Catcher in the Rye

Holy shit. I just realized...he's the Michael Jackson of contemporary literaure, isn't he? (Which means Joyce Maynard = Emmanuel Lewis, right?)

Anyway you are all being way too hard on a good not great novel.

My friend Ranney teaches high school English and one of his extra-credit projects was a video interpretation of the book. The results were pretty hysterical--Catcher in the Hood, Enter the Dragon in the Rye, that sort of thing--and the students really loved the part with the teacher, turning it into a heavy seduction scene. One even had the teacher playing Barry White in the background, coming on to Holden in a kimono and offering a scotch on the rocks to loosen him up. It was downright upright.

oh, nevermind. I knew I was gonna hate this thread...

Thanks for sharing. I remember when I was like you.

Amazing that a thread on a www mentalist geek site, about this book, has elicited such a heavily negative response. In a way that may be admirable: better than being predictable and credulous.

Still, naturally I love it - just in the way that everyone does. Except it's now clear that 'everyone' doesn't.

-- but it's set in the *1940s* - the world of the book is really contemporary with, say, Cary Grant's peak years, Atlee / Cripps / Orwell's last years -- etc: an age before most of our conceptions of Alienated Youth really belong. (Caulfield wears a tie almost throughout.)

I think it's interesting that those who do like Catcher, like it a LOT, and feel that no one else understands it the way they do, and those who don't, hate it just as strongly. That could be the reason it's not quite part of the canon yet - we don't have this kind of love-hate complex over The Scarlet Letter, yknow?

Dillingham is about right, esp. re. the (maybe unhelpful) polarization of opinion.

Surely there need not be an either / or choice of Sympathy / Mockery. The book, or whatever it is we do while reading it, can accommodate both - alternately or simultaneously.

Strange - I never knew this ("authorial attitude to narrator") was a big debate re. CitR - it used to be the big debate re. JJ's Portrait of the Artist. The apparent impossibility of solving, or agreeing on, such apparently basic questions is not encouraging.

xp Well to be fair, this revive is ALLLLL CITR love, eephus. :)

VG: That's too bad! I skipped to OAC (Grade 13, since dropped from Ontario schools) and got to study The Wars by local author Timothy Findley, which I now also adore. A book too good (imo) to ruin by dissection!

interestingly, my younger sister hated reading, did not read for pleasure at all growing up. And then she studied Catcher in school and fell in love with it. I swear she read that thing 10 times. It was really cool to see!

I think that outcome is not so uncommon and is in fact the reason the book is so frequently taught.

From the Faulkner at Virginia website:

William Faulkner: Let me repeat. I have not read all the work of this present generation of writing. I have not had time yet. So I must speak only of the ones I do know. I am thinking now of what I rate the best one, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, perhaps because this one expresses so completely what I have tried to say. A youth, father to what will—must—someday be a man, more intelligent than some and more sensitive than most, who—he would not even have called it by instinct because he did not know he possessed it because God perhaps had put it there, loved man and wished to be a part of mankind, humanity, who tried to join the human race and failed. To me, his tragedy was not that he was, as he perhaps thought, not tough enough or brave enough or deserving enough to be accepted into humanity. His tragedy was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there. There was nothing for him to do save buzz, frantic and inviolate, inside the glass wall of his tumbler, until he either gave up or was himself, by himself, by his own frantic buzzing, destroyed.

One thinks of course immediately of Huck Finn, another youth already father to what will some day soon now be a man. But in Huck's case all he had to combat was his small size, which time would cure for him. In time he would be as big as any man he had to cope with. And even as it was, all the adult world could do to harm him was to skin his nose a little. Humanity, the human race, would and was accepting him already. All he needed to do was just to grow up into it. That is the young writer's dilemma as I see it. Not just his, but all our problems is to save mankind from being de-souled as the stallion or boar or bull is gelded, to save the individual from anonymity before it is too late, and humanity has vanished from the animal called man. And who better to save man's humanity than the writer, the poet, the artist, since who should fear the loss of it more, since the humanity of man is the artist's life's blood?

(later)

John Coleman: Mr. Faulkner, you said earlier that Holden Caulfield's tragedy was the fact that mankind wasn't there or that Holden Caulfield didn't think he was there?

William Faulkner: He wasn't there.

John Coleman: I sometimes thought the tragedy of Holden Caulfield was that he did not fall, in a way, that if he fell off into humanity he might've found humanity.

