Stop Teaching Catcher in the Rye
- Posted by: Anne Trubek
- on August 13, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Why is The Catcher in the Rye still a rite of high school English? Sure, J.D. Salinger’s novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. But that was 50 years ago. Today, Salinger’s novel lacks the currency or shock value it once had, and has lost some of its critical cachet. But it is still ubiquitously taught even though many newer novels of adolescence are available.
To this day, The Catcher in the Rye remains one of the most referred-to books on back-cover blurbs. Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing is, “as a coming of age story … one of the best since Catcher in the Rye”; Douglas Coupland’s Generation X is “a modern-day Catcher in the Rye”; David Sedaris’s Barrel Fever is “a caustic mix of J. D. Salinger and John Waters.” Indeed, there are many tales of adolescent angst out there, and they all, it seems, need a wink to Salinger to claim a place in this genre. But Salinger’s novel no longer deserves the top spot in contemporary coming-of-age literature, even if most would still agree that it firmly occupies the X spot in the “X meets Y” publishing pitch (“It’s Catcher in the Rye meets Blood Diamonds”; “It’s Catcher in the Rye for gay teenagers”).
High school teachers got on the Catcher bandwagon in the early 1960s, in an effort to update their hoary reading lists. When it was first assigned, Catcher’s purpose in the curriculum was to offer students a contemporary, cool alternative to, say, something lengthy and dense like David Copperfield. Salinger had a prescient sense of his hero’s eventual cultural role: Holden starts his story by telling us he is not going to rehearse “all that David Copperfield kind of crap,” because it bores him.
If Salinger needed to acknowledge Dickens in 1951, today any new adolescent coming-of-age tale must go through “all that Holden Caulfield crap.” In the 19th century, a bildungsroman showed the growing maturity and self-awareness of a young person. That remains more or less true, but now the equation for the modern bildungsroman is more like, as a friend puts it: “Horny plus bored minus transportation divided by the whole of one’s interior life, multiplied by an inverse ratio of miles to a city or a place where there is anything at all to do.”
The publication of Catcher helped launch a “Salinger Industry,” as George Steiner described the phenomenon in a 1959 article for The Nation. Released in the summer of 1951 by a 32-year-old writer with a modest reputation as a short-story writer, Catcher was a mid-summer Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and by fall it was fourth on The New York Times Best-Seller list. A scant eight years later, the critic Granville Hicks thought twice about including Catcher on his New York University Contemporary American Literature syllabus, because 18-year-olds had already read it.
One reason for Catcher’s instant-classic status was that is was—to employ that overused neologism—“relatable” to those who had the power to write about it. In 1961, The New York Times Book Review credited the popularity of Catcher with the “shock and thrill of recognition” it gave readers: “Many of my friends and this writer himself identified completely with Holden.” Those few well-known critics who did not look like Holden tended to have a different perspective: Joan Didion, who thought Salinger’s work slight, mocked the “relatability factor” of Salinger’s novel in a 1961 essay, in which she describes a “stunningly predictable Sarah Lawrence girl” who declared Salinger “the single person in the world capable of understanding her.” Like Didion, Steiner considered Catcher of minor literary merit. Its main appeal to students, he argued, is simply that the young like to read about the young, prefer short books, and ones without too many references to other books. Salinger, he says, “flatters [their] very ignorance and moral shallowness.” And it helped English professors get promoted, Steiner grumbled, since writing about Catcher “requires less research and has less competition than writing yet another essay on Shakespeare.” The Salinger Industry proved that there was something “seriously wrong with contemporary American criticism.”
American criticism may have been in trouble in the 1950s, but it is in even worse shape now. Today, there is far less overlap between what teachers, scholars, and the public read. Rare is a combination of scholar, public intellectual, and pedagogue who publishes—as did Steiner, or Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson—across our increasingly specialized publications. And rarer still is the common reader (say, a high school teacher) who peruses scholarly journals, educational publications, and general-audience magazines alike.
