The Cold War and The Catcher in the Rye

The Cold War infected an entire generation of Americans with a sense of fear and mistrust for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Anything that posed contrarian viewpoints to ideas of democracy, freedom, and the American dream were viewed as threatening and fundamentally un-American. Such movements are most greatly supported in the well-documented political villainy of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957) of Wisconsin, an individual who thrust himself onto the national stage in his famous Wheeling Speech in 1950. There, he claimed to have in his possession a list of 205 names of Communists working for the State Department. With the Truman Doctrine well under way since 1947 in the interest of Soviet containment, McCarthy's passionate call to action against un-American actions resonated with American society. Coupled with the House Un-American Activities Committee charged with controlling cultural figures who had the audacity to politically speak out against the right-wing status quo, figures like Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) and Paul Robeson (1898-1976) found themselves continuously surveyed and harassed by the government. In effect, American popular culture was saturated with Cold War sentiment.

Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010) lived with an independent attitude that maintained its own course in spite of the swirl of change and clash of ideologies occurring around him. His abhorrence for fame and distaste for critical review are well documented (Baldwin 4). Perhaps, Salinger's vehement refusal to allow publication of an unauthorized biography of his life stands as the greatest argument for his reclusive nature (4). The publication of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) tells the story of an adolescent Holden Caulfield struggling to understand and appreciate the world around him. Salinger's gritty depiction of the disengaged protagonist shocked American society. Nevertheless, some may view the author's pension for detachment as an indicator that Holden Caulfield represented nothing more than a character working to find his way in life. Any Cold War interpretations of the text remain within the realm of the hypothetical, and as such, represent meagerly imposed attitudes on the book rather than implicit messages voiced by Salinger himself. Quibbling interpretations aside, more than one writer has attributed Salinger's work to exacerbated themes of the Cold War such as mistrust and passive-aggressive behaviors. While a case could be made for Salinger's detachment from society and hostile neutrality to the world around him, more important matters of context lie at hand. In spite of Salinger's own ideas, this essay will explore lying, authenticity, censorship, and truth in The Catcher in the Rye as seen from critical reviews.

Multiple writers associate The Catcher in the Rye with the Cold War. John Seelye implicitly places the novel within this frame of reference, arguing that it contains no direct ideology although it could be manipulated in the service of ideological viewpoints (Salzman 16). Alan Nadel chooses a more direct route, stating that Holden's monologues address prevalent themes of the Cold War era such as "generalization, the establishment of rules, and the need for authority" (Bloom 51). Sally Robinson contends that Catcher in the Rye existed in an unstable social paradigm where literary critics began to question societal norms as in the case of The Organization Man (1957) by William Whyte, White Collar (1951) by C. Wright Mills, and The Lonely Crowd (1953) by David Riesman (Baldwin 70). After a review and report of each of these critics, I will directly address the questions posed in the thesis.

John Seelye's contention that The Catcher in the Rye exists without ideology yet could assist in service of an ideological viewpoint could seem contradictory. It lies at the heart of my issues with literary criticism of this book. No doubt, Salinger creates a complex character in Holden Caulfield who perceived most things as phony. For example, lawyers merely "make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot" (Salinger 223). As such, the model of the world is convoluted to the point where Caulfield simply does not like anything, especially schools (220). This important distinction presents the setting in conversation with his sister Phoebe to share his deepest ambition:

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them (224–225).

Herein could lie a criticism extrapolated to the exterior environment of the Cold War. Although old Phoebe did not know how to respond to such a comment and remained silent, the politically charged atmosphere of the time had a clear way of perceiving critiques of phoniness.

