Rate Your Experience: One Final Survey!

Here at the Uni High English Department, we value customer satisfaction above all. Please take a few minutes to answer a few short questions about your experiences this semester. And thank you for your many contributions to this class every week!

English Department Survey

The English Department has been experimenting with various forms of "ungrading" in all of our core English classes for the last two years--we are looking at ways to deemphasize letter grades in favor of a labor-based, qualitative-feedback-driven mode of assessment of your writing and other activities.

Please take a few minutes now to record your impressions and experiences in all of your English classes over these last two years: https://forms.gle/TaKqBDzaayYHu4Te7.

Thank you!

A Generation Gap

We’ve seen a good deal of tension between generations this semester: from Esther Greenwood’s rejection of her mother and Mrs. Willard’s narrowly defined gender roles, to Alison Bechdel’s complicated efforts to distinguish herself from her father, to Jason Taylor’s repeated conviction that his parents have no idea what his daily life is really like. Perhaps generational tensions are inherent to coming-of-age narratives: parents have one view of what their children’s life should be like, while the children’s self-definition often entails setting themselves apart from those values.

But Sag Harbor presents a starker rift between generations than any of these, and this generational story seems fundamental to the larger story Whitehead is telling. We’ve talked in class about how Benji and his friends have to deal with very particular issues of self-definition, as paradoxical “black boys with beach houses.” Their racial identities—their sense of themselves as part of a larger context of Black culture and history, their personal navigation of racial stereotypes, even their musical tastes and fashion choices—don’t seem to come “naturally” to them. The culture at large views them as a walking paradox; The Cosby Show notwithstanding, Benji is all too aware that to white America, he and his friends don’t exist. There’s a particular view of what being Black in America means, and this doesn’t seem to include a doctor father, lawyer mother, midtown apartment, elite private school, and a beach house near the Hamptons. Of course, Benji doesn’t experience his own circumstances as a contradiction: “what you call paradox, I call myself” (72). It’s the life he’s born into. There’s nothing strange about Sag for Benji and Reggie and their crew—they’ve literally been coming out since they were in utero.

The enclave of African American families who own beach houses in Sag Harbor has a long history, and these boys are born into that history. They have been taught about this history, too. Benji might not be sure who W. E. B. Du Bois is, but he knows the name Maude Terry, for whom Terry Drive in Sag Harbor is named. The narrative fills us in on what Benji has been taught about this history. Maude Terry is “the spiritual architect of the developments”: “She was part of a group from Brooklyn and Queens who started coming out in the ’30s and ’40s. . . . One day our Maude, after walking through the dirt paths summer after summer to what would become Azurest Beach, decided to investigate who actually owned these woods” (95). She finds out they’re owned by a guy named Gale, who gladly sells the seemingly useless stretch of land to Terry, who then divides the parcel into lots and sells them “to her friends, to her friends’ friends, and so on, the middle-class black folk of their acquaintance” (95). Hence was born the “first generation” of black Sag Harbor. Benji and his crew are the third.

The history of Sag Harbor mirrors the larger course of Black history in the twentieth century. The first generation, Maude Terry’s crew, represent the pre-civil-rights-movement individual strivers, those who put up with all manner of prejudice and bigotry to carve out a modest piece of the American Dream for themselves in New York. (Du Bois, who reputedly enjoyed fried fish with this crowd once himself, would have called them the “talented tenth.”) A beach house on Sag is a pretty good token of “making it” in America. The second generation—Benji’s parents—represent what some cultural historians have called the Civil Rights Generation. They have a strong and even combative sense of racial identity, and Benji’s father is sharply attuned to even the subtlest of racist insults. They’ve lived through the strife of the 1960s and its aftermath, they have a strong awareness of Black history and their place within it, and they enjoy the fruits of their labor with a proud defiance. (Benji’s father lives his own kind of “paradox,” switching between easy listening and Black-nationalist talk radio on the drive out to Sag.) Benji’s mom and dad have had to fight for what they have, and they see themselves as closely connected to an ongoing racial struggle in America. They send their kids to private school, but they’re upset when they have no idea who Marcus Garvey is.

And here’s where the novel’s generational conflict comes to light. What about Benji’s generation? What’s their relationship to the history of the African American Sag community, or to the larger context of Black history in America? They are living in the wake of the civil-rights movement, presumably enjoying the hard-won spoils that their parents’ generation sacrificed for. Whitehead doesn’t let the reader indulge in the white liberal fantasy that once buses and lunch counters were desegregated, America was on a clear and direct path to racial equality. From the first chapter, thanks to his dad’s radio listening, we hear references to contentious current events in New York that call into question how much “progress” has been made: “The playlist of the city in those days was headline after headline of outrage, in constant rotation were bloody images of Michael Stewart choked to death by cops, Grandma Eleanor Bumpers shot to death by cops, Yusef Hawkins shot to death by racist thugs” (19). But while his father is constantly chiming in with his own affirmation of this outrage, Benji and his brother are just trying to sleep in the back seat. This image aptly illustrates the generational dynamic in the novel as a whole: the father muttering about racism on his way to some hard-earned peace and quiet and grilling at his beach house, while the teenage boys just want to get some more sleep.

Benji and his crew represent what has been called, variously, the Post-Civil-Rights Generation and the Hip-Hop Generation (subsets of the larger category Generation X--i.e. your parents' generation): the kids who are coming of age in the 1980s and early 1990s, whose parents lived through the civil-rights era. As Whitehead points out, his generation is coming of age alongside the emerging hip-hop culture—he and Ice Cube were born the same year, and they both grew up listening to Run-DMC (176). In his narrative, the kids and hip-hop itself “lose their innocence” around the same time: the “golden age” of the late 1980s gives way to the hypermasculine violent rhetoric of gangsta rap as these kids grow into men. Hip-hop is just emerging as what will become a dominant, global cultural and economic force, and kids like Benji and Reggie and Nick are riding the cusp of this movement.

What is this novel’s view of the Hip-Hop Generation and its relationship to the larger narrative of African American history? Do Benji and his friends see themselves as part of a proud tradition? Do they even seem to appreciate how lucky they are? The opening chapter sets up the blank slate of a summer in Sag as replete with possibility and transformative potential—a time for “self-reinvention,” which also represents Reggie and Benji’s most extensive exposure to Black culture (he has to learn all the new slang and handshakes and hairstyles). But once the novel gets under way, this potential seems squandered. Benji and Reggie seem to work all the time, and when they don’t work, they sit around, or drive around. The days seem empty and aimless. They get themselves into trouble for no good reason at all (“discovering a new way to kill a chunk of summer” [157]), and they spend all their time gorging on ice cream, watching TV, and listening to the radio. In previous summers they played video games, but now they’ve outgrown that in favor of sitting around on the beach talking shit, boasting, and putting each other down in new and creative ways.

Benji does give some respect to Bobby’s grandfather: “a real gentle guy, always kind to our mangy bunch when we came over. Gentle in that way that said he’d seen a lot of racist shit in his life and was glad that things had turned out better for his children and grandchildren. That cool old breed. . . . He had a right to be proud. And a right to get some damn sleep at the first hints of twilight” (152). But what are Benji and his friends up to, while Bobby’s gentle grandfather retires for the night? Posing with Randy and Bobby’s new toy guns, pretending to shoot each other, calling each other “pussy” for not wanting to play along, making empty boasts about “sticking up some pink motherfuckers” at school in the fall. The contrast is stark. Is this what Bobby’s grandfather and his generation worked so hard to establish?

There’s a definite sense of decadence to Whitehead’s depiction of Benji’s generation. It’s not that the “racist shit” they have to deal with isn’t real—they’re all too aware that, as “black boys with beach houses,” they don’t have the freedom to completely define themselves. They are constantly anticipating how others might view them, and calibrating their behavior and appearance accordingly, and Whitehead isn’t clearly mocking or belittling the various strategies they pursue (the “prep-school militant” is a bit of a punchline, but Benji is ultimately sympathetic to the fact that he and his friends can’t merely “be themselves”—they have to project a certain “front” to the world). The Head-Patting Incident is a big deal—or at least it’s maybe a big deal, depending whether or not Martine is Black. And they can’t tell if he is or not. So maybe they’ll do something about it, maybe they won’t. And when Benji does (sort of, passive-aggressively) do something about it, the novel raises the likelihood that his action was based on a misidentification of Martine’s race.

