Caulfield's Implicature

Speranza

I first want to say that I think "Rebel in the rye" is a good film!

One may wonder what exactly happened to J. D. Salinger to drive him away from publishing and people, from much of an active participation in the world. 

Clearly he was wounded by the attention he received, and I’ve always wondered exactly what the breaking point was.

I read “The Catcher in the Rye” the average number of times for a person my age—which is to say, every few years between when I was twelve and seventeen. 

When I was sixteen I read the rest of his oeuvre, and when I met with friends, I usually included a Salinger story, usually demonstrating the use of conversational implicature to illuminate character. 

His is still my favorite conversational implicature, the conversational implicature that rings truest, that is at once very naturalistic and musical.

It is really remarkable how difficult it is to do what he does between quotation marks.

I like to think that had J. D. Salinger continued to write and publish, he would have continued to evolve in bold new ways. 

The man was an artist, no doubt about it, and his work was always growing in new—darker, stranger, more wonderfully obsessive—directions. 

And always, no matter where the stories go (or do NOT go), his sentences are so beautiful, and so unlike anyone else’s. 

When he backed out of the publishing of “Hapworth,” some wanted so badly to write to him, to say that they'd publish that and anything else he saw fit, and that we’d do it in whatever quiet and respectful way he sought. 

It’s clear he wasn’t so crazy about the splashy aspects of publishing on a certain scale, and I can identify with that—with the desire to just have the oeuvre look like you want it to, on the scale you feel comfortable with. 

But I don’t think Salinger ever could strike that balance between the public and private worlds of writing and publishing his work.

To me the question of whether or not he continued to write strikes at the heart of the nature of writing itself. 

If Salinger indeed wrote volumes and volumes about the Glass family, as has been claimed, it would