William Faulkner: Well, he would have to have been tougher than he was. If he had been tougher than that, there wouldn't have been any story in the first place, but his—his story was an—an intelligent, very sensitive young man who was in this—this day and time was an anachronism, was almost an obsolescence, trying to cope with and struggle with—with the present-day world, which he was not fitted for. When—he didn't want money. He didn't want position, anything. He just wanted to find man and wanted something to love, and he couldn't. There was nothing there. The nearest he came to it was his sister who was a child, and—and though she tried to love him, she couldn't understand his problem. The only other human beings he ran into, he had preconceptions to doubt, the—the teacher which could've helped him, and he suddenly began to suspect the teacher's motives.

Joseph Blotner: Sir, this sounds an awful lot like a novel called The Sound and the Fury, (with) Quentin Compson wanting to love people and the same sort of relationship with his sister.

William Faulkner: I don't quite agree with you. I don't believe that—that Quentin and Holden were very much alike in—except in being a little too sensitive and coming from a somewhat similar background of—of people that were—were over-intelligent but incapable of—of any strength of—of mutual affection and tenderness, which, as I got it, was—was Holden's home.

Joseph Blotner: You'd feel that Salinger, for example, just hasn't created enough characters who seem to be a part of this big human race. There isn't just a—there just isn't enough for Holden Caulfield to come in contact with before he can get anywhere?

William Faulkner: He couldn't get to them. He tried. There was the chance with the professor that understood him and—and could have helped him, but there he had—right in there he had run into a—a preconception which was foisted on him, that every man if—if—if he's not happily married, he must be homosexual. That's the—the pressure to belong to a group, to be typed, that you can't be yourself, you've got to—to belong to something. If he—if he ran into two people that should have been a part of the—of the moil and seethe of—of simple people which I spoke about, that was the prostitute and the pimp, and the only point they met on was that—that shabby five-dollar bill, that there was no human contact otherwise, even when the—the man hit him it might have been a door swinging into him. There's nothing human in it. The only human contact he could reach was with his little sister, who was too young to—to see that, she knew that he was in trouble, but she had no conception of—of what the anguish and trouble was.

^^ This is why I can't read Faulkner, either.

wow, that's v cool JD

it's prob one of my favorite pieces of lit criticism ever, and it blows my mind that faulkner was apparently just talking off the cuff. i like to imagine him sitting around in bars striking up conversations with strangers that sounded like that.

yeah he kinda nails Holden...I haven't really seen him summed up quite so well as that. I'm not really a huge Faulkner fan at all, like I have started Sound & Fury 20 times and never finished it, everytime I try to read him I feel like I'm wearing really uncomfortable shoes that I can't wait to take off

yeah, wow, this is amazing and I've never heard of it.

"there was no human contact otherwise, even when the—the man hit him it might have been a door swinging into him. There's nothing human in it."

and it's so true, it's not that he doesn't have the opportunity to be part of society, it's that he's prejudging the people who would genuinely help him on a solid path

poor holden

The only human contact he could reach was with his little sister, who was too young to—to see that, she knew that he was in trouble, but she had no conception of—of what the anguish and trouble was

breaks my heart all over again

that's amazing, jd, thanks so much for posting - remember all of that faulkner stuff surfacing & had never got around to really exploring

http://i.imgur.com/Q8ZtzoM.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/7Z79d8Yj/IMG-1581.jpg

Street find
Kids these days, they don’t even read CIIR

I picked up Crying of Lot 49 at a Buy Nothing "free yard sale" today.

Is anyone assigning Catcher anymore? A few years ago, it came up in a conversation I was having with a Children's/YA lit scholar, who dismissed it with a "ugh," which makes me wonder how it is regarded these days.

15 years since he died, 6 years since his son said his unpublished stuff would be published, but still nothing. I wonder if we'll ever find out what he was writing during those 50 odd years of not publishing

It got an enthusiastic talking-up on Backlisted a few years ago, which made me curious to reread.

I wish I’d been assigned it at school, instead of Lord of the Files, or I’m The King of the Castle, or Mayor of Castebridge (twice)

Reread it right around the time Rushmore came out (reminded me of Catcher). Not pleasant.

Is anyone assigning Catcher anymore?

I would assume that it would be among the first to go in a book ban

I wish I’d been assigned it at school, instead of Lord of the Files, or I’m The King of the Castle, or Mayor of Castebridge (twice)

we did both lotf and catcher in the rye.

we did The Spire instead of Lord of The Flies, that is a very odd book to read aged 17.

