For a guy who holds other people to such high standards, Holden Caulfield is rather prone to self-contradiction. The astute reader can cite a number of examples just from the first few chapters: he despises “phoniness,” yet he admits that he himself is “the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life” (16); he values genuineness, yet he constantly introduces himself with false names and lies about his age and medical history; he complains about Ackley for “not taking the hint,” yet he bugs Stradlater in a rather Ackleyesque manner the whole time he’s trying to shave (and gets “in his light,” too). In my favorite example, he complains about a general blindness to nuance—“people always think something’s all true”—in a sentence that is itself a sweeping generalization about “people” and what they “always” do!
If you’re looking for consistency, look elsewhere. Holden can be a compelling and witty social critic, and many readers enjoy and relate to his complaints about American society and human behavior. And a big part of his pose as narrator—the “authority” he generates for his world-weary pronouncements—derives from his willingness to wield the reckless generalization. Holden presents himself as a guy who knows what he’s talking about: “I’ve had that experience quite frequently,” he says quite frequently. But he would be the first to admit that he often fails to live up to his own standards. He disappoints himself, too.
Some readers will grow exasperated with Holden’s tendency to contradict himself, in part because he seems to place himself in a superior position by calling everyone else out for their “phoniness”—he seems to think of himself as above it all, the one genuine dude in a sea of frauds. As one early example of Holden’s apparent blindness to his own self-contradictions, we might cite the fact that he denounces football on one page, and then a page later indulges in a fond memory of playing football with a couple of classmates. I agree that, at first glance, this appears to be yet another classic Caulfield contradiction. But under closer inspection, some crucial differences emerge. And these differences offer an important early glimpse into Holden’s idiosyncratic values.
Let’s take the first example. When the novel opens, Holden is standing “way the hell up on Thomsen Hill” (2). He is leaving Pencey Prep, after failing four out of five classes in the fall semester, and he’s just returned from his ignominious last gig as manager of the fencing team (wherein he left the team’s equipment on the subway). Far below him, from his vantage on the hill, the biggest football game of the season is going on—and Holden’s physical position here seems significant. He feels that he is “above” such trivial (or “moronic”) pursuits as football; he is “looking down at the game” (4) and looking down on it. Most readers—especially in 1951—wouldn’t need to have the scene of a high-school football game described to them, but in Holden’s narration, this most quintessential of American activities is defamiliarized: “You could see the whole field from there, and you could see the two teams bashing each other all over the place. . . . [Y]ou could hear them all yelling, deep and terrific on the Pencey side, because practically the whole school except me was there, and scrawny and faggy on the Saxon Hill side, because the visiting team hardly ever brought many people with them” (2). What to a connoisseur of the game is a highly nuanced, carefully organized strategic campaign is reduced to meaningless, violent absurdity: “two teams bashing each other all over the place.” Holden removes the underlying meaning that informs the activity—the purpose and rule-based, highly organized strategy of all this “bashing”—and in the process reduces football to an absurd and brutal activity. Just a bunch of guys bashing each other around, for no apparent reason.
So then what of the people who care so passionately about the outcome of this pointless exercise in violence? Why is “practically the whole school” (except for Holden) screaming so loudly? Football, of course, has a social meaning as well. “[I]t was the Saturday of the football game with Saxon Hall. The game with Saxon Hall was supposed to be a very big deal around Pencey. It was the last game of the year, and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn’t win” (2). The game itself is stripped of meaning, and the enthusiasm of the fans is given similar treatment. The other great American tradition that goes along with the game itself is its social meaning—school spirit, and the “collective self-esteem” (to borrow a phrase from Paul Beatty) that such events generate among the classmates of these student-athletes. Holden’s rhetorical distancing is audible here: you were supposed to care about who wins the game, and his indifference to doing what he’s supposed to do is made tangibly, visibly evident from his position up there on the hill. Everyone else cares about something brutal and stupid, whereas I couldn’t care less. Just as everyone else cares about school in general, whereas Holden won’t put any effort into his classes. Here on the second page of the novel, we are introduced to a dynamic that will resurface throughout. It’s an apt introduction to The World According to Caulfield.
Holden explains his presence on the hill that afternoon with a characteristically idiosyncratic purpose: he’s “trying to feel some kind of a good-by” (4). He hates the school and thinks it’s full of phonies, but Holden also has a sentimental streak: “I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse” (4). He’s trying to call up a memory from his brief time at Pencey that will allow him to “feel” the fact that he’s “getting the hell out,” and eventually he hits on one: “I suddenly remembered this time, in around October, that I and Robert Tichenor and Paul Campbell were chucking a football around, in front of the academic building. They were nice guys, especially Tichenor. It was just before dinner and it was getting pretty dark out, but we kept chucking the ball around anyway. It kept getting darker and darker, and we could hardly see the ball any more, but we didn’t want to stop what we were doing” (4-5).