Despite critics’ disapproval, Catcher is now canonical. It is a part of literary history. Holden is our contemporary American David Copperfield, our 20th-century Huck Finn. He’s part of our common conversation, our cultural literacy. You have to admire the guy.
Still, after half a century of new, equally “relatable” coming-of-age-stories, don’t some of Holden’s younger siblings deserve the end-of-the-year spot in sophomore English? Since a syllabus is a zero-sum game, adding means knocking something off the list (“Scarlet Letter!” yell my undergraduates). But not to worry: Given that a higher population of Americans now attend college than they did in the 1950s, most will be forced to read the old classics a few years later.
A revised syllabus:
Freaks and Geeks (1999)
NBC’s series, produced by Judd Apatow, deftly portrayed the tenderness and anxiety of high school.
Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson (1999)
Anderson’s Speak tells the story of Melinda, a high school freshman and teenage outcast whose struggles with adolescence cause her to fall mute.
Drown, Junot Díaz (1996)
This book of short stories (by this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner) is told from the perspective of Dominican adolescents struggling with family, sexuality, and identity. The lyrical, inventive prose makes their stories all the more memorable.
Project X, Jim Shepard (2004)
Shepard’s bold novel tells the story of two eighth-graders in a Columbine-style school massacre. Shepard tackles one of the scariest aspects of 21st-century adolescence.
American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang (2007)
This graphic novel tells that age-old story of trying to accept who you are. Taking up Asian-American themes, Yang breaks new bildungsroman ground.
Old School, Tobias Wolff (2003)
Set in a prep school in the early 1960s, a scholarship boy with literary ambitions tries to find his voice. Wolff reworks Salinger’s terrain without sentimentality.
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)
The first novel by the author of Middlesex plays with the horror genre, and tells us that not all is at it appears in suburbia. Unflinching and masterfully written, Suicides is not easy, but that’s the point.
Anywhere But Here, Mona Simpson (1986)
A mother-daughter story about life on the road and a child’s desire to be rooted. Simpson reminds us that sometimes a teenager’s rebellion against a parent is warranted.
DISCUSSION: 15 Comments
I first read Catcher in the Rye three years ago when I was a freshman in high school, and I honestly believe that Catcher in the Rye is far more appealing to adolescents than any of the books that you have listed.
No other book can resonate with so many adolescents. Look at the books in your “revised syllabus.” The characters of these books are “Dominican adolescents,” a “teenage outcast” who falls mute, “two eighth-graders in a Columbine-style school massacre,” a daughter who must deal with “life on the road,” “a scholarship boy with literary ambitions,” etc. How could any of these characters be ‘relatable’ to a wide range of teenagers? Having experienced the displeasure of reading these books, and others like them, I can firmly state that none of the characters within them resonated with me, or the majority of my peers.
Holden’s problem is simple. He isn’t ready to accept the world for what it is. That is the essence of adolescence, and the reason for his timelessness.
Anne begins her piece: “Why is The Catcher in the Rye still a rite of high school English? “
Answer: It’s not.
The only exposure I had to Salinger’s work in my teens was through the media, such as the Mel Gibson movie “Conspiracy Theory.” It was never even referenced in high school.
Also,as a guy with a BA in creative writing from a prominent Michigan university who has read his share of books in and out of school, you can take my word on it that the book is all but ignored in college-level courses as well.
Anne makes a point in terms of literary criticism – not every story of a disillusioned youth needs to be compared to “The Catcher in the Rye.” Aside from that, I feel her post, while written well enough, is sadly irrelevant.
That said, Salinger’s best work in my opinion is found in his short stories anyway, particularly “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”
I haven’t read all of the alternate coming-of-age options listed here, but I have read/viewed some, and the biggest problem with the list is none of them is nearly as good as A Catcher in the Rye.
