If the rebellious, misanthropic sediments of the youthful heart could be encapsulated into a single line of American fiction, it would have to be the opening to J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Evidently, we did want to hear about it. Since its original publication back in 1951, the novel has sold over 65 million copies and continues to be included in English high school syllabi across the country. Although it has been frequently challenged by school boards and libraries in the U.S. for, among other things, its vulgar language, explicit sexual references, and promotion of smoking and drinking, Catcher In The Rye has endured all this time because of the empathy that Salinger was able to create between his youthful audience and his widely celebrated anti-hero, Holden Caulfield.

Writing in a style that was incredibly simplistic and unprecedentedly honest, Salinger gave a voice to a pent-up post-war generation that had been taught to submit to authority and obey societal norms. Still Shaking off the effects of WWII, Americans retreated to a sort of feigned sense of solace with the archetypes of the tightly-knit suburban community and the nuclear family. But underneath these contrived social structures brewed a deep sense of urning to freely express the repressed emotions of a lost generation. With Salinger’s advent of not only Holden’s character, but his sardonic and insightful commentary as well, Catcher In The Rye immediately became a source of inspiration to everyone who felt like an outsider surrounded by a bunch of “phonies.”

Aside from Holden’s memorable one-line witticisms (“All morons hate it when you call them a moron”; “I’m always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to somebody I’m not at all glad I met”; “If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.”), what made him so relatable to the youth of America was the simplicity and straight-forwardness of his speech. Not since Mark Twain’s invention of Huckleberry Finn had a literary character addressed its audience with such insouciance and relative ease. Salinger was able to emulate this model and apply it to a more modernized setting, as we see with Holden’s bitter rant against his high school, Pency Prep: “It’s full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques.” Holden’s comments are direct and to the point. Rather than dress up his dialect or delve into some sort of unnecessary philosophical exploration, Salinger presents Holden through a form of teenage colloquial speech that is authentic and still well understood today.

Essayist Arthur Mizener writes in his essay The Love Song of J.D. Salinger: “His [Salinger’s] immediate appeal is that he speaks our language, or, to be exact, makes a kind of poetry out of the raw materials of our speech.” There is nothing artificial or pretentious in the vocabulary that Salinger bestows upon Holden. In a retreat from the grandiose language and in-depth characterization used by other authors during this time (most notably, Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner), Salinger sought to create a character that was emblematic of his story and his audience: an uncompromising, angst-ridden teen straddling between his youth and the adult world. Even today, teenagers are not only able to relate to the conversational narration and catalogue of coined adjectives––“pretty,” “crumby,” “terrific,” “lousy,” “stupid,” “old,” “quite,”––but they can wrap their heads around what Holden is going through as well. Wolfe impressed us with his imagery; Faulkner intrigued us with his style; Hemingway taught us what it meant to be a man; Fitzgerald regaled us with stories of the middle-upper-class lifestyle; but none of these prominent twentieth century writers could quite grasp an entire generational age to the extent of Salinger and his ability to empathize with his readers through Holden’s desire to be our catcher in the rye: “What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

Here, we presumably see Salinger interject himself into his own character more than at any other point in the novel. He is not some distant, remote “Author,” writing down to his his audience; rather, he is right there with Holden, seeking to protect our innocence, warning us of the dangers that await at the bottom of the cliff in the adult world. There isn’t a generation that can’t relate to Holden’s imagery of being in the rye because we all know what it’s like to be young one moment and all grown up the next. Evidence of the novel’s continued influence can be seen in such films as Rebel Without A Cause, American Graffiti, Dead Poets Society, Summer of ’42, and Stand By Me, The Graduate, just to name a few. Catcher also inspired the novels Less Than Zero, A Complicated Kindness, The Bell Jar and Ordinary People.

It’s remarkable and at the same time unfortunate that Catcher In The Rye is Salinger’s only novel to date. A devout recluse who guards his work like an over-protective father, Salinger has denied the rights to his novel for several possible stage and film adaptations. Most recently, Salinger was forced to make a rare public appearance in court where he successfully sued to stop the U.S. publication of a fan fiction novel that presents Holden as an old man. Although Holden may never be seen outside of the text from which he was created, his story will continue to be told for generations to come.

>Written by d/visible contributor Ben Millikan.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Culture, Literary form, Classic Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.