In other words, things are significantly more complicated for this generation. Racism is still there, even though the existence of shows like Cosby might imply otherwise, but it’s a lot more ambiguous and elusive. Benji’s father likes to talk about “whitey” as a catch-all antagonist, but Benji goes to school with mostly white kids, and he also digs “white” music like the Smiths and Bauhaus along with Run-DMC and Afrika Bambaataa. And when he is the victim of what seems like a racist incident, he can’t even tell for sure if the perpetrator is “white.” Is it too clichéd to say that, for Benji’s generation, things aren’t quite so black and white as they used to be? “That’s some racist shit right there,” NP says after the Incident (115). Or, then again, maybe it’s not. We’re in “deep eye-of-the-beholder terrain” (113), and Benji can’t merely react against racism because he’s not even totally sure racism is what he’s experiencing.

Does the novel indulge in any nostalgia for the older generation? Is there a sense that Benji’s decadent crew represents a dropping off from some more noble community ideal? He’s certainly aware that they might be viewed in this way. Referring to the first generation, he says, “They had fought to make a good life for themselves . . . and they wanted all the spoils of their struggle. A place to go in the summer with their families. To make something new” (65). But then he adds, with audible irony, “If only they could see us now. O Pioneers!” Benji’s teenage narcissism and detachment is epitomized when he follows up the proud origin-myth narrative of Maude Terry with, “Cut to forty years later, to me, more specifically, as I made my way to work and confronted one small hitch. Taking the beach shortcut meant running a gauntlet of forced social interaction” (95). I can imagine the first generation rolling their eyes in exasperation at this ungrateful brat: We fought so hard to establish this place for you, and you can’t even be bothered to make a little small talk on your way to work? To bring us back a pint of Rocky Road?

Benji cites Bobby’s grandfather on how things used to be. To the reader, the picture he evokes probably doesn’t sound half bad: “[E]veryone was welcome when you threw a party. Maybe you didn’t know each other personally, but you all had the same story, right, when it came down to it: after a long journey you had found safety on this shore. . . . If you saw the lights or heard the music . . . you walked on up and pushed in the screen door, whether you knew the person or not. And once you walked in, you were blood brothers” (97-98). This image of a small, close-knit community formed along bonds of common interest and experience—a refuge from a racist society where a little music can be played, drinks shared, chicken grilled—doesn’t resonate at all with Benji. “That sounded crazy, frankly. The custom of a better time. Half the fun of having a party, it seemed . . . was in excluding people, especially your neighbors, who would be forced to listen to the music and laughter” (98).

I don’t know whether Ben, the adult narrator of the novel, is criticizing or defending his generation’s decadence and narcissism. He often sounds bemused by the image of his younger self—the things they did and said, the ways they acted, the stuff they ate (the thought of which now literally sickens him). He refers to “the other boy” when he contemplates Benji with the BB in his eye. I think he’s just saying that this is the way it was, and this is the way they were.

Notebook Prompt: Ben and "the other boy"

Ben, the older narrator of Benji's teenage adventures and mishaps in Sag Harbor, concludes the chapter "The Gangsters" with the following passage, referring to the copper BB that is lodged in his eye socket: "It's still there. Under the skin. It's good for a story, something to shock people with after I've known them for years and feel a need to surprise them with the other boy. It's not a scar that people notice even though it's right there. I asked a doctor about it once, about blood poisoning over time. He shook his head. Then he shrugged. 'It hasn't killed you yet'" (191).

What do you make of the fact that Ben still has the BB in his eye? What does this particular story about "ill shit going down on a Thursday" have to do with the older man telling the story? How does Ben seem to view the episode in hindsight? Why does he refer to his younger self as "the other boy," and why might he assume people would be "shocked" to hear this story?

Take 5 minutes now to contemplate these questions in your Notebook.

Toxic Masculinity in Black Swan Green and at the Jersey Shore

Although he would be unlikely to describe it this way himself, we can see that over the course of Black Swan Green Jason is struggling with gender trouble. So much of his anxiety about being accepted into the tribe of “hairy barbarians” (as Madame Crommelynck memorably christens them) has to do with performing a particular version of heterosexual masculinity—anything that would be denounced, by local standards, as “gay” or not “hard” must be rigorously edited and suppressed, whether it’s a wooly hat, a map of Middle Earth, or the fact that he’s taking a walk on a weekend day (because walks are, you know, gay). Poetry—probably the most meaningful and “real” part of Jason’s life at this point—is the “gayest” of his propensities, and he literally conceals his poetry under a false name, terrified of the consequences if he were “outed” as the author.

There are closeting dynamics throughout this novel, as Jason is afraid that his insufficient masculinity, or his “gayness,” will be discovered. It goes without saying that his “life will be over” if it is. Jason doesn’t appear to be attracted to boys (we’ve probably had a bit too much evidence at this point that he's attracted to girls), and there’s no evidence that he’s experiencing actual gender dysphoria (he does confess to us that he sometimes wishes he’d been born a girl, although he knows that saying so out loud would subject him to violent homophobic harassment [6]). But what if Jason were gay? What if he were experiencing gender dysphoria? David Mitchell makes clear that there is, in Worcestershire in 1982, no possibility of coming out, of living openly with a gender nonconforming identity, among this teenage culture. There is a consistently homophobic and gender-normative valence to all of the bullying depicted in the novel (“Maggot” is just one letter off from the most common term of abuse I endured at Jason's age), and it’s easy to see how daunting it would be for a gay or trans kid to come out in such a context, where even wearing a wooly hat on a cold day can get you denounced as “gay.”

And this heteronormative gender-policing regime is not limited to the kid-culture in the book. We first see Jason anxiously editing himself in “January Man,” as he joins an exclusively kid group on the frozen lake: these standards are enforced primarily through other kids, who police each other’s gender expression relentlessly for any sign of deviance or weakness. But as the novel unfolds, we can easily see how systemic this culture of masculine heteronormativity is throughout the community. Think of Mr. Carver, the P.E. teacher, who gets laughs from all the kids when he makes homophobic jokes about Floyd Chacely and Nicholas Briar in the showers. Or Mr. Murcot, the metalshop teacher, who calls the co-ed class of students “boys,” unless he’s “bollocking” them, in which case they are all “girls.” Think of the stories and rumors surrounding Mr. Blake and his alleged physical abuse of his son, who has left home forever. Think of Uncle Brian getting creepy and sexist at the dinner table, interrogating Julia about her choice of college and implying that she’s following a boyfriend to Edinburgh, and how Hugo reminds Jason of Uncle Brian when he sexually harasses Kate Alfrick at Mr. Rhydd’s shop. These hairy barbarians Jason is so eager to impress didn’t invent these gender standards—they have inherited them from their fathers and teachers, and we see this most clearly in the Ross Wilcox situation. It is implicit in Mr. Kempsey’s aphorism, “The brutal may have been molded by a brutality you cannot exceed” (212).

As I ponder the Ross Wilcox situation, and the role that Ross’s father plays in his son’s brutality, I recall a story from my own experience as a non-gender-conforming kid growing up on the Jersey Shore in the 1980s. I have far too many of these stories, and I usually don’t like to share them in class, because it takes our focus away from the literature. But dealing with what we now would call “bullying” was pretty much a daily occurrence, in some form, for me and my friends in our first two years of high school. The social dynamics were different from Black Swan Green, and the “hierarchy” Jason describes was less rigidly defined. But when my friends and I started to get into skateboarding and punk culture, which at the time was pretty much nonexistent in our town, the backlash was swift and immediate. I have sat in a classroom while a teacher mocked my haircut or called me a “girl” or “card-carrying queer” (I swear my history teacher used precisely this expression, a favorite of his to denounce liberal politicians in general). I have had cops tell me that they would not pursue the person who just assaulted me because I “asked for it” with my “faggot haircut.” On some days, it would just be random people yelling insults from passing cars, and on other days the cars would stop and the violence would be verbal and physical. On some school days, it would just be random football players or metalheads shoving you against the lockers as you walked the halls, and on other days (one in particular) I ended up in intensive care with a ruptured spleen and liver. Simply riding a skateboard through town put a target on your back, and my partly shaved head with gross little dready spikes on top was seen as a direct provocation in the hallways at school.

