The Catcher and the Carousel
What Holden misheard in the rye
"I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy." J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
The figure is not confined to scripture. Once seen, it turns up wherever someone imagines saving a plane from its edge, and the clearest case is secular: a boy reaching for the turning cross and failing to become it. Holden Caulfield wants one thing. He says it once, near the end of the book, to the only person he trusts, and it is the only ambition he ever states: to stand at the edge of a cliff by a field of rye where thousands of children are playing, nobody big around except him, and catch each one before he goes over.
Lay it on the axes, the one vertical and the plane of neighbors crossed upon it, and every piece is here. The field is the horizontal plane. The children running across it in every direction are the neighbors on the plane. The cliff is the fall, the going over, the body’s rotation to the horizontal, death along the gradient. And Holden posts himself at the edge as the guard. He has cast himself as the cherub, the sentinel at the boundary, with the sword read as a wall.
The Fixed Post
The fantasy is impossible, and it is impossible for the reason the geometry has been giving all along. One body cannot cover a plane. The children come from every bearing, and a single guard can face only one at a time. The sword could do it, because it turned every way and was made of fire that reached every bearing at once. Holden is one boy with two hands. He wants to be the turning blade and he is a fixed post. The grief of the book is the gap between the figure he reaches for and the single body he has to reach with.
This is the second time the cycle has met the wall reading, and the two readers complete each other: Ahab decided the guard at the center of the world was masonry and gave his life to striking it; Holden decides the same thing from the other side and volunteers for the garrison. One attacks the wall; one applies for the job of being it. Neither can imagine the third reading, the one the sword’s own grammar carried: that the guard at the edge is a door, that the office is not to prevent the crossing but to keep the way, and that keeping a way means holding it open for traffic, not holding traffic back from it. Holden has taken the most generous post in the cycle’s whole geometry and read it as a fence. He wants to keep children from the edge. The sword kept the way over it.
And notice what the job, honestly described, would do to the field. To catch every child before the edge is to stop every child mid run; a plane fully guarded is a plane where nothing moves. Holden knows this about himself, though he never adds it up. His favorite place in the city is the museum, and his stated reason is that nothing in it ever moves; the figures in the glass cases stand where they stood when he was nine, and the only thing that changes is the visitor. He loves the world best under glass. The catcher fantasy is the museum instinct given a field to govern: every child held just short of the fall, which is to say held, period, the whole rye put in a case. The guard who succeeds completely is indistinguishable from the freeze.
The Misheard Line
He has also misheard the song, and the mishearing is the whole disease in one word. The line is Burns: gin a body meet a body, comin thro’ the rye. Meet. An encounter on the open plane, two bodies crossing. Holden hears catch. Intercept, prevent, hold back from the edge. He has turned a meeting into a rescue, the horizontal as embrace into the horizontal as barrier, which are the two hands of the swept disk, the sending and the sword. Phoebe, ten years old, corrects him to his face: it is meet a body, not catch a body, and she is right about the words the way she will shortly be right about everything else. The book is built on a boy who took the guarding hand for the meeting hand and broke himself on the difference. The rye is for meeting. He insisted it was for catching.
But mishearings are not random. A boy who substitutes one verb for another, against the plain words of a song everyone knows, got the verb from somewhere, and the book says where.
The Glove
The fantasy has a date of birth, and the date is a death. Allie Caulfield died of leukemia at eleven, three years before the book begins, and the night he died Holden slept in the garage and broke every window in it with his fist. Allie is the child who went over an edge no catcher could have covered; there is no cliff in leukemia, no rim to stand at, no moment when two hands in the right place would have mattered. The catcher in the rye is grief wearing a job. Holden has taken the one failure that was nobody’s, least of all his, and converted it into a standing post, a vigilance that arrives three years too late and faces the wrong direction, guarding every child on the plane because the one child could not be guarded.
And the book gives the grief its object, the single relic Holden carries. Allie’s baseball glove. A fielder’s mitt, the leather a boy wears to catch what comes to him out of the air, and Allie had covered it with poems, written in green ink across the fingers and the pocket, so he would have something to read in the outfield when nothing was coming his way. Hold that object up to the cycle’s light. It is catching equipment, inscribed; the hand that receives, covered in text; and the boy who wore it is under the ground. Holden’s one school assignment in the book, the composition he writes for his roommate, is a description of that glove, and it is the only writing he does with his whole heart. The dead child’s catching hand, covered in words, described in words by the brother who could not catch him. The catcher fantasy was never about the rye. It is the glove, scaled up to a field. And the mishearing is solved: Holden hears catch in a song about meeting because catch is the verb his grief carries in its pocket, written in green ink. He did not mishear Burns. He heard Allie.
The Rye
Why rye, of all crops. In Burns it is nothing, and that has to be said first or the rest is a cheat. Rye was what stood in the lowland fields the lovers cut through, and the crop is rye because rye was what grew there. Any weight the grain carries here is weight I set on it, not weight waiting in the line.
Set it anyway, because of all the crops the field could have been, a grain is the one whose nature is the figure this cycle keeps turning. Grain is the body: the seed that falls into the ground and dies and only so bears much fruit, the bread that is the body broken. A field of grain lives by being cut down and put under and raised, the death and rising drawn as agriculture. The children run through a crop whose whole nature is the motion Holden stands at the edge to prevent. He guards the rim of a resurrection field, trying to stop the going down the field exists to perform. The grain was never the danger. It was the harvest, and he could not tell the two apart.
