January 31, 2010
I’m kind of scared to reread The Catcher in the Rye.
After J.D. Salinger’s death on Wednesday, I keep telling myself I want to revisit The Catcher in the Rye. You know, to preserve Salinger’s legacy and all that. But I can’t bring myself to do it. The Catcher in the Rye isn’t even my favorite Salinger book (that’d be Franny and Zooey. Mostly “Franny” :P), but it’s the only one of his I have.
It’s kind of killing me right now that I can’t find the article I'd read (because it was written much better than this), but it mentioned how people would go to his house, hoping to get a chance to talk to him, hoping that they’d be The One, only to realize he really meant he wanted his privacy.
And of course, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t also hoped that, but it’s not even possible now. It’s heartbreaking.
I think most of it is because I’m scared I won’t like The Catcher in the Rye as much as I did the first time around. Or that (even though I didn’t particularly identify with Holden Caulfield in the first read), I’ll identify with him even less now. Or perhaps there’ll be that one day when I pick up The Catcher in the Rye and realize I don’t understand him at all.
How terrifying.
Edit:
From "Holden at Fifty," which was published in The New Yorker in 2001, actually (it's a great article. And I totally got the “Catcher in the Rye for girls” vibe from The Bell Jar, too):
You can’t, in other words, rewrite “The Catcher in the Rye” simply by telling the story of an unhappy teen-ager and updating the cultural references, or transposing the events to a different city, or changing the sex of the protagonist. You have to reproduce the Salinger mystique, because the mystique has become part of what “The Catcher in the Rye” is. The end product of the ideal Salinger rewrite isn’t a Salinger story. It’s Salinger. To rewrite the story of Holden Caulfield you have to become a melancholy genius, too. You have to be your own sorrow king.
I would quote this entire article if I could, but here's one last one to tie everything up:
A great deal of “youth culture”—that is, the stuff that younger people actually consume, as opposed to the stuff that older people consume (like “Lord of the Flies”) in order to learn about “youth”—plays to this feeling of loss. You go to a dance where a new pop song is playing, and for the rest of your life hearing that song triggers the same emotion. It comes on the radio, and you think, That’s when things were truly fine. You want to hear it again and again. You have become addicted.Youth culture acquires its poignancy through time, and so thoroughly that you can barely see what it is in itself. It’s just, permanently, “your song,” your story.
…
It isn’t, of course. Maybe, in fact, the nostalgia of youth culture is completely spurious. Maybe it invites you to indulge in bittersweet memories of a childhood you never had, an idyll of Beach Boys songs and cheeseburgers and convertibles and teen-age crushes which has been constructed by pop songs and television shows and movies, and bears very little relation to any experience of your own. But, whether or not the emotion is spurious, people have it. It is the romantic certainty, which all these books seduce you with, that somehow, somewhere, something was taken away from you, and you cannot get it back. Once, you did ride a carrousel. It seemed as though it would last forever.