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 eleven years ago, and here I am thinking hard about words he wrote more than sixty 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.

Notebook Prompt: What would you say to Holden Caulfield?

Throughout his lonely wanderings around New York City, Holden Caulfield is seemingly desperate for a little "intelligent conversation," trying to strike up some kind of discourse with everyone from cab drivers to Sunny the disturbingly young-seeming sex worker he inadvertently hires. But in most of these attempts at conversation, Holden has no interest in talking about himself or his current crisis--after he gets the "start applying yourself in school" routine from Mr. Spencer, he seems uninterested in any advice or suggestions about his plight, and while he certainly seems to enjoy complaining in his rants to the reader, we have to remind ourselves that he's not in fact walking around the city criticizing everything and everyone he sees.

Starting with his ill-fated "date" with Sally Hayes, we see Holden start to talk a little more directly about the "topics on his mind," and we also see Sally and Carl Luce push back against the assertive self-assurance of Holden's narrative voice. They both call him out in various ways, and we get an uncomfortable glimpse of how Holden is apt to come across to others in his life: emotionally immature, erratic, and seemingly out of control.

If you could talk to Holden Caulfield at this point in his narrative, what would you say to him? And how would you say it so that he wouldn't simply denounce you as just another phony giving him phony advice? Remember that this narrative style uniquely positions or projects the reader as a close friend and confident--along with Jane, we are the only ones he's ever told about Allie's baseball glove, for example. He seems to presume that we will always agree with him or "get" his various complaints about human behavior and society, but he also seems to trust us, to potentially value our opinions. Imagine that this is a friend of yours who is going through this difficult period: What would you say to him? What does he need to hear?

Please take 7 minutes to contemplate this prompt in your notebook.

“Bashing Each Other All over the Place” versus “Chucking the Ball Around”

For a guy who holds other people to such high standards, Holden Caulfield is rather prone to self-contradiction. The astute reader can cite a number of examples just from the first few chapters: he despises “phoniness,” yet he admits that he himself is “the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life” (16); he values genuineness, yet he constantly introduces himself with false names and lies about his age and medical history; he complains about Ackley for “not taking the hint,” yet he bugs Stradlater in a rather Ackleyesque manner the whole time he’s trying to shave (and gets “in his light,” too). In my favorite example, he complains about a general blindness to nuance—“people always think something’s all true”—in a sentence that is itself a sweeping generalization about “people” and what they “always” do!

If you’re looking for consistency, look elsewhere. Holden can be a compelling and witty social critic, and many readers enjoy and relate to his complaints about American society and human behavior. And a big part of his pose as narrator—the “authority” he generates for his world-weary pronouncements—derives from his willingness to wield the reckless generalization. Holden presents himself as a guy who knows what he’s talking about: “I’ve had that experience quite frequently,” he says quite frequently. But he would be the first to admit that he often fails to live up to his own standards. He disappoints himself, too.

Some readers will grow exasperated with Holden’s tendency to contradict himself, in part because he seems to place himself in a superior position by calling everyone else out for their “phoniness”—he seems to think of himself as above it all, the one genuine dude in a sea of frauds. As one early example of Holden’s apparent blindness to his own self-contradictions, we might cite the fact that he denounces football on one page, and then a page later indulges in a fond memory of playing football with a couple of classmates. I agree that, at first glance, this appears to be yet another classic Caulfield contradiction. But under closer inspection, some crucial differences emerge. And these differences offer an important early glimpse into Holden’s idiosyncratic values.

