"Anyway, I always imagine a bunch of kids playing a game in a big wheat field, there are thousands of them, and there's no one around —I mean not a little older —I mean just me. I would stand on the edge of a broken cliff. What I'm going to do is grab every kid who runs towards the cliff — I mean if they run and don't look in the direction, I have to come over and grab them from there. I do that all day, and I'm a watchman in a wheat field. I know the idea is outrageous, but it's the only thing I really want to be, and I know the idea is outrageous. ”
In Sun Zhongxu's translation, this "famous quote" in Salinger's "Catcher in the Wheat Field" is so approachable that it is far less sonorous and powerful than Shi Xianrong's translation.
In the Chinese-speaking world, most of the "Salinger fans" were moved by Shi Xianrong's translation.
On January 1, 2019, coinciding with the centenary of Salinger's birth, in order to commemorate this great master, Yilin Publishing House launched the "Salinger Complete Works", which is the first time that Salinger's works have been published in China, and they are all new translations approved by the Salinger Foundation.
It is called the complete set, but it is not complete in fact. Salinger's early short stories such as "Go see Eddie," "Trick," "The Two Brothers of Wallioni," "Madison's Mild Rebellion," "The Heart of a Broken Story," and "The Upside Down Forest" were not received, nor did it receive the late "Hapworth 16, 1924."
The collection embodies the Salinger style in two ways: First, the cover design is minimalist. Second, there is no preface, no afterword, etc. Its greatest value lies in its faithfulness to the original face of Salinger's text. They are trivial, deconstructed, anti-sentence obsessive, and each story is bland, and only by diving into them can you understand what Salinger really wants to say.
The fact that reading Salinger has never been an easy task is somewhat frightening: in an era of increasing emphasis on ease, will Salinger also be forgotten? Does his resistance and struggle still make sense?
He was always a loser
Salinger's life and novels have two major themes: failed growth and failed love.
Salinger's growth was a failure, and he never met his parents' expectations.
Born into a middle-class family, Salinger was expelled twice in middle school for poor grades, and after graduating from a private prep military school, he was admitted to New York University, but less than a year later, he dropped out and returned home. In 1937, Salinger went to Europe to engage in sausage import and export business, ready to inherit his father's business, getting up at 4 o'clock every morning to buy pigs, sell pigs, and fell in love with a Jewish girl in Austria. Because of the anti-Semitic wave in Vienna (Salinger was Jewish), Salinger left Europe.
In 1939, Salinger tried to write in a short story writing class run by Columbia University. He enlisted in the army at the end of 1941 and went to War in Europe in 1944. In 1951, when "Catcher of the Rye" became a sensation in the United States, Salinger was 32 years old.
Salinger had six failed relationship experiences.
Una · O'neill.
After World War II, Salinger returned to Vienna to try to find his first love, but the Jewish girl had died, and she became the protagonist of the novel A Girl I Know (not included in the full collection).
Salinger had fallen in love with Una, the daughter of Nobel laureate Eugene O'Neill, and she took advantage of Salinger's service to marry the comedian Chaplin. In the novel The Sad Sergeant (not included in the complete collection), Salinger implicitly satirizes Chaplin.
In 1946, Salinger married a French woman born in Germany for less than 8 months. He later married Claire, gave birth to a son and a daughter, and lived together for 13 years. Five years later, Salinger moved in with maynard, a college student, and a year later the two broke up. At the age of 73, Salinger married a nurse who was 40 years younger.
Failed growth and failed love are intertwined, so in Salinger's writing, professors are mostly hypocritical and sophisticated, and girls are mostly superficial and vain (except for "Frannie").
Growing up is a festering that people must go through
Salinger's writing is often obscured by big words such as "Ode to Innocence" and "Watching Over Innocence".
According to this illustration, the "adult world full of desire" and the "innocent child world" are opposed to each other, and Salinger's Teddy, Kaulfeld, Zuy, etc. have penetrated the illusion of the former because of their "precocious wisdom" and have to bear the burden of "semi-wise".
Although the generalization is wonderful, it uses philosophical wisdom to obscure the suspicion of novel wisdom.
Along with philosophical wisdom, the next question is: How to solve it? If it is just a high-level complaint, is it still necessary to exist?
But in the wisdom of fiction, the writer does not assume the obligation to give a solution, and the obligation of the writer is to discover the true state of man and dig out the story in it.
"Discovery" is the most interesting part of Salinger's novel, not the complaint. His "discovery" was earth-shattering—growing up is a festering mess that people must go through.
Salinger was still writing until his death in 2010, but has not published his work since 1965.
The so-called "growing up" is a modern concept. In pre-modern culture, there was no such thing as "childhood" or "adolescence", and children were considered to be compressed adults, while education was a luxury that only few children could enjoy.
In "The Disappearance of Childhood", the famous American scholar Neil Bozeman found that in the Middle Ages, the vast majority of European parents would not give special care to their children, no children's books, no children's food, no children's toys, and even sex did not avoid children.
One of the costs of modern society is that people need a long education to adapt to it. As a result, adults forced children to accept a state of control through information obscuration, violence, and collective life, which the French philosopher Foucault called a "prison society."
Few adults dare to admit that they are equal to their children, their moral standards and knowledge levels are not necessarily stronger than those of children, they are not willing to accept the torture of examinations, and they cannot predict the future.
A cartoon image of a deforestation.
However, adults strive to create the illusion that life is highly certain, and if you study hard now, you can become a winner in life in the future. The so-called "winner in life" is nothing more than being able to drive a Cadillac car and talk nonsense every day.