I didn’t know the term “toxic masculinity” at the time—I first heard it maybe ten years ago, and it was one of those phrases that I knew immediately what it meant. It’s something I’ve experienced, and pushed back against, my whole life, but it can be illuminating and even revolutionary to be able to name something like this. (As when Julia helpfully teaches Jason the term “Pyrhhic victory” [115], and he is then able to grasp why his father hasn’t really “won” when he celebrates the crane eating Helena’s new koi in “Rocks.”) When we think about Ross Wilcox and his horrible behavior as being largely shaped by his experiences at home, by the model of masculinity that his tax-dodging, wife-beating father represents, we are thinking about the effects of toxic masculinity, or how this culture of bullying has become systemic in Jason’s world.

When I think about Ross Wilcox and his father, I am reminded in particular of Robbie Holmes. He was never one of my main tormenters—just a kid two years older than me who would reliably mess with me about half the times I ran into him, but not someone I usually think about when I revisit these old days. He never did anything too bad, and for whatever reason he seemed to have it out for my friend Pat even more than me (these guys would sort of play “favorites,” in that it often seemed like they hated one or two of us especially). But this one interaction I had with Robbie when I was fifteen and he was probably seventeen, as he stood in my face asking me why I had to be such a total queer, springs to mind as a neat example of toxic masculinity. On this particular day, I was loitering with a couple of friends around a public bench, doing some tricks on the curb and the bench—the same as a hundred other afternoons over these years. Robbie Holmes and another guy came up to us, and we braced ourselves for what might come next. On this particular day, Robbie focused on me.

It was a common kind of interrogation: “Why do you have to look like such a queer? Why do you wear those earrings, don’t you know that’s gay?” In the mid-1980s in America, it was somewhat acceptable for a straight/cis male to have one pierced ear, but it was widely understood that it had to be the left ear; I have no idea where this notion originated, but everyone knew that a pierced right ear was a signal to the world that you were homosexual. I pierced my own ears, both of them, with safety pins—this was the kind of thing I thought was fun at the time—and I had one ring in my right and two in my left, an extent of accessorizing that went beyond the narrow bounds for men and boys in those days. Robbie’s interrogation then ascended to a new level: “Do you know how bad my father would whip my ass if I came home looking like you?”

I don’t remember how I responded—probably something very witty like “No, I don’t, why don’t you tell me?” But I distinctly remember thinking more along the lines of Your father sounds like a real dick. I’m glad he’s not my father. I don’t know what Robbie Holmes was trying to convey with this statement, but it was clearly an expression of disgust, a statement of what I deserved for my deviance. Was he impugning my own father, who was too weak to beat me for cutting my own hair and piercing my own ears? My Dad hated the way I looked in high school, and he would really have preferred me to pursue a more conventional route, but he never punished me or beat me for it. Was he doing an insufficient job as a father? What kind of man allows his son to go around looking like this? At the same time, I sensed a twinge of envy, as if Robbie Holmes would really like to have the flexibility to explore his identity in these ways, but he knows that his Dad would kick his ass if he did. He hated me and my friends because we represented a kind of freedom he could not enjoy, and he took it upon himself to police these gendered boundaries, to enforce the “iron-clad rules” his father had taught to him.

This particular interaction did not lead to violence, apart from the verbal abuse. It is likely that Robbie ended it by taking my skateboard and rolling it into traffic, a common move by lunkheads who couldn’t skate and wished they could. And I don’t remember even talking about it with my friends at the time—this stuff was so common, we’d just get back to whatever we were doing after the goons walked away. But in retrospect it strikes me as an almost too-perfect illustration of the concept of toxic masculinity, and how it is “inherited” and enforced from one generation to the next. He was literally bullying me by threatening me with the prospect of his father being my father, and gloating about how this “real” father would have abused and rejected me because I wore earrings and liked to skate.

The happy ending to this story, if there is one, is that the culture does seem to be shifting in profound and significant ways when it comes to gender expression among teenagers, and it is possible that the cycle is starting to weaken or break. In my hometown these days, the tennis courts where we used to get kicked out for skating are now a skate park, and the popular kids at my old high school in the early 2000s skated and dressed like punks (I have no idea what the local scene is like these days). These were the sons and daughters of my tormentors, in many cases, and I did smile at the thought of their parents having to accept their shaved hair and piercings (even if these accessories were purchased at the mall).

Jason Taylor: The New Holden Caulfield?

In a 2012 article from Slate, a high-school English teacher, Jessica Roake, describes how excited she was to first teach The Catcher in the Rye, and how disappointed she was to discover that her students failed to relate to Holden Caulfield in the way she’d expected. Like many who have put this novel on their syllabus, she had anticipated “blowing their minds”: “They would see themselves in Holden Caulfield, and J. D. Salinger’s words would elucidate their own frustrations and struggles. They would write righteous screeds against phoniness, start keeping journals, and forever treasure their pored-over paperback. The book would blow the minds of teenagers seeking a pilgrim soul—a friend’s voice in the wild of adolescence.” Instead, they were merely bored. Holden’s world seemed impossibly ancient to them, and they couldn’t relate to his “first-world problems.” He was a whiny, privileged white boy who needs to get over himself. His slang was antiquated and quaint, the cultural references (Peter Lorre, the Lunts) failed to resonate, and his disillusionment seemed like a cliché, “fundamental teenage anguish.” Salinger’s New York, to twenty-first-century readers, feels as distant as Fitzgerald’s West Egg in The Great Gatsby: “places of antiquated privilege and clarinet-heavy music.”

In a particularly pithy (and home-hitting) formulation, Roake notes that Catcher is “no longer a book for cool high-school students” but only “for cool high school teachers.” (Ouch!) Its ubiquity is part of the problem. The book is assigned so frequently in high school, and so often framed as “the book that will change your life,” that a student is wise to approach it with skepticism: how subversive can it be if my teacher is insisting that I read it? (When I was teaching Catcher in CoA Novel a few years back, the director of the school dropped by to observe class for a couple minutes. As he was taking his leave, he briefly interrupted the discussion to declare Catcher the “best book ever.” I don’t doubt the sincerity of the sentiment, or the enthusiasm; but it’s a nice illustration of the paradoxical dynamic Roake is talking about, and I suspect Holden would be bemused at the endorsement of such an authority figure.)

Roake decided that, as much as she loved Catcher in her day, and as much as she believes that there is much to be gained from reading it, contemporary students need a new book for their generation that defines what it is to be young, confused, and idealistic in the face of an often brutal and hypocritical world. Her nomination: David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green.

My initial reaction upon reading this article was to be glad that I teach the kinds of classes I teach at Uni—junior-senior semester-long special-topics courses—because this means I don’t have to choose between Catcher and Black Swan Green. I get to teach them both, in a course devoted entirely to the coming-of-age novel. Most high-school English teachers face a range of constraints on their curricula; they might be expected to cover particular material over the course of a schoolyear, and thus they might only be able to accommodate one “teenage novel.” I don’t know that I’d want to choose between Salinger and Mitchell; I’ve had a lot of fun teaching them both, as they bounce off each other in interesting ways. (Consider how often this semester we’ve used Holden as a point of comparison, a touchstone of quintessential teenagerhood against which to measure other characters and their situations. Even students who failed to fall in love with the book find it useful as a paradigm.)

I can partly see where Roake is coming from, and I’ve been aware of the growing view of Catcher as “outdated” even before this. When Salinger died, in early 2010, commentaries seemed to fall into two categories, with little neutral territory between them: there were the “this book changed my life” testimonials, and the “I never saw why this book is such a big deal” rebuttals. Common to the haters was (often) the familiar framework where the book had been built up as the most world-shifting, life-changing representation of adolescent human experience ever committed to print; this kind of hype almost guarantees a certain percentage of shrugging, “no big deal” responses. Add to this the irony of a story about a teenage rebel and truant being endorsed and celebrated by the very figures of authority the book denounces as “phony” (who themselves discipline students for being rebels and truants) and a certain type of reader is bound to be turned off. It feels like a fraud—“rebellion” packaged as schoolwork.

None of this has ever stopped me from including the novel on my syllabi, in college courses and in the Coming-of-Age Novel here at Uni. I suppose I’m lucky that my senior AP English teacher, Mrs. McLean, didn’t tell me the book was going to change my life—it was just assigned as the next thing on our syllabus. I had the vague sense it was probably about baseball; I knew Billy Joel mentioned it in that song about not starting the fire, which we talked about in history class; I knew that Ad-Rock had boasted that he’s “got more stories than J.D.’s got Salinger” on the new Beastie Boys record. But otherwise, I came to it with no particular expectations—and this was a good thing. I felt like I was “discovering” it on my own. I didn’t expect anything like Holden’s narrative voice, or his general attitude, and it truly felt “refreshing,” as cliché as that sounds now. And over the last twenty years, I’ve seen students of various genders respond strongly to the novel—maybe girls especially, despite so many commentators dismissing it as a “boys’ book.” It still has the capacity to surprise, amuse, delight, and confound—when you get past the dated slang, the “goddams” and “as hells,” Holden still cracks kids up (“Suave as hell, boy”). They still feel like he confides in them, and even readers who are turned off by what seems like his arrogance and apathy at the start can be brought around, by the end, to appreciate the idealism and loneliness at the heart of this enigmatic character.

