So begins Salinger’s now infamous The Catcher in the Rye, and Holden’s first clue to readers that he is going to stylistically mimic how we speak and listen to one another–thus he chooses to replace the verb “to read” with “to hear”–instead of how we write.
Below, Gary Larson has some fun with his own misinterpretations of both the Burns’ poem and Holden’s “Catcher Fantasy”:
After the publication of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, many critics and reviews dismissed the work as a novel of questionable merit that would hardly withstand the test of time. Harold Bloom (uber-critic, publisher, professor, and “strictly Ivy League”) admits that when he read it with “moderate pleasure” for the first time as new graduate student at Yale (“Big deal”), he had “little expectation that it would prove to be more than a period piece.” Now, more than half a century later, these assumptions have been clearly disproved (although Bloom stubbornly suggests in his introduction to his collection of compiled crit. on Catcher that he still thinks it’s a “period piece”).
But it is still interesting to go back and look at the New York Times review of The Catcher in the Rye that was published shortly after the book was in print for the first time. The reviewer, James Stern, attempts to implement—and at the same time mock—the teenage skaz narration style used by Holden/Salinger (although in my opinion he has very little success doing so).
Finally, in the chapter titled “Teenage Skaz” from the collection The Art of Fiction, David Lodge argues, “make no mistake, it’s the style that makes the book interesting.” I assume that the style is what made this novel unique when it was published, however I also would wager that some of my students disagree with this statement, or at least have some other ideas as to why this book is interesting. Any thoughts? Feel free to comment below.
I’m working on an ever-growing list of films that I describe, for one reason or another, as Holden-ish; I’ll try to post them some time this week.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I actually agree with that (Lodge’s) statement; I think Lodge got it right because he goes on to say that the book is comprised of mostly trivial events, and (to me at least), if it weren’t written in such an interesting style, I wouldn’t have bothered to read much more of the book; Salinger’s (Holden’s?) style of writing is what kept me going, because if you take those few days apart and translate the events literally, they become incredibly boring on their own. A lot of Holden’s own narration also adds to the other dimensions of the book, especially in his use of skaz.
I saw this same sort of thing happen again in another book, from 2004, called “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” The narrator has Asperger’s Syndrome, and so the entire style is incredibly literal and patterned upon [the author's perception of] the effects of autism. It’s almost as if the narrator is too reliable, because there are a lot of points where you as the reader know much more than the narrator in a given situation because of his condition and how he perceives the world around him (hence dramatic irony). Either way, the book tracks the narrator’s few days solving a mystery as to who killed his neighbor’s dog, and goes so far as to describe his daily schedule by the minute; again, if it weren’t for the style, it would be really easy to shelve the book halfway through, but not quite so much as The Catcher in the Rye, seeing as The Curious Incident has a definitive plot/storyline.