The Coming of a Writer

I figure since all the seniors seem to be reflecting on their time in individual classes and at Uni as a whole that I can spend one blog post reflecting.  Of course I'm not leaving this school, but it is the end of the year after all.  For all the books that I've read this year in AA Lit and now Coming of Age, the amount of allusions, allegories, social commentary, and a whole host of other literary elements found in the books we've read has been amazing.  Last semester I remember wondering if Ralph Ellison intended everything that we (and professional literary critics) were able to see in his words.  Surely, I thought to myself, it would be impossible for Ellison to finish a novel of Invisible Man's complexity and intentionally add in all that he did.

This curiosity of mine was reinvigorated when I began writing the semester project.  There was so much I wanted to say, I wanted to continue the story lines of Holden and Jane, have Julia meet new people, make social commentary, all while trying to make a just plain interesting story at the surface level.  In the end, my semester project turned into a long, roughly thirty page short story that really did hit almost everything I wanted to cover.  At times though, I sacrificed brevity to make sure everything was fleshed out.  Sure, it made the paper more accessible to an average reader who hadn't read the books it was based on, nor was versed in reading between the lines, but did that make it better or worse?  Is it the author's responsibility to make it possible for nearly any reader to understand their work, or as the author is it okay to make the reader work for it a little bit?

In the end, I realize that maybe it isn't always best to spell everything out so much.  That may be where the genius of someone like Ralph Ellison lies, he puts in just enough that an astute reader (or group of readers) can get an inkling as to his point, and from there notice it recurring and being supported later in the novel.  James Joyce didn't write Portrait with all the notes that we had the benefit of in the back of the book.  That was a publishing decision, and one which I imagine he wouldn't have chosen.  Those notes certainly made the already complicated novel more understandable for modern readers, and in turn more popular (because an average reader doesn't like books it doesn't understand).  That is what a publisher's job is then: to sell the most books possible.

That was Salinger's greatest success, maintaining control over the physical book, not just the story.  He's famous for not including a picture of himself in his bio, not allowing the cover of the book to be fancy, and to control all the information from cover to cover.  Take that in comparison to another book from a few years earlier in The Great Gatsby.  That book is known for it's cover, with the faceless eyes and lips, and the stylized version of the New York skyline.  Fitzgerald was even quoted as saying once that the cover art came first (without the artist having read the manuscript) and he, F. Scott Fitzgerald, then incorporated images into the book that could be related to the cover.

Of course my "Re-Illusion off Oxford" will never be a world famous work.  There won't be movie deals or famous cover art, but I can still, in some small sense, relate to the struggles of authors to maintain ownership over their own work.  In my case I fought with myself, over giving my work a more accessible level of detail, or keeping it more below the surface in an elusive attempt to create art.  The reader friendly version won out, though even the struggle between the two roads diverging was important for me, both as a writer, and as a reader relating to the authors I've begun reading more and more.

Do we need it to be fresher?

When I read over Mr. Mitchell's blog post the other day about the teacher who found that Black Swan Green was more relatable to her students than Catcher in the Rye, I was somewhat surprised, though not entirely.  I wrote earlier about how coming into Catcher I didn't like that everyone told me it was the book that would change my life.  When I would tell assorted family members at different Hanukah parties during winter break that I was taking a class on coming of age novels, with few exceptions everyone would ask, "Are you going to read Catcher in the Rye?  You just have too."  I was then often treated to their personal take on the book, its role in their life and their guess as to how it may change my life.  Like Mr. Mitchell said in his post, discovering a book (or telling yourself you've discovered it) can make a book really appealing.  I would never get a book that's sitting at the front table of Barnes and Noble, with posters and flyers advertising it, I like to go and find books that I've never heard of.  Catcher was certainly not that kind of experience.

I did enjoy the book in large part because I related to Holden though.  Maybe because I thought his struggle to remain a childlike teenager in a society that told him that as a rich white man he should relish in his ascension to the pinnacle of 1950s American society mirrored my similar struggle with going to a school and having friends college plans are a given so the focus is on career outlook and things of that nature.  Though he was from a different time, and many of the images a contemporary of Holden's would understand I didn't, translating from that time to this time wasn't that much of a stretch.  The things expected of you, the phoniness of some of the people around you, those things haven't really changed.  It's not to say that the students in Roake's article live in some alternate universe where the aforementioned behavior doesn't exist, or that somehow they aren't astute enough to be able to translate Holden into something more relatable to them, maybe the complex voice of Stephen Dedalus made Holden's more real-world oriented banter seem much closer to current life.

That isn't to say that I couldn't relate to Jason Taylor because I related to Holden, his many struggles were very familiar, either things that I went through or saw others have to overcome.  It was nice to start reading Black Swan Green and have no one who saw me read it know what it was about.  It was nice to feel that feeling (though probably untrue) that I was connecting something from the text that hadn't been though of before.  It was a similar feeling to when I read White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty last semester.  It's also relatively new, by a largely unnoticed author in the prose world (though Beatty is a known poet).

Jessica Roake's point in her Slate article, that English departments should replace Catcher with Black Swan Green, on the surface I suppose makes sense, if you can only do one coming of age novel you might as well go with the more modern one.  But it doesn't seem right to just swap out one book for another to fill the spot deemed "young boy coming of age and struggling with his society."  I really didn't like on the back of Black Swan Green's cover when it had a quote reading that it was Britain's Catcher in the Rye.  I believe that there are elements that Mitchell probably picked up from Salinger, and traits of Jason that may trace back to Holden, but with a new book to say that it is only a translated version of an old classic seems sacrilegious for a literary critic and an author.  No one would ever say that Don Quixote is a Spanish version of Canterbury Tales (perhaps because the plots are distinctly different), but both these novels serve the same purpose as the beginning of each nation's literary tradition.  Both Catcher and Black Swan Green say that being independent is okay, that you don't have to follow every whim of the society around you, so why would anyone who likes these two books, let alone wrote them or about them define them in terms of each other.  In the end I think each book stands on its own as an important member of the larger coming of age genre, and while I disagree with Roake's position that Black Swan Green is the new Catcher in the Rye, I don't envy her for having to make the decision between a classic in the genre and what may well be a future classic.