World in my eyes

“Let me take you on a trip
Around the world and back
And you won't have to move” (Depeche Mode, 1990)

or me, it was inevitable to remember these lines while I was reading The Catcher in the Rye. For me it seems fascinating the ability that Holden Caulfield has regarding being in two places at the same time, and I think that it has to do with what Stradlater asked him: “a description”. The description of the World outside Caulfield seems exasperatingly static: most of the people act in the exact terrible way, and what happens when you have an uniform mass? You’re stuck, there’s no flow. I think that flow takes place mostly inside Holden’s mind, and what could he do if the world surrounding him does not satisfy him at all? :“I'm lucky, though. I mean I could shoot the old bull to old Spencer and think about those ducks at the same time. It's funny. You don't have to think too hard when you talk to a teacher. All of a sudden, though, he interrupted me while I was shooting the bull. He was always interrupting you”

(Salinger, 1951, p.7)

Reality is full of phonies and touchy subjects, but I think that one of the ideas that freaks Holden out the most is the shallowness with which most of the people faces life. Everything is seen, but just in the surface, almost nothing is authentic, almost everything is dictated by conventions and the way in which people want to be seen by other people. Communication is almost an illusion, and I think that that’s the main reason why Caulfield is all the time living the moment, and in parallel, rationalizing that moment. His doubts, his ideas , his nuisances and his complains are the partners that he cannot find in the real world.

In the beginning, when Holden goes to say good-by to his teacher, he is received by the teacher’s wife. She is partially deaf, so for her is difficult to communicate with Holden. On the other hand, the teacher does not have a physical limitation which could inhibit him from listening; he does not listen just because he does not want to, and he needs to act according to the role that society has already chosen for him:

"I flunked you in history because you knew absolutely nothing." "I know that, sir. Boy, I know it. You couldn't help it." "Absolutely nothing," he said over again. That's something that drives me crazy. When people say something twice that way, after you admit it the first time. Then he said it three times. "But absolutely nothing. I doubt very much if you opened your textbook even once the whole term. Did you? Tell the truth, boy."  

I think that introducing in the same situation a person anatomically partially deaf and a person who is intentionally deaf fulfils the purpose of showing how communication tends to disappear as you grow up in life.

I want to focus specially in the episode when Holden notices that Stradlater is going to have a date with Jane Gallagher. First, Holden Cautfield is pretty upset because of his roommate’s behaviour.

“"Hey," Stradlater said. "Wanna do me a big favor?"

"What?" I said. Not too enthusiastic. He was always asking you to do him a big favor. You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he's a real hot-shot, and they're always asking you to do them a big favour. Just because they're crazy about themseif, they think you're crazy about them, too, and that you're just dying to do them a favour. It's sort of funny, in a way.”

( Salinger, 1991, p.15 )

For Stradlater, the world spins around him, and he sees himself as a product to sell. I believe that J. D. Salinger has represented to Stradlater as an exaggeration on how this non-communicative world works. In general, the adults presented in this book show an almost total lack of interest. A similar situation occurred when Caulfield’s brother dies. His fathers were not emphathetic when that brother des, and they considered that the way in which he burst when his brother died was not appropriate.

For me, Calfield does not only hate phony or touchy people. He is angry because of the lack of emotions that peoples experiences, and also, the lack of interest in gettint to know each others.

The empty representation of family

            Long Day's Journey into night can be read as an attempt of the author to illustrate how his life was, since this play has several autobiographical elements of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, but it can also be read as a statement, warning us about the danger that the lack of communication is.

            The character in the play are gloomy and mysterious. They don't get along well, they all bear secrets, and they never ever talk about the problems they have. The Father, James, was an actor, a classical actor that was interested in money, and suffers from nostalgia and fear of dying poor.  The mother, Mary, is a former morphine addict, which is now rehabilitated. The older son, James Jr., carries the guilt of having killed his brother, directly or indirectly. And Finally The younger brother, Edmund, who although he is more poetic and artistic than his brother and father, he is weak and sick, carrying the curse of tuberculosis.

            The plot of Long Day's Journey into Night revolves around this family and how this family slowly fall apart because of the heavy load each one of the member has to carry. We can argue that, if they were to trust each other, and communicate those feelings of desperations, sadness, guilt, etc., they could help each other bear those feeling together, avoiding falling in this black hole they fall into in the play. So, why don't they? Why do they remain silent, keeping all that's wrong inside of each one of them? In my opinion, It has to do with the idea of family.