Most of my high school English class despised it when we read it (early 90s). I remember it was far more readable than anything else on our reading list, probably because it was one of the few books set anywhere close to the present day. Everything we read seemed to be about war, even Catcher is probably a war story underneath.

reading about him and joyce maynard and the underage girls he fell for kinda ended any interest i had in him. taking joyce maynard to a doctor to have her hymen stretched so that they could have sex......ugggghhhh....also forcing her to give him oral sex.....later for you, dude.

https://www.bustle.com/p/what-writing-about-my-abusive-relationship-with-jd-salinger-taught-me-about-silencing-womens-voices-2951259

https://ccsalinger.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/j-d-salingers-women/

I have no interest in rereading it at this point in my life and no wish to defend Salinger the person, but I will say that first reading this at 14 when I was stuck without a car in the middle of cornfields was one of those keys unlocking a wider world for me.

(i did like that book when i was in high school because i liked the use of slang. i liked that kinda "real" talk in books back then whenever i came across it. which is why last exit to brooklyn kinda blew my mind when i discovered it. i didn't know that you could do that. it was definitely inspiring. augie march too. and then miller and celine. poetic slang. well-written slang. not just transcription. people think it would be easy to write a book like last exit and they have no idea how wrong they are. all people i no longer read by the way! but they left a mark for sure. if i could be a novelist though i would still want to be stanley elkin. he did it best for me. he got me high on it. he could be a better poet than a lot of poets.)

writing a coming-of-age novel that's adopted as canon is probably a pretty lucrative accomplishment... thinking of all the school libraries buying hundreds of copies of Catcher and Lord of the Flies, many of which are lost or destroyed so they need to keep ordering more

Add A Separate Peace to that list ^^^^^

Ugh, a Separate Peace

yeah i had to read all of these in high school. it was better than James Fenimore Cooper, whose stories were the most boring thing i had ever laid eyes on at the time, FU Natty Bumppo. i wouldn't be surprised if i have said this before on ILX bc i have been saying it for decades. hated those stories.

the contemporary fiction that stood out to me most in my hs assigned readings was Joyce Carol Oates' Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
worst award goes to some short story called R*pe Fantasies that i am scared to google but don't remember the author.

i wonder if anyone reads The Chocolate War anymore.

Do they teach Perks of Being a Wallflower in schools now? Haven't read the book, but I love the movie. Charlie's teacher lends him a copy of Catcher at one point.

watching this in school was always a treat. saw it more than once!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=387nRTNV964

Did Chocolate War in school also.

(that Owl Creek film was a unique one in the Twilight Zone canon, they basically licensed it and had nothing to do with the actual production)

We read Go Ask Alice in Grade 8. We read a completely fradulent book.

OMG that book is SUCH bullshit

I remember Flowers for Algernon being one of the better books I was forced to read back then

Never forget Charly!
Go Ask Alice and Sybil are two of the best fraudulent bestsellers

i loved go ask alice.

At 12, I did too, especially the film (and all the covers-I-didn't-know-were-covers of "White Rabbit" and "Dear Mr. Fantasty" and "It Ain't Easy"). And I was scared straight! (For the nex three years, anyway...)

the full Go Ask Alice movie is on YouTUbe

(I'd forgotten it has both William Shatner & Andy Griffith!)

We didn't get assigned Go Ask Alice but I definitely read it in the school library! Also Catch-22, which I was jealous that other classes got as assigned reading when I was stuck reading the Red Badge of Courage and the Sun Also Rises

we did I Am David by Anne Holm when I was about 14, and I absolutely hated it. I had been put down into the second lowest English set for never doing any homework or saying anything in class, and we covered a few pages every lesson, it seemed like an insult having to read something so simple.

not assigned in school, but this exploitation novel scared me when i was a kid. i just thought the cover was cool. it turns out being a pill-popper is so not cool!

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1247700748i/6618983.jpg

Ugh, a Separate Peace

A Separate Peace is a good queer YA novel. Americans seem to hate it, though: Bill Konigsberg even takes a subtle shot at it in his contemporary queer YA novel Openly Straight.

I revived this thread to chat more about set texts at school

Books You Had To Read At School

I don’t think you could pay me to revisit this book.

Saw a great T-shirt on the subway today: "i think i even miss that goddamn maurice," small type, all lower-case. Had to ask where the quote came from--oh yeah, that's right.