Not everyone likes Holden Caulfield, of course—and this should be no surprise. I’m not especially looking for unanimity in any aspect of this (or any) course, but I certainly don’t expect to find it with Catcher in the Rye. Some of you end up liking Holden, even caring deeply about him—even if we do peer through a good deal of historical and cultural distance to imagine the postwar New York he wanders through, it’s easy enough to find the human heart to the story. Some of you never warm to him, find him affected, hypocritical, judgmental, overwhelmingly negative. Others are exasperated at his generally ungrateful attitude, his white-boy-privilege, and his ennui. And both of these responses—and the whole range of gradations in between—are not incompatible with a rewarding and valuable study of the novel. I don’t put it on my syllabus to change your life; I believe there’s value in working out your own response to Holden, and that you learn a lot about yourself and your world when you do so. You don’t have to fall in love with him, or the book. But it’s also okay with me if you do.

Black Swan Green is another story. Pretty much everyone in class, every time I’ve taught this novel, falls in love with Jason Taylor, and with the novel. I’ve heard from multiple alums of this course that it’s their favorite on the syllabus (apparently Ms. K, who was a student in the spring 2013 incarnation of this course, was overheard enthusing about it the other day!), and a number of people have already gone back and reread it. Roake points out a lot of similarities between these two books, and she articulates nicely some of the important differences, as well: “Holden’s cynicism and alienation from the world he inhabits have become a cliché; the sincerity and openness of young Jason feels fresh. He reads as real and naive, as immature as Holden is jaded. Instead of finding almost everything ‘sad as hell,’ Jason remains childlike in his enthusiasm for all the ‘epic’ things around him, even as the events of his life become harder for him to process.” I think age may have something to do with this: readers your age feel protective of Jason; he’s like your little brother, going through a period you’ve just emerged from, and like Julia at the end, you want to tell him it’ll all be okay, even if it doesn’t feel like it just now. But unlike Holden, about whom the jury remains out at the end of the novel, in terms of significant growth and development in his character, Jason is inspiringly dynamic. We see him grow in small and large ways over the course of his thirteenth year, and although we know he’s in for any number of trials and torments as he begins his fourteenth year as the “new kid” at his new school, we also are happy in the knowledge that he seems better prepared to deal with them.

Jason is a less divisive character than Holden—and for all the talk about “this novel changed my life” coming from your parents’ generation, I suspect he always has been. He’s crude, confrontational, abrasive. He makes fun of deeply held American values, like equating one’s ego with the type of car one drives, and this must cut close to the bone for many readers. He doesn’t hold himself up to his own standards, consistently, and this chips away at the authority he tries to consolidate with his reckless generalizations about “people” and what they “always” do. Jason confronts many of the same problems, but he doesn’t rant about them very often or with the same energetic spleen as Holden does. He’s simply easier to like and, for many readers of both genders, to relate to.

And Black Swan Green, as Roake points out, is still not widely known—it still feels like a discovery, or a secret, and you may want to pass it on to your friends. Even though it’s set in 1982 (i.e. your parents’ generation), it feels a lot more contemporary than Catcher in the Rye does. Jason doesn’t have the internet, or digital media, or mobile connectivity, or whatever, but the suburban landscape he faces, the domestic troubles, the bullying, the complications of self-editing, the gender anxiety, all looks very familiar to contemporary young readers.

I’m curious to hear your responses to Roak’s article, as readers of both Catcher and Black Swan Green. I’ve had a very similar kind of good time teaching both of them, and they both are books that I’m glad to bring into your lives at this crucial stage. My admiration for Black Swan Green deepens each time I teach it—that’s one of the pleasures of discovery, figuring out all the connections and interrelated themes and motifs and structural features on our own, without the burden of years of critical study and classroom lessons to lean on. In fact, I try hard to avoid some of the most common conversations about Catcher (notice that we didn’t really talk about the “symbolism of the red hunting hat” or the “symbolism of the ducks in Central Park” at all!), so we can focus more on the beguiling and seductive narrative voice. With Black Swan Green, as a teacher, I have that feeling of discovering a book that we all can share as a secret. If it were to become the “next Catcher,” I worry that such status might ruin it a little. I often wish Catcher were not the second-most commonly taught novel in high school. I kind of hope it does fall from this status a bit. I’d much rather teach it to students who don’t come to it with any preconceptions, positive or negative.

Do I like Black Swan Green “better” than Catcher? I can’t say. In some ways, yes. Jason Taylor’s world is much more familiar to me and my personal experiences than Holden’s is. But Catcher itself is part of my development as a person, and the development of my tastes—the very tastes that lead me to enjoy Mitchell’s novel so much. I can’t excise it from my personal history; I encountered it at such an early age in my reading life, its influence can’t even be measured. It’s not simply a matter of how distant Holden’s era is from my own; reading his book is a part of my experience of the 1980s.

Read both.

I’m glad I don’t have to choose.

Notebook prompt: Jason as "Maggot"

In the ninth chapter of Black Swan Green (September 1982), the moment Jason has been dreading since "January Man" has come to pass: the chapter opens with Ross Wilcox, his breath smelling like "a bag of ham," getting in Jason's face and outing him as a kid who "goes to the pictures with Mummy!" and also (to his horror) as the "school stutterboy." The chapter "Maggot" follows through on Jason's debilitating dread of exposure back in "Hangman," as he is compelled to read aloud (from Lord of the Flies, appropriately enough) in English class. By the end of the day, when Ross and his "lot" toss Jason's Adidas bag on the roof of the departing schoolbus, he believes himself to have fully become the self-deprecating and timid voice in his head that he calls "Maggot."

As you reflect on this harrowing day of school, narrated in excruciating detail, think about how Jason's experiences connect to your own experiences throughout childhood. Have you witnessed "gang-up" or bullying dynamics in your school career? Inside or outside of school? What side(s) have you found yourself on in these situations--part of the mob, victim of the mob, bystander, or somewhere in between? Does David Mitchell's depiction of Jason's most hellish day of school ring true to you? Does it seem hyperbolic? Are kids these days generally less cruel, or less prone to mob dynamics, than they were in Mitchell's era? Does Jason's experience in this chapter resonate with you at all? Do you take away any insights from his worst day of school ever?

Take 5 minutes now and reflect on this chapter, in whatever direction your thoughts take you. You can use these questions as prompts, but don't try to address all of them.

A Novel with a Soundtrack

So why have I been opening our classes lately by playing music on our janky off-brand Bluetooth speaker? What valid pedagogical role could songs by Human League or Talking Heads play in a very serious English literature course like this one? Is the instructor pursuing a personal agenda to promote the appreciation of 1980s synth-pop in today’s generation? Well, not exactly (although if you ended up checking out Fear of Music because you first heard “Heaven” in my class, that would be okay by me). Aside from the fact that it nicely breaks up the monotony and puts us all in a good mood when we listen to “Mr. Blue Sky” before launching into the second half of discussion—a song so full of earworms that the entire class will have little snippets of bouncy chords, freaky vocoder effects, and the jauntiest guitar solo ever recorded ricocheting around in our heads for the rest of the day—music serves as a uniquely crucial element of this novel’s evocation of Jason Taylor’s world. For one previous iteration of this course (2019) I tried to go for deep authenticity and produced a mixtape of the songs in these chapters on my cassette deck on my home stereo system. I was borrowing the library's boombox, which featured a cassette player, but the player was in pretty bad shape, and the music sounded terrible. So now we're using Spotify, which Jason Taylor wouldn't have had access to. He needs to overhear music from his sister's room, or be turned on to cool new music like Talking Heads by her boyfriend. And in this way, he reflects a lot about the role of music in popular youth culture in the 1980s.

