Kings in the Back Row Meaning through Structure. A Reading of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

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1、Kings in the Back Row: Meaning through Structure-A Reading of Salingers The Catcher in the Rye, Author(s): Carl F. Strauch Publication Details: Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Winter. (1961): p5-30. Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Vol. 12. Detroit: Gale R

2、esearch, 1980. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Critical essay Bookmark: Bookmark this Document Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1980 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning Full Text:In The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger sharply accentuates the portrayal of Holden with a symbolic stru

3、cture of language, motif, episode, and character; and when the complex patterns are discovered, the effect is to concentrate our scrutiny on a masterpiece that moves effortlessly on the colloquial surface and at the same time uncovers, with hypnotic compulsion, a psychological drama of unrelenting t

4、error and final beauty. (p. 6)Salinger has employed neurotic deterioration, symbolical death, spiritual awakening, and psychological self-cure as the inspiration and burden of an elaborate patternverbal, thematic, and episodic, that yields the meaning as the discursive examination of Holdens charact

5、er and problem out of metaphoric context can never do. Structure is meaning.As a start, the readiest way of understanding The Catcher lies in an awareness of the dualism or ambivalence of language, for Holden employs both the slob and the literate idiom. Holdens slob speech is obviously justified as

6、 a realistic narrative device, since it is the idiom of the American male; yet from the psychological point of view, it becomes the boys self-protective, verbalized acceptance of the slob values of his prep school contemporaries. He thus may justify himself in his overt being and may hope to secure

7、immunity from attack and rationalize his “belonging”; slob language, therefore, hits off two important social themessecurity and status. But the psychological intent becomes symbolical portent when we see that the mass idiom emphasizes a significant distinction between two worldsthe phony world of c

8、orrupt materialism and Holdens private world of innocence. For his private world Holden uses a literate and expressive English, and so the profounder psychological and symbolical purposes of slob language may be detected only as that idiom functions in polarized relationship with the other. We need

9、not labor the point that the full range of Salingers portrayal would never be disclosed without an awareness of the ambivalence of language. (pp. 78)Once we have recognized the ambivalence of language we are prepared to discover Salingers elaborate use of several kinds of pattern that support and he

10、lp to develop the narrative. The first verbal pattern to be examined stands in an ironic and mutually illuminating relationship with the image of the secret goldfish at the head of the narrative symbolizing Holden and his secret world. In D. B.s short story “The Secret Goldfish” the boy would not le

11、t others see the goldfish “because hed bought it with his own money.” Holden likewise was to pay in far more than money for his secret world; and as a further parallel, nobody ever saw (or cared to see) this secret world, although Holden invites inspection in the confessional mode, “if you really wa

12、nt to hear about it.” This mode is maintained throughout with frequent interpolations of “if you want to know the truth” or “if you really want to know.” As the story uncovers more and more of Holdens dilemma, these phrasings, although employed in the most casual manner, transcend their merely conve

13、rsational usage and become psychologically portentous. The inference is that society, including his own parents, has no desire to recognize the truth about Holden or its own obsessions. In the middle of the tale Holden learns from the psychoanalytical snob, Carl Luce, that his father had helped him

14、to “adjust”; and the blunted resolution of the narrative on the Freudian couch represents societys final humiliating indifference to truth. Recognition of the truth would embrace the love and compassion that it has no time for but that Holden himself not only lavishes on his secret world but extends

15、 to the public world in episodes and reflections rounded off with a minor verbal pattern, “You felt sorry for her” or “I felt sorry as hell for him.” The confessional mode embraces still another verbal pattern put variously, “People never notice anything,” “He wasnt even listening,” “People never be

16、lieve you,” and morons “never want to discuss anything.” The failure in communication could not be more bleakly confirmed; and there is an immense irony in the contrast between Holdens telling the truth and the indifference surrounding him. Note, then, that the confessional mode, developed by severa

17、l verbal patterns, provides a beautifully formulated enclosing structure for the talewith the symbolic image of the secret goldfish at the start and at the end of the equally symbolic talking couch.Two other patterns ironically reenforce the confessional mode. At Pencey Dr. Thurmer had talked to Hol