Perhaps it is here that Seelye sees such potential for ideological manipulation in Catcher in the Rye. Senator McCarthy made his argument against communism a marked conflict of worldviews. He made a point of describing Karl Marx as an individual who viewed love, justice, and morality as sentimental babble that had no place in communistic society. Would Holden Caulfield view love and justice as phony qualities? His view of phony seemed more often to lie with authority figures that acted like they knew everything and refused to acknowledge their own shortcomings. He certainly made a point of rejecting the status quo around him with rough language and vehement distrust of the education system (Sallinger 276). Seelye's assertion that Catcher in the Rye exists as an ideological tool finds its greatest support in recognizing that this novel is fundamentally anti-establishment. Here, the governing establishment is phony. Caulfield's greatest villain could become distilled in the epic portrayal of a man, McCarthy, who pitted the democratic Christian against the communistic Atheist. The protagonist likely would have repudiated such shallow superficiality.

Alan Nadel's specific connections of this novel to the Cold War capture the imagination for their provocative implications. By acknowledging the widespread connection to Mark Twain's character, Huckleberry Finn, Nadel interprets Caulfield as a young adolescent trapped in the auspices of the borough of Manhattan searching for a raft and river to find greater freedom and sanity in a place far from home (or perhaps Colorado) (Bloom 51). In the search for sanity, "rhetorical relationships formulate the normative world in which a speaker functions, a fictional text . . . unavoidably creates and contains a reality in its rhetorical hierarchies, which are necessarily full of assumptions and negations" (51). As such, Nadel views Caulfield's monologue as a place that assimilates the inconsistencies so prevalent in Cold War society (52). In Caulfield's world, everything deserves comment as a critique of a system filled with rules and regulation—through these critiques, the reader arrives at an understanding of the censored nature of society where actions are regulated and people are taken advantage of.

Nadel does not hesitate to provide examples of this phenomenon. He categorizes Caulfield's monologues into three categories of examples, generalizations, and rules (52). When his camel's-hair coat gets stolen, for instance, Caulfield uses this as an example to generalize that his boarding school, Pencey, is full of crooks (Salinger 7). This leads him to the overall rule that with more expensive schools come more nasty crooks to watch out for (7). How can someone feel free to express himself or herself in a world where the strongest institutions are the most fundamentally corrupt? This is one of the most important challenges of Caulfield's existence, according to Nadel. When confronted by the filthiness of his surroundings, Caulfield does not feel free to express himself and censors, even shuts himself out from the world. Nowhere is this clearer as when he shares advice in the final words of the book: "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody" (277). Caulfield's mistrust of the world around him causes him to censor his expressions to others, perhaps a symptom of Cold War rigidity.

Nadel creates a portrait of Holden that views him as an individual with a fundamental desire to impose his own view of truth and meaning on his environment. Some examples of Caulfield's paradigm of reality as highlighted by Nadel include "it's really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are better than theirs; 'grand' is a phony word; real ugly girls have it tough; people never believe you; seeing old guys in their pajamas and bathrobes is depressing" (Bloom 53). In the current world of social media, such comments wittily juxtaposed together seem fitting for an ironic Internet meme in spite of the fact that Nadel published his article in 1988. To clairvoyant thinkers, such comments carry a resonating degree of truth.

At the same time, Caulfield struggles to come to some sense of authentic understanding for the structures surrounding the world he lives in. Nadel illuminates this struggle, this time turning to Chapter 9 as Caulfield observes a typical flirtation between a man and a woman squirting water out of their mouths at each other. . . . First he'd take a swallow and squirt it all over her, then she did it to him—they took turns, for God's sake. . . . The trouble was, that kind of junk is sort of fascinating to watch, even if you don't want it to be. . . . It stinks, if you analyze it. I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you're supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it (Sallinger 80–81).

What does Caulfield think about truth of women's desires and sex itself? He freely admits he does not understand these echelons of social interaction, but seems threatened by his inability to grasp the nuances when he admits his unsuccessful endeavors to "quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave [him] a pain in the ass" (82). It seems clear that Caulfield is engaged in a struggle to understand deep truths within himself and the real functioning of the world he lives in. Nadel finds these conflicts occurring between Caulfield with individual ideas and Caulfield as a member of society (Bloom 53). The result renders truth a mere receptacle for spreading rhetoric. In the Cold War era and today, truth depends on what side of the globe one lives on.

