The Catcher In The Rye: A Free Zone For Will-to-Power

As a strand of poststructuralist thought, Foucault's discursive theory together with his concept of"perspectivity of knowledge"declares the death of"transcendental"subject, removes the ground for any truth-telling mental authority, thus opening the way to a new and non-truth-oriented form of historical study of text. It objectively echoes Barthes'anti-humanistic formula in literary criticism expressed in his essay"The Death Of The Author", finally facilitating the climate of anti-realism, relativism and skepticism in Post-World-War-Two intellectual circles. As a result, any literary text, successfully exempted from authorial interpretation, opens up a realm for us readers to have a free play in its signification. While the tongue is freed in interpretation, the reader's"will-to-power"is materialized, leaving the critical writing as its remnant, which is nothing less than another free zone for a free play, since the death of the reader is predestinated.Above is a brief account of the critical formula I adopt in my study of Salinger's masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye. This is a book widely read since its appearance in 1951 with its main character and also its first-person narrator Holden Caulfield, for his nonconformist standing against the conformist pressure of Post-World-War-Two American society, immortalized in American literary history as another mythical cultural hero standing up for individualism with Huck Finn as his forerunner. However, departing from this approved critical mode of Salinger's book, my analysis will show another story. The thesis focuses on the adaptation of Foucault's thought of modern power and the discursive formations to the fictional context where Holden, a middle-class young adult living in 1950's American society, experiences a chain of discursive practices by agents of social control such as Pencey, the Caulfield family, mass media, and witnesses in himself a succession of character formation and transformation all through his social interaction with one group afteranother. Tracing Holden's years of life from his childhood, then over an embarrassing adolescence, headlong to his adulthood, we manage to come up with a mapping of Holden's subject constitution as effects of power by social relations, typical of its absurdity, ambiguity, paradox and thus all-inclusiveness. Unruly, insane, alien as he is accused by those packing his life, Holden surfaces above the suffocating thickness of standardized behavior codes of his time as a spokesman for"others", voicing his"otherness"to the full. His self-destructive trick in combination with his signification of"phony"manages to confront those normal outward with their inward"otherness". His reading of modern life and modern people deeply impresses us with the knowledge that spontaneity is the essence of human nature, ambiguity is the nature of modern existence, absurdity is the attribute of modern power, and finally, impotence characterizes modern psyche. Despair sets in with total disillusionment on any absolute-truth claiming. This is the fact of modern life for the adolescent to digest for final maturity.To define The Catcher in the Rye as a growing up novel embodying the theme of"the Quest"to show its continuity with the western literature tradition could hardly encounter any dissent. For the convenience of literary criticism in literary classification, such an agreement is a necessity. It must be the"truth"of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. However, Holden's ambiguous ending together with Salinger's intentional retirement from interpretative authority over his works into an insignificant state suggests both their authorial modesty and their authorial impotence for an interpretative uniformity, thus embodying an absolute truth: there is no absolute truth at all. Their self-dethronement has cleansed the text of any possible confinement by master discourses in the name of critical authority. Thus The Catcher in the Rye is and should be a free zone for a free play by a plurality of individual wills to power. In this sense, Holden's narrated discourse can be interpreted as a declaration of free speech with"Holdenization"looming in its wake as an anti-socialization trend heading for re-individualization. Greatly awakened, I feel motivated to conduct an act of reading risking the least violation to integrity andauthenticity of my mind and my literary competence.