            Families are supposed to be the core of society as it is. Every religion and culture from the beginning of written history, has considered families as a pivotal part of the cultural machinery. Greeks had the goddess Hestia, the goddess of family, and Egyptians had Bes, the dwarf god of family and new born babies. This illustrates how important family is for culture. The problem is , that sometimes, family is over idealised, meaning that the idea of forming and keeping a family becomes more important that the individuals that form up the family. This becomes worse when we look at the idea of the American perfect family: The perfect wife, the perfect husband, the perfect children, the perfect dog in the perfect house, with the perfect car.

            Perhaps trying to keep this idea of the perfect family is the one that is holding these character back, because speaking about the problems in the family, is making the white elephant in the room, to become real, and you know that, if you have an elephant in your living room, you will have problems. Making explicit the problems in the family, forces the members to engage in conflict, and brings crisis and change to the organisation.

            So, instead of speaking out and facing the problems that are tearing the family apart, the Tyrones choose not to speak, in order to preserve the status quo, the perfect American family. This is why at the beginning of the play, everything seems fine, luminous, almost to perfect to be real, but once the play continues, every character becomes gloomier, and the family descend into darkness, making the night written in the title of the book, more real that it should be.

            And this problem of lack of communication is not unique to the American culture. Here in Chile is present too: Families avoid talking about their problems, seeking help to solve them, and solving their problems, in order to look as a normal, perfect family. And what's worse, people do not realize that avoiding the problems to look normal  is exactly what causing so much harm to families.

            And coming back to the Tyrones: It is lack of the communication what causes this family to fall apart, it is the detachment of each member to the others that help th family to fall into chaos.

            This play has the mark of a good play: One that can be read and analysed from thousands of viewpoints, and for this short entry, I decided to focus on this small spectrum of topics presented in the book. I have decided to talk about this one, because it was one of the problems from the Tyron family were not only relevant when the play came out, but also because the same conflicts presented in these pages are present in our lives and therefore becomes relevant to tackle these issue and for once, start doing sometime about it.

            This was a first look at the topic of the family and how miscommunication can tear one apart. To end up this post, I think that it is really important to once more, think how many problems could be solved by talking to each other, by letting go of all the negative emotions, and by facing crisis.

            

Devoured by Moloch

It is kind of difficult to start writing a post about Death of a Salesman by Miller since it has so much to analyze and relate to the American society. Even though the play is very short in length, it has so much content. But, I will mostly focus in Willy Loman’s journey through the whole play.

Although the play has not had an explicit or omnipresent narrator, we know that the story is told from Willy’s perspective. Willy is so devastated by his constant failure in trying to succeed, that he is becoming mentally insane up to a point that he prefers to keep living in the past through memories of  better times, when he was just started his life and still has his dreams untouched by the US society:

“WILLY: Don’t say? Tell you a secret, boys. Don’t breathe it to a soul. Someday I’ll have my own business, and I’ll never have to leave home any more.”

Willy is letting their sons know how important is to work hard, to get in the business, he seems to believe that is the only way to succeed in life, and off course, he wants their sons to remember this. He made a promise in front of their sons that he is determined to achieve it.

We all have made promises to somebody or to ourselves, and we give everything to accomplish them, and if we broke them, we felt just horrible. Now, imagine this father promising to their family that he is going to make it, that he is going to achieve the American Dream, and then inevitably failing.

So for me, the exact part in which Willy’s life broke into pieces is when his eldest son, Biff, returns home. This gives Willy the feeling of not having achieved any success in his (Willy) life at all. 

His son is back, but without having anything in life, without having a bright future, or at least, without having the future Willy wanted for him. Willy always believed that Biff was well qualified to become a man of success, so he didn’t see the reason of their son’s “failure”

“WILLY: Biff Loman is lost. In the greatest country in the world a young man with such—personal attractiveness, gets lost. And such a hard worker. There’s one thing about Biff— he’s not lazy.”

Since that moment Willy start to get lost in the shadows of memories, in which he realize how much he has failed in life, as a worker ( he felt he was never take into consideration when it comes to work), as a husband ( he cheated on Linda ), and as a father (since his son doesn’t find their way). So basically he is screw up by all this memories, and he felt trapped in a life that he cannot manage, the American dream and the society had promised him better opportunities, and all was just a lie, and now he cannot come back to start all again… he is not able to forgive himself for having lost his life trying to success in business, he cannot still living on such horrible society, and he doesn’t really know how to escape.