I first read it when I was a teenager in the late 80s. That’s around the same time I first heard the Sex Pistols. I heard the Beatles way before I’d ever heard the Sex Pistols, and now as a guy in his mid-30s, I still prefer the Beatles. But what the Sex Pistols did for me that the Beatles never did was they made me think about WHY I liked them. Why do some songs speak to us and others don’t? The fact that the music WAS so simplistic and stripped down is exactly what forced me to think about that. It’s not something you think about much as a pre-teen—you pretty much just like whatever your friends like. But it’s a good thing to start thinking about when you’re a teenager, and I think Salinger has a similar impact on me in the realm of literature. It didn’t matter that neither Salinger nor Johnny Rotten was my contemporary. I think I preferred that they weren’t. Green Day wasn’t around yet, but if they or some other modern imitation had been, I would’ve felt like I was being marketed and pandered to.
Of course, some people just don’t like Salinger–Anne Trubek seems to be one—and everyone’s entitled to their opinion. But for me and all my friends, Salinger was it. Junot Diaz just wouldn’t have cut it.
I’m afraid you have missed the point. I am one of those “teachers who got on the band wagon”, although in my case it was in the ’70’s. I change the books I teach yearly, but I have taught Catcher every year of my career and every year students find new things in it. It works because it is full of extraordinary poetic structure and symbolic language. As my twenty four year old son who forwarded this article to me said, it has, ” a simultaneous density/brevity that even Hemingway never quite touched.” That, Ms. Turbeck is why we continue to teach it.
Yay Anne for questioning the status quo! And yay for the suggestions you have made. I agree with everything you have said about Catcher in the Rye. Of the books you recommend, I have read Virgin Suicides. That book is so much more about THIS world, for all it’s eery and surrealistic tone. Now to start ordering the other books you recommended.
Maybe it’s because I myself am just a “stunningly predictable Sarah Lawrence girl” (and a New School girl, for that matter,) that this essay made me want to puke. But my extremely high opinion of Catcher and Salinger is not even the point–the point is that the author’s arguments/opinions are unconvincing on more general levels. Do we stop teaching kids certain literature because It’s not new enough? Would we not teach one of your pieces in the ‘revised syllabus’ in the future because some Joan Didion of today didn’t like it? Is the fact that a young reader probably has no idea who the Lunts are something that makes this book less timeless? I think the reason the book is still such a dominant figure is because it DOES resonate with so many people, young people included. I never related to it in the way that I thought Holden described me or that Salinger understood me. I just treasure this book because it is a masterpiece, and if you think that modern literature doesn’t owe it much, then you’re deluded. Not to mention if you think that Jeffrey Eugenides is a better writer than Salinger…
How nice. You have suggested a revised syllabus that includes a television show.
Has it really come to this? Discarding art and literature for television?
I am now dumber for having read this tripe.
No list of books can be appealing and relevant to all students. Can’t we lose the idea that all kids in a class need to read the same books? Let students choose for themselves what novels to read, and have them present their books to the rest of the class, or keep a reading log. Require them to learn the plot of the “traditional” English class books without having to read the whole thing. That way they’ll gain the cultural literacy, and get practice reading full length books, without getting turned off of reading completely.
I would like to respond to this statement:
The characters of these books are “Dominican adolescents,” a “teenage outcast” who falls mute, “two eighth-graders in a Columbine-style school massacre,” a daughter who must deal with “life on the road,” “a scholarship boy with literary ambitions,” etc. How could any of these characters be ‘relatable’ to a wide range of teenagers?
For the same reasons that Caufield is relatable. None of the identities listed are any more isolated or less relatable than that of a privileged white man. In fact, I would argue that the alienation felt across identities of race, class, gender, ability, sexuality and even environment makes these characters more relatable and even challenges readers to connect with characters on a number of levels.
I appreciate that you spoke to your personal experience with these books and with Catcher in the Rye, but I would also say that the conflicts in the other books are no less universal than Caufield’s.
I am grateful for a few suggested alternatives to Catcher in the Rye as – while I acknowledge its importance – I am also sensitive to the importance of having diversity among the authors and characters represented in any English literature curriculum.