Music is a part of Holden Caulfield’s world, too, of course. Our picture of late-1940s New York in The Catcher in the Rye might be enhanced if we listened to a general example of the kind of music Ernie must have been playing in the piano bar, or if we could track down the (fictional) song “Little Shirley Beans” by (real-life) Estelle Fletcher (even though Phoebe herself never gets to hear the song). But the vital place of music in Jason’s world reflects significant changes in the role of popular culture by the latter half of the twentieth century, and we’ll see the same thing in Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, which is set in the same era. David Mitchell is so specific about the songs that are playing in crucial scenes throughout this novel—“Don’t You Want Me?” by Human League is namedropped in the very first paragraph, like a theme song over opening credits. For many readers, a reference to a song like this will immediately evoke the era, along with the other pop-cultural references to The Rockford Files or The Empire Strikes Back.

But what if you’ve never heard the song before? Does a novel like this require a supplementary playlist in order to be fully understood? Are these musical allusions akin to the literary allusions throughout Fun Home, which depend on a reader’s familiarity with Greek myth or the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald? When I first started teaching this novel, in 2009, most students in class associated “Don’t You Want Me?” with a Swiffer commercial (apparently the broom is upset because the homeowner has started using a Swiffer exclusively?), which is not the association David Mitchell has in mind. For me, in contrast, the song inevitably evokes the local roller rink when I was 12 years old, cruising in wide circles on urethane wheels to the sweet synth sounds of British pop ("Cars" by Gary Numan was also a big hit at the rink). 

I have put together a 25-song Spotify playlist for Black Swan Green (and I will do the same for Sag Harbor, which is similarly anchored in musical references), and while it does include some stuff I haven't played in class, it doesn’t even include every song mentioned in the novel (by the chapter “Disco,” we’re getting two or three songs mentioned per page! I do include most of the DJ's inspired playlist). Typically, there’s one song per chapter, and listening to these songs in order works as a nice parallel to the novel—we think of lovelorn Julia up in her room, blasting Kate Bush, or newly stoked Jason kicking back and playing “Mr. Blue Sky” five or six times in his room, or fantasizing about escaping the stresses of his life in the front seat of Ewan’s car while listening to David Byrne sing about heaven as a “place where nothing ever happens.” The songs are a key part of these scenes, and a reader should be able to “hear” them (either literally or in our minds’ ear) when we read. These are more than superficial details; a reader really misses something important about this book if they aren’t familiar with the songs Mitchell cites.

Some critics have suggested that contemporary writers like David Mitchell, Colson Whitehead, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Nick Hornby, and others run the risk of dating their works by packing them with references to popular culture. Literature aspires to the eternal and the universal, in this view; a novel should cut more deeply than an episode of “I Love the 80s” on VH1. I can sort of see the logic here—would a reader of Black Swan Green in 2125 require audio footnotes to “explain” all these allusions to long-obscure pop music from the twentieth century?

The music in Black Swan Green is more than simply a nostalgic trigger for Gen X readers. It’s a fundamental part of what it was to be a kid Jason’s age at the time. He doesn’t go to shows to hear live music, he doesn’t go to clubs, he doesn’t play music himself. He listens to recorded music, often alone, on the radio and on LPs and cassettes, and the author marks important moments in his character’s story by specifying the exact song that was playing at the time. He pays close attention to what his older sister and her friends listen to, and he sneaks a chance to play her records whenever he can. We can observe a progression over the course of the novel, as Jason goes from overhearing Human League in his sister's room, to "borrowing" her records without permission, to playing her records when she's not home, to being introduced to new stuff by Ewan and Julia (via a mixtape, a quintessential genre of 1980s music culture), to choosing and listening to his own music in the later chapters. He has strong feelings about the music he hears—Jason is rarely indifferent to a song, and he deploys (often italicized) adjectives like “incredible” and “kazookering” to describe what he hears. Forming his musical tastes is a significant part of Jason’s formation of a self, and David Mitchell namedrops songs in part as a method of characterization.

 

Notebook prompt: An Antihero's Journey?

Why does Alison Bechdel title the seventh and final chapter of Fun Home "The Antihero's Journey"? What ideas does it evoke, and how do you see these manifest in the chapter (and the book as a whole)? In what sense might we view Bruce as an antihero? Would this make Alison the "hero" of her own narrative? How, in the end, does this graphic memoir frame the complex relationship between these two protagonists?

Please take 5 minutes to contemplate these questions in your Notebook.

Libraries in a Book about Books

Given her self-described “bookish” upbringing, it’s not surprising that libraries feature prominently in Alison Bechdel’s coming-of-age/coming-out narrative. Her own memoir is saturated with other books, which aren’t only referred to in passing but are fundamental structural elements of the story she tells: we view the story of the Bechdel family through the lens of Greek mythology, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Henry James, Collette, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Camus, and a bunch of others I’m probably forgetting right now. Fun Home is a book that is very much “about” other books, and Bechdel uses other books as a way to give shape and meaning to her story. She gets this habit, in large part, from her father. The brief period of “closeness” between them, in the final years of his life, has a lot to do with the fact that Alison is now getting into reading, and Bruce clearly is thrilled at the prospect of sharing his favorite books with her, serving literally as her teacher in English class (in a coming-of-age-themed course “Rites of Passage”), with her as the “only one in that class worth teaching” (199). It is fitting that her efforts to understand him after his death are filtered through the books he loved. She hates Ulysses when she tries to read his old copy in that winter-session course, but she’s clearly studied it very closely in the intervening years: chapter 7 of Fun Home reflects a deep critical familiarity with Joyce’s uber-modernist, antiheroic mock-epic, which is itself an extended ironic riff on Homer’s Odyssey.

Early in chapter 3 (“That Old Catastrophe”), Bechdel introduces us to Bruce’s library as a prime reflection of the artificial façade that defines him—the “art” that the constantly remodeled home represents, which prizes artifice and appearance and décor over underlying reality. She acknowledges the pretensions reflected in Bruce’s “library” right away: “For anyone but the landed gentry to refer to a room in their house as the ‘library’ might seem affected, but there really was no other word for it” (60). The illustration of the room includes labels that specify the artful décor—velvet drapes, gilt awnings (or whatever those tops of window-dressings are called), “flocked” wallpaper (not sure what “flocked” means either). The room looks like the epitome of Bruce’s “art”—ornate, lush, baroque, antique, crowded with ornament and accessory, very much a visual spectacle. Bechdel narrates the room as a kind of stage set for Bruce’s performance: “My father liked to imagine himself as a nineteenth-century aristocrat overseeing his estate from behind the leather-topped mahogany and brass second-empire desk” (60). The “library” appears to be the masterpiece of Bruce’s carefully curated illusion, a pretentious affectation that (once again) conceals an underlying reality.

But Bechdel qualifies this picture somewhat, by acknowledging that, for all its pretensions, the room is a functional library (“Where’s the atlas?” “In the Canterbury atlas rack” [61]). “Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense . . . and becomes, for all practical purposes, real” (60). Bruce is both playing a role, projecting himself as a quasi-nineteenth-century aristocrat with a library in his mansion, and actually being that role. The image is Bruce’s reality. The room is a key prop in his “country-squire routine,” which involves “edifying the villagers—his more promising high school students” by lending them books by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. And she also notes that these innocent exchanges of books were often likely cover for clandestine sexual relationships (just about everything in Bruce’s life could be seen as cover for his clandestine sexual relationships), a key feature of the “act” through which he seduces his students: “Such a suspension of the imaginary in the real was, after all, my father’s stock in trade,” Bechdel narrates, as a “promising high school student” remarks, “Man, being in this room is like going back in time. What’s this shit?” (65).

The primary intertext here is The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s novel about a man who reinvents himself and creates a house (an actual mansion) that reflects and projects this invented personality. Gatsby’s mansion on Long Island prominently features a library as a foundational element of his fictional origin myth, even if Jay Gatsby (not his real name) hasn’t actually read any of the books on the shelves—Bechdel alludes to the moment when a party guest marvels at the “thoroughness” and “realism” of Gatsby’s illusion because his books are “real” and not “cardboard fakes” (84). Gatsby “knew when to stop,” however—the pages in his books are not “cut” (which is how you could tell if a book had actually been read or not: pages used to be in bundles, and you’d have to “cut” the edges in order to separate the pages). Bruce’s books (most of them) have “clearly been read,” and therefore his illusion doesn’t go as deep as Gatsby’s, but nonetheless, Bruce’s library reflects “the preference of fiction to reality” (85). The library in the Bechdel home is an elaborate stage set designed to bolster Bruce’s “fictional” self, and a convenient cover for his “secret life,” his surreptitious affairs with younger men and boys. In chapter 3, it serves as a primary image for Bruce’s essential dishonesty, sexual repression, and self-evasion, hidden behind a beautiful façade.

