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Holden Caulfield Syndrome
by Mark Mordue
Mark Mordue gets caught up in an American disease.
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I was watching Eminem on the television when it hit me. The anger at the world, the
stubborn yet lost boyishness, the weirdly uncomfortable sexuality in spite of all his
posturing, the feeling that everyone is a fake but for him, the whole confessional art
he's made his own, even the repetitive cursing... In Warren, Detroit and maybe Quentin
Tarantino's bedroom they probably would have shouted, 'Yo, this is my nigga!' But goddam
it if I didn't stand up and say, 'Wow, it's Holden Caulfield!'
So forget 8 Mile and all that 'hip-hop is the street CNN' crap about being young, white
and disgruntled in America today. Because if you really want to hear about it, J. D.
Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) remains the seminal text for teenage angst
in the half a century or so since Holden Caulfield first appeared. And Eminem is just the
latest screwed-up model on the block to confirm it absolutely.
Of course it's hard to pinpoint when these standardized tropes of rebellion and
question-mark cool mutated into an all-out renaissance indebted to one book. But the
phenomenon I've started calling it 'Holden Caulfield Syndrome' can, I think, be put down
to a particular and mighty bad case of the post-September 11 teenage blues.
Since that time a deepening mood of uncertainty and resentment has grown beneath the
enforced façade of togetherness now encroaching its way across every aspect of American
life, the with-us or against-us mentality which assaults every interrogation or question
that might be put forward against it. A façade, strangely enough, that mirrors the 1950s
era of conformity in which the book first emerged as a destabilizing and so-called
'irresponsible' force.
Interview magazine noticed this opposing and somewhat existential trend enough to put
together an issue under the theme 'The New Catchers in the Rye', spotlighting a bunch of
hot young actors oozing the restlessness that once defined Salinger's greatest creation:
"We're making a loose connection about the mood of the zeitgeist... the kind of
missfitty, outsidery quality that Holden Caulfield had."
Over the last few years it's certainly clear a wave of offbeat American cinema has been
obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye. The reclusive Salinger meanwhile continues to shun
all contact, treating his beloved book as if it were a holy text, refusing to let anyone
make a film or a play of it. Inevitably people just 'borrow' from it instead.
Among the more explicitly connected films was a grunge-acting vehicle for Jennifer
Anniston called The Good Girl, in which her teenage love interest, played by the
sorrowfully-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal, changes what he calls his 'slave name' to that of
'Holden Caulfield' because of an unhealthy obsession with the novel that assures you he
will go through similar 'madman stuff' by the end.
There was also the brilliantly skewed Igby Goes Down, a film which transformed The
Catcher in the Rye into a contemporary New York parable of drugs, models, queer
performance artists, and privilege gone rotten to the core, with Kieran Culkin perfectly
disenchanted as the teenage wunderkind on a bummer - or as his aristocratic mom in the
film, Susan Sarandon, put it, "You're just a furious boy".
These films and others like them set me thinking about Holden Caulfield as an icon and
who might best represent him today? Which is where I came in with Eminem - and some
broader intuitions of negative youth protest and futile heroism the like of which we
haven't seen since the height of Kurt Cobain and the grunge years.
It doesn't have to be a guy thing either. I honestly think singers like Pink and Avril
Lavigne have that Holden spirit, a certain kind of confessional and confused authenticity,
even though I'd imagine he'd be more into Cat Power and Fiona Apple were he 'alive' today.
It's even arguable that the best 'catcher in the rye' so far has been Thora Birch, who
played the be-goggled teenage girl wading her way through the suburban drift-life of
Ghostworld. Birch is so outside of things she seems to spend all her time looking into
everyone else's world waiting for someone to wake up - perhaps in the end herself. It's
ultimately a lonely story, with a message of escape that reads more as a broken, depressed
fantasy than anything like reality. Very Holden Caulfield indeed.
The truth is America has whole families under a Holden cloud, the Culkins and the
Phoenixes among them. It's notable that the character in the book is from a similarly
refined and promising background, which is why his rejection of society distressed and
annoyed everyone when he first appeared in the fifties. It was like he had everything, so
what's his problem?
Of course this portrait of adolescent discontent was at some level a nascent attack on
that most elusive of subjects, the class system in America and those born to succeed
without question or doubt. Sentiments that would bond the book to later 'protest' works
like the The Graduate (1967) and Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero (1987).
