Catcher In The Rye: As Phony As They Come

Discussion in 'Art & Culture' started by CounslerCoffee, Oct 28, 2003.

  1. CounslerCoffee Registered Senior Member

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    This topic was brought up in another thread, so let's continue it here.

    I loathe CITR because Holden Caulfield is, as he would put it, a phony. He claims in the book that the world is full of phonies, when he actually is a phony. A huge phony at that. Just watch Holden give his young friends tips on life, even though he's as clueless as they are about the world around them. He's a big fake.

    So tell me, what is it about this book that makes people like it?
     
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  3. Pollux V Ra Bless America Registered Senior Member

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    I liked the book because of the flawless voice, the humor in it, and the parallels I drew between Holden and myself. Where, specifically, does Holden give advice to other people?
     
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  5. lixluke Refined Reinvention Valued Senior Member

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    Holden is supposed to be a phony. That's part of the irony in the book. I didn't like it much.
     
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  7. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    The Human Condition, I suppose

    Exactly what you find so loathsome. From that side of the coin it usually has something to do with Holden's humanity. It's true that Holden recites some awful truths, some golden truths, and all of it is something unattainable to him because he's just a punk.

    It's sort of an underlying theme in Salinger's work. "At War With the Eskimoes" and "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut", both from Nine Stories, play on it significantly; Franny and Zooey seems somewhat rife with it. To see it in three acts, I recommend in the following order, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", the first story in Nine Stories, followed by Raise High the Roof Beams Carpenters, and Seymour, two stories in a single volume which reveal the character so cryptically dealt with in "Bananafish". That's the order I read them in, and spread out over time. Sometimes the dead-end of what seems akin to Camus' notion of The Absurd becomes dominant; but "The Masked Bandit" is a good break that comes to mind, also in Nine Stories.

    I'm one of those that holds that Salinger really is that good, but if one lends any personal credibility to something like "Seymour", you come to realize that it is good to hold Salinger at arm's length, apropos, for instance, Twain's disclaimer at the beginning of Huck Finn.
     
  8. CounslerCoffee Registered Senior Member

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    The man is an early version of a goth from the 1950s. I hate goths. "Blah, blah, blah, pain." Why didn't he sleep with the hooker? Why didn't he get slum drunk and get in a bar fight? Why didn't he force that bitch to run away with him? Why didn't he do anything? Because he's a phony.
     
  9. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Exartly!

    You have it exactly.

    The rest is how you choose to respond to it. I know that seems shallow, but some days it seems as if the whole point was to demonstrate that we have to do what Holden was unable to: look past the façade.

    Holden is a ranting ninny throughout most of the book, but it all adds up to periodic gems. How the reader responds to Holden, or to Buddy (Raise High ...) or even the oversensitive narrator of "The Laughing Man" (previously and incorrectly referred to as "The Masked Bandit") makes all the difference in the world.

    Isn't it obvious that Holden Caulfield is insane? Read the very beginning, the first paragraph essentially. The voice is confessional; under what circumstances does that confession arise? Catcher is best read, in my opinion, if you picture that narrating Holden in a little white gown smoking a cigarette and glaring at you from across a table in a psychiatric ward in California.
    One must be careful about overt comparisons, but I do like to compare Holden with Seymour Glass to a certain degree. There's something different about Holden in that context; he's not nearly as smart as Seymour, but still ....

    It is the interior phony that Holden is, in fact, wrestling with. The most vital threat to himself he knows, he sees superficiality everywhere, and unable to lash himself, he lashes against it wherever he finds it until it nearly destroys him. Yet in his focus we, the reader, see a good deal of the superficiality of the world around him; whether or not we choose to sympathize with his human condition or revile it is left to each reader.

    Which invites a larger philosophical examination, so I'll stick to the short version of it. But we might ask on behalf of Holden something I've asked on behalf of others and even myself in the past: Do we consider Holden's experience extraordinary, even if merely in the statistical manifestation, or do we consider Holden's experience par for the course insofar as you would, in a bar, tell him to stop bitching because everybody's got those problems and he's nothing new? In the event of the latter, why is someone like Holden sensitive to the condition?