Libraries (and a co-op bookstore) play a key role throughout Alison’s own coming-of-age/coming-out experience, and once again we see fundamental contrasts between her and her father. Bruce’s library is an affectation, window dressing, a stage set, the creation and maintenance of an illusion so thorough it becomes “real.” He uses it to push books that he values onto others, and we see him do the same thing with Alison when she’s old enough to appreciate it—a place for him to tell others what they “have to” read next. Alison’s library experience, significantly, is framed as more of a private experience of self-discovery: she describes her “realization at nineteen that I was a lesbian” as “a revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind” (74). (Technically, this scene takes place in a “co-op bookstore,” but the function is very much like a library: she stumbles upon the book herself and “borrows” it, reading it surreptitiously in the aisle.) She experiences the first “qualms” about her emergent identity at age thirteen, when she sees the word “lesbian” in the dictionary, and from there, her journey of self-discovery and self-revelation takes place almost entirely through books. First she “screw[s] up [the] courage” to buy a book called Lesbian Women at the bookstore (an initial, partial, hesitant form of public acknowledgment), and then she follows all the references in that book to find others in the school library. She finds “homosexuality” in the card catalog (you have no idea what this is, a kind of early prototype of an online book search using paper cards in alphabetical order), and then she proceeds to “ravish” a “four foot trove” of books on the subject. There’s an early kind of coming-out progression, as the initial fear and embarrassment leads to her “trolling even the public library, heedless of the risks.” This initial course of “independent reading” leads directly to the moment when she writes to her parents to declare “I am a lesbian.”

The contrasts with Bruce’s stage-set library are stark: the library for Alison is functional, practical, a source of nonfiction information rather than fiction (she reads books of interviews with lesbian women, psychology, cultural studies, history), and, most importantly, a route to self-knowledge and a public embrace of that identity. In chapter 7 (“The Antihero’s Journey”), she frames this experience as the start of an “odyssey . . . nearly as epic as the original” (203). To put a fine point on it, Bruce uses his library and fictional books to construct an elaborate façade; Alison uses the co-op bookstore and academic and public libraries in order to get to a deeper truth about herself, which she will then declare and embrace publicly. His library is private and a reflection of his personal aesthetic (concealment, decoration, artifice), while Alison’s is public, academic, scholarly. Bruce’s serves to conceal a fundamental truth about himself; Alison’s serves to reveal a fundamental truth about herself. One more way that these two can be seen as “inversions” (or negative mirror-images) of each other.

There is a sense in which, in chapter 7, we see Bruce’s library take on new potential—as a possible form of bonding and mutual understanding with his daughter. There aren’t many points in this book where I identify with Bruce, but the way he gets so “elated” while picking books off his shelf to share with his daughter is one of them. He ends up lending her the French feminist writer Collette’s memoir Earthly Paradise, in part about gay and lesbian Paris in the 1920s, which plays a key role in her “independent reading” on the subject of queer identity through the ages. Bruce, in these scenes, seems more “real,” less performative. He isn’t putting on an act for Alison, and he is only trying to “seduce” her by inspiring her mind, finding some common ground to talk about books. As you may know, I too very much enjoy sharing books that I have found interesting and revelatory with younger people—it’s really at the heart of what I do for a living. And I admit to occasionally pressing a book or movie on my kids, telling them they “have to” read or see it. (In fact, the very night before I'm posting this commentary, my own daughter, about to depart for an international trip, asked me to recommend and lend some books from the family “library” for her journey. I did feel a bit like Bruce, eagerly perusing the shelves and trying to limit myself to just two or three.) It is one of the great pleasures of life to introduce someone to a book that may make a difference to them, and I remain grateful to the people who introduced me to these same books when I was younger. We see some potential for a deeper, more meaningful, and more truthful relationship between father and daughter start to emerge here—but, perhaps predictably, we see Bruce start to overdo it, getting too excited, talking at Alison about all the books he’s pressing on her, and generally driving her away into her own independent-reading course. She’s not as into Ulysses—initially—as he hopes she will be. She’s far more interested in reading about lesbian culture, and she quickly falls behind in her course. But Joyce’s novel has clearly made an impact on her, as this whole final chapter represents an extended meta-riff on Ulysses and its creative refiguring of The Odyssey. Bechdel knows Ulysses very well, now, at the time she is writing this book, and it’s as if she’s sharing these insights into “spiritual” and “consubstantial” fathers and children with Bruce posthumously, to try and come to some kind of understanding of their complex and ambiguous relationship.

I can’t help but assume Bruce would be proud of his former student.

Sylvia Plath reading her late poems

In the final year of her life, Sylvia Plath was living in England as her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes fell apart. This was a very productive year of writing for Plath, as she completed the manuscript of The Bell Jar and prepared it for (pseudonymous) publication and wrote a number of her most well-known, beguiling, and deeply personal works of poetry, usually in the early morning hours before her infant and toddler were awake. These late poems were posthumously collected in the book Ariel (1965), but Plath was reading versions of them publicly in 1962, including a series of recorded readings for the BBC.

Here is a recording of Plath reading one of her best-known poems, "Lady Lazarus," on the BBC in 1962:

And here is a recording of Plath reading another of her best-known poems, "Daddy," also on the BBC in 1962:

Notebook Prompt: Esther's Recovery as a Coming-of-Age?

The Bell Jar ends at a literal threshold: Esther is about to step into the room where her psychological fitness to return to college will be assessed by a panel of experts. She is hopefully "graduating" from the asylum and returning for the spring semester--she describes herself as "patched, retreaded, and approved for the road" (244), as if she were a car being inspected for safety. How do we view Esther's harrowing experience in these psychiatric institutions, and what do they have to do with the larger question of her coming-of-age? Is her life-threatening descent into clinical depression and what sounds like schizophrenia a brief episode of deviation from her path, and at the end of the novel she is essentially returning to where she left off? Or do we view these experiences as an inherent and important part of her coming-of-age? Is she being "restored," or do we see her as somewhere new at the close of the novel? Does the narrative of The Bell Jar represent a significant kind of growth or development in her character, or is she instead "starting, after a six months' lapse, where [she] so vehemently had left off" (236)?

Please take five minutes now to contemplate your views on the conclusion of The Bell Jar and the question of coming-of-age in your notebook.

“The Perfect Setup of the True Neurotic”

The Bell Jar opens at the onset of a serious identity crisis for Esther Greenwood. Her dislocation to the unfamiliar world of New York City and fashion magazines—the result of one more “prize” she’s won for her excellent academic performance—seems to kick in some deep uncertainties about who she is, and from the start of the narrative we see her “trying on” a range of identities. Is she more Betsy or Doreen? Will she try to be Jay Cee, a powerful literary editor who lunches with famous novelists and poets, or a housewife who knows the practical skill of shorthand, like her mother? She “experiments” with a Doreen-style persona in her evening on the town as “Elly Higginbottom from Chicago” and then recoils from the carnal and creepily violent grotesquerie she witnesses back at Lenny’s memorable bachelor pad. But she can no longer pull off the Betsy persona, either; she tries to go along with the Ladies’ Day events planned for the interns, but her heart isn’t in it (and it literally makes her ill at one point). “[S]omething was wrong with me that summer,” she states early in the narrative; “I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullaballoo” (3).

The “something wrong” clearly has to do with identity, with the pressure to construct and maintain a passable public self. (She only feels truly “herself,” notably, when she’s in the thoroughly private confines of a hot bath.) When Jay Cee interrogates her, the “terrible things” she says might not seem all that terrible, or even unfamiliar, to the average Uni junior or senior. “Doesn’t your work interest you?” (31); “What do you have in mind after you graduate?” (32). Esther is deeply troubled by these questions—or, rather, she’s deeply troubled by her inability to produce the usual acceptable answers. She describes herself as being “unmasked” by Jay Cee, even though we can see that her mentor is only expressing reasonable concern, doing the kind of thing mentors do. The cheerful, overachieving persona that has defined Esther so far in her life no longer feels genuine to her, and under Jay Cee’s direct questioning, her façade crumbles quickly: “I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort or another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race” (29). She tries to access her “old, bright salesmanship” (33) and produce some answers that will get Jay Cee off her case, but the very recognition that giving such answers equals “salesmanship” is at the root of her problem—she doesn’t quite believe in her own product.

