Democratization and Holden Caulfield

Walking out of the house for the airport last week, it suddenly dawned on me that I had not packed a single book for my trip. Glancing over at the shelf of paperback books (best for travel) my eye landed on The Catcher in the Rye. A little history here: I spent the summer of 1988 in Cambridge England taking a few courses in English at Clare College. One day, while walking to class with a professor, he began talking about The Catcher in the Rye. When I told him I hadn’t read it yet he stopped and said. “You better read it quick, because in a few more years, this book won’t make any sense to you, at least not for another 20 years.” So there I was, 20 years later, standing at the French doors, suitcase in hand, having this flash back. “Oh, what the hell.” I thought and grabbed the book.

The first thing that I have to tell you is, I’m pretty sure I have never read this book before. Nothing in the book seemed familiar. Stranger still were the notes in that back of the book written in my own hand writing. Be that as it may, the book was a complete surprise to me on many levels. Most notably, the last page. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, anyone who hasn’t been through AP English in high school that is, but I was completely taken back by the final page that lead me to believe that the entire story was written while Holden is sitting in an asylum of some sorts. He has been given a project to write by his therapist, and he chose to write this story. His brother comes to visit him and asks him what he thinks about what he has written, and finally Holden says he is allowed to leave and restart school in the fall because he is doing much better.

I found myself flipping back to page one. Wait. Is he crazy? If so, how? (I realize that “crazy” is not the appropriate nomenclature nor terribly PC) I immediately started thinking back to the comment my professor had made. Why wouldn’t a 20 or 30 something year old like this book? I suppose the short answer is that most adults have very little patience with the trials of adolescence, and that it isn’t until one has grown, raised a family, owned a home, and gotten a lot more experience under their belt that we are able to once again view those teen age years with a bit of sympathy.

I suppose the struggle for independence and the desire to be recognized as mature that accompanies youth and inexperience must look a little desperate to an outsider, and even be annoying. I know that being a teenager was incredibly hard, and I have no desire to relive those years. But as I grow older, as I have children of my own, I begin, once again to see the world as a very big place, and one life, one momentary 70 or 80 years journey in the vast well of eternity is really only a very small piece of something much larger. I recognize my own limitations, and strive to be something more. I am perhaps more like myself as a teenager than I would ever want to admit.

So, why is it that Holden ends up institutionalized? Throughout the book he constantly struggles accepting life as genuine. Everything is “Crumby” or “Phony” or “Perverted”. It is obvious that Holden is troubled, he fails out of four schools, he is completely apathetic about his future, and he is unable to connect with other people. Holden’s ex-teacher cautions him saying that he is riding towards some terrible fall, and might end up growing up to hate everything about his life and viewing others with disdain as he gets older, amassing just enough education and experience to slip quietly under the radar, but with few friends or meaningful relationships. (Interestingly the ex-teacher says this will happen to Holden in his 30’s.) Still, is this deserving of being hospitalized?

The thing is I don’t think that Holden is that much different from people I see around me. I look around and I see people hidden away behind their computer desks, locked inside or their SUV’s, listening to their ipod’s and playing with their playstations. In many ways we are as isolated as he is,maybe even more so. Throughout the novel, Holden remains separate from the world around him, perhaps as a means of self-preservation. He certainly uses his isolation as proof that he is better than everyone else around him and therefore above them. Ultimately, his interactions with other people usually confuse and overwhelm him, and his cynical sense of superiority serves as a type of self-protection.

When I teach my class on modernism, I spend a bit of time talking about the Age of Enlightenment, and try to get my students to understand the radical shift in thought that takes place during this time. The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy and reason as primary values of society. Who in America doesn’t feel that the right to question one’s government, one’s religions, one’s basic way of life isn’t an inalienable right? We are still very much the children, or grandchildren of this thinking. If anything, it has gone much further. Instead of individualism, we now practice a type of hyper individualism, in which we choose our own music, our own unique fashions, and our particular mode or brand of living as means of self-expression. Don't want to be another face in the crowd? Build a gigantic home in the suburbs. Don’t like the music on the elevator? Plug in your ipod.

The problem with hyper individualism? We need look no further than the extreme case of individualism brought about by isolation as depicted by Holden Caulfield. First there is the tendency to assert rights without accepting responsibilities, the tendency to ignore or avoid responsibility for the consequences of our individual behavior for others, the desire to gain the benefits of social cooperation without accepting the burdens of the shared activities that are needed to produce those benefits, and finally, the tendency to assert our freedom at the expense of connection with other human beings. One such example from the book: Holden is the manager of the school's fencing team, and he loses the team's equipment on the subway. However he is unable to take responsibility for his actions. He is unable to comprehend that his action was irresponsible; instead, he focuses on how he feels his mistake, which he insists is not his fault, is humorous.

It is easy to idealize Holden and downplay the ambivalence and anxiety he feels in viewing a world full of phonies and perverts. Who doesn’t feel a little alienation in a world full of serial murderers, rapists, child molesters, and clowns? But Holden is the quintessential unreliable narrator (no relation to my old friend), and as such his account is tainted by his living in longing of his unfulfilled needs of love and acceptance, rather than by the values he idealizes. Holden dreams of becoming the "Catcher in the Rye", a heroic individual who, by virtue of his insight and natural intellect is foreordained to save the wayward and the innocent. What he lacks is the shared emotional connection with the different members of the community, and more importantly any kind of shared fate or moral responsibility, the sense that we are all in it together, that what happens to one happens to all.

I feel this is the great failure of the idea that America’s great export can be the democratization of another country. Somewhere we got the idea that our country can somehow be the great “Catcher in the Rye” for other nations. Setting aside the hubris that one country can say what will be better for another. The basic thesis is that over time, we will all be better off (as measured by our income, opportunity, and standard of living) if we accept the need for the "democratization" of the world. Unfortunately our democracy resembles something more like "free market economy" than equality and human rights. Like Holden, the democracy we envision is often not the one we are able to bring. Holden’s moment of insight comes as he realizes that he cannot save himself or his sister from the inevitability of growing up. Worse, she understands better than Holden that any refusal to mature reveals less about the outside world than it does about himself.

I have an urge to wrap this up. In the end, Holden sits down and examines his actions through the narration of the events. Through this process he begins to realize that the thoughts he had been carrying around with him about his relationships didn’t match the images of story he had been telling himself, and so he was forced to reexamine his beliefs and ultimately form healthier attachments.