“Holden Out for a Hero?”

I don’t tend to reach for heroic narratives in my own personal reading. My favorite movies don’t typically involve costumed avengers or caped crusaders. I’ve read all three Lord of the Rings volumes and The Hobbit to my son as our bedtime reading a few years ago, and parts of them were really cool, but I admit to zoning out for large portions of the story. As a kid, I had only gotten about halfway through the second book before I gave it up, but that may reflect my general laziness as a young reader more than my interest in heroic quests. I never did get around to seeing the third movie, although I mostly enjoyed the first two. They do make it back from that big mountain where he chucks the ring, and the world is saved—I remember that much from volume 3. It’s just that some of the twists and turns along the way—the close brushes with death, the cliffhangers—might have lost me.

For your inaugural writing assignment, I am asking you to contemplate the significance of heroism as a part of your general consumption of literature, television, and film. I’m approaching this course, based in part on what I’ve gleaned from my students in the past, with the assumption that many of you are more actively conversant in the heroic genre, in your day-to-day recreational reading and viewing, than I am. And I look forward to reading your writing this semester, as you unpack those interests and bring to light something fundamental about why and how heroic narratives continue to appeal to and inspire you. I feel like I get the hero thing, even if I don’t fully feel it myself. But I also have a lot to learn.

I understand that the concept of the hero is still alive and well, at the movies and in the news, but my own ambivalence reflects what’s maybe an unfortunate tendency in our contemporary culture—toward irony and cynicism over idealism and sincerity. Does the concept of a “hero” seem outdated or quaint, a relic of a simpler and more credulous time? We’re hesitant to speak seriously about some public or historical figure as our hero because we expect some killjoy to interject and remind us of their flaws and shortcomings (“Oh, you admire President Obama? What about all those drone strikes against innocent civilians? Some hero!”). To admit to having a hero is, in a way, to make yourself vulnerable to disappointment or disillusionment. We don’t want to seem too credulous, easily duped. We want to seem like we’re already over it, unimpressed, devoid of wonder. It’s somehow safer not to have heroes. Some airline attendant is caught on video resigning from his job in a dramatic and made-for-YouTube kind of way, and we all repost the clip, with a knowing smirk, captioned with stuff like, “This guy is totally my hero LOL.” But we don’t really mean “hero” in the wholly unironic way Joseph Campbell uses the term.

I did a lot of thinking, in my initial preparation for teaching this course, about the role of heroes throughout my life. I don’t know that I’ve ever actually had a hero. I was heavy into Star Wars, but it was the whole imagined-world aspect that compelled me, more than Skywalker’s quest. I always preferred Han Solo, the reluctant, mercenary hero who gradually does develop a sense of social and moral responsibility but never loses his trademark sneer, over Luke Skywalker. I was a sucker for the sarcastic riposte over sincere idealism. I went through some phases where I was into superhero narratives as a kid—a faithful viewer of the Superfriends every Saturday morning, and I did see the original Christopher Reeve Superman in the theater—but it didn’t really stick. By the time the first Batman movie (dir. Burton; 1988) came out, I was in high school, I went to see it mainly because Prince did the soundtrack, and I was (and am) a huge Prince fan. I've listened to the album way more than I've watched the movie.

There are people I admire—in history, in culture, even in sports—and it’s hard to unpack how much they may or may not have shaped my development as a person. I can name names of people whose actions and experiences impress me deeply, and whose life stories and the values they represent have made a strong impression on me. At various times in my life, I have thought about them a lot, and maybe in some distant capacity modeled my behavior on their example. But it doesn’t sit right with me to call them my “heroes”—it feels like I’m fronting, like I’m expected to cite heroes, so I have a few I could name.  But really, there are no shrines in my bedroom or office. On my desk here at school I do have a religious-style candle depicting Virginia Woolf as a secular/literary saint, and I admit that I do think of her lifelong struggle to produce profoundly beautiful and insightful art in the face of sometimes debilitating mental illness as genuinely  heroic and inspirational--but the candle is a bit of an ironic joke, the kind of thing English teachers are given as gifts by friends.

I do follow some professional sports on occasion, but the concept of “hero” as applied to elite athletes has always seemed a little shaky to me. Professional athletes often do admirable things, on and off the field, in a heavily scrutinized public forum. I’m inspired by Muhammad Ali’s refusal to submit to the draft, or Tommie Jones and John Carlos protesting American racism at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, or Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem. I admire the courage it took for Michael Sam to come out as gay on the eve of the NFL draft. And as a Yankee fan by birth, of course I believed for a long time that Derek Jeter might well be immortal. But still . . . it seems false to claim any of these guys as my own personal heroes. I’m not denying that they play this role for others. It’s just that I don’t necessarily relate.

