The Catcher in the Rye

[Apologies in advance for this - I am writing this post, to the best of my ability, as I imagine Holden Caulfield would, were he taking over my brain for the duration of its composition. Like method-acting for writing a book review. I feel his first-person narrative voice is so integral to the way this novel works that imitating it will help with the largely explanatory and self-justifying aim of this post. Another thing I should apologise in advance for; most of what I'm going to talk about are more like defences of the novel against several of its many major criticisms, which I will argue are unwarranted and unfair, given that this is one of the most beautiful works of fiction ever crafted in the English language. Please excuse me a healthy measure of sentimentality on my rereading it too; it was my gateway Salinger book when I was a miserable confused little fifteen-year-old, and though I revisited it repeatedly in subsequent years and also read (several times) everything else by its author, this was the first time since that I've read it all the way through. Anyway, over to Holden...]

Listen, so I've been roped into telling you all about this book I re-read recently (and was the narrator of, to tell you the truth). It's a novel by this guy called J. D. Salinger, he became sort of a big deal because of it but hid away living in a cabin in the woods by himself for most of his life after he got famous and all. It's one of the best-selling novels of human history too. Something crazy like at least sixty-five million people bought a copy since 1951 when it came out. I think though if you write a kind of sad book and suddenly everyone in the entire goddam world knows who you are and gets to see something of how you think and goes mad about it, especially if they're sorta phony and don't quite get it and a lot of people get angry or critical about it too, then I can see why you might want to go live in the woods and not see anyone or anything. I got quite a bang out of reading it though. Anyone who's not too judgmental, or doesn't demand to be easily or cheaply entertained, would probably enjoy reading it, maybe even grow from it. You really would.

   Instead of going into too much detail about the story and myself and all, since this is a book with so much cultural baggage I kind of want to talk about that. One of the big things is how controversial people think it is. Lots of people who haven't even read it think, oh yeah, that The Catcher in the Rye book, I've heard of that and that it was controversial, be wary. Part of what made it controversial might have been how famous Salinger got for writing it, especially since he then practically became a hermit afterwards. Another thing was people said it was provocative. In the novel I sort of blaspheme and swear quite a bit, and I guess there are a few sexual references, but nothing that bad happens, honestly it doesn't, just horsing around. Post-war American readers were pretty conservative though, so I guess they took it prudishly, and lots of schools and libraries banned it, and lots of public officials spoke out against it being a corrupting influence. If they'd ever actually been someone like me and felt or thought things I felt and thought while all that stuff was happening in the book, they probably would've changed their mind about all that. I mean, once they knew what it was like to be in my shoes, like a lot of people who read it and liked it did, then maybe they would have taken more seriously the problems that I was all upset about throughout instead of just getting riled up and trying to ban the whole goddam book. And that reminds me.

   Blasphemy, well, I can see how lots of religious folks find that offensive. I don't do it on purpose though, like I want to stick it to their beliefs, it's just a natural way I've learnt to use language, and maybe it's not too nice, but even religious people can't say it's all that bad. If anything it's a helpful signal maybe for who they can direct their love to. In my experience people who are wound up enough to be spouting blasphemies all the time just need someone nice to talk to. Maybe even God, who the hell even knows. But pointing a blamey finger just because of that language use doesn't help anybody, especially when it means you end up banning a book that might've helped a lot of people learn how to not be quite so sad.

   I should probably tell you what the book's about - the guy who usually writes these things seems to try to do that a bit - but a lot of people hate this book, or pretend they hate it, because it lacks 'compelling plot'. Christ, what unimaginative unsympathetic phony rubbish. Compelling plot, that kills me, it really does. The book, okay, it's about some crazy stuff that happened to me back when I was a teenager. I don't really feel like going into too much detail but basically I flunked out of this school I was at that was absolutely terrible, and it was only a few days before we were due to break up for holidays anyway, so instead of waiting around or going straight home, I went round New York by myself for a few days and tried to have fun. Mostly I didn't though. People kept messing me around or whatever and I just ended up wasting a load of money and time, and getting made sad. People I knew either didn't want to talk to me that much, or they'd say something phony and ruin our conversations, and sort of the same thing happened with strangers I tried to get to know. There was no intense action or crazy conspiracies or big surprises. A few nice things happened but it was mostly just kinda depressing. I guess if you're looking for compelling plot in a story like mine then you're gonna have to be disappointed, life isn't an adventure or anything, even if you're sixteen and run off alone in an enormous city, most of what happens to you isn't going to be the kind of action worthy of going in the movies. You might just find yourself trying to talk to people or keep yourself distracted, and maybe the worst thing that could happen is that people just don't want to spend time with you or anything. I don't know. That's more or less what happened anyway.