When did we agree that the point of a syllabus is to please the students? Students are perfectly capable of pleasing themselves, in their freetime. I, like many normal high-school girls, read Catcher in the Rye because my boyfriend told me to. I was entertained but not impressed, but that’s not the point.
University-level education is already commercialized enough for the entire system. Kids can take whatever nonsense they want to for courses as undergrads, so they really need to be “forced to read the old classics” for every minute that the educational system can still control their curriculum.
I also strongly object to the assumption that highschool students can only enjoy or relate to relatively recent stories about adolescents. I know that when I was in highschool, we all very much enjoyed Waugh, and the boys (who thought a great deal of themselves) had no trouble at all relating to the Scarlet Pimpernel.
I could not agree less with Ms. Anne. This was truly upsetting to me as I just finished reading this book for the first time. It somehow escaped my school years which may just be the point. It is a coming of age story but it is also just a wonderful story about someone who feels like no one gets them. I think people of all ages and stages in life can say that they have felt this or know someone who may have also felt like the world was against them or things just never fell the right way for them. I am 27 years old and can say that I identify with Holden on many issues and it isn’t just about being school age. He said and thought a lot of things that no one else had the guts to say or think. Granted he fought everything but he fought. And in the end he doesn’t end up shooting up a school, or killing his parents or raping someone. This story was written at a time when writing was GOOD, and as shocking as some of the dialogue in this book may have been at the time, it wasn’t sick. You still loved Holden and most of the characters in the book. It is dark without being nasty. I think it is just terrible to want to destroy or erase this work from the studies of young people. Albeit there are more and more captivating books that refresh the book shelves everyday but let them be read separately and let it be known that this was a first. Let the new and the old be shared with equal weight. Although I have to say that this book really touched me and I will be looking for something of equal merit.
Catcher In The Rye is so much more than a coming of age story. It’s an absolutely one of a kind piece of literature written by one of the most interesting authors of our time. I think it will always be worth reading for its literary merit, in the way Hemmingway and Fitzgerald are.
I never read Catcher in the Rye in high school. Nor does it seem like it’s big in college. For me, it was To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo & Juliet, two stories which I read three times each in my high school and junior career and will no doubt read again sometime in my college career. And you can actually make an argument about those not being particularly contributory. As interesting as I find both of them (but I’m the literature geek so almost any book is interesting to me) none of them really contributed much. But the point isn’t for books to be realistic. That actually isn’t drawing kids in. You know what the big book is right now? Twilight. It is the most unrealistic piece of drivel I have ever read, but teenagers are eating it up. But never in my life would I condone using this as a school reading assignment.The point of reading assignments are to get kids interested in all sorts of reading, not alienate them to only one kind. Face it. If a kid doesn’t want to read, he’s not going to no matter WHAT you put in front of their nose unless it’s a Dr. Seuss book. In the end though, a kid who likes to read or wants to read will read it regardless of content or they will read it based on genre, not based on “how much they relate”.
While I’m sure plenty of alternative suggestions could have been made for the revised syllabus (especially as quite a few of them found additional notoriety as films or as one of them was, oddly, a television–which I love, but still, unless you put on the subtitles, it makes for difficult reading) there is one book that I thought would have added an incredibly interesting addition to the piece: King Dork by Frank Portman. Portman not only presents a new hero for readers to “relate to” as they did with Holden, but does so through the backdrop of a discussion of Catcher in the Rye itself and why it might be considered past its prime. I gave both books to my much younger brother and while he was impressed with Catcher, it was King Dork that hooked him. Of course, that might open up whole other discussions on literature appreciation and how that is acquired in contemporary schooling.That being said, I still completely enjoy Catcher and think it holds value for many readers. An argument could be made against the pedestal it rests upon in many literary circles, but I think that speaks more for the reverance we reserve for the idea of things that extends beyond the actual things themselves. I’m all for updating curriculum to bring in new great works to replace items I’m not sure why we read so devoutely in the first place (like David Copperfield) but bringing in new material just to be new and relevant seems to escape the concept of why we appreciate literature.
Fuck that! It’s an awesome book. It’s timeless.