The death of a great novelist

A few days ago, the great American novelist, J.D. Salinger, died at the age of ninety-one. He was an exceptionally influential novelist, some even claiming that he was the most influential after Ernest Hemingway.

Unlike other major novelists, his output is not large, but it was of sufficient power and inventiveness to generate a great measure of interest in reading publics across the world. Each year, his most well-known novel, The "Catcher in the Rye", sells about 250,000 copies; in all, it has sold over 65 million. This is the novel that won the greatest acclaim for Salinger and spawned an idolatrous response from young readers. His other works include "Nine Stories" (1959), "Franny and Zooey" (1961), "Raise High the Roof Beam" (1963), "Hapworth, 16, 1924" (1965), Since 1965, he has not published any work, although it is rumoured that he has written a number of other works which may be hidden away in a vault somewhere; no one knows for sure whether this is true or not.

J.D. Salinger is the most reclusive of modern writers, and for the last so many years he has chosen to live in self-imposed isolation in a remote house in Cornish, New Hampshire. At a time when writers everywhere are actively involved in strategies of self-promotion and self-publicity, he chose to stay away from the limelight with an obsessive defiance. He hardly gave interviews, or made public speeches, and preferred to lead a solitary existence in New Hampshire, gathering around him a comforting silence. This silence of his is legendary, and some have sought to gloss it in terms of various metaphysical imperatives.

However, if this line of inquiry is to be meaningful, it should move beyond the territories reclaimed by Beckett and Kafka, and head towards Eastern modes of thinking that privilege the eloquence of silence. He once remarked that, "Publishing is an invasion of privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." Whether this is an accurate statement of his true feelings or a carefully designed gimmick is for discerning readers to uncover. However, what is clear is that his willed invisibility has produced a greater visibility for him as readers' searching imagination conjures up newer visions. As someone observed, he was famous for not wanting to be famous.

"The Catcher in the Rye", his most celebrated novel deals with teenage angst, confusion of values, search for meaning and self-loathing. The protagonist Holden Caulfield has been deeply influential among youthful readers over the decades. The story begins at a prep school where Holden has performed poorly, and he flees to New York. He finds everyone "phony" except his sister, Phoebe. We see how he is trading an uncertain path towards his destiny deploying a self-protective cynicism. The story takes place over a few days during Christmas. New York, as usual, is lit up in dazzling colours for the holiday season, and this has a negative impact on him. He is put off by the blandishments, hypocrisies, mendacities that mark the life in the city.

Holden has a deep-seated desire to interact with people, and forge mutually beneficial relationships, but it is constantly thwarted by the circumambient realities as well as inner uncertainties. One consequence of this frustration is that Holden resorts to play-acting, self-deception, as a way of coping with the sordid truths that entice him. There is a kind of alluring ambivalence about his behaviour; when he remarks, "I swear to God, I'm crazy'. We as readers both believe what he says and reject it. That the novel is both funny and terrifying simultaneously is a measure of its achievement.

Part of the success of the novel is the way Salinger controls the tone. The very opening sentences of the book offer us an indication of this truth. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." This sentence, with its echoes of Mark Twain, manifests the colloquial idiom, the tone of self-loathing that is pervasive in the narrative. This novel, as with his short stories, contains a deep ring of authenticity, but is also limited in scope and intent.

Holden Caulfield, with his rebelliousness, became an iconic figure for youthful readers; he also, in an interesting way, caught some of the anger, despair and self-doubt that characterized the Cold War. The novel pitted the good-heartedness, even innocence, of the younger generation against the duplicities, manipulations and double-standards, of the older generations, and the way Salinger framed his fictional argument held a deep fascination for younger readers over the years across diverse territories. This novel has exercised an incredible influence, both good and bad. Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon said he was inspired by "The Catcher in the Rye", while a copy of this book was found in the hotel room of John David Hinckley who tried to assassinate President Regan. The representational space that Salinger was most comfortable in inhabiting was that of youth culture; hence, the statement of Norman Mailer that, "Salinger was the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school" merits serious consideration.

For those of in Sri Lanka, an interesting facet of Salinger's writing is that as he matured, he was increasingly drawn towards Hindu philosophy and Buddhist pathways of thinking. He was interested in the twin desiderata of right action and right speech (two locutions with Buddhist overtones) and hence resolved to look to the East for guidance. Some of his short stories bear the ethos of Buddhist re-figurations of life, while a short story like "Teddy" is clearly influenced by Hinduism. In a world that seems to have abdicated the trust in interpersonal communication, he is searching out a transcendental and universal compassion mapped by religions such as Buddhism. This is not to suggest that he understood either Hindu philosophy or Buddhist ways of thinking with any degree of sophistication and depth. However, the fact that he was impelled to move in that direction merits close analysis. Some years ago, I remember reading an essay by an Indian critic who drew interesting parallels between Salinger's fictional formulations and Advaita Vedanta.

Basically, J.D. Salinger is a very American writer who deals with the lives and predicaments of young people living in American urban centres. Hence the following question may be legitimately raised" Why is he relevant to us? Part of our literary education should be precisely to read books that deal with contours of experiences, structures of feeling, symbolic creations and cultural values that lie beyond our ken; to expand our experiential horizons is surely one important function of creative literature.

There are different productive approaches to the understanding of J.D. Salinger. To my mind, one of the most useful ways of seeking to uncover his deeper structures of meaning is through the vision of innocence that he sought to capture and re-possess, and which in many ways is the concealed centre of his work. He dealt mostly with youth, who represented for him an emblem of innocence and a necessary antidote to the dislocations and disaffiliations that afflict society. The absence of heroism, darker apprehensions of reality, the lack of initiative and the concomitant sequaciousness are counter-balanced by his privileged vision of innocence.

Salinger is a hugely influential novelist, but he also has serious drawbacks. His space of operation is rather limited. At times he seems to descend into a kind of sentimentality, if by that term we mean a perceived disjunction between the portrayed situation and the emotions engendered. In his later short stories, there was a visible lack of control over the cohesive and determinative forces that shape the narrative discourse and a tendency to yield to certain digressive propensities. Despite these limitations and puzzling insufficiencies, Salinger is a powerful voice that we have to engage very carefully.

The following observation of John Updike, who was hardly an unqualified admirer of Salinger, sums up a facet of Salinger's achievement well. "As Hemingway sought the words for motion, Salinger seeks the words for things transmuted into human subjectivity. His fiction.. matches the shape and tint of present American life. It pays the price, however, of becoming dangerously convoluted and static."