   Let's go back to the whole controversial side of it. Another angle on that is that the book's linked to some shootings. This isn't half as bad as it sounds though. Like, if you tell someone a food is 'linked to some shootings', they might initially be horrified - you know, "oh my god I can't possibly eat this, it might draw me into a similar set of circumstances as that shooting". This is basically just bullcrap. Two of the cases, where Ronald Reagan was shot (he survived) and Rebecca Schaeffer was shot, in both of those cases the only thing connecting the book to the crimes was that the shooters owned a copy. Remember this is one of the highest-selling novels of all time. Saying that these shooters owned a copy is like saying they both preferred a particular brand of bread and then implying that their shootings were linked to this suspicious bread. Yet some people get all concerned about this - some guy even wrote a book about how it could've been a literary conspiracy with J. D. Salinger remotely activating hypnotised assassins.

   The most famous case though, is where this guy called Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon, you know, from The Beatles and all, and not only did he own the book but he explicitly stated that it was 'his manifesto'. He bought a copy on the day that he planned to shoot John Lennon and went and wrote inside it "To Holden Caulfield, this is my statement, from Holden Caulfield", and then after he shot John Lennon five times he just sat by the body and read the book until the police came and arrested him and all. And when they were asking him why he did it, he just kept telling people he wanted to reject what he saw as Lennon's phoniness, the same way I did in the book, but clearly Chapman didn't even get my point or the ending. Poor sad bastard. It makes me feel terrible to think that one of the world's best-loved peace campaigners and musicians could have been done in by such poor literary interpretation. Also, the whole misreading thing was vastly exacerbated by the fact that this Mark Chapman guy was seriously psychotic. Five of his assessors before trial diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, in such an extreme form that he probably would've responded badly enough to any story to decide that it was telling him to go out and shoot somebody. It makes me really uncomfortable and all but you just can't blame something like this on the novel that a madman uses as an excuse for murder.

   Enough controversy. People try to slate the book not only plot-wise, as I talked about a bit earlier, but because they just don't like me. I actually get that. Most of the people I interact with in the book didn't like me either. I'm a hard person to get to know and even harder to get to like - nigh on impossible when I was sixteen and in distress. But that doesn't mean the book isn't good, or nice, or interesting. I think you have to be the kind of reader that appreciates real human idiosyncrasy to properly enjoy it, you know, taking things like 'sad' and 'funny' not as prescribed nuggets of forced feeling, but as distilled from understanding, or at least seeing, the complexity of things that are going on. It makes me sound like a dick to say so but people who read this novel and finish it and can only think 'well that was boring' are kinda ignorant and lacking in empathy. They really are. I mean it. The same goes for people who say 'I didn't like the narrator's style or tone'. Imagine someone like that, and some spotty awkward kid who's sort of sad and lonely comes up to them and tries to talk to them, and the whole time that they're trying to make conversation, this goddam phony is just thinking furiously to themselves about how much this kid's voice is irritating or their breath stinks, and so they don't bother to extend their listening enough to care or understand. People do that with this book. It makes me sick. They complain about how the dialogue and narration is always full of what seem like random disparate digressions - they're probably itching for some 'compelling plot', ha. To tell you the truth, J. D. Salinger was great at getting to know what I was thinking and feeling while all this stuff was going on, and reconstructing the narrative and dialogue in ways that looks natural (it sounds like me and all) but reveals subtext too, you know, the underlying literary themes and whatnot. I can't say I put much effort into those myself, I was just the protagonist, but my story was similar in some of the core themes to lots of Salinger's other works, and so I guess that's why he asked me if he could write mine too.

