talk about a Christmas tree. It was sort of funny, though, in an awful way, and I started to sort of laugh. It was about the //worst// thing I could've done, because the minute I started to laugh I thought I was going to vomit. I really did, I even started to, but it went away. I don't know why.

It is, of course, //for the sake of Christ// that the tree has been reaped and hauled and now put into place. But the mover's remark, "Hold it //up//, for Chrissake," is only ironically and absurdly an invocation of this now lost original meaning, embedded like a fossil in language—the language not of a blessing but of a curse. Absurdity, nausea—these terms seem recurrently relevant to Holden's predicament as he hangs suspended between laughter and sickness. And is not Holden's predicament in some sense the modern predicament? At one point he remarks:

I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.

Perhaps the post-World War II comedy of blackness points the way of endurance in an insanely reeling world: if we do not at times feel nausea at contemporary horrors, we are, in a way, already dead; if we cannot occasionally laugh at contemporary absurdities, we shall in the darkness of our despair soon die.

**Source Citation:** **"J. D. Salinger."** __EXPLORING Novels__. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. __Student Resource Center - Bronze__. Gale. North Penn High School. 4 Feb. 2008 .