It’s not that Esther lacks motivation, or has no idea what she’d like to be when she grows up. She has a passion for poetry, and she’s always imagined herself as an academic poet/professor or a literary editor. Jay Cee freaks her out by reminding her what a competitive world she’s thinking of entering and making her believe that her award-spangled perfect-GPA transcript will not be sufficient (“Hundreds of girls flood into New York every June thinking they’ll be editors. You need to offer something more than the run-of-the-mill person” [33]). I suspect that this idea of daily life as a perpetual effort to  build a resumé will resonate with Uni students, and Jay Cee’s admonitions—you’ve always impressed people, and you’ve been amply rewarded and praised and told that you’re special and gifted, but soon you’ll be in the “real world” where these achievements won’t amount to much—might be depressing for you to read. If anything, the process has only gotten more cutthroat since Plath’s day. The conversation Esther is having with Jay Cee, the summer before her senior year of college, is one that high school juniors regularly have, with counselors and parents and other concerned elders, nowadays. You’re being asked to “define yourself” earlier than ever; education is seen less as an opportunity to explore and discover your interests, to mold your identity, than as a rigorous program of training in preparation for a specific career. You’re expected to know what program you want to enlist in at the point of entry; indecision puts you behind in the “race.” In Plath’s day, the moment of truth comes near the end of the college career; these days, it tends to come near the end of high school. To answer Jay Cee’s loaded question—“What do you have in mind after you graduate?”—with “I don’t really know” increasingly might feel like a failure on the student’s part. Of course you need to know what you want to be when you grow up; childhood and adolescence is merely a preparatory stage toward this ultimate act of self-definition. Coming-of-age as a declared major.

Do you relate at all to Esther’s sense of failure—of some deep inadequacy as a person—for her uncertainty about her future? It’s not that she isn’t interested in anything, although it is grimly funny to watch her try to persuade Jay Cee with her flailing efforts to articulate this interest (“I felt like yelling the words, as if that might make them more convincing” [31]). She feels strongly about the inherent value of poetry, as she comes up with a good rejoinder to Buddy’s dismissive remarks about poetry compared to medicine months after the fact (“I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep” [56-57]). But there’s also a strong social pressure on a young woman in the 1950s to marry, and she gets the idea—from Buddy, from Mrs. Willard, from the example of her own parents—that poetry and housewifery are incompatible. That freedom and housewifery are incompatible, for that matter.

Esther seizes on the image of the fig tree from the short story Jay Cee asks her to read to illustrate her indecision: “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch . . . a wonderful future beckoned. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was . . . the amazing editor, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila,” and so on (77). “I saw  myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest” (77). “What’s wrong with her” isn’t indifference, apathy, or a lack of intelligence or creativity. It’s an inability to choose. And the choice here has to do with more than a mere occupation. It’s a matter of identity—who she will be in the world. She’s convinced she is supposed to be able to choose one, and to be unable to choose is to fail to come of age properly.

Something in Esther recoils from the prospects of being a housewife as her primary identity, largely because she’s been given the idea that marriage means something different for a woman than for a man. In Mrs. Willard’s words, she’ll be the “place the arrow shoots off from”—the domestic stability in the background that makes possible her husband’s worldly accomplishments: “That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket” (83). Buddy Willard finds her indecision amusing, and he doesn’t seem to take it all that seriously. When he asks if she wants to live in the country or the city, she says both, and he laughs and tells her she has “the perfect setup of the true neurotic” (93); the question itself was drawn from a diagnostic test he’d learned about in psychology class. Her putative boyfriend gets a kick out of diagnosing her, here and elsewhere.

As the novel moves into the second half, it becomes clear that Esther is in fact grappling with some serious—and life-threatening—psychological issues. But at this earlier point, she fully and rather confidently embraces the label of “neurotic”: “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell” (94). Do you see her inability—or hesitation—to commit to one “fig” at the expense of all other possibilities as a weakness, even an illness? Or does Esther’s indecision seem at all familiar here?

I suppose I envy the student who, as a senior in high school, knows (or thinks they know) precisely what they want to do after graduate school—but I also wonder how much of this certainty is genuine. As long as the plan accords with what the parents and other important elders want, I can see how this apparent sureness of purpose would be rewarded. It’s awkward to ask one’s parents to shell out a small fortune in tuition simply to allow a young person to explore a fig tree’s worth of interests in search of identity and purpose. There’s a powerful incentive to tell them what they want to hear, to frame college tuition as a sound investment in a clearly foreseen future track. As Esther and Jay Cee illustrate, it feels better to be able to answer the Big Question with poise and confidence. But personally, I relate to the student who openly admits they have no idea what to do after graduation, but who’s still excited about the road ahead—who approaches the prospect of college (or even the prospect of not going to college, right away or ever) as an opportunity for genuine learning, exploration, and self-discovery with no particular “career path” in mind. Maybe this narrowness of purpose isn’t required. Maybe we are more than our chosen careers. Maybe we can stumble into a career—or multiple careers—without any “master plan” in effect. When students tell me they know exactly what they want to do with their lives at age sixteen, I just hope they’re not telling me what they think I want to hear. I hope they really mean it, and that it works out for them. And I hope that they’re open to the idea that their plans might change.

While Esther’s experience becomes harder and harder for many readers to relate to in the second half of the novel, it’s important to recognize that her identity crisis—which eventually becomes as extreme a crisis as we can imagine, where she literally loses all sense of self and will to live—arises from some stuff that’s pretty easy to relate to. It’s too simple to say that her breakdown results only from people asking her what she’s going to be when she grows up, but it’s crucial that we recognize how these pressures to define herself, combined with the increasingly limited options realistically available to her as a woman in 1950s America, provide a reasonable basis for her loss of reason.

For a high-school student struggling with these same questions of self-definition, this novel can be pretty scary.

Holden’s Grecian Urn

In chapter 16 of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger switches up the relentless stream of negativity coming from Holden Caulfield. The night before had him up past dawn, alone in a sleazy hotel in Manhattan, recovering from a beating and grifting from an unscrupulous pimp and apparently contemplating suicide. His search for a “good conversationalist” has been frustrated—the cab drivers are either “touchy as hell” or indifferent to aimless queries about where the ducks go in the winter; the women from Seattle he meets at the Lavender Lounge are too obsessed with movie stars (and too prone to making cracks about Holden’s youth) to satisfy his desire for companionship; even the young prostitute, Sunny, who is being paid to spend time with Holden, isn’t interested in “just talking.” It’s becoming increasingly clear that our narrator is profoundly lonely and maybe even clinically depressed. And Holden tends to depict depression as something imposed upon him from the outside—people’s words, actions, and even clothing choices “depress the hell out of [him]” or “drive [him] crazy.” Holden isn’t “crazy”; he experiences depression as a (reasonable) response to the world around him, which is, well, depressing.

So as he walks around New York, Holden’s mood tends to get worse—the more people he sees, doing the kinds of things people do, the more depressed he gets. But in chapter 16 (and in fact starting in chapter 15, when he meets the nuns at breakfast), we start hearing a new refrain from Holden. He tells the nuns that he “enjoyed talking with them,” adding, “I meant it, too” (112). Then he sees “one nice thing”: a little kid walking along behind his parents, singing a song to himself while traffic squeals all around him. “The kid was swell,” Holden comments. “It made me feel better. It made me feel not so depressed any more” (115). He finds a rare record he’s been thinking of buying for his sister Phoebe, and this success “made [him] so happy all of a sudden” (116). He heads over to Central Park, thinking Phoebe might be there, but instead he meets a classmate of hers and helps her tighten her rollerskate. This, too, marks an improvement in his mood: “God, I love it when a kid’s nice and polite when you tighten their skate for them or something. Most kids are. They really are” (119).

Each of these surprisingly “happy” moments reveals a good deal about Holden’s value system—what he likes, to counterbalance so much that sickens and repulses him. A range of common denominators emerge: the unworldliness and genuineness of the nuns; the innocent indifference of the little kid to his parents, to the dangers of the traffic, and to the general fact that people don’t tend to walk down the street singing; and the overall “little-kidness” of the girl in the park, who reminds him of his beloved sister.