18、den “about Life being a game,” and Mr. Spencer added for the truants benefit, “Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.” Toward the end Mr. Antolini sustained the clich in his overblown rhetoric. Considering Holdens own honesty and the indifference of his seniors, “playing the game” bec

19、omes a grisly farce; and there is further irony in the fact that Holden is himself fervently devoted to the concept, first in his treasuring Allies baseball mitt and then in his confiding in Phoebe that he would like to be a catcher in the rye to save children from falling off “some crazy cliff.” An

20、d does he not wear his red hunting hat backwards like a catcher? Mr. Antolini, who speaks to Holden from a sophisticated height and warns him of a “terrible, terrible fall,” a “special kind of fall,” is capable, in these psychological terms, of no more than talk, for he arrived too late to catch you

21、ng Castle, who jumped out the window to escape the persecution of his contemporaries. The second pattern furnishes an ironical grace note or two. At the beginning of the tale Holden thought that Mr. Spencer yelled “Good luck!” at him, and toward the close a teacher in Phoebes school wished him “good

22、 luck.” Unrelenting in its vision of the double-dealing of society, The Catcher portrays teachers as sentimentalists and guardians of an exploded ethic; and one of them, Antolini, is a linguistic phony. In these closing patterns, then, the reverberations of irony appear to be endless, and the struct

23、ure of language and motif is all the more impressive because everything is presented in such an artless and colloquial fashion.If the design thus far disclosed may be construed as the motif of unsportsmanlike sportsmanship and if the social corollary is that by playing the game (but what are the rul

24、es?) one may achieve security and status, it remains to be said that society reduces Holden to an ambivalence of acceptance and rejection, of boastful claims and humiliating admissions that are, in effect, destructive of the integrity of his personality. Holden seeks status with his contemporaries b

25、y talking slob language, but he shows the same impulse with his elders in more subtle fashion. (pp. 911)If society were no worse than a somewhat difficult but rational enough arrangement for status-seeking and if a person had merely to pay a stiff psychological price in adjustment for the rewards, H

26、oldens frequent charge of “phony” might be dismissed. But the matter goes far deeper than that: society, in the repulsive form of Stradlater, subjects Holden to humiliations that pass beyond the legitimacies of playing the game. Holdens career discloses intensified patterns of ambivalencewithdrawal

27、and aggression, guilt feelings, fantasies of mutilation, the death-wish; and the reason lies almost as much in the social encounter as in the death of his brother Allie. A society that ignores or rejects his gesture for understanding, that preempts his possessions, body, and mind, that invades and v

28、iolates his inner beingsuch a society is not only status-seeking; it is actively and crudely anthropophagus and psychophagus. The vision of ugliness in The Catcher challenges anything else in the same genre. (p. 11)The somewhat less than twenty pages of chapters four and six, the Stradlater episode,

29、 provide a brilliant instance of Salingers technical virtuosity. Here we have convincing evidence that this completely selfish and indifferent young animal did push Holden, in his already neurotic state, down the nightmarish incline toward the psychoanalytical couch. Since it is the despoiling and h

30、umiliation of Holden Caulfield, the cynically indifferent invasion and stripping bare of his person, property, and secret imaginative world that is the burden of this episode, we note with fascinated attention how Stradlater possesses himself of all things that are Holdens, one after another. He use

31、s Holdens Vitalis on his “gorgeous locks,” he borrows Holdens hounds-tooth jacket for his date, and yawning all the while, he expects Holden to write his theme for him. A sovereign indifference to all about him is Stradlaters salient characteristic. He could not be bothered to get Jane Gallaghers fi

32、rst name right; he called her Jean. When Holden, with his studious care for the other person, asked whether Jane had enjoyed the game, Stradlater didnt know. A bitter humiliation for Holden is that he must ask this gorgeous phony, who has made a theme-slave of him, not to tell Jane that he is being

33、expelled from Pencey; most galling for the reader is Holdens admission that Stradlater probably wont tell “mostly . because he wasnt too interested.”It is, however, the imminently dangerous quality of sex that is frightening. In chapter four when Holden heard that Stradlater was to have a date with

34、Jane Gallagher, he “nearly dropped dead” and “nearly went crazy,” and in chapter six, through all the mounting ordeal, he “went right on smoking like a madman.” The psychological significance of these verbalisms is unmistakable, for Stradlater has invaded Holdens secret world and violated a symbol o

