Rail against Holden. Call him a spoiled brat. When it comes to all the money and opportunity he squanders, he is! Let 20 years pass. Let the world wash over you, then read it again. You might see Holden for who he really is.
Not a stand-in for every single teenager that ever walked the Earth, but a lonely individual who finds the injustices of the world intolerable. From everyteen to annoying: are today's young readers turning on The Catcher in the Rye? Falling out of favour … A first edition from On the other, Oof! What's more, while the critic Alfred Kazin is, I think, on the mark in ascribing the excitement of Salinger's stories to his "intense, his almost compulsive need to fill in each inch of his canvas, each moment of his scene," the writing in Catcher is nowhere near so alive with moti mentali.
The whole, too, is slight. Salinger characterized himself as "a dash man and not a miler"; and indeed, though Catcher 's opening explodes with life, the whole reads like a novella that only just managed to shed its diminutive.
It does not develop appreciatively through its middle; Holden neither deepens nor comes to share the stage with other characters. Instead the book starts to feel narrow and maniacally one-note; reading it today, one wonders whether its real contribution lies in its anticipation of Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism.
In contrast to, say, The Great Gatsby, this is manifestly not a book to be studied for insight into the novel form. Unless, that is, one is interested is how a book can hit home with no evidence of its author ever having read Henry James's The Art of Fiction. Catcher demonstrates, among other things, how variously and mysteriously novels finally work and how even sophisticated audiences tend to genuflect to art but yield to testimony.
We are enthralled by voices that tell it like it is--or, in the case of Catcher , that seem to. My year-old son--who has, coincidentally, been reading Catcher for his 10th grade English class even as I write--puts it this way: "You feel [with Catcher ] like you're in on the real story," but that in the end Catcher is a "break" from reality rather than a source of information about it.
He likens Holden's appeal to that of Harry Potter: Just as Harry speaks to children because Harry is like them only able to do magic, Holden interests my son because Holden rebels and "gets away with it" in a way my son guesses—rightly--he would never.
In short, one part of Catcher's appeal lies in its purveyance of fantasy. This can, of course, have value--sensitizing an audience to the real limits of its freedom, for example--but can support solipsism, too. Alfred Kazin, among other critics, took the harsh view, characterizing Salinger's audience as "the vast number who have been released by our society to think of themselves as endlessly sensitive, spiritually alone, [and] gifted, and whose suffering lies in the narrowing of their consciousness to themselves.
And though he was later rumored to have gone quite bonkers—drinking urine, espousing Scientology, sitting in a Reichian orgone box, and more--he managed to retain an aura of martyred integrity, which the recurring censorship of Catcher only intensified. Academia, too, pressed on. The critic Alan Nadel--noting that the Cold War blossomed in the period between when, for unknown reasons, Salinger withdrew from publication a page version of the book, and , when it was published--interestingly saw in Holden, not so much heroic nonconformity, as a reflection of McCarthyism.
Many features of the narrative--the obsession with control in its rhetorical patterns, as well as its preoccupation with duplicity and compulsion to "name names"--bespoke, for Nadel, a psychic imprisonment in which the performance of truth-telling could never yield truth. And indeed, the insistence of phrases such as "I really mean it" and "to tell the truth" do finally seem to signal quicksand more than terra firma.
Holden at story's end is under interrogation--more isolated than independent, more defeated than defiant. If you want to know the truth, I don't know what I think about it," he says, touchingly. Has Holden, the avatar of American authenticity, become an avatar of American inauthenticity? Here Salinger's funhouse proves, yet once again--perhaps enduringly--ours. Her new book, Thank You, Mr.
Every now and then he gets sentimental about someone—a kindly teacher, an old girlfriend, his younger sister—but is quickly disillusioned. And in the end, for all his supposed rebellion, he is poised to take up his role again as a son of the privileged class.
There seems nothing further to get. If you come to the novel having heard it's a great work of social criticism, you're bound to be disappointed. How profound or incisive can the interior carping of a self-centred twerp be? To such disappointed readers, I can only say, "Yes, you've got a point. Maybe it's not destined to become one of the great universal classics of American lit up there with Huckleberry Finn.
In fact, I suspect the legions of its dismissers will grow the further we get from the zeitgeist of the mid-to-late twentieth century.
Of primary importance is its style and what scholars refer to as its voice. Right from the first line, Salinger serves notice this story is not going to be presented like anything its readers had ever read before. The line dispensing with "all that David Copperfield kind of crap" heralds both a new kind of story structure specifically not a Dickens-style coming-of-age story and a new kind of language to tell the story. Lots of writers had used profane speech before, but few had made this an entire novel.
Salinger sustains the profane, adolescent tone of Holden Caulfield as narrator through almost the entire novel, without a false note struck in more than two hundred pages. Today, with generations of scribes having copied this trick, it's hard to realize what an astounding feat this was back then. Caulfield's verbal tics have provided material for parodies: tagging sentences with vague phrases like "and all" and "if you want to know the truth", overusing "phonies", putting "old" before people's names, spicing it up with weak expletives like "goddam" and "for God's sake"—and everything "driving me crazy".
Salinger is easily satirized for lines like "People never think anything is anything really. I'm getting goddam sick of it. Vague but meaningful to anyone on the same wavelength as Holden.
0コメント