Robinson addresses the struggles of Caulfield with a focus on masculine frustration in a post-war era. She describes a shift in perspective where the masculine values of self-reliance and autonomy that made America great and powerful are subjected to feminization through a focus on material goods and dependence on market forces for sustenance (Baldwin 70). The frustration of this dependence culminates in a reliance on obtaining a consensus before making decisions—Robinson claims that throughout the literature of this era one finds a "suspicion that gender difference is eroding" (72). Men must learn how to sell themselves and package their personalities in an effort to find success in society when before they could find ready acceptance without superfluous marketing efforts.

Here, Robinson gets specific about the meaning of "phony." She distinguishes it from adolescent paradigms, describing a world where anyone who willingly prostitutes, markets, or promotes himself to achieve societal acceptance is a charlatan playing a meaningless cultural game (72). Robinson correctly points out Caulfield's rage against the phoniness of people who use words to make their living, those who willingly manipulate texts to create a new reality and serve the commercialism of the feminine market place (72). Therefore, if phonies represent those individuals who have bought into a new reality, Caulfield remains relentlessly confronted by his own reality of truth where the reality of his perception pervades all other interpretations. To him, the world of the organization man and consumerism is a lie. Every expression of phoniness relates to people who attempt to directly appeal to their audience rather than share their own viewpoints, aesthetics, or even truths (74). In effect, the world of Caulfield is expressed through a perception that sees everyone as a liar. People simply misrepresent themselves to the face of others in an attempt to best guess what others desire to hear thereby integrating into some acceptable form of society, albeit a false paradigm.

The world of Holden Caulfield yearns for something that no longer exists. Men no longer rule the workplace by default and must subject themselves to the whims of others by becoming phony in order to successfully integrate into society. As society evolved in the aftermath of the World War II, Caucasian males found themselves surrounded by new movements threatening their dominance and prosperity. This embrace of nostalgia is acknowledged and struggled against as the protagonist Caulfield moves through life experiences of sexual frustration, desire for meaning, growth in spite of future uncertainty, and innocence longed for. In spite of the lies promulgated throughout society, The Cather in the Rye concedes that phoniness is here to stay (76). As such, the world of Caulfield acknowledges unstoppable waves of change defining how he must be perceived.

The Cold War affected lying in The Catcher in the Rye by creating a paper doll sensation of the correct and the proper. Caulfield consistently struggled with understanding the peers and adults around him and viewed society as a propped up mechanism that imposed superfluous realities over unstable circumstances. This is fundamentally reflected in the Truman Doctrine where democracy is seen as an ideal that must be defended to support the ability of American society to influence others as a beacon of good. Caulfield likely would have sworn heartily at such rhetoric.

As the American government posed certain ideals of the authentic, Caulfield searched for his own authenticity in the eyes of children, yearning for a lost childhood innocence that was being sucked away from him. Most directly, he found this authentic connection through the eyes of his sister Phoebe: "I mean if you tell old Phoebe something, she know exactly what the hell you're talking about. . . . If you take her to a lousy movie, for instance, she knows it's a lousy movie. If you take her to a pretty good movie, she know it's a pretty good movie" (88). Caulfield may have hated artistic phoniness (his brother "prostituted" himself to Hollywood), but he was infatuated with the idea of obtaining meaningful connections with others.

The Cold War pitted conflicting standards of truth against one another and acted to censor those viewpoints that lie in contrary to popular beliefs. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the rhetoric of McCarthyism that captured the national imagination for nearly a decade. Caulfield lived in a world where he felt compelled to censor the truth of his feelings on matters in sharing that he missed people, to lie in order to order to get sex even when the girls annoyed him a lot, to yearn for authenticity demonstrated in others, and view himself alone as the true voice for interpreting reality. Although Salinger may remain indifferent to such links between broad society and the inner struggles of Caulfield, the connecting themes remain clear.

Works Cited

Baldwin, Stanley P. CliffNotes Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Hungry Minds, 2000.

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.

Salzman, Jack. New essays on the Catcher in the Rye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.