In considering all this you've got to understand The Catcher in the Rye isn't that much
of a story, beyond this 16 year old kid wandering round New York for a few days trying to
find himself and having a nervous breakdown; it's more to do with an attitude towards the
world and a way of talking or trying to talk. I mean it's all talk really.
People argue that Holden Caulfield was the first 'teenager' ever, the first at any rate
to have a genuine voice of his own. Through the use of slang and contradictory, circling
statements, the constantly repeated mantras of 'goddam' and 'that kills me' and 'kind of',
Salinger accrues a powerfully believable and alive young man at odds with the world around
him. In that sense the book does not feel written, but entirely spoken - one reason why it
appeals once again to a net generation fascinated by the same 'chat' that flows through
works by contemporaries like Dave Eggers and James Frey.
When this kind of talk first arrived, it would have explosive consequences. Before The
Catcher in the Rye, the leading Australian contemporary youth author, Susanne Gervay
observes, "It was all sorority parties and pigtails." You just didn't have some
crazy kid hating everybody and drinking booze and meeting a prostitute and flunking school
like it was meaningful back then. It's even more radical to recall that most of the book
was actually written in the forties.
Gervay's own books are now marketed as 'Young Adult', one of the cutting edge
categories in literary publishing today. She believes Salinger virtually invented this
category in modern literature. More than that, "He showed how young people were
alienated in a society that held up materialism as the way to happiness. Holden Caulfield
really was the first rebel without a cause. He showed how difficult the search for
meaningful relationships is. How people can get lost. And what a dangerous and frightening
time it can be between childhood and adulthood when there are no guidelines. It's really
the beginning of our modern search for identity and meaning in a secular world."
It's important remember that when the book emerged there was no Elvis, no Brando, no
Dean, no rock 'n' roll. Because of this the author became a guru and father figure to many
young people, a situation that often disturbed him. Maybe this was part of the reason he
ceased publishing books after 1963, but you can see other signs in The Catcher in the Rye.
Salinger basically didn't like people very much - unless you were the Buddha or someone
below the age of twelve (children tend to be the sacred lights in all his novels). There's
a kind of pissed off Zen to this, reflecting the author's own misanthropic spirituality
and where it finally led him as a recluse from society.
These shivers of dissent and spiritual protest in The Catcher in the Rye previewed the
attitudes of the Beats and the 1960s that followed, an entire culture of generational
protest with all its ideas about rejecting or dropping out of society. It was as if
Salinger saw something early, even if Norman Mailer always made fun of him for his
enduring obsessions. He called Salinger "the greatest mind ever to stay in prep
school".
Salinger had actually written his book in the wake of his own experiences as a soldier
in World War II. He saw some of the heaviest fighting in Europe, with some two thirds of
his battalion killed around him, and there's speculation his writing is affected by a form
of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Whatever you think of that notion, there's something
not right in the head about his stories, which happen to have an obsession with suicide
that's somewhat repetitive if you don't like that sort of thing.
Maybe that's why teenagers do like The Catcher in the Rye so much. Maybe that's why I
found myself using the word 'syndrome' in relation Salinger's main character and his
influence, because it has established an archetype that continues to appeal to the
American state of mind - and that of many other young people all over the world - in the
most messed up ways. Though I write this story from Sydney, I can still recall reading the
book and feeling less lonely myself as an adolescent, just as I can note its influence on
various films and novels in contemporary Australia.
I do wonder about the appeal to loneliness that comes out of the book. The way it seems
to be written especially for misfits. I mean, it is Winona Ryder's favorite novel! Then
again, Bill Gates says the same thing, so who's the misfit? It's not always a benign
appeal, that's for sure. Mark Chapman, who shot John Lennon, got the singer to sign a copy
of the book while he was stalking him earlier that same day. Supposedly Lennon's negative
remarks about The Catcher in the Rye to this over-eager fan were the final spur for
Chapman to do the deed, along with a feeling he should rid the world of all 'phonies',
Holden Caulfield's definition of the worst type of human being.
It's not the only time The Catcher in the Rye has been associated with unstable people
and even murder. In some respects the book is the teen lit equivalent to satanic heavy
metal. It's exactly the kind of novel that appeals to confused loners, to shooters at
schools, to suicidal youths, and an America looking nervously around for the next
Columbine to happen. You can bet Gus Van Sant's new film Elephant wreaks of a bunch of
Holden Caulfields gathering up their existential rage to bring it on down.
So it's no wonder The Catcher in the Rye has been banned more times than any other book
from the American school syllabus, usually for its profanity and sexual references. People
love it. And people love to hate it. Sometimes they hate it for good reasons.
