MLA Citation:
Lundquist, James. J.D. Salinger. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979. Print.
First Paragraph:
“This is 1979, and it has been twenty-eight years since Holden Caulfield dragged his deer-hunting cap and his prep-school heart through Manhattan. But J.D. Salinger’s ideas on the true and the false in American culture, his religious solutions to the crises of alienation and isolation, and his overriding sentimentality may have had more impact on the American brainscape than anyone yet has taken into account. Since the publication of a long story, ‘Hapworth 16, 1924,’ in The New Yorker in 1965, Salinger has maintained a silence that has turned him into the Howard Hughes of American Literature. But Salinger’s lasting significance has no declined. The startling thing for many of us to realize is that the confidential ravings of Holden Caulfield, the enigma of Seymour Glass’s suicide, and the pathetic pragmatism of the Jesus Prayer embraced by Franny Glass, remain part of our consciousness – and it is not just simply nostalgia for that time in the 1950s and early 1960s when Salinger’s characters provided just about the only voices that did not sound phony. As a whole new generation of readers indicates the appeal of his work is enduring. His influence remains, and we cannot get around it, perhaps cannot get over it.”
Summary:
The American Brainscape and The Disappearing Man
First Paragraph
“This is 1979, and it has been twenty-eight years since Holden Caulfield dragged his deer-hunting cap and his prep-school heart through Manhattan. But J.D. Salinger’s ideas on the true and the false in American culture, his religious solutions to the crises of alienation and isolation, and his overriding sentimentality may have had more impact on the American brainscape than anyone yet has taken into account. Since the publication of a long story, ‘Hapworth 16, 1924,’ in The New Yorker in 1965, Salinger has maintained a silence that has turned him into the Howard Hughes of American Literature. But Salinger’s lasting significance has no declined. The startling thing for many of us to realize is that the confidential ravings of Holden Caulfield, the enigma of Seymour Glass’s suicide, and the pathetic pragmatism of the Jesus Prayer embraced by Franny Glass, remain part of our consciousness – and it is not just simply nostalgia for that time in the 1950s and early 1960s when Salinger’s characters provided just about the only voices that did not sound phony. As a whole new generation of readers indicates the appeal of his work is enduring. His influence remains, and we cannot get around it, perhaps cannot get over it.”
Summary
Lundquist discusses the “four phases of Salinger’s career” – the first where his characters are affected by World War II, the second where his characters suffer loneliness and a Zen-type “awakening,” the third where he brings the Zen into the discipline of the short story, and the fourth where he frees himself to be philosophical and experimental. Lundqust says that all of these phases are inspired by “an initial disturbing event,” which is World War II.
**ed note: This is a great resource for people studying Salinger and World War II, both the biographical details and the stories that reflect that “disturbing event.” Though Lundquist strives to assert that Salinger is not a “war writer” like others, he does talk a lot about the influence of the war on Salinger’s fiction. Also, Lundquist does state that Salinger had no “single, harrowing experience” in the war, and that, according to many sources, is not true. For more information, see the Salinger and World War II section of this website (forthcoming).
Lundquist also discusses many of the early stories.
Against Obscenity: The Catcher in the Rye
first paragraph
The Catcher in the Rye appeared in a sober and realistic time, a period when (by comparison with the 1960’s, at any rate) there was a general disenchantment with ideologies, with schemes for the salvation of the world. Salinger’s novel, like the decade for which it became emblematic, begins with the words, “If you really want to hear about it,” words that imply a full, sickening realization that something has happened that perhaps most readers would not what to know about. What we find out about directly in the novel is, of course, what has happened to Salinger’s hero-narrator, Holden Caulfield; bu we also find out what has happened generally to human ideas on some simple and ultimate questions in the years following World War II. Is it still possible to reconcile self and society? Is it any longer possible to separate the authentic from the phony? What beliefs are essential for survival? What is the role of language in understanding the nature of our reality? Is it possible to create value and endow the universe with meaning? that Salinger deals with these questions in one way or another points to a problem with The Catcher in the Rye that has often been ignored or simply not taken seriously – that the climate of ideas surrounding the novel is dense, and that the book is not just the extended and anguished cries of a wise-guy adolescent whose main trouble is that he does not want to grow up.”
Zen Art and Nine Stories
first paragraph
“The secret of balancing form with emptiness and in knowing when one has said enough is behind the art of the modern short story. This secret is also behind the art forms of Zen Buddhism with its emphasis on an idea that must be at the center of every good short story: One showing is worth a hundred sayings. The short-story writer and the Zen artist must work to convey the impression of unhesitating spontaneity, realizing that a single stroke is enough to give away character, and avoiding filling in the essential empty spaces with explanation, second thoughts, and intellectual commentary. These principles are brought together in Salinger’s Nine Stories, a collection of his finest work and a startling blend of West and East in its aesthetic assumptions.”
A Cloister of Reality: The Glass Family
first paragraph
“The important business for the writer of fiction is to place boundaries where, naturally, there are none. A short story or a novel is a limited, formal, artificial representation of the illimitable. The total of consciousness for the writer is like Leibnitz’s sea wave whose murmur is made up of all the particular sounds produced by the droplets composing it. As Henry James cautions in the preface to Roderick Hudson, ‘Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.’ What James means by circle is the necessary and arbitrary cutting-out accomplished by the artist in the great fluid mass of experience to create a cloister within which reality can be isolated, contemplated, and represented. For James this comes to be, in a whole series of novels, a matter of establishing a central point of view in the consciousness of a single character and then allowing that point of view to open onto a peripheral world. For Salinger in the work that follows Nine Stories, it is a matter of using family characters, the Glass family, and multiple-although closely related-points of view in order to delineate the sources of insight and stability that are his way of dealing with and adapting to the chaos of experience.”
Where He Has Been, where He Has Gone: Patterns of a Career
first paragraph
“When one stands back from Salinger’s career, if does take on a curious and disturbing pattern. He begins as a writer of formula fiction fresh out of a course in short-story writing, becomes a member of The New Yorker school, achieves a scandalously popular success with The Catcher in the Rye, and then gradually loses himself within the potentially brilliant concept of the Glass family. His writing turns more and more inward until it becomes in “Seymour: An Introduction” a commentary on itself, and it becomes difficult to believe that here is a writer who was once a best-selling novelist, his most famous work a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection.”