Latest one day Twitter controversy was the eternal debate about The Catcher in the Rye, kicked off this time by somebody who apparantly felt the need to warn women against men who like Holden Caulfield too much. By the time it crossed my feed, the backlash against that position was already in full swing, but I do feel the need to add my two cents. To start with, is there actually anybody under the age of sixty who has The Catcher in the Rye as their favourite book, or Holden as their hero?
Doubt.
Furthermore, is anybody ever honest about why they dislike The Catcher in the Rye so much? I’ve seen all this before, back to the days of Usenet and rec.arts.sf.written, I know what this is about. It’s the pure resentment of the book nerd for being made to read books in school they didn’t enjoy. Normal people just write this off as just another annoying thing that high school forced them to do, but to your average book lover it’s an insult that they’re made to read books they don’t want to. How dare they make me read this trash when I could be reading something I’d actually enjoy. I don’t need this, I’m a reader, not so slavish television consumer. That’s the mindset we’re dealing with here, the 16 year old intellectual outraged that their teacher puts them on the same level as their class mates. A resentment stoked and nurtured for decades. And poor old Catcher gets it in the neck because it’s one of a few novels everybody had to read in high school.
You can’t really say that of course without being laughed at, so you get all those high faluting excuses about Holden as an exemplar of toxic masculinity blah blah blah. Occassionally you get some earnest young puritants involved too who think all fictional characters should be moral exemplars and who cannot get their head around unsympathetic protagonists, but usually it’s just boomers and gen-xers begrudging their high school English classes.
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