Now, HOWL by Ginsberg totally fits here. We know that his poem is about a self-destructive generation oppressed by a dominant culture, in this case the American society or more obviously the American dream, which was overvalued. 

The poem feels like it was written for Death of a Salesman, in fact, it seems to have been written in an angry tone, just the same as Willy talks through most of the play.

The strongest connection that I can make with the play and the poem is the one related to Moloch. This beast that feeds on babies that were sacrificed by their own parents is totally the representation of the American society feeding on Willy’s dreams to achieve the American dream.

“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up

            their brains and imagination? (…)”

“(…) Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless

jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running

money! (…)” 

Willy is immerse in this kind of Moloch society which he cannot defeat since he has contribute with his life to support it. He had quit all his dreams, and personal life in order to success, so he ended up sacrificing himself to Moloch in a more literal way (committing suicide) in order to get absolved of his mistakes that he cannot carry on.

You Only Get One Life, Make Sure You Live It Right

To me Death of a Salesman was a journey to the past, a journey to my fears but at the same time to my dreams. It was impossible not to relate myself to Biff, especially in these lines in which he refers to the vision of his life.

HAPPY: But I think if you just got started — I mean — is there any future for you out there?

BIFF: I tell ya, Hap, I don’t know what the future is. I don’t know — what I’m supposed to want.

HAPPY: What do you mean?

BIFF: Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it’s a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or

buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still — that’s how you build a future.

HAPPY: Well, you really enjoy it on a farm? Are you content out there?

BIFF (with rising agitation): Hap, I’ve had twenty or thirty different kinds of jobs since I left home before the war, and it always turns out the same. I just realized it lately. In Nebraska when I herded cattle, and the Dakotas, and Arizona, and now in Texas. It’s why I came home now, I guess, because I realized it. This

farm I work on, it’s spring there now, see? And they’ve got about fifteen new colts. There’s nothing more inspiring or — beautiful than the sight of a mare and a new colt. And it’s cool there now, see? Texas is cool now, and it’s spring. And whenever spring comes to where I am, I suddenly get the feeling, my God, I’m not gettin’ anywhere! What the hell am I doing, playing around with horses, twenty-eight dollars a week! I’m

thirty-four years old, I oughta be makin’ my future. That’s when I come running home. And now, I get here, and I don’t know what to do with myself. (After a pause.) I’ve always made a point of not wasting my life, and everytime I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life.

HAPPY: You’re a poet, you know that, Biff? You’re a — you’re an idealist!

Who hasn’t been in his shoes? Nowadays, most students seem to be choosing their university programs by the money they are going to make. Some others feel force to go to university because they think they will have no future if they don’t. Others don’t even know what they want for a living, but still they study or do what their parents tell them to do, and not to mention when there is someone who gets a national PSU score that wants to study pedagogy or arts… no future for him, people say.

These are only a few examples of how society can affect our decisions and therefore, our lives. We grow up within a country, a family, a culture, surrounded by traditions, or better to say, stereotypes. The ghost of the American Dream still echoes in many people with a fixed mind set.

People always had high expectations on me. Everybody in my family and in the school thought I was going to study to become a dentist, an engineer or a doctor, something that will ensure a good future. Finally, I decided to study pedagogy, but I didn’t know what to choose, I didn’t know what I was supposed to want for my life. After some time studying I went over an existential crisis because I wanted to quit the program, I realized I was going nowhere and I couldn’t stand not doing anything about it.

After some time I found my purpose in life and everything changed. Today I am thankful for that because not many people overcome these crisis, and now I am able to see them with another perspective. I strongly believe that existential crisis are not more than a chance to break the mold, to break with all that tells you your dream is not good enough or is not going to be compatible with your happiness. It is your inside against the world’s pressure, your dream against the conformity, your happiness against your emptiness. It is your responsibility, no one is going to give the lost time back to you, and nobody is going to live the trials for you. You have to decide for what makes you, who you are. You just have to go for what completes your life.

As you know, I am still in the English Pedagogy Program and I pretend to finish it, not because it is what I see myself doing in the future but because it does not interfere with my purpose in life; in fact, it provides some useful tools for the future.

Another character I relate myself to is Linda. When I think about her I immediately think about the poem Housewife by Anne Sexton because it talks about how women are a part of their house and about how taking care of the house becomes their job and they are expected to do nothing more than clean, cook, and look after their family. This poem also reveals how men are seen as dominant and how they take advantage of women and take them for granted. Women are not respected in the same way men are.

