To say that rhetoric is subjective is almost redundant. It is one of the few fields of study that wear subjectivity without issue; there is no intelligible way to think of language as functionally impersonal. With language, there must be a speaker and there must be a listener. Rhetorical language has yet another quirk: it is unconcerned with “Truth” in its ordinary sense. By this I mean those who study rhetoric are not so much concerned with what you say as they are with how you say it.
We, as language speakers, have an intuitive sense of this dichotomy in language. Namely, we understand that the way in which something is said matters, an obvious example being our capacity for sarcasm. The way that we speak about language, especially literature, further demonstrates this innate duality. Literary discourse is typically concerned with both content and form; the former,“we assume, is a body of ideas contained in the writer’s mind and in the reader’s”, and “which is supposedly ‘transmitted’ by the language” in distinct forms equally worthy of analysis (Whipp 16).
Unfortunately, outside of the literary tradition, we perhaps don’t pay as much attention to linguistic approach as is warranted. Aside from issuing the occasional warning to “choose carefully”, it is not the average person’s business to preach the significance of language. Still, decisions of form, as in stylistic form, are considerably consequential. For example, if your wife were to ask you, “how does this dress look on me?” you might answer, “it makes you look awful,” or tell her, “I think you’d look even prettier in a different dress”. Both statements are products of the same idea — the dress is unappealing — but you can imagine how greatly the consequences of linguistic style would vary in this situation. The rhetorician, however, suggests that the consequences of form are even greater than their immediate provocations. “The choice of a way of saying,” says the rhetorician, “is sometimes also a way of seeing” (Whipp 15).
Whipp suggests that the way we channel content through certain avenues of speech (as opposed to others) reveals something important about ourselves. To stay with the former example, telling your lovely lady that another dress better compliments her dazzling features signals that you, as a speaker, have an appreciable interest in maintaining her feelings (and some common sense). In this case, as in others, the way you choose to speak indicates something about your intentions and your contextual understanding, or, in short, something about you. The literature of fiction has a uniquely special relationship with this principle by virtue of its containing entire persons and worlds made up of nothing but utterances. Presumably then, the style an author takes to creating his world has indescribably important implications for that world. It follows that, as readers who seek to understand these worlds, we must pay special attention to literary form, or risk overlooking important information.
For the unconvinced, I offer an elucidating example of the crucial function of style by way of that American novel which famously rebels against the ordinary dimensions of literary language: J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. This novel, sometimes unflatteringly called “a story about nothing,” ironically puts non-literary language, that is, language that is apparently craft-less, at its forefront. The entire procession of the story is narrated by the self-proclaimed “illiterate, but well-read” sixteen-year old Holden Caulfield. A frequent-flyer among high school English curriculums, Catcher is often flippantly reduced to a chronicle of teenage angst and lament for the loss of childhood innocence. However, the reputed colloquialism of the story’s narrator, far from being a simple idiosyncratic novelty, adds immense philosophical depth that too often goes unnoticed.
Holden’s speech functions in two modes which can adequately be described in Holden’s terminology of “illiterate” versus “well-read”. The sloppy, illiterate Holden is the more conspicuous one, and perhaps the more enduring. This is the idiosyncratic Holden who talks incessantly of “phonies” and loosely strings thoughts together with the indiscrete “and all” and “or something”. There is much to be said of how this type of language renders Holden more authentic. Evidently few would disagree with this sentiment: “most critics who looked at The Catcher in the Rye at the time of its publication thought that its language was a true and authentic rendering of teenage colloquial speech. Reviewers in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, the London Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic…all specifically mentioned the authenticity of the book’s language” (Costello, 172). However, less appreciated is how Holden uses the banality of ordinary teenage speech to his own purposes, that is, no purpose, or at the very least no consistent one. Take, for example, Holden’s aforementioned colloquialism of “and all”. Holden often uses the phrase to indicate that the issue at hand has additional dimensions, but he won’t go into them, as in, “my parents were occupied and all before they had me” / “they’re nice and all”, but just as often breaks this pattern arbitrarily with statements— “he’s my brother and all” / It was December and all” — that warrant no further commentary (Costello 174).