35、f innocence and respect. Indeed, in the elaborate pattern of this episode, Stradlater, the “secret slob,” matched Holdens secret world with his own, for when Holden was driven to ask the crude but important question, he announced with all the taunting impudence of his kind, “Thats a professional sec

36、ret, buddy.”When Holden recalls for this “sexy bastard” how he had met Jane and goes on to say that he used to play checkers with her, Stradlaters contemptuous comment is “Checkers, for Chrissake!” This girl, who had had a “lousy childhood” with a booze hound for a stepfather running “around the god

37、dam house naked,” always kept her kings in the back row. As Holden put it, “She just liked the way they looked when they were all in the back row.” Half earnestly, half facetiously, he requests Stradlater to ask Jane whether she still keeps her kings in the back row; the symbolism of this imagery, p

38、ortraying defense against sexual attack, is the central motif of the episode. Stradlater cannot, of course, know what a shocking and menacing figure he has become, for on the simple realistic level the request is merely casual reminiscence; but in the psychological context danger signals have begun

39、fluttering in Holdens mind. If the request may be construed as Holdens desire to send Jane a secret warning against the slob who would himself be the bearer of the message, this defensive gesture, nevertheless, cannot issue in decisive action, and it remains no less symbolical than Holdens wearing h

40、is red hunting hat “with the peak around to the back and all.” But these gestures indicate, so early in the narrative, that Holden is unconsciously preparing for his subsequent role as a catcher in the rye. In chapter six the futile best that he can do is to invite a beating at Stradlaters hands, an

41、d after the struggle he cannot, for a while, find the hat. All the protective gestures have dissolved in impotence, and with his nose “bleeding all over the place” Holden has had a thorough lesson in the game of life.This lesson is all the more pathetic because in chapter five we have the first full

42、 glimpse of Holdens secret world and hence some indication of how, given a chance, Holden would play the game. The subject of his theme is his dead brother Allies outfielders mitt that has “poems written all over the fingers and pocket and everywhere.” The mitt symbolically indicates that Holden wou

43、ld like to play the game with sensitivity and imagination, and Stradlaters crude rejection of the theme is itself a symbolic gesture, and a final one, shutting off all hope of communication. Holden tears the theme into pieces. But it should be added that, like Janes kings in the back row, Holdens pr

44、ivate world is impotent, and the effort at self-revelation in the theme is of a piece with this futility. His rapidly worsening neurotic condition has frozen him in this posture of feebleness, and indeed Holden must take Antolinis “special kind of fall” and disappear into the museum room where the m

45、ummies are and thus symbolically encounter death before he may be reborn to an active defense of his world. (pp. 1214)Holdens fantasy begins at the obvious and apparently extroverted level of “horsing around.” With Ackley Holden pretends to be a “blind guy,” saying, “Mother darling, give me your han

46、d. Why wont you give me your hand?” Considering the view we get later of parental care in absentia or by remote control, and considering, furthermore, what has already been disclosed of the highly wrought design of The Catcher, we should not fail to note, so early in the novel, the motif of mutilati

47、on and the implied charge that a mother has not provided guidance and owes her son the hand that he has broken; with Holden the extroverted simply does not exist. Ackleys response is, “Youre nuts, I swear to God.” Ackley calls Holdens hat a “deer shooting hat,” and Holden facetiously retorts, “I sho

48、ot people in this hat”; and once again, in the sequel, the facetious may be seen to envelop aggressive tendencies. The hat, indeed, is the central symbol of Holdens fantasy and so of the booknot only, as here, for aggression, but later for his humanitarian role, faintly foreshadowed, as we have alre

49、ady noted, in the Stradlater episode; and a third symbolic function of the hat is to hit off Holdens quest, which is in a large measure hysterical flight, as he rushes about New York before he comes home to Phoebe. Aggression and withdrawal follow each other rapidly in the opening scenes, the first

50、with Stradlater when Holden leaps on him “like a goddam panther,” and the second when he wakes up Ackley and asks about joining a monastery.In his hotel room, after “old Sunny,” the prostitute, has gone, he talks “sort of out loud” to Allie and expresses guilt feelings about his having refused to ta