Housewife-Anne Sexton

Some women marry houses.
It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,
a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
The walls are permanent and pink.
See how she sits on her knees all day,
faithfully washing herself down.
Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah
into their fleshy mothers.
A woman is her mother.
That's the main thing.

This poem encapsulates through daily-life language and imageries how women were seen by society at that time. In the 50’s most women used to have a 24/7 affiliation with the ‘house hold’ things after they got married.

The house is portrayed to be the other kind of skin and having some human’s body parts such as heart, mouth, and liver. It seems to me that the house became a real companion for women in struggling through the life after marriage.

 “Men enter by force,” shows me that men were always forcing their demands. Here, particularly related to the sexual abuse or domestic violence in a family, and women not having the freedom to disagree or desist.

Along the play Linda seemed to be a lovely wife, despite his grumpy and violent husband; however, her devotion and love for her husband made her dependent on his dream and deprived her to have her own.

Overall, I think Death of a Salesman is a demonstration of the American society beliefs during the 1950’s and a great reminder of the impact it can have in our lives nowadays. As women, we have to be thankful that we are not trapped in a housewife model anymore, that’s not the only thing we can aspire to be in life. But how to be thankful? Using that freedom to pursue our own dreams, not anyone else’s dreams, and not being influenced by the new stereotypes, because one thing is true and it’s that the housewife model might have changed but there are some others that can be as damaging as the ones that are not part of our mind set anymore.

A book about yourself

            The Catcher in the Rye is one of those novels that, despite having been written 50 years ago, the truth and the message at the book's core is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago. Furthermore, we could say that this book is as alive as we are, because it grows, it adapts, it changes. Each time we read JD Salinger's novel, we read a different version: The words are the same, the wording is the same, the little amount of action is still the same, our protagonist is still the same, and yet, it feels as a completely different experience.

            But, why is it so? Why does the book changes so much? I believe that the topic of the book, and some literary magic, make it change through the years and the readings. What is the book about, then? The book is, and I am not kidding, about change. Yes, about change. A change of lifestyle, a change in physiology, and a change of identity, the book tackles the change of Holden Caulfield, as he moves from childhood to adulthood.

            Holden Caulfield starts the novel as a kid, who has been recently expelled from his school for performing poorly in his tests, and must now return to his home. This first scene in the book is in itself a huge change for Holden, and in a way, it means a great change in us too. He has been expelled from high school, the place where he has lived the last four years of his life, what means he will have to face the world he lives in, not as a student anymore, but as dropout, or, if we go deeper into the allegory, as an adult. While taking the train to New York, he decides he will not go directly to his house, but that he would stay in a hotel in New York.

            There at the hotel, that works as a midway stop in the trip from childhood to adulthood, that Holden himself delays by not going home, he faces many questions, about his body, about society, about life, and some answers that make him wish he could stop time, and stay forever frozen, like the artefacts in the museum he later visits, or to quit society, and go live in the west, apart from all the fake people and their fake lifestyle.

            In the end, Holden accepts the fact that time won't stop for him, and ends up warning us that, when you start telling a story, you start missing those people who shared it with you.

            Back to our question, why is it that this book changes with us? And now I can give a less vague answer: This book changes because the things that Holden lived, that Holden did, and all the realizations he came to, they are all related to us in some ways, or, to put it in other words, we all find ourselves in those situations at some points in our lives.

            The characters and the situations in the book are situations and character that we face in our lives, archetypes that transcend time, and that everyone can relate to. We all question our sexuality, our ideals, we all want at some point stop time, get off of this thing call life. We are all at some point thrown into adulthood, just as Holden was kicked off his school: We all feel what he felt, because that's how we build our identities, and the book, above all, deals with how identity changes, how it evolves.

            And that's the thing with identity, we can revisit who we are and how we came to be, and analyse what we did or didn't with other eyes, from different places, just as we analyse Holden's actions with different eyes each time we read the novel. That is why each reading of the book becomes a unique experience, because we ourselves change over time, and we can take what is written on the book and adapt it to the situation we are living, to the time we are living, to the experiences that we've had.

            In the end, The Catcher in the Rye changes because we change, which makes the book as immortal as it is, as relevant as it is, and as good as it is: A book that is a alive as a human being, and that will live to change the lives of thousands of human beings, helping them to find answers to the problem that identity brings on all of us.

            Before ending this post, I would like to say something that I had no time to tell here, but it is worth thinking it over: When you read this book, you are not only reading the book, you are reading yourself.    