   I guess I'll finish by talking about those themes a bit then. The guy who usually writes these blog entries, in a post about one of old Salinger's other books, talks a lot about social and valuative alienation. I can't be all that bothered to explain the whole thing afresh so if you really want to understand what I'm on about read that post about Franny & Zooey too. Anyway, in the novel I display a pretty textbook case of these kinds of alienation - hence both my loneliness throughout and my preoccupation with phoniness. Because these kinds of alienation are complex and hard to pin down to any one thing, a lot of people percieve them as me just being fussy or whiny or entitled. And I guess in some ways my selfish streak does come out through those disillusionments, enabling me to act 'too pure for this world' without a twinge of self-consciousness about it (which is weird, as I get extremely self-conscious about every other damn thing). So people who get all irate at me being a privileged little kid tossing his life away haven't learnt two big things. Firstly, I don't think they understand these kinds of alienation (dammit, if you haven't already, go read that post I linked above), because if they did they sure wouldn't see 'phony' as some illegitimate made-up complaint. Phoniness is a super-powerful shapeshifter that's been around forever, taking over all modern life and culture and community and replacing it with ego, most people don't even realise and some of the only ones who do think it's a good thing.

   The second thing that these phonies (allow me) need to learn though, is that I know now that who I was as a teenager needed to grow up, and I have grown up, largely. Growing up means accepting that the world is full of crap, that people are full of crap, and that in several places in every building full of children in the world the words 'fuck you' are probably written on the walls somewhere. When you're a kid, these things don't make sense to you. You can go on being more or less innocent - without experiencing the full depth of these kinds of alienation. In the novel I talk about lots of kids playing in a rye field on the top of some cliffs, and how that would be perfect if they could just stay there and play in bliss and every time one of them strayed too close to the edge I or someone would have the job of being the 'catcher in the rye' and stop them to keep them safe. But it's a regrettable biological fact that people do grow up, a related sociological fact that people do experience conflict, a related psychological fact that people do get blasted by forms of social and valuative alienation at many points throughout their lives. And these things obviously aren't great, but they're facts. When you become a teenager and start to realise these things, lots of people get all angsty like I did when I was sixteen, lots of people let their lives sort of slide away from them because of it. But just because these things are sad doesn't mean your life once you know about them has to be defined by that sadness. You can step back and decide to just keep going. This doesn't mean ignore them or deny them or even compromise your standards for how much you dislike them - growing up just means you can't let them paralyse you. For example, Seymour Glass, who you may remember from another of Salinger's books and so of these blog posts, was a beautiful character because of how dedicatedly he clung to the ultimate wisdoms at the bottom of his ideals - but in that exact same way he never grew up. Ultimate wisdom without everyday wisdom makes you a sage, a poet, a Seymour Glass, but it doesn't help you forge relationships or do jobs or even enjoy life in any meaningful pragmatic sense. Maybe in part because he was depressive, but whatever the reason for his mental nonconformity, he stayed put-under by the overwhelming tides of these forms of alienation and everything that's bad about the world, and it drove him to suicide (oops, arguably minor spoiler alert).

