By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
I was intrigued by the comments earlier in the day [June 3] about The Catcher in the Rye.
Perhaps I am missing something, but I see the book somewhat differently. The book is rightly considered an accurate and compelling portrait of adolescent confusion, anxiety, alienation and rebellion. Adolescent. Adolescent. Because Holden cannot find his own identity and so much needs a kindly voice at the end of the book to tell him that gently living for a cause has a lot more value than noisily dying for one, he lashes out at everything around him and spirals downward, alienating those who were his friends, even his girl friend.
"Phony" is his way to express the immature view that all who are not perfectly coherent are traitors to what is true and valuable. THis is, apparently, a necessary part of finding one's own identity. Anyone who has not felt the pain, anger, and rage-at-helplessness of Holden's plight was not, perhaps, having his or her own feelings at the time. It happens.
As I said,TCiR is a perfect and invaluable portrait of adolescent struggle to escape parental and societal introjects and form one's own ego and superego. For most of us that is a messy task, and for some it is real agony. Take one part hormones and add a dash of neuroticism and off we go.
Part of making it to maturity is making peace (a separate peace, in the words of a companion novel) with the phony in oneself and in the people around one. Transcending black-and-white and recognizing that everyone struggles with a flawed integrity, and that we can support each other in a halting growth in truth, describe the adult tasks. Being essentially principled without being essentially angry is a mark of a healthy adult.
While I think that genuine, unfeigned empathy for adolescent struggling is a part of our task, I think it is a seriously counter-maturational response for us to valorize it--it is part of the long process of cutting the cord. When the adolescent qualities so appropriate in Holden appear in adults, there is a problem. People who are proud of being a pain in the butt are perhaps stuck in a maturational phase in a way that needs help. Genuineness is not a state, it is a commitment to a process of growth.
Those of us of a certain age remember that the two decades that followed TCiR favored rage over reason, something we again see in the politics of our own day. If you want to see the less charming side of Holden's problems, give Philip Roth's American Pastoral a read. It doesn't have the hopeful ending.
Salinger's book was at one point the most-banned and most-taught book in American high schools. This can only be the case for a book that tells powerful truth. Salinger's truth is in the accuracy of what he portrays, and the meaning that Holden begins to seek after the fire slakes and he realizes that he needs help. He also finds that he needs human community. His last words in the novel, as he comes in from the cold, are "you start missing people."
+Paul
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