There have been literary protagonists who have made a profound impression on me, and who have indeed shaped my development as a person. Among the most significant of these—and this is such a cliché, it’s a little embarrassing to admit—I would have to count Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). I came to Catcher later than many readers, who had the book thrust upon them by a parent or older sibling, usually with the insistence that they “have to” read it, that it will “change your life.” Happily, no one told me the book was going to change my life. I was under the impression, based solely on the title, that it was about baseball.

It was assigned in my senior-year AP English class in high school. I had just started to enjoy reading and analyzing literature in a scholarly context—a development that would have obvious consequences for the course of my life, although I never would have anticipated it at the time. We had read a few books already in that class that had made a strong impact on me; I had never really gotten into English before this year. I wasn’t aware of Catcher’s reputation as a landmark representation of American adolescent disenchantment, but I was a rather disenchanted American adolescent, and when I first encountered Holden Caulfield’s distinctive narrative voice—sarcastic, irreverent, occasionally profane, funny as hell—it blew my mind. I couldn’t believe the book was being assigned in school. I felt like I was encountering a kindred spirit: Holden’s academic record was a lot worse than mine, but his impatience with all the things a high-school kid is “supposed to” be impressed by and interested in really struck a chord with me. It was my first experience of a narrator in a novel who seemed to be speaking to and for me alone, against what I perceived to be the madness and stupidity that was all around me. In an utterly unprecedented event, I ended up staying in on a Friday night and reading the entire novel in one sitting. I’d never even done homework of any kind on a Friday night before.

Holden Caulfield isn’t a classical example of a hero—although he does take a journey through the streets of Manhattan, slowly wandering his way back home on the Upper East Side. His general attitude toward adulthood and mainstream American society is disaffected and cynical—and this negativity was indeed a big part of what appealed to me about the novel, the way it seemed to articulate my own unspoken feelings about the world into which I was coming of age. But there is a kind of “heroic” aspect to Holden, in the way he stubbornly affirms youth and innocence in the face of the seemingly inevitable corruption of adulthood. And he gets beaten up a couple of times over the course of a few days—something else I could, unfortunately, relate to all too well. In one memorable scene, Holden is beaten up by his roommate at his boarding school, a guy named Stradlater, for no good reason at all. Holden refuses to take it back when he calls Stradlater a “moron” (“all morons hate it when you call them a moron”), and he takes a beating. The crazy logic of Holden’s behavior—which sort of “proves” Stradlater is a “moron” by making him get all violent and worked up over Holden calling him one—made sense to me. I could recount way too many such stories, but one time I was skateboarding at the beachfront in the early spring (so it was pretty desolate) with a large crew of associates when a carload of wrestlers from a nearby town drove up and started harassing us. My so-called crew scattered, but I, stupidly, refused to run away. I was skating here, and I’m going to keep skating here, whatever these morons have to say about it. The episode ended badly, with a giant kid named Artie getting out of the car and beating me down, at one point slamming my skateboard against my head. Like Holden, I didn't even try to fight back. My humble protest accomplished very little. And I couldn’t quite explain why I had refused to flee with the rest of them. There was a doomed, futile, stupid pride and protest in my refusal, and I took a serious beating for it. So while some readers are perplexed by some of Holden’s seemingly incoherent, self-destructive behavior, I could kind of see myself in him and his pointless efforts at heroism.

Holden Caulfield is probably closer to an antihero than a traditional hero, and it’s not clear how much the novel ultimately affirms his doomed rebellion. There’s a lot of irony in Salinger’s depiction that I entirely failed to see at the time—which is one reason it’s been so interesting for me to keep teaching this novel in my fiction classes at the University of Illinois when I first started teaching, and in my Coming-of-Age Novel course at Uni. Every time I reread Catcher in the Rye, I view Holden (and my younger self) with a little more distance and critical detachment. But I still also see, and affirm, the aspects of his character that resonated with me as a young man, and I still hold many of those same values today. As a reader of fiction and a filmgoer, I continue to be drawn to antiheroes—lonely, often morally confused outsider figures, or those who operate outside the law or the bounds of conventional society. I admit that I grow bored as a larger-than-life action hero cheats death in scene after scene. There’s no drama, no recognizably human fear of death or personal insecurity, for me to latch onto. And yet, sitting in a theater crowded with people who clearly love this stuff, I realize I am likely in the minority.