Peter Kuch, who lectures on The Catcher in the Rye in the Department of English at the
University of New South Wales in Sydney, appreciates the connections I try to make between
the novel, figures like Eminem and broader notions of rebellion today. But he argues the
book has a strong reactionary streak to it as well that is often overlooked.
"It does appeal to dissident adolescents. I think now as in the 1950s there is a
total distrust of authority," Kuch says. "Whether he knew it or not, when
Salinger was writing the book there was also all this stuff was going on behind the scenes
in America, a lot of misinformation the public was not made aware of. Just as the book was
published you're moving straight into the McCarthy era and Cold War paranoia. Now it's
international terrorism and a new imperialism. There's something in the novel that chimes
with these times again. Which is where the connection with Eminem probably comes in too.
Because The Catcher in the Rye has this language of protest that is not being heard. That
can become violent. It's the argot of rebellion, yes, but also of a disbelief in the
efficacy of language to express anything. The way Holden says 'goddam' all the time. It's
like what's the use? Just say 'fuck' and that's it. It's the feeling that you can't get
your protest heard and saying 'fuck' is all you've got left."
Kuch believes this inarticulacy is also there because "Salinger got the idea that
there could be sufficient spaces in the language for readers to interpolate their own
experiences. When you're reading The Catcher in the Rye, you're speaking to Holden, not so
much him speaking to you."
The contradiction, of course, is that the book does suggest, because it is a book
coming from Holden, the birth of an artistic identity. An academic has even tried to
parallel Holden Caulfield with Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist As
A Young Man.
So with that in tension in mind, who would I rate as Holden Caulfields for their times?
Well James Dean and Kurt Cobain make the grade with their tormented sensitivity, as does
the musician Nick Drake in his own introspective English way, as well as Dustin Hoffman in
The Graduate, Johnny Depp in What's Eating Gilbert Grape? and Toby Maguire in both The Ice
Storm and The Wonder Boys. There's something too about Ed Norton's twisted edge in both
the Fight Club and The 25th Hour that suggests Holden Caulfield all grown up with no place
to go. Not exactly a shopping list for happiness, I know - more a roll call for the
melancholy, dreamy, pissed-off and suicidal at heart.
But I figure nowadays it's not just icons like Jake Gyllanhaal and Kieran Culkin that
represent him in Hollywood. It's more the young directors behind the scenes who are
putting out that Holden Caulfield attitude: people like Todd Solondz (Welcome to the
Dollhouse; Happiness; Storytelling), Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides) and most
especially Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia; Punch Drunk Love). To me all of them seem to be
making an existential protest about the times they live in.
Looking at the USA from afar, it's certainly easy to agree with Susanne Gervay's
observation that the nation and its people appear to be "clinging to identity and
clinging to each other in the face of this hatred of America that goes beyond terrorism.
It's a hatred that raises all these questions about their ideals and ideas of
themselves."
Perhaps these questions are what make The Catcher in the Rye such an appealing and
archetypal novel again. In much the same way Eminem and some of the actors and filmmakers
I've mentioned are such an attractive force. And yet this is not just an American
condition. It's larger, bigger, more entirely Western - as if young people can't bear to
defined by market imperatives anymore, and their rage, their new sense of rebellion and
'cool', is toughening and breaking apart all at once under the stress of being identified
and branded.
"You know, my daughter is in love with Eminem too," Gervay tells me somewhat
curiously. "So I asked her why? And she said, 'He's had so much trouble, so much
family problems and violence and yet he's had the courage to find himself. His courage
gives me strength to go on.' But you're in Australia, I told her, and it's not like that
for you. 'Yeah, but it's still hard' she said and I realized he's speaking to them about
conflict and the difficulties of growing up and how to make it in much larger ways. It's
like one step beyond Holden Caulfield. The difference is he's come out the other end to
say it doesn't matter what shit you go through you can make it. The thing is these
characters and people like him are just conduits for their own searching, for the
confusion young people find in the world."
That's why I figure Holden Caulfield is really something of a confused saint. The kind
they used to torture and burn back in inquisition times because they asked too many
questions and didn't follow the crowd. A saint, you might say, for people who don't have
much to believe in. That kills me. Goddam.
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Mark Mordue is the author of
‘Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip’ (Allen & Unwin Book Publishers; Sydney 2001).
He has been published in The Nation, Interview, Salon and Planet.
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