   But anyway - as a teenager and for most of the events of the novel I was like that, using my sadness under experiencing these sad aspects of normal life to avoid participating in normal life. I was all set on running away, hitch-hiking out west and living by myself in a cabin in the woods. It was my little sister Phoebe who talked me out of it by trying to come with me; I realised that she couldn't come with me because it was important for her to stay, to be in school plays and practice dancing and making friends, even though these were all things tainted to some degree, especially as she'll grow older, by phoniness. But if I thought it was important for her to stay then maybe it was important for me to stay as well. To get over the bad stuff and just get on with life. It's a stoic sorta compromise, one we all have to make at some point when we realise it if we still want a shot at a functional existence, and even though it means sometimes we'll have to do things we don't like or allow other people we care about to do things we don't like, there's a kind of freedom in that, because that's just how reality works, and we can't opt out. That's what I kind of learned from everything that happened anyway, and I think J. D. did a fine job turning my several days in New York into a masterfully-crafted fable about how to grow up. Ol' Salinger himself used to sometimes talk about how when he was the age I was when all this that he wrote about happened to me, he was fairly similar to me like in terms of his personality and whatnot. He felt slightly put out by the world in the same way I did. But just like I learned to make that decision to just put up with the crappy bits, not like them or anything, but don't let them stop you from living your life properly and all - basically to grow up - and that's a helluva painful but good thing to learn.
   Anyway. This is the lengthiest goddam post on this blog now, by a long shot. Whichever phony bibliophile usually runs this crumby thing is gonna have quite a proofreading job on his hands.

     - Holden Caulfield

Boo: the Life of the World's Cutest Dog

This book is a compilation of content from a facebook page ran by J. H. Lee about their dog, a weird shaven pomeranian called Boo, who is, in that bizarrely specific way that only freakish-looking-cutish animals can be, famous on the internet. You can probably imagine what kind of book it is. Photos of the dog with poorly-formatted but neat captions in Comic Sans saying things like "Hi. My name is Boo. This is my life." and "Sometimes I sit in things. [photo of Boo wedged lopsidely and adorably in a dog-basket] But I don't always fit!" My friend Charlotte gave me this as a birthday present because she knows me well enough to know that, in the right moment, I find things like this side-splittingly hilarious. She was right. It's a deplorably needless book. The dog isn't even that cute, it's so weird-looking, and the captions are so bland, so twee, so downright moist, that I can't quite imagine who in their right mind would deliberately buy something like this. I mean, literally all the content is available on the dog's facebook page anyway, who on earth would spend real money on a hardback book with close-to-a-hundred pages of pictures of this chickpea-headed tiny-faced probably-lobotomised little inbred canine? Unless you're buying it as an event. Not for the content or to hold in any memorable regard whatsoever, but for the experience of showing it to a friend, to know that they'll find it as disarmingly odd like it deserves to be responded to as such, to laugh together at that oddness. I don't know why I'm doing a post about it really, I guess I've not been reading much lately (having started my MA there's a lot of chapters and articles that I have to read academically instead of full books for leisure or interest), sorry, but this thing is technically a book, and a ridiculous one at that - this is not something I could ever envisage a sane person buying to read. But let me restate that it was a brilliant present. All the best presents are, to greater or lesser extents, more about the implications of the giving than about the gift itself, and shared laughter at a weird dumb dog is great and was the gist of this. So, thanks Charlotte - and to any readers who find stuff like Boo funny, please buy this book as a jokepresent for your weirdest friend.

Critical Theory: A Graphic Introduction

This book, a breakneck tour of the rambling complex labyrinth of ideas that is critical theory, part of the 'Introducing' series, written by Stuart Sim and illustrated by Borin van Loon, was actually a very good introduction. I borrow-stole it from my housemate (thanks and sorry Chris) as I've just started a MA in politics, and having never properly studied political theory before, thought it might be helpful to get a general introduction done. All theory I've studied prior has been either philosophical (which asks questions brilliantly but in a very distanced manner, so even profound conclusions often come across as merely academic) or from economics (which has so many problems, the academic discipline being more or less completely overrun with restrictive neoclassical theory without pluralism or critical engagement, which is terrible for debate and does not make for interesting or useful theory: see this or this or this for further discussion of this point). Political theory, on the other hand, is power-oriented, which lends itself quite naturally to radical implications.

