The Catcher In The Rye

J.W. Deenick. Trowel & Sword. October 1971

Preamble: While searching for articles to include in T&S Revisited I came across a debate from 1971 that had a profound impact on me. It concerned the use of “Catcher in the Rye” as a high school text. At the time I was at University preparing to become a teacher and wrestling with the idea of using secular sources in teaching from the standpoint of a Christian worldview. Rev. Deenick was my pastor at the time and I have come to realise over the years what a profound impact this man had on my thinking and approach to life – not just education. The phrase from this debate that I have remembered to this day is Rev. Deenick declaring, “For myself I must honestly admit that I love Holden Caulfield as if he were my own son.” It revealed to me that when I engage with secular literature, indeed any literature, I do so as a disciple of Christ, weighing the ideas, values, brokenness and hopes of the author as expressed through the characters, from my Christian Worldview. In the case of Holden Caulfield we see a young man grappling with his circumstances trying to make sense of it and finding his place in a crazy world. When exploring this with students in a class many of them will have the same struggles, and worse, but we don’t have to leave them Holden’s chaos; we can point them to Christ and a Kingdom where there is hope. Literature, music and art express the values, priorities, questions and angst of the age. We do not need to be afraid of them, because after all, we have been blessed with an understanding that can challenge, question and even point to healing for the ills and fears of our time. (Pieter)

The Catcher In The Rye

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is one of the books that most high school students in Victoria have to read. From correspondence coming in from Queensland I understand that the same is true about that state, and also in N.S.W. the book has been on the high school list for years. In other states things are not likely to be different.

What I would like to do here first is to offer a bit of help to this category of T. & S. (non-)readers as they try to understand the book and try to come to an opinion about it that is consistent with the christian faith. Not many of them are likely to get much assistance of this nature at the high schools they attend; and (unfortunately) few of their fathers and mothers will take the trouble of reading the book and of helping them to arrive at a Christian evaluation of it. Consequently they have to sort it out for themselves, which may be a good thing but in which some may appreciate a few notes to help them.

I do not intend to discuss here whether Salinger’s novel is one that should be made compulsory reading for all seventeen and eighteen years old students. A Queensland correspondent voices a strong protest against this; see elsewhere in this issue, page 23. What I aim at primarily is that I would like to look for the basic philosophy behind the book and to test it in the light of biblical thinking. Whether this is a good Christian book or not is not finally determined by the obvious misuse (profanely) of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ in it, or for that matter by the frank but disarming way in which Holden Caulfield reveals the turmoil in his boyish heart as to matters of sex. It is with books as with people and institutions. The fact that we discover a measure of ethical imperfection, or even that we discover certain grave and sinful defects, may never lead us to the disqualification of a person as a Christian. The heart could still be loyal to Christ. This is also true of books. Reading a book is like meeting a person. What we should look for in a book is its heart. Admittedly there are many books in which it is very difficult to discover any heart at all in the sense that it is difficult to find any basic unity of thought in it. For that reason it is hardly worth the trouble to take any note of them. They are just a mess as so many people are a mess. But this is not our problem at the moment.

Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is definitely not a mess. It is a book to be taken seriously. People far more qualified to judge in these matters than most of us are of the opinion that it has been very capably written from the language and composition point of view, and that psychologically it is a little masterpiece. I would believe this to be true. It has been written entirely in the language of the American teenager of about twenty years ago in the idiom and with the repetitiousness typical for that age group. The only way for you and me to find out how psychologically well written it is, is to read the book and to listen to our own heart responding to it. We may then (more so than we care to admit) recognise ourselves in Holden Caulfield. Someone has described Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye as “the case history of all of us …. not at all something strange and rich, but what every sensitive sixteen year-old since Rousseau has felt and of course what each of us has felt”. I cannot quite see where Rousseau comes in here; but it IS true; even Christian young people will recognise themselves in Holden Caulfield. As a matter of fact there is plenty evidence that teenagers, long before they were known under that name, even in the most distant past have felt as Holden did. It must have started with Cain, the first teenager of all times who rebelled in this way: And we all, if we are honest enough with ourselves, discover in our own hearts that same rebellion. Paul did in any case.

Now I am not going to work out what kind of a boy Holden Caulfield was as I see him. Salinger “created” him in the way he did with his profanity, his swearing, his love for his little sister and his dead little brother, his basic loyalty to his parents and his boyish bravado. If we take the trouble not to be offended by his swearing we are inclined to love him, because we are able to understand him. We are able to understand why he is so disgusted with the phoney-ness of the world around him. We are also able to understand his religious confusion. He boldly proclaims himself to be an atheist; yet, he tries to pray but finds it very hard. He never seems to have been confronted with the Christian message in a meaningful way. The man who “created” him, Salinger, was unable to make him meet the Lord Jesus Christ. Holden Caulfield has been cast in Salinger’s image and Salinger himself professes (at least in this book) to nothing much more but to an atheistic humanism.

What then is mainly wrong with this novel from a Christian point of view? It seems to me that the philosophy of unbelief, the fundamentally non-Christian approach to life, upon which this novel is based is evident mostly from the typically humanist arrogance with which it has been written. When all the chips are down Holden is an arrogant little boy, even in his kindness towards the girl-prostitute he invites to come to his room. In his opinion about people he is unrepentantly arrogant. Nearly everybody is phoney. This is not merely so because Holden is a teenager with the very typical self-fascination of the boy who discovers himself as a person. That would only be natural. But with Holden (as with his “creator”) his arrogance is more deeply rooted. Nowhere in his self-interest is there any humility. Practically everybody is written off except Holden himself with the little circle of his parents, his little sister, his dead brother and of course Jane. His basic spiritual conceit is nowhere broken through by flashes of true self-knowledge in the mirror of the law and the love of Christ. Salinger never confronts him with Christ. Holden looks at himself constantly in the mirror of the world and the people around him. That may not seem a very exhilarating reflector, but (precisely therefore) it presents him with an image of himself that boosts his self-esteem.

I must say that I am terribly sorry that I have to say this of Holden. I like him tremendously. More than I like his “creator”. He at least should have known better. But as far as Holden is concerned, I would like to be his friend. He reminds me in a way of the rich young ruler of whom the gospel says that Jesus loved him. This man was even in Jesus’ eyes a very attractive person, kindhearted, humane, a gentleman every inch. Yet, deep down he was a spiritually conceited man. Although he had covered it up very skilfully he bursted with arrogance.

In Holden I find this too. With him there is the apparent rudeness, but underneath we discover his tender heart. Do you know what I like in him most? His concern about and his attachment to this girl Jane. I do not know whether I understand it correctly, but I sense his frustrated indignation about Stradlater’s date with Jane as the deepest motive behind his erratic behaviour during the days following, even behind his wild language. He knows Stradlater and that worries him to the core. All the time he plans to give Jane a ring; but he cannot do it; he is too deeply shocked and worried. And mind you, deep down Holden still all the time sees himself as the catcher at the edge of the cliff of the rye field, saving innocent people from going over the cliff. That is the image of himself that he would like to hold on to. But has he failed Jane? His pride refuses to admit it.

I can understand Holden’s (and Salinger’s) spiritual arrogance. I understand it only too well. I find it in my own heart. My only hope (in life and in death) is that God by his grace has broken through that arrogance when He confronted me with the law and the love of Jesus.

J.W. DEENICK

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