![\"rye.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/magazine.nd.edu\/assets\/21090\/rye.jpg\" "\\"rye.jpg\\"")
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J.D. Salinger died a few days ago. Within the past five years, death has been visiting this generation of authors and artists, including Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Sydney Pollack and Paul Newman. Do we feel the loss? My literature students had never heard of Updike\u2019s Rabbit Angstrom, a literary character who existed for over 40 years in four different novels. My film students had never seen a film with Paul Newman, an actor whose career included nine Oscar nominations. But when I asked a group of sophomores in my American Short Story class if they had read Catcher in the Rye<\/em>, more than half of them raised their hand. Why? What is it that brings Holden Caulfield into their lives?<\/p>\n As I listened to them talk about Holden, I realized that I wanted to change the subject just a bit. I wanted to tell them about Seymour Glass and the entire Glass family, characters who appear in Salinger\u2019s short stories, particularly the stories written after Catcher<\/em>. In these stories Salinger gave a lot of attention to Zen concepts, especially something he came to call \u201cdetachment.\u201d Holden doesn\u2019t really fit into these stories because he cared so much, too much. And he felt so helpless. He wanted to catch people before they fell, as they came running through the rye. And this is what I kept hearing from my students. They were telling me how much they liked Holden, what a \u201cnice guy\u201d he was despite all his complaints and criticisms.<\/p>\n What is this caring that is at the center of Salinger\u2019s fiction? In memory it seems to be so clearly, even simply, Christian. A literal rendering of Christ\u2019s \u201cSuffer the little children unto me.\u201d Of course, Holden never does catch any little children. But he wants to, and that desire leads to so many of his difficulties. For Salinger, apparently, even just feeling the Christian ethic was a dangerous enterprise. Look at all the breakdowns. Holden breaks down, Franny Glass breaks down, Seymour commits suicide, Buddy lives alone as a recluse. In Salinger the alternative to caring too much is to learn from \u201cpure Zen\u201d its \u201cnear-doctrine of Detachment.\u201d Buddy sums up a series of examples with the phrase \u201cdon\u2019t care a hoot.\u201d But is Detachment a useful remedy for caring too much? Is it better to be detached than to care? In a world filled with \u201cphonies,\u201d Detachment certainly seems to be safer.<\/p>\n By the end of the book Franny & Zooey<\/em>, we can see that Franny will apparently recover from her breakdown. Her brother, Zooey, had struggled to detach himself from Franny\u2019s distress. But when he fails to achieve this Detachment he resignedly settles down to talk her through her difficulties. He cares about her well-being and, unlike Holden, Zooey is ultimately able to translate this caring into a helpful act. In his long conversation with Franny he sets out to redefine Christianity for her. At the center of his effort is Christ\u2019s advice that we should \u201clove our neighbor as ourself.\u201d In Salinger\u2019s words this challenging suggestion becomes Zooey\u2019s belief that everyone, including the \u201cfat lady\u201d for whom one should shine one\u2019s shoes, is \u201cChrist himself.\u201d<\/p>\n But just how does one live as if every person in your life is Christ himself, even the \u201cfat lady\u201d? What does such a caring life look like? For the 20 years during which J.D. Salinger published his writing, he worked hard to give us even a glimpse of the enormity of living such a Christian life. Pick up any of his fiction \u201cif you really want to hear about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Notre Dame Professor William Krier\u2019s specialty is 20th century American fiction. He has published articles on writers from Henry James to John Barth.<\/em><\/p>\n Photo: <\/p>\n J.D. Salinger died a few days ago. Within the past five years, death has been visiting this generation of authors and artists, including Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Sydney Pollack and Paul Newman. Do we feel the loss? My literature students had never heard of Updike\u2019s Rabbit Angstrom, a literary character who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4248,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4248"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhttp:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/jenny-pics\/<\/a> \/ CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/div>\n<\/p>\n
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