   Critical theory is not the same thing as this. Critical, sometimes also called radical, theory, is the attempt to systematise a theory of everything: all aspects of reality, psychological, philosophical, politico-economic, sexual, moral, linguistic, sociocultural, and so on, woven up in an explanatory framework. The general aim is to critique this reality's features that stand out as significantly negative, and figure out a way of overcoming them, leading society and culture in the general direction of moral progress and liberty. Emerging in the 19th century from the political and philosophical works of early feminists, socialists (chiefly Marx), and existentialists, the intellectuals engaged in this poorly-defined but rampantly-expansive field soon came to realise the impacts of culture and independent thinking on the systems they were criticising. Rather than being simply 'about political society' or 'about justice' in any tangible way, the practice bulged to encompass new ways of thinking about and within this weird tangled web of normativity. Psychoanalysis (chiefly Freudian), linguistic analysis, structuralism, literary theory, various aesthetic schemas, concepts such as ideology, hegemony, patriarchy, privilege, and so on, as well as philosophical shortcuts past these ways of thinking in themselves - leading to strands of thought like postmodernism and post-structuralism, deconstruction as a form of analysis, the increasing tendency to prioritise considerations of the subjective in forming true judgments. The development of critical theory is one of explosive depth and breadth since the second half of the 20th century, and to be honest, it's making it harder and harder to get any clear answers to sociocultural issues. But this is good. Frameworks of thinking are emerging that do help us dig closer to finding clear answers and solutions, to share understandings across barriers and work to remove those barriers, breaking down privilege in all its forms. Truth is not necessarily simple: in fact, more often than not, to properly uncover useful truth is extraordinarily complex and difficult. But through critical theory, we lead our thought in the right direction, asking more and better questions, working for universal justice and liberty for the individual. There is a distinct humanist-libertarian agenda driving critical theory, so it may surprise some readers that I seem so keen on it - needless to say my economic views are far from libertarian, and my theological views far from the agnostic individualism carried along by the torrents of theory (funny, the last Christian book I read was a primer against relativism. Sorry Clive), but in a political and sociocultural sense, I fully endorse getting behind critical theory. Its capacity for picking apart systems, institutions, and structures, and showing where they could be improved, is almost unmatched by anything else I can think of as a normative force (except maybe Christianity, science and philosophy, all of which can tie into critical theory quite well anyway but are very different as intellectual and social movements or whatever). I also love how intrinsically pluralistic it is - there is so much critical theory knocking about and lots of it contradicts a lot of the rest, so anyone wishing to use it as a tool must carefully select and synthesis their own approach (which makes for some pretty funny-long descriptors to dogmatic thinkers: one could be a post-feminist post-Marxist post-structuralist post-psychoanalytic postmodernist, if one were so inclined, but you wouldn't be much fun to talk to). One thing it's helpful to remember is that the possibility of existing plurality of truth does not imply the impossibility of existing objective truth: i.e. I can very much appreciate inter-subjective facets of reality as true in my conception of the world, while also holding Christianity and certain other things as definitively true above and against all subjective thought otherwise. My thinking so doesn't make it true, I'm just saying that it's perfectly consistent to be a critical theorist and believe in something other than your own perspective, even in cases where that something you believe would have to override other peoples' perspectives.

   That was a long, dense paragraph - sorry.

   Let's start a new one (again) to feel a bit more spaced out.

   Anyway. Critical theory is incredibly exciting - it's lent a new-found depth and scope to my thinking about identity, politics, fairness, society, art, gender, minds, literature, community, and so much else. The fact that a bog-standard-looking little introduction could have brought me into such enthusiasm for the field is testament to how good of a graphic guide this is: Stuart Sim has done a fantastic job of summarising, not dumbing down but overviewing immense ground in remarkably little text, core theories and thinkers and strands of thought, placing each into their historical and intellectual contexts so we see not only where critical theory is currently leading but where it has come from and why it developed thus. Borin van Loon's illustrations I wasn't mad about but they space out the pages nicely. Would be a great read for someone with a bit of an intellectual edge regarding culture, society, politics, gender or sexuality or race or division generally, language, art, mental behaviour, or pretty much anything really - it's a very slow read for such a short book but that's because the ideas are so huge and complex, but you can engage with them, and the book presents them in a very accessible but non-patronising and relatively neutral way. Overall, it's a great little book that I would 100% recommend to basically anyone who thinks - hopefully it'll get you into critical theory and soon we can have a conversation about bell hooks or Roland Barthes or something.