Oh, wow, sanitary belts-- I remember my mom explaining that when she was a girl, that was a new thing, and it was like she was explaining that when she was a girl people talked out of their noses. I never read
Margaret, actually-- I remember being in third grade and finishing the
Fudge books and someone's older sister had given her a copy and the teacher explaining that it was "too old" a book for us (we were eight, she kind of had a point); and by the time blood 'n' god were appropriate age-wise, I'd moved on to other, non-Judy Blume things. Now I wonder if I missed some important mid-80s rite of passage.
Thanks for posting that link, Herkimer-- I thought this was particularly interesting re: the question of what literature is for:
Holden Caulfield was not created to serve as some hero to inspire all kids; he's a misfit now, he was a misfit then. He's not supposed to be popular. For heaven's sake, that's the whole narrative thrust of the book. Some kids will connect, others won't. Are we really so lacking in nuance as a species that we can't accept that? Does it have to result in stories about a cultural shift? Really? And do we have to use his "popularity" (a term as sickening to me now as it was in 7th grade) as a referendum on the worth of a novel? Why does whether kids today "like him" have to be the main referendum about the book?
Personally, I think the blogger is wrong-- I think Holden is meant to be an anti-hero and he is meant to be popular, not in the sense of being elected Prom king, but in the sense of being easy for adolescents (particularly adolescent boys) to identify with. The best explanation I've read of what I'm trying to describe comes from a book called
The Child that Books Built, by Francis Spufford:
The lines of attention run from reader to book, never laterally from reader to reader. A reader feels alone in a book, but is actually one of a crowd, all occupying the same points in textual space, all making a hubbub that none of them can hear. If the readers of Catcher in the Rye were visible to each other, it would become clear that the solitary paths of Holden's thoughts are actually intensively trafficked. (p. 201)
Spufford describes
Catcher as a book that is adopted by adolescent boys, in particular, as a "One Book" which "expressed their natures better than any of the thoughts in their own heads did"-- which rings true with what I remember. Popular in loved by many, not democratic.
One question I wonder about is whether this type of reading has been changed by the development of fan communities and similar things of which I'm only vaguely aware, because I'm old. Another-- perhaps the characteristics of an appealing antihero are changing? I would love to learn from someone else how another book from my high school canon,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is aging-- but I'm never going to find out for myself because I hated that book intensely. I don't think I knew the
word misogyny at that point in my schooling, but I could damn sure recognize it when I saw it.
