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.
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 criticism 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).
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 are welcome below.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I definitely agree with Lodge, the style makes Catcher a truly unique and interesting novel. It’s especially great, in my opinion anyway, for high school students because its not a typical novel that uses standard English and tries to put you to sleep as you’re reading it at 11:00 the night before the reading quiz (not that I ever did that), but rather, it reads like a one-way conversation that you’re having with one of your friends. Salinger also makes it interesting by letting us into Holden’s head (which is how we as readers are exposed to Holden’s use and style of language). I think that without teenage skaz (and Holden’s insight on the situation) Catcher would just be a boring story about some loser drop-out ambling around New York.
Mr. Quale! I was reading this article and it reminded me of what we were talking about in class once about how books have a certain physical quality to them that e-readers don’t…well, it’s begun:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/09/04/a_library_without_the_books/?page=1
Thanks for the comment, Callie. I guess some students wonder whether we get too far into Holden’s head. But we were playing around with language today, trying to make dialogues that only certain people would understand. The Scottish dialects were the hardest for me to get.
And Kamran, thanks for the link. I’m curious what you and others think about this. We’ve already seen it happening with newspapers. I’m guilty of reading the NY Times every morning free on my desktop. But this article makes me sad. Even as I peruse my high school library, I often wonder how much the permanent collection of books is used. Same for Mira Loma. What is that Vonnegut quote?
“By accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.”
Vonnegut has a way of putting things in perspective . . .
I think that sort of digital transformation, for lack of a better way to put it, is somewhat inevitable but only in the very long run. I’ve been volunteering at Central Library for 5 years now, and the sheer amount of information that exists is staggering; that information in itself has to be converted digitally, and I think only once that happens in its entirety can we have a truly comprehensive digital library. What that school’s headmaster did was particularly dumb (in my opinion) because e-books don’t account for all the resources he did away with, not to mention a number of other issues that may crop up (checking books out, multiple students, etc.)
His comment about books seeming like scrolls in their functionality seems like the type of statement that’s going to be used in the future to justify this sort of large scale change. I say this especially because environmental issues are becoming more and more visible, and proponents of e-readers and digital libraries often cite the environmental friendliness of digitized information over paper books. I still can’t even begin to imagine that sort of change on a large scale (i.e. a public library system); again, what the school did was fairly drastic. Elsewhere though, these changes are coming along slower, but surely.