Impressions about "The Catcher in the Rye"

To start off, Holden Cauldfield is a 16-year-old boy telling his own story. Primarily, he says he doesn’t want to talk about his family or about his lousy childhood. He starts the story when he considered that his life changed. It begins with him saying ‘good-by’ to one of his teachers, even when he flunked that subject he didn’t want that his teacher would feel bad.

What caught my attention was the style of writing of the book. Holden is telling the story in first person and it seems like he is directly talking to the reader, but it is interrupted by himself telling his thoughts, including the repetition of many words such as ‘boy’ and ‘sunovabitch’; and that gave me the impression I was reading a jerk. But, while I went beyond in the reading I realized Holden wasn’t that stupid. He was childlike but he wasn’t a bad person. There were few moments in his life that made him be like that; so rude and so depressed. But most important, he was trying to be truthful in a world of phonies. And this is another thing I think is remarkable: Holden was conscious that sometimes he may be what he criticized. He described himself as a phony too. But in the reading I could see he only was looking for finding himself.

In some way I could relate this to ‘Mirror’ by Sylvia Plath, in the sense of accepting and realising who we are, even if we don’t like it.

“Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully”.

Also, it seems to be like Holden Cauldfield functions as a ‘mirror’ for J.D Salinger; Holden was thought (for some publishers and readers) to be crazy, and J.D Salinger wrote the book after spending three years in a mental institution.

In my point of view, these both works show the struggles of become older and growing in life, confronting what society and families expect from us and accepting or not who we are.

Death of a generation

Death of a generation

Death of a Salesman is a convincing demonstration of the lifestyle aims of the American society during the 1950’s. Willy Loman seems to be a tireless man pursuing his dreams. But these dreams did not see come from his real inner illusions. As we can appreciate, Loman has been molded according to what he has been told during his life. According to this, if he worked hard, he would be able to achieve the American Dream. These high expectations about how he should live, are grounded in fragile dreams, which lead him to a collapse.

Apart from that, but also as a consequence of this, Willy had to face situations in his life that would not help him to achieve his dream.  The fact that both of his children were 32 and 34 years old and still lived in his house, definitely was a product of what he did along his life, by overprotecting and always justifying them, even when he knew that both of them were not the successful men he would have expected.

All along, Death of a Salesmen represents the American society and its expectations, as much as at the family as at work level. Since it shows the life of a working class family during the 1950’s.

At the family level, we can recognize Willy’s desire’s for his children to be successful in life. However, due to his own actions they never grow up to be men, and stay living as children even during their adulthood. After the moment in which Biff faces his father and blames him for his lack of success in life (due to the incident with “the other woman”), he starts to raise awareness that he is the only one who should be in control of his life. That is why he, eventually, realizes that he must not pursue the American dream, but he must follow his owns.  Regarding Willy’s wife, she was always a great companion in this pursue for his husband’s dreams. However, she seemed to be a little bit more down-to-earth, despite her obvious lack emotional maturity, since she was too dependent on her husband and children.

In comparison to Death of a Salesman, which tries to exemplify the consequences of people pursuing someone else’s dreams, Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” is a complaint (no, it is actually MORE than a complaint, it is a howl, right from the guts) from someone who is witnessing that the people around him are being absorbed by this system of life in which no one pays attention to the things that can really make you happy, who do not enjoy the simple things that life gives your every day; he is immersed in a world where people are living a life in which everyone tries to be someone else to please everyone except themselves.

Regarding the hero of the play, I would dare to say that Biff, Willy’s son, is the one who is “howling” in his family, so he saves them. He was able to face his dad, face reality and help him and his family to wake up from this fairy tale his dad always kept around them, making them believe that that is the way they would achieve goals in their lives. His father, on the other hand, represents a regular person and does not fit in the hero idea of a person with admirable values.

Gingberg’s poem was also written during the 1950’s, but unlike Death of a Salesman, it uses more vulgar and explicit language. The type of language is also used to express the feelings of anger and disgust of the man who is witnessing this scene.  

To sum up, and despite the fact that this play and the poem were written during the 1950’s, and they were quite transgressive for the time, I would say that the theme is still in vogue. The fact that nowadays the family gathers to eat surrounded by electronic devices, the fact that people who travel just want to take a good picture instead of enjoying the experience, are a clear examples of the society of the Loman family.

Apparently, despite all the howls, it is too hard to save a society that has been molded to obey. In the play, the one who dies is the father of the family. However, I would dare to state that it was an announcement for the death of a whole generation and, maybe, a whole society. 

Regards,
Valentina