Inspiration from stories

MIRA SUCHAROV

Before there was J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, there was his 1948 short story called “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” With Salinger’s recent death, I found myself reflecting on the story whose title I had long forgotten, but whose plot had remained with me since my Grade 8 English class at Eric Hamber. Although Catcher gained a level of fame only dreamed of by most authors, “Bananafish” had a more explosive impact on me.

“Bananafish” is mostly about the ending: newlywed Seymour Glass retreats to his Florida hotel room and shoots himself. Some interpretations blame his sudden actions on his emotionally detached wife; others on the trauma he suffered as a veteran of the Second World War. For me, at 13, puzzling out the plot and parsing the wordplay took a backseat to obsessing over the ending.

As an extraverted teen with well-articulated goals and dreams, the notion of suicide induced terror in me. I irrationally feared that it was something that could just happen, like cancer or car crashes, a phobia that Salinger’s inclusion in our reading list silently aggravated.

What made Salinger’s offerings particularly problematic for me was the tension between presenting troubled characters who are seriously ill, and those who are voices of clarity calling out a structurally flawed world. I was (and still am) too much of an optimist to consign the world to permanently wrecked status. I was (and still am) too naturally gregarious to be a detached voice on the sidelines, silently seeing everyone else as “phony” – I’d die of loneliness.

If we think of adolescence as the first (and thus most powerful) simultaneous realization of human mortality and individual agency, we can gain insight into the challenges that Salinger’s writing poses for the human condition. Ultimately, he advocates authenticity and certainty – both decent antidotes to the terror of mortality and the moral challenges of agency – but both possessing problematic implications.

Catcher’s Holden Caulfield famously prides himself on exposing peddlers of artificiality, and Glass is certain that his version of reality is the only correct one. I lack that certitude of personal authenticity. I also try to allow other versions of reality to have some truth. (Professionally, I try to identify multiple narratives in my research area of choice, the Israeli-Palestinian morass.) And I lack the confidence that my experience of life is truly authentic – currently at least. (I recognize that it might evolve.) While my lack of certainty over the correct version of reality is more of an intellectual commitment than a given, neither are positions that I would easily give up.

To grasp Salinger is to acknowledge that the world is flawed, but it’s also to presume that one has the ability to identify solutions. How else to make sense of protagonists who remove themselves from the fray, if one cannot clearly see alternatives that the characters could not?

It is no coincidence that Salinger, grandson of a rabbi, lived his remaining decades in near seclusion. How does one continue a legacy of such fictional detachment – so divorced from the natural optimism of theological conviction – such as he created?

A generous interpretation would be that Salinger challenges us to appreciate his cutting irony not as an indictment of the world, but as an invitation to enjoy all its complexities. While art is not political manifesto, the best kind moves the spirit to action. The question remains as to how stories can inspire us to apply solutions to social problems in a manner that is more fluid than fixed, more tentative than arrogant.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She is currently writing a book on nostalgia and political change.

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