    If Holden has yet to "toughen up", and that's all there is to it--one perspective I remember from school--can we pretend that people in a world devoid of sympathy have successfully resolved the common problem? The melodramatic spin on it would be, If it's a common problem, why is nobody doing anything about it?

    And for those who knew "cutters" or pill-babies in school with their bi-monthly suicide attempts, I might point out that Holden, despite all else, survives. He may not be in very good shape, but here he is telling the tale. Perhaps, were there a sequel, he might do what most cannot, and find in his litany of bitching something of value that helps reconcile him to the misery of his condition; you can't make it go away, but if Holden wasn't a phony he'd just suppress it and hide from it. Well, according to American social convention, but if there's any sarcasm there, Counsler, it's not aimed at you. (Obviously, as I'm writing the conventions I disagree with to such a degree.)
     
  10. CounslerCoffee Registered Senior Member

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    4,997
    Tiassa,

    About the mental institution. One of the last paragraphs in the book is as follows:

    Holy smokes Batman, he was insane!

    Moving on...

    His problems are nothing new. Every school has that kid who gets kicked out, every teacher knows a student that has potential but doesn't touch upon it, and everybody knows that one crazy guy that thinks he’s original. The problem is that the student isn't touching his potential because he's lazy, the problem with the crazy guy is that he's not original, and the problem with the kid that gets kicked out is because it happens everyday (Me most recently).

    People that think they're original make me sad. Let me give you a quote from one of my most favorite movies, Fight Club:

    "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic material as everyone else."

    Isn't everyone? I mean c'mon, I notice things that bother me. Most recently the top seller on amazon.com pissed me off. Did I whine about it, yes. Did anything happen, no. What makes me different is that I'm not a rich kid from Pency who got rejected by his crew.

    He's the only one having a problem with it. He had a problem with actors because actors don't act like people. That doesn't bother me. It probably only bothers 3% of the worlds population. Does it bother me that the best seller at amazon.com is a diet book? Yes, but once again, nobody gives a shit but me.

    I guess it's obvious that I don't sympathize with Holden. His problems are minor and his rantings are insane. What he needs to do is take a Zoloft, go to bed, and get over it.
     
  11. gendanken Ruler of All the Lands Valued Senior Member

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    4,779
    Question: I wonder which of you here realizes the appeal of that brainsore was the fact that a schizoid used it as a reason to kill off a phony named Lennon?



    Let it go Counselor. Never ever put much stock in a book with the words "stuff" and "crumby" in it.
    This book is hot pigshit.
     
    Last edited: Oct 30, 2003
  12. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Various

    It's amazing how rarely that comes up among people I know. Not because they're not aware, but because it doesn't matter to their opinion of the book.

    Throughout his writing Salinger seems every bit the lunatic fringe permeating his more notable characters. To hear him spoken of some time ago, on the occasion of his eighty-first birthday, on NPR, I got the impression that there's more of good J.D. in those pages than people are wont to admit. I mean, the guy writes in a bunker, and has left explicit orders that its contents be burned immediately upon his death.

    What makes it valuable is its sense of lucidity. There is a thematic sense of consistency throughout Catcher as well as the tales of the Glass family that sets an even base for a sweeping range of comparisons. The narrators are aware of their neurosis; it's almost but not quite a Woody Allen pace of fretting, and it's largely internalized.
    To start anecdotally, I might look at my father. He'd agree with Counsler on these points. Or at least he would have at one point.

    These days he's much more of my mind on the third point that "Holden" isn't the only one having a problem with it. The same manner of conflict played out through diverse details lends much to domestic violence, drug abuse, and in some cases even organized political crimes.

    But on the first two, he will these days confess that while they still hold true insofar as he cannot prove them wrong, he mistrusts anything these days that seems axiomatic. And so for years he never really faced off with himself over various issues that were nagging him. He was afraid, on the one hand, of something that he would come to see in me--spending so much time neck-deep in issues of conscience while his soul bled to death--and of his own prejudice on the other: he refused the idea that the internal conflict should be isolated and dealt with on the merit that it did not merit special attention. For all he may have criticized faults in other people, he tolerated them in himself until the conflict, unresolved, snapped him.