Let’s take the first example. When the novel opens, Holden is standing “way the hell up on Thomsen Hill” (2). He is leaving Pencey Prep, after failing four out of five classes in the fall semester, and he’s just returned from his ignominious last gig as manager of the fencing team (wherein he left the team’s equipment on the subway). Far below him, from his vantage on the hill, the biggest football game of the season is going on—and Holden’s physical position here seems significant. He feels that he is “above” such trivial (or “moronic”) pursuits as football; he is “looking down at the game” (4) and looking down on it. Most readers—especially in 1951—wouldn’t need to have the scene of a high-school football game described to them, but in Holden’s narration, this most quintessential of American activities is defamiliarized: “You could see the whole field from there, and you could see the two teams bashing each other all over the place. . . . [Y]ou could hear them all yelling, deep and terrific on the Pencey side, because practically the whole school except me was there, and scrawny and faggy on the Saxon Hill side, because the visiting team hardly ever brought many people with them” (2). What to a connoisseur of the game is a highly nuanced, carefully organized strategic campaign is reduced to meaningless, violent absurdity: “two teams bashing each other all over the place.” Holden removes the underlying meaning that informs the activity—the purpose and rule-based, highly organized strategy of all this “bashing”—and in the process reduces football to an absurd and brutal activity. Just a bunch of guys bashing each other around, for no apparent reason.

So then what of the people who care so passionately about the outcome of this pointless exercise in violence? Why is “practically the whole school” (except for Holden) screaming so loudly? Football, of course, has a social meaning as well. “[I]t was the Saturday of the football game with Saxon Hall. The game with Saxon Hall was supposed to be a very big deal around Pencey. It was the last game of the year, and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn’t win” (2). The game itself is stripped of meaning, and the enthusiasm of the fans is given similar treatment. The other great American tradition that goes along with the game itself is its social meaning—school spirit, and the “collective self-esteem” (to borrow a phrase from Paul Beatty) that such events generate among the classmates of these student-athletes. Holden’s rhetorical distancing is audible here: you were supposed to care about who wins the game, and his indifference to doing what he’s supposed to do is made tangibly, visibly evident from his position up there on the hill. Everyone else cares about something brutal and stupid, whereas I couldn’t care less. Just as everyone else cares about school in general, whereas Holden won’t put any effort into his classes. Here on the second page of the novel, we are introduced to a dynamic that will resurface throughout. It’s an apt introduction to The World According to Caulfield.

Holden explains his presence on the hill that afternoon with a characteristically idiosyncratic purpose: he’s “trying to feel some kind of a good-by” (4). He hates the school and thinks it’s full of phonies, but Holden also has a sentimental streak: “I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse” (4). He’s trying to call up a memory from his brief time at Pencey that will allow him to “feel” the fact that he’s “getting the hell out,” and eventually he hits on one: “I suddenly remembered this time, in around October, that I and Robert Tichenor and Paul Campbell were chucking a football around, in front of the academic building. They were nice guys, especially Tichenor. It was just before dinner and it was getting pretty dark out, but we kept chucking the ball around anyway. It kept getting darker and darker, and we could hardly see the ball any more, but we didn’t want to stop what we were doing” (4-5).

A mere page earlier, Holden has just been making fun of football, literally positioning himself “above” it, savoring his distance from the morons in the stands yelling their heads off for sentimental reasons over a bunch of guys bashing each other around. And now the big sentimental moment he fixes on entails him playing football?! It does appear to be a contradiction, and I doubt Salinger is unaware of it, placing the two passages so close together within the first chapter. Indeed, Holden’s denunciation of the football game seems to lead directly to this particular memory, which is warm enough for him to “feel his good-by.”

I would argue that the common denominator of football underscores the significant differences between the two scenes, and these differences reveal a lot about the values and ideals that drive Holden’s narrative. On the one hand, we have a high-stakes competition—it matters to a lot of people who wins the game, to the hyperbolic point that they’ll “commit suicide or something if old Pencey doesn’t win” (notice the dig at midcentury discourses of school spirit in the sarcastic rendering of the phrase “old Pencey”). The game is organized, officially sanctioned, a community activity that is an annual highlight for the school (it’s not just a game; it’s “the Saxon Hall game”). Do people “really” care, or are they just doing what they’re “supposed to do”? Can they even tell the difference? This most familiar Saturday (or Friday-night) American ritual is reduced to an absurdity in Holden’s voice, and we can see here the start of a dynamic that persists throughout the novel (in addition to football, he also hates cars and movies—the sacred triumverate of modern Americana!).