A mere page earlier, Holden has just been making fun of football, literally positioning himself “above” it, savoring his distance from the morons in the stands yelling their heads off for sentimental reasons over a bunch of guys bashing each other around. And now the big sentimental moment he fixes on entails him playing football?! It does appear to be a contradiction, and I doubt Salinger is unaware of it, placing the two passages so close together within the first chapter. Indeed, Holden’s denunciation of the football game seems to lead directly to this particular memory, which is warm enough for him to “feel his good-by.”
I would argue that the common denominator of football underscores the significant differences between the two scenes, and these differences reveal a lot about the values and ideals that drive Holden’s narrative. On the one hand, we have a high-stakes competition—it matters to a lot of people who wins the game, to the hyperbolic point that they’ll “commit suicide or something if old Pencey doesn’t win” (notice the dig at midcentury discourses of school spirit in the sarcastic rendering of the phrase “old Pencey”). The game is organized, officially sanctioned, a community activity that is an annual highlight for the school (it’s not just a game; it’s “the Saxon Hall game”). Do people “really” care, or are they just doing what they’re “supposed to do”? Can they even tell the difference? This most familiar Saturday (or Friday-night) American ritual is reduced to an absurdity in Holden’s voice, and we can see here the start of a dynamic that persists throughout the novel (in addition to football, he also hates cars and movies—the sacred triumvirate of modern Americana!).
On the other hand, we have the moment that Holden seizes upon for his “good-by” to Pencey. Yes, a football is involved, but here the parallels end. It isn’t a game (like “life,” according to Spencer and a whole list of others who have lectured Holden about “applying himself”); there is no purpose; there is no cheering crowd. In fact, no one is watching at all. They aren’t “bashing each other all over the place”; they’re merely “chucking the ball around”—in other words, sharing the fun instead of acting like they want to kill each other, chucking it around instead of at a goal. The scene takes place in a stolen, fleeting moment between obligations, after classes are finished but before dinner. (For some reason, these are often the moments we remember most.) The sun is going down, but they keep playing until the last possible minute, when cold, hard reality intervenes (in the form, notably, of the science teacher) and tells them they have to come inside for dinner. Fun’s over. No more playing. Holden appreciates this simple, aimless moment of elemental fun (how much more basic can you get—three boys throwing a ball back and forth to each other!). There’s no competition, no audience, no high stakes; the activity is an end in itself. No one is “showing off,” and no one is “committing suicide” if the right team doesn’t win. There aren’t even “teams.” Football here assumes a dramatically different meaning than it does down on the field in the game against Saxon Hall.
Return to this moment when you’ve finished the novel, and you’ll see that some of Holden’s core concerns are introduced: the delightfully simple, noncompetitive, low-stakes childlike activity is fleeting, but they try to get the most out of it before time moves on (the October sun goes down, earlier each day—the fall season in literature traditionally evokes the passage of time and the incipient twilight of life), before the life of obligations and schedules intervenes.
Maybe this distinction is especially potent to me because it rings a number of personal bells. I used to love playing football as a kid, although when I finally was old enough to sign up for Pop Warner I quit after two weeks, before the first game, because I couldn’t deal with the regimentation and the screaming coaches. Organized football has almost nothing in common with park football—where every play is a pass, two completions for a first down, no one keeps score, the tackling is hard. And back in my day, the park was a strictly kids’ realm—adults were never around for these games, and kids of all ages were present. It was especially fun to play with older kids. We’d play until dark, or even later—I remember thrown footballs suddenly appearing out of the darkness an inch from my face—and we never wanted to quit. You literally wouldn’t stop until you had to. But by the time I was in high school, when I first encountered Catcher my senior year, I had long ago sworn off football—especially the school-sanctioned variety. Uni kids don’t have any experience with this, I realize, but in my school, football was a very big deal. The big game, against Point Pleasant, was on Thanksgiving. I could even hear the roar of the crowd and the band from my bedroom window, which wasn’t too far from the school, but I never once attended a game in my four years at that place. Like at Holden’s school, at my school “all the athletic bastards stuck together,” and often this meant bullying and harassing me and my skate-rat friends. My dislike of high-school football was personal. There was a kind of moral high ground in renouncing it, a certain satisfaction in ironically smirking my way through a pep rally with my dirtbag crew in the back row of the bleachers. The cheering crowds seemed like idiots from that vantage point, the players they lionized a bunch of thugs. So Holden’s position up there on the hill made a lot of sense to me. But so did his fond memory of playing a simple game of catch, and not wanting to stop when it became dark.
The meaning of football changes, in other words, depending on its context. I don’t see much of a contradiction in Holden here: his distaste for the big game sits comfortably alongside his fond memory of chucking the ball around with some nice guys in his class.
No comments:
Post a Comment