    The problems are nothing new. What would be new would be something about how to deal with them that doesn't lead to medicated isolation.

    Imagine a bad scene in a bad comedy movie. "Mom" has to go somewhere--to see her sisters or something two states away--and "Dad" has to ... gasp ... cook dinner. ("But I can't cook!") So he's got two kids screaming, there's no Pop-Tarts, he has no skills about him to help him handle the situation ....

    Well, Mom will be back on Friday.

    But for Holden that's part of the problem. He sees the screaming infidelity of the world; he sees the same in himself. He is utterly lacking the faculties to exist without it; he is utterly unable to reconcile himself against what he loathes.

    He's not the only one having such problems, but it's true that not everyone is as sensitive to such things as Holden. Some have medicated, some have diverted their attention to distractions. I think of Brust's overly-sensitive "Billy" (Cowboy Feng's Space Bar & Grille) or "Vlad Taltos" of Adrilankhan infamy; both of them wrangle with certain issues of integrity and, to a certain degree whine and largely fail to cope with their own weaknesses. (Poor "Satan", in To Reign in Hell.) Salman Rushdie revisits such inner conflicts in Fury. Camus? Sartre? The tale is told all the way back to Gethsemane. ("What? You have faith that you're the Son of God! Why are you whining now?" Because I'm human.)

    It's a fundamental theme. Holden Caulfield is just a modern version of it. Salinger struck pretty close to the bone.

    If he's the only one that has a problem with being a phony, maybe Holden isn't insane after all. And maybe, somewhere in that angst-driven mess, that's part of the point.
     
  13. river-wind Valued Senior Member

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    2,671
    when we read this book back in High School, the day we discussed it in class was the only one where I sat silenty. After class, my teacher asked "So, it made a real impression on you, huh?"
    to which I replied.
    "No. It sucked."
    his question:"well, you've disliked other books, and have said that they were bad in class. Why didn't you say anything?"
    "While books like the Red Pony exsist soley for those people who have never looked at their own lives in detail, and need someone to shove emotion and empathy down their throughts, this book exsists for those people who have never had a lucid day in their lives. The questions this book askes are the same ones you would have answered yourself had you ever bothered to spend ten minutes thinking about frustrations everyone goes through. These are childish questions, asked and avoided by a character who acts like a depressed 5 year-old. He is not real, he has no connection to his own desires. It's not confusion he is in, its detachment - and detachment is not where people find themselves while asking these questions. If they did, depression, drugs, alcoholism, etc wouldn't be needed as escapes. This book wasn't bad. This book should never have been published." Then I walked out of the classroom.

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    as you can tell, it did have a profound effect on me. It convinced me that people must be extrordinarily ignorant of their own lives if this was some sort of ground-breaking material for them.

    These days I don't dislike it as much. I still think it's a dumb book, but I'm not as insulted by it anymore. I, after considering for a few years, have learned alot about people by both how it was written and how other people feel about it. It's a very education tool when the environment around it is studied. Sort of like how you can learn alot about a drug by looking at who takes it and what it does to them, as opposed to studying its chemical nature.
    I like the Red Pony only slightly less than I like this book, and The Red Pony is #1 on my "Stupid people should read this, anyone not drunk doesn't need to waste their time" list. Numbers 3,4 and 5 are a series of fiction novels by the guy who wrote the screenplay for Batman II. the "dragon rising" series.

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    There was only one book I read in Public school that I liked. "When Legends Die" by Hal Borland. It's not a great book, but at least the people in it are more real. People die, people get pissed off. they do stupid things they regret later, and know while they are doing it that they'll regret it, but do it anyway, as a self-punishment mechanism. Where the Red Fern Grows was pretty good too, but I was 10 when I read it, so that could have effected how good I thought it was.
     
  14. Xev Registered Senior Member

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    "She is simply thirsting to face some torture for some one, and if she doesn't get her torture she will throw herself out a window"

    *Yawns*
    We'd all be far better off if the Holden's of the world either found their torture or threw themselves out of windows.

    Unfortunately, they won't and thus we are condemned to suffer from them because they aren't suffering enough.
     

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