On the other hand, we have the moment that Holden seizes upon for his “good-by” to Pencey. Yes, a football is involved, but here the parallels end. It isn’t a game (like “life,” according to Spencer and a whole list of others who have lectured Holden about “applying himself”); there is no purpose; there is no cheering crowd. In fact, no one is watching at all. They aren’t “bashing each other all over the place”; they’re merely “chucking the ball around”—in other words, sharing the fun instead of acting like they want to kill each other, chucking it around instead of at a goal. The scene takes place in a stolen, fleeting moment between obligations, after classes are finished but before dinner. (For some reason, these are often the moments we remember most.) The sun is going down, but they keep playing until the last possible minute, when cold, hard reality intervenes (in the form, notably, of the science teacher) and tells them they have to come inside for dinner. Fun’s over. No more playing. Holden appreciates this simple, aimless moment of elemental fun (how much more basic can you get—three boys throwing a ball back and forth to each other!). There’s no competition, no audience, no high stakes; the activity is an end in itself. No one is “showing off,” and no one is “committing suicide” if the right team doesn’t win. There aren’t even “teams.” Football here assumes a dramatically different meaning than it does down on the field in the game against Saxon Hall.

Return to this moment when you’ve finished the novel, and you’ll see that some of Holden’s core concerns are introduced: the delightfully simple, noncompetitive, low-stakes childlike activity is fleeting, but they try to get the most out of it before time moves on (the October sun goes down, earlier each day—the fall season in literature traditionally evokes the passage of time and the incipient twilight of life), before the life of obligations and schedules intervenes.

Maybe this distinction is especially potent to me because it rings a number of personal bells. I used to love playing football as a kid, although when I finally was old enough to sign up for Pop Warner I quit after two weeks, before the first game, because I couldn’t deal with the regimentation and the screaming coaches. Organized football has almost nothing in common with park football—where every play is a pass, two completions for a first down, no one keeps score, the tackling is hard. And back in my day, the park was a strictly kids’ realm—adults were never around for these games, and kids of all ages were present. It was especially fun to play with older kids. We’d play until dark, or even later—I remember thrown footballs suddenly appearing out of the darkness an inch from my face—and we never wanted to quit. You literally wouldn’t stop until you had to. But by the time I was in high school, when I first encountered Catcher my senior year, I had long ago sworn off football—especially the school-sanctioned variety. Uni kids don’t have any experience with this, I realize, but in my school, football was a very big deal. The big game, against Point Pleasant, was on Thanksgiving. I could even hear the roar of the crowd and the band from my bedroom window, which wasn’t too far from the school, but I never once attended a game in my four years at that place. Like at Holden’s school, at my school “all the athletic bastards stuck together,” and often this meant bullying and harassing me and my skate-rat friends. My dislike of high-school football was personal. There was a kind of moral high ground in renouncing it, a certain satisfaction in ironically smirking my way through a pep rally with my dirtbag crew in the back row of the bleachers. The cheering crowds seemed like idiots from that vantage point, the players they lionized a bunch of thugs. So Holden’s position up there on the hill made a lot of sense to me. But so did his fond memory of playing a simple game of catch, and not wanting to stop when it became dark.

The meaning of football changes, in other words, depending on its context. I don’t see much of a contradiction in Holden here: his distaste for the big game sits comfortably alongside his fond memory of chucking the ball around with some nice guys in his class.

Noteboook prompt: What does coming-of-age mean to you?

 As a young person who is rapidly approaching legal and cultural maturity, does the concept of "coming-of-age" have any meaning to you? Do your peers and elders tend to speak about your growth and development and education in terms of your "coming-of-age"? What are some of the main ways we measure or acknowledge coming-of-age in contemporary American society? Where do you currently see yourself in terms of your own coming-of-age? How will you know when you've achieved it? Have you already achieved it?

As we embark on a semester-long course in which we will read and discuss a range of narratives about young people on the brink of this ambiguous and confusing milestone, please take 5-10 minutes to contemplate these questions in your first prompted notebook entry. Come to class on Tuesday or Wednesday prepared to contribute thoughts and reflections on this topic to our discussion.

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