The Fall Without a Floor
The book contains one actual fall, and Holden was not at the edge for it. James Castle, a thin boy at one of the old schools, said something true about a bully and would not take it back, and rather than unsay it he went out a window. He died on the stone steps. He was wearing a sweater he had borrowed from Holden, so the body at the bottom of the one real fall in the novel went down dressed in the catcher’s clothes. And nobody caught him; falling bodies are not caught. What happened instead is the detail Holden cannot stop remembering: one teacher pushed through the crowd, took off his own coat, laid it over the boy, picked him up, and carried him all the way to the infirmary, not caring that he got blood on himself. The teacher was Mr. Antolini, and whatever else is true of Antolini, and the book will shortly refuse to make him clean, he is the one figure in the novel who understands the available office. You cannot catch the falling. You can carry the fallen, at the cost of wearing what the fall cost them. The book sets the two offices side by side, the catch that never happens and the carrying that does, and Holden, given the choice of which man to become, spends the whole novel applying for the job that does not exist.
It is Antolini, later, who names the fall that is actually coming, and he names it in the cycle’s own terms without knowing it. Sitting up at night with the runaway boy, he tells Holden he is riding for a fall, and then he specifies the kind, and the kind is the terrible part: a fall with no bottom, the falling man not permitted to feel himself land, no floor to strike, down and down without arrival. Set that beside the letter on Hester’s breast. The buckled cross was a fallen figure, but its two legs ended somewhere; the A has nadirs, and a shape with nadirs can stand, brace, bear weight, be inhabited honestly for seven years and carved on a stone. The fall Antolini describes has no nadir at all. It never finishes becoming a shape. It is the fall as pure fourth axis, descent with duration and no geometry, and it is worse than any buckled letter, because a structure that has hit bottom can be built on and a man still falling cannot even be found. The catcher wanted to prevent the fall. The teacher does the only available work: he attends to the fallen and tries to put a floor under the still falling, a coat, a couch, a conversation at two in the morning. And then the night turns. A touch in the dark, ambiguous and never resolved, and Holden bolts, and the book lets the ambiguity stand: the one bearing hand in the novel is also the hand the boy wakes to find on his head, and whatever was true in that room, the floor that was offered is the floor he flees. He goes back out into the descent, and the reader is left holding what Holden is left holding, that the carrying office and the thing to run from arrived in the same man, which is the bitterest version of the lesson the whole book teaches: the help is never clean, never total, never the catcher, and it is still the help.
The Carousel
The book hands him the turning figure at the end, built and running, and seats him outside its sweep. Phoebe rides the carousel in the rain. It turns. The horizontal goes round, every bearing in succession, the children riding the plane as it sweeps, the working version of the figure Holden could not be alone. The thing he tried to be at the cliff, one guard covering the whole plane, stands in front of him as a machine that covers it the only way it can be covered, by turning. And he sits off it, at the rim, beyond the reach of the arm.
Both halves of his failure are in that seat, and they are the two failures the cross is always between. The sweep does not reach him; he is the neighbor still out on the far plane, not yet gathered. And he does not rise and go to meet it; the door is open and he abstains. Nothing bars him. The carousel is not a sword and not a wall, and if he stepped into the turning it would carry him. He stays clear of it on purpose, except that he does not stay dry. He sits in the rain and is soaked and does not care, he says, because he is so happy watching her go round. He has taken the exposure of the open plane, the soaking, the cost, and kept it as a spectator, the vulnerability without the meeting, the seventy run exactly backward. They went out wet into the world to be received and to receive. He gets wet watching and calls it enough.
The child has no such trouble. Phoebe climbs on without a thought, because the plane is for her and she meets it. And the ride immediately stages the whole argument in miniature, because the carousel has a gold ring, and the children riding reach for it, and reaching for it is how a child falls off a carousel. Gold again, at the end of the arm; the cycle has learned to check its pockets whenever gold appears. On the letter it was embroidery over a sentence. On the mast it was a mirror that drowned its readers. Here, for once, the gold is neither cover nor glass. It is just the thing reached for from a turning seat, the reach that risks the fall, and Holden, watching Phoebe stretch for it, arrives at the sentence that retires him from his profession: if they fall off, they fall off, and you have to let them do it, and it is bad if you say anything. The catcher in the rye, watching the one child he loves most lean out over the drop, decides not to catch her. That is the guard laid down at last. He stops blocking the plane. He simply cannot yet step onto it.
One Step Short
So the book ends one step short, and the step is nameable now. Off the rim and onto the turning. To be carried round rather than to watch it go. It is the plumb line step, the move from the edge of the plane into the sweep of it, from guarding the way to being taken along it, and it is the same step the cycle has watched refused and taken in every text so far. The minister took it onto the scaffold at noon and it killed him into plumb. Ishmael was taken, passive voice, at the axis of the wheel. Holden, gentler than either, gets as far as the bench. He has put down the sword, blessed the reach for the gold ring, released the one child he was holding, and he sits in the rain with the turning in front of him and a painted horse open on it, and does not get on.
Do not read the bench too harshly. It is further than Ahab got. The boy who began the book applying to be the wall ends it wet, disarmed, and glad, watching the figure he could not be perform the office he misunderstood, and saying he was so happy he could have cried, and meaning it. That is not the crossing. It is the surrender of the garrison, and in this cycle’s accounting the surrender is most of the distance; the guard who lays down the reading of the wall is one consent away from the door. What no one on the bench or the painted horse can know is the thing no one inside the turning ever knows, the question the geometry hands to time: whether the round is a climb or a closed loop, whether the carousel is the figure rising or only the figure running. The turning is real. The boy watches it in the rain, one step from the sweep of the arm, and the music plays, and the music will stop before it answers.