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.
I wince every time I see that reference to Britain's _Catcher in the Rye_ on the back of _BSG_. But that's become an almost obligatory way to hype pretty much *any* literary work that features a teenaged narrator--to hitch it to the Salinger wagon, as a way to sell books. Maybe one result of the shift Roake is calling for may be that publishers will stop trying to hock new novels as the "latest Holden Caulfield" or whatever--a comparison that usually does a disservice to both Salinger's creation AND the distinctiveness of the newer work.
ReplyDelete(In fact, I'd love it if ALL the books I taught could come in the classic Salinger generic-looking paperback. Cover images and graphics are okay, but I could do without all of the hyperventilating blurbs and especially the summary that reveals all kinds of stuff about the plot and setting.)