The value of Salinger's novel lies in the fact that in the face of a variety of goods, funny entertainment, and a swarm of handsome men and women, there is a cry of cessation: Am I really willing to accept this festering?
He doesn't need a good story
Read Salinger and go back to his text.
Reading Salinger's works and Wang Shuo's works in pairs is that they are particularly painful, disgusted with the glassy sense of consumerist culture, and at a loss for salvation. The difference is that people who read Wang Shuo will feel that they have become enlightened and are more willing to take the initiative, while those who read Salinger will feel that they are bound and more willing to escape.
Wang Shuo has also written many tragedies, so why didn't he have the same effect as Salinger's novels? This can be seen in the Grasse collection.
The Grass series consists of 6 novels, namely "The Best Day to Catch a Banana Fish", "Frannie", "Lifting the Beams, Carpenters", "Zuy", "Seymour: A Short Biography", and "Hapworth 16, 1924" (the first 5 are all in the full collection), in which Seymour Glass appears.
Seymour Glass's name seems to have a metaphor, and in English, the sound is near "see more glass". Seymour was also a "precocious" man, and his cynicism had a huge impact on his brothers and sisters. He inexplicably falls in love with the superficial woman Muril, but refuses to attend the wedding, offending almost everyone.
After marriage, Seymour and his wife went on vacation by the sea. The wife gets her nails in the hotel, reads Sex: Paradise or Hell, and talks to her mother over the phone over long distances. Seymour rode a rubber raft and chatted with a five- or six-year-old girl, Sybil, on the surface of the sea, saying that there was a banana fish in the sea that would burrow into a banana hole and eat bananas non-stop, because it became fatter and fatter, it could no longer swim out of the hole, and eventually died of banana fever.
This is clearly a metaphor for materialism. Sybil said she saw 6 bananas in the mouth of the banana fish.
Sybil taught Seymour that even children have become full of lies and that all paths to salvation have been blocked. Back in the room, Seymour shot himself.
What shapes the fate of the characters in Salinger's novels is the mental unbearably painful pain. Salinger doesn't need to design a good-looking story, doesn't need to hide the plausibility of the ending in the story, so his tragedy is more contagious.
Everyone is lying
Novels are the art of gradually opening, and retaining readers is a lifelong effort that writers have been practicing. Salinger's novels have a relatively simple storyline, how did he retain readers? In "Frannie", there is a particularly wonderful show.
It is generally believed that the prototype of "Frannie" is Claire. Salinger pursued her when she was 19 years old and was studying at a university. Salinger wanted Claire to drop out of school, but was refused. Claire was married to someone else at one point, and a few months later the two broke up, and Claire married Salinger.
Salinger spent his life looking for young, unworldly women, and he preferred to be a father besides lovers.
The protagonist of "Frannie", Frannie, dates Ryan, a student at a prestigious school. Ryan is a typical middle-class kid who "doesn't speak in any way, no one who doesn't sharpen his voice and make a generous statement, as if he were settling once and for all an extremely controversial problem that has left the world outside the university scratching the ground and has been working blindly for centuries."
Ryan talks about novels, poetry, and plays, but his biggest concern is whether the paper can get a "big a." Frannie strives to play the role of a literary lover to complement Ryan's speech, in which Ryan can eat snails, frog legs and salads.
Salinger's women are mostly material women, "The Catcher in the Rye" has been criticized by female readers, and "Frannie" is likely to be a female version of "The Catcher in the Rye", which outlines the path of women's self-awakening.
Calfield chose to flee the city, and Frannie finally fainted after a long period of patience.
Salinger loved to write dialogue. Life is the stage, everyone wears a language mask, which distorts the logic of dialogue and shows the deep drama of the heart: everyone is lying, they all think they are the protagonists, but they are all wasting their lives. This constitutes the richness of the Sellin format, so that it is free from the interference of the plot.
Salinger is considered one of the most important american writers after World War II.
This enlightenment came a little late
As early as 1963, "The Catcher in the Rye" had a Chinese translation and could only be "internally distributed" until 1983, when it could be published publicly. A few years later, the book for middle school students unexpectedly became popular on college campuses.
At the time, Chinese readers were still immersed in the myth of modern education, seeing it as a salvation remedy, and college students were called "the proud sons of heaven." However, after passing the college entrance examination with difficulty, I found that life itself has not changed.
Falling from a dream to a reality forces people to reflect on existence.
The Catcher in the Rye calls it the "Book of Enlightenment" of a generation from which too many people begin to pursue themselves. But this enlightenment is too late after all, and the basic beneficiaries of the enlightenment are the beneficiaries of the college entrance examination system, and when they read this novel with the mentality of "watching the shipslide on the Yellow Crane Tower", it becomes a kind of thought.
Salinger, who lived in seclusion in the mountains in his later years, angrily pounded the window of a hasty visitor's car
The Salinger we see is a hermit, a thinker, and an idol of life, not a novelist.
From then to now, the burden on primary and secondary school students has increased significantly, and the space for spiritual growth has become more cramped. How many children still read Salinger today? After all, the resistance offered by fiction is too fragile and limited, far less direct than video games.
Video games provide a space to play with and manipulate, and by sinking into it, one does not have to bear the pain of awakening.
By the time it was finally understood what Salinger was saying, a generation had grown old, either becoming Ryan, or Becoming Mr. Spencer (Calfield's teacher, a hypocrite), or becoming Muriel... Become a character they hated when they were young.
The previous generation is misreading, the next generation simply does not read. Perhaps, Salinger will drift away.