After the girl in the park politely declines his offer to join him for a cup of hot chocolate (how many strangers has Holden invited out for a drink at this point in the novel? For a misanthrope, he sure seems desperate for company!), Holden heads over to the Museum of Natural History (“the one where the Indians”), even though he’s pretty sure Phoebe won’t be there with her class, since it’s a Sunday. It becomes clear right away that this is something of a nostalgic trip for him. Central Park is his neighborhood, the turf where he spent much of his time as a kid, and he marvels throughout this chapter at all of the ways Phoebe is now doing so many of the things he used to do (“It’s funny. That’s the same place I used to like to skate when I was a kid” [118]). “I knew that whole museum routine like a book,” Holden remarks. “Phoebe went to the same school I went to when I was a kid, and we used to go there all the time” (119). He proceeds to recount his memories, not of any single visit to the museum, but a kind of composite montage of images from all the times he went there with his elementary classmates. It’s one of the longest paragraphs in the novel—it begins on page 119 and goes all the way into 122 in my edition. (One of the nifty “real-time” conceits of Salinger’s narrative style is that Holden tends to digress and reminisce during moments when the story affords him an opportunity—we get the sense of “time passing” on his walk because he shares with us what he was thinking about as he walks. He never simply says, “I walked until I got there.” It’s like we walk with him, listening all the while.)

And it’s clear that this digression, at least at the start, is a pleasant one—“I get really happy when I think about it,” Holden reports. “I loved that damn museum” (120). He recounts a bunch of evocative details, which for most readers will call up our own memories of elementary-school class trips. He doesn’t claim to have learned too much in terms of the substance of the museum’s exhibits, favoring instead his memories of the freedom from routine the kids enjoyed, the little mischief they would engage in (dropping marbles all over the floor), and the generally pleasant experience of simply being in the building surrounded by friends—“Nobody gave too much of a damn about old Columbus, but you always had a lot of candy and gum and stuff with you, and the inside of that auditorium had such a nice smell. It always smelled like it was raining outside, even if it wasn’t, and you were in the only, nice, dry, cosy place in the world” (120). This trip down memory lane really bolsters our sense of Holden as an essentially nostalgic and sentimental character; he idealizes childhood and laments the increasing distance he feels from this period of his life. Even the teachers and museum guards are “nice” when they correct the kids’ behavior (“She never got sore, though, Miss Aigletinger”; the security guard always reminds the kids not to touch anything,  “but he always said it in a nice voice, not like a goddamn cop or anything” [120-21]).

This passage works on a couple of levels simultaneously. The museum, of course, functions as a link to our collective past (that of “natural history”); it literally preserves evidence of distant ways of life. And the museum itself functions as a site for Holden’s personal memories, an imagined repository for these distant experiences he now thinks about so fondly—it now represents his personal past as well as that of the Native Americans in the canoe. It’s as if he is looking at his own childhood in a glass case, as he contemplates these class trips years ago, and we see these two levels start to blur as the chapter comes to an end.

In a revealing moment, Holden comments that “the best thing . . . in that museum was that everything stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move” (121). The dioramas depict “life” frozen in place, and for reasons that are becoming increasingly clear, Holden finds this idea appealing. Because, even though the museum houses images of life arrested in progress, this very consistency serves as a reminder that the rest of us are emphatically not in “glass cases. While everything in the museum stays the same, “The only thing that would be different would be you” (121). The stasis of the museum diorama, paradoxically, helps dramatize the fact that the rest of life does not—cannot—“stand still.” And this is something that really bothers Holden Caulfield. “I kept walking and walking, and I kept thinking about old Phoebe going to that museum on Saturdays the way I used to. I thought how she’d see the same stuff I used to see, and how she’d be different every time she saw it. It didn’t exactly depress me to think about it, but it didn’t make me feel gay as hell, either” (122). Maybe Holden is glimpsing the fact that Phoebe is growing older, just as he is; they both are going to be adults before too long. Nothing stays the same, and those “nice” days at the museum will never come again for him. This reflection leads to one of the quintessential statements of Holden’s worldview: “Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. I know that’s impossible, but it’s too bad anyway” (122). By the time he reaches the museum, sobered by these thoughts, he’s no longer in the mood to go inside. The last thing Holden needs now is another reminder of the inevitable passage of time.

Holden’s “impossible” wish—to stick “certain things” in a glass case to preserve them from decay, aging, change, and death—perfectly reflects his idealization of Allie (who will always remain static in Holden’s mind; he won’t grow up and disappoint him) and Jane (one of the reasons why he doesn’t go talk to her at Pencey, or call her; she’s “safer” in the diorama of Holden’s memories from two summers ago). Even the novel’s memorable final image—Phoebe circling around on the carousel, while Holden watches her from a rain-soaked bench—could be read in this light: the carousel, a quintessential child’s activity, represents a kind of stasis, “around and around” rather than moving purposefully in any direction. He is able to keep Phoebe suspended in childhood, for the moment, having stemmed her sudden premature development into a smaller version of himself (dragging a suitcase around, wearing his red hunting hat, talking rudely about quitting school and running away). A big part of Holden’s emotional distress has to do with the fact that he realizes this is an impossible wish, but he still can’t help but rage against the basic facts of life: nothing lasts, everything is transient, people die, even (especially?) young and good ones. There’s literally no solution to Holden’s dilemma; he either has to live with this knowledge, or cease to live.

Holden’s description of the dioramas themselves, these comforting images of life suspended, which are so reassuringly the same every time you visit—“You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs [like Phoebe’s!], and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket” (121)—always reminds me of the famous poem by the nineteenth-century romantic poet John Keats (who, incidentally, died in his mid-twenties), "Ode on a Grecian Urn." In a nutshell, the speaker of Keats’s ode contemplates an ancient, illustrated Greek urn (the kind we see most often in museums), and seeing its scenes of everyday life (a young guy singing to a girl, a cow being led to ritualistic slaughter, a town seemingly empty of people) as a mystical form of communication between ancient past and present, and also a reminder of the transience of all life (“when old age shall this generation waste / Thou shalt remain”). The speaker zeroes in on the young lovers depicted on the urn, almost imagining them as sentient beings who “know” that they’re frozen on the urn for all eternity: “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave / Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; / Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal.” At first glance, this might seem like a bummer—a form of torture, to be forever stuck in the moment just before a kiss, never to come together. But Keats looks at it another way: “yet, do not grieve; / She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss / Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” You may not ever “have thy bliss,” he says to the young lover, but at least you’ll always love with this same intense ardor, and she will always be beautiful! And the reader reflects how, indeed, they are preserved here on this urn for Keats to contemplate fifteen hundred years later (and now we contemplate them again via Keats’s poem, written two hundred years ago, and the cycle continues).

In other words, art achieves a kind of immortality. Holden’s dream—to “put things in a glass case”—can sort of be accomplished by art. In some ways, the intense anticipation of a kiss is better than the kiss itself, Keats seems to suggest. Beauty fades, but in the famous final line of the poem, beauty is also “truth”—and art can achieve this “truth” by preserving beauty “eternally” (or at least far beyond the individual artist’s lifetime, as the urn represents).

Rereading this novel every couple of years for my entire adult life—revisiting Holden’s strange odyssey through Manhattan, again and again—has led me to think about how the book itself works as a kind of Grecian Urn. The “moments” Holden is reliving here can be revisited over and over. The characters stay the same. Holden is always a restless and moody teenager. Phoebe is always a 10-year-old girl. Allie is always dead, but our image of him—drawn in Holden’s concise and evocative vignettes—is as alive as any of the characters in the novel. Art resists transience; it represents a way of “sealing off” a period of time, a set of events, or a person at a point in his or her life. And this counts for the author as well as the characters; we’re also always looking at a portrait of J. D. Salinger around 1948-50 when we read this novel. He died fifteen years ago, and here I am thinking hard about words he wrote more than seventy years ago. You can achieve a kind of “immortality” with the right poem or novel.

This is in many ways a bittersweet realization—as with Holden, I can’t help but reflect that I too am “different” each time I come back to the novel, and the period of life Holden is grappling with (which I was in the midst of  when I first encountered the novel at age seventeen) is increasingly distant to me (although the memories all feel very close). I revisit my own adolescence whenever I read Catcher—not only through identifying with Holden, but simply by visiting the “museum” again that I first visited as a teenager—but I also think of previous times I’ve taught the novel, here and at the University. I start to feel nostalgic for a particular class I had ten years ago, in addition to feeling nostalgic for the world I inhabited when I first read the novel. (And all of this is compounded by Holden’s own relentless nostalgia.) It’s always weirdly sad to realize that Phoebe would be in her eighties today, this eternally sharp, sweet, emotionally mature 10-year-old. There’s a weird kind of comfort in the fact that Holden has put her into his own “Grecian urn” in this novel; she’s always the same memorable little kid each time we come back to the book.