51、ke Allie with him and a friend on a luncheon bike-trip because Allie was just a child. Since Allies death, whenever Holden becomes depressed, he tries to make up for this past cruelty by saying that he may go along. Here, then, in his guilt feelings we have an explanation of why Holden broke his han

52、d against the garage windows, and we may trace all the elements of his fantasying to this psychological cause. Mutilation is itself the physical symbol of a psychological state of self-accusation and self-laceration. Hence, when Holden, after discovering that he cannot pray, reflects that next to Je

53、sus the character in the Bible that he likes best is the lunatic that lived in the tombs and cut himself with stones, we observe a consistent psychological development of the motif of mutilation and, linked to it, the death-wish; and . we note further Holden identifies himself with a madman. In Mark

54、, V:120, we are told of the lunatic that broke all chains and fetters, for no man could tame him. Jesus drove the spirits that possessed him into the swine and told him to go home to his friends. If we are to comprehend what really happens in The Catcher we must attribute prime importance to this li

55、ttle scene of about two pages at the head of chapter fourteen; for Holden will subsequently break his morbid psychological fetters, he will go home to Phoebe, and, in a manner of speaking, he will be able to pray. (pp. 1617)The visit to Central Park and then home to Phoebe must be regarded as the tw

56、o halves of a single, unfolding psychological experience; they provide the hinge on which The Catcher moves. Holden had started thinking about the ducks during his talk with “old” Spencer; and in New York he asked two cab drivers about what the ducks did in such wintry weather. Holden knew the park

57、“like the back of his hand,” for as a child he had roller-skated and ridden his bike there. But now, searching for the lagoon, he is lost, and, as he says, “it kept getting darker and darker and spookier and spookier.” The park has become terra incognita. When at last he finds the lagoon there are n

58、o ducks. (pp. 1819)The psychological and thematic components of this little scene are profoundly rich and yet beautifully simple. Central Park represents Holdens Dark Tower, Dark Night of the Soul, and Wasteland; the paradise of his childhood is bleak, and the ducks that, in his fantasy, he has subs

59、tituted for the human, have vanished. In effect, Holden is finished with childhood and is prepared for the burdens of maturity. But all the same he gathers up the pieces to be treasured, and in a final act of childhood profligacyskipping coins over the lagoonhe symbolically rejects the materialism o

60、f the adult world that he is about to enter.The apartment episode with Phoebe is so brilliant and so densely packed that we must examine it in two stages, here largely from Holdens point of view and later from Phoebes. The meeting between brother and sister is presented as a conspiracy, for Holden e

61、nters the building under false pretenses and slips into his own apartment “quiet as hell.” “I really shouldve been a crook.” The anti-social bond is confirmed when Phoebe tells Holden that she has the part of Benedict Arnold in a Christmas play and when he gives her his symbolical hunting hat. They

62、are rebels and seekers both.Almost the first thing that Holden notices in D. B.s room where Phoebe usually sleeps when D. B. is away is her fantasying with her middle name, which she changes frequently, the present one being “Weatherfield.” The various kinds of fantasy have an important role in The

63、Catcher and, in alliance with other motifs, hint at the philosophical question of the narrative: “What is the nature of reality?”From this point onward the novel converges upon the answer. Meanwhile, Phoebes fantasying “killed” Holden; and in this and later scenes with children his mood is good humo

64、red, indulgent, and parental. The word “kill” is used throughout the novel in colloquial fashion, as here; but presently it reflects a rising hysteria when Phoebe exclaims again and again about Holdens leaving school, “Daddyll kill you.” Paradoxically, the terror exists not for Holden but for Phoebe

65、, and the boy who had been fleeing from one physical and psychological terror after another now finds himself in the role of the elder who must reassure his young sister that nobody is going to kill him.The spotlight is, furthermore, powerfully focused upon Holdens problem when Phoebe acts out a kil

66、ling. She had seen a movie about a mercy killing; a doctor compassionately put a crippled child (on his way to the apartment Holden, continuing his mutilation fantasy, had been “limping like a bastard”) out of its misery by smothering it with a blanket. In symbolic mimicry Phoebe places her pillow over her head and resists Holdens plea to come out