Few Self-Accounts, Whether Autobiography Or Novel, Display Quite So Ostensibly Disaffecting a Take-It-Or-Leave-It Bravura As the Catcher in the Rye
19 FLUNKING EVERYTHING ELSE EXCEPT ENGLISH ANYWAY: HOLDEN CAULFIELD,AUTHOR The imagination also has a history … the imagination is also part of autobiography. Leonard Cohen, Interview (2006) 1 Few self-accounts, whether autobiography or novel, display quite so ostensibly disaffecting a take-it-or-leave-it bravura as The Catcher in the Rye. From Holden’s opening disparagement of his early childhood as “all that kind David Caulfield kind of crap” through to his last, peremptory “that’s all I’m going to tell about”,2 J.D. Salinger has his narrator sound the very model of scepticism about whether indeed we do “really want to hear about it” (3). Yet given the book’s spectacular popularity since its publication in 1951, clearly only the most obdurate of readers have proved resistant to wanting to hear about it and to Holden’s different virtuoso flights of scorn or dismay or selective approval. Yet however Holden has most come to be regarded – one of the classic isolates of modern times, the savvy but endlessly vulnerable witness to crassness and bad faith, post-war American adolescence itself – he also engages to become the catcher of his own broken self. That is, he invites a conscious, at times near conspiratorial, tryst with his reader, a reciprocal, and so redeeming, companion awareness. In giving notice, at virtually every turn, of the need to establish a usable signature in life, so he shows himself, knowingly or not, as nothing other that the author-in-waiting of The Catcher in the Rye. To that end, and in kind, he consciously and recurrently reaches out to the reader 1 Interview with Leonard Cohen, PBS News Hour Poetry Series, 29 June 2006.
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