The careless reader will applaud Salinger for accurately depicting the teenage dialect of his time and then take his leave, but there is much more to be said about these particular peculiarities. We can make sense of Holden’s language as a protective mechanism — one that, on the surface, asserts his belonging amongst his boarding school peers, but in actuality is devoid of any substance. This is the difference between Holden as representative of the mid 20th century teen and Holden as representative of a teenager of the time trying to fit in. Holden was a relatable character for so many, flaws and all, because he “encapsulated the sheer frustration of a society that had been irrevocably altered in the wake of war. Holden’s longing for something beyond superficial social inclusion, for an authentic and intimate communication with another, mirrored the predicaments of contemporary youth—a generation of silenced and oppressed individuals with whom contemporary ideals and ideologies had failed to connect” (Kinane 118). Unfortunately for Holden, the culture of his time, right down to its popular language, was not designed with genuine connection in mind. Superficiality was the flavor of his day, and in light of this understanding Holden’s critique of the adult world as “phony” takes on new weight. The “phoniness” Holden denounces becomes less directed on a culture of materialism and more at odds with “a trait exhibited by characters in the novel who communicate blithely — without sincerity, intention, or without even being thoroughly engaging (such as Stradlater, the school principal, and the prep-school jerks, for instance)” (Kinane 119).
Another peculiarity of Holden’s is his habitual tendency to assert his earnesty: “in a phony world Holden feels compelled to re-enforce his sincerity and truthfulness constantly with, “it really is” or “it really did.’” (Costello 174). Immediately, the expression seems to further cement Holden against a phoniness that is so pervasive it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to identify real earnestness. However, in tandem with Holden’s other formulations and his unfolding trauma the verbiage becomes something more significant. His verbal patterns around truth, “if you want to know the truth” or “if you really want to know,” begin to suggest that society as a whole generally doesn’t actually care about Holden’s truth. Aside from Phoebe, and arguably Mr. Antolini, the other characters in the novel are immensely indifferent to Holden and to each other. “Recognition of the truth,” Strauch argues, “would embrace the love and compassion that it [society] has no time for but that Holden himself not only lavishes on his secret world but extends to the public world” (9).
The literate Holden, on the other hand, can be best understood in contrast to his illiterate self: “as we have seen, Holden shares, in general, the trite repetitive vocabulary which is the typical lot of his age group. But as there are exceptions in his figures of speech, so are there exceptions in his vocabulary itself, in his word stock. An intelligent, well-read, and educated boy, Holden possesses, and can use when he wants to, many words which are many a cut above Basic English, including ‘ostracized,’ ‘exhibitionist,’ ‘unscrupulous,’ ‘conversationalist,’ ‘psychic,’ ‘bourgeois.’ (Costello 179). This suggests, as Costello points out, that Holden is self-conscious in his use of language. He is actively making choices about when to default to his standardized common discourse and when to use more discretion. The literate Holden is then, in a sense, the real Holden, insofar that he means what he says, and he means how he says it. This Holden is the one who needs us to understand him clearly, and thus sacrifices his social standing — to a degree — for clarity and self-expression. Take for example, his following commentary:
People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. I’ll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I’d see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence–there was this fence that went all around the course–and he was sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That’s the kind of red hair he had.
In contrast to Holden’s typical kind of speech, this writing is overflowing with literary precision and specificity. Yet at the same time, there is a profound ineptitude in Holden’s description. Twice he voices an intention to describe “the kind of red hair Allie had”, but in actuality produces an unrelated bittersweet anecdote from the boys’ childhood. Holden’s love for Allie is unambiguous, and so untranslatable to the language of the illiterate. Thus Holden invents an alternative mode of speech for talking about his precious brother, one that simultaneously demonstrates Holden’s linguistic dilemma and tender heart.
Holden Caulfield’s language is not simply the language of a 1940s teen; it is, for lack of a better term, the language of Holden Caulfield. That is, Holden’s language is that of an educated, socially isolated, neurotic teenage wanderer who deeply misses his brother. It is at times conformist and ambiguous, and at others precise and heartfelt in an implicative way. To miss this is to miss Salinger’s final commentary, which is that there is no communicable cure for disillusionment. It is the individual, rather, who is responsible for his own salvation. With this understanding, the novel’s blunted final chapter is less of a dampener (a therapy couch was never going to be Holden’s solution) and more of an auxiliary to its tale of self-discovery.
Works Cited
Costell, Donald P. The Language of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’. American Speech, Vol. 34, No. 3, Oct. 1959, pp. 172-181.
Kinane, Ian. “Phonies” and Phone Calls: Social Isolation, the Problem of Language, and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 73, Number 4, Winter 2017, pp. 117-132
Strauch, Carl F. Kings in the Back Row: Meaning through Structure. A Reading of Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1961, pp. 5-30.
Whipp, Leslie T. The Language of Rhetoric. College Composition and Communication, Vol. 19, No. 1, Feb. 1968, pp. 15-21.
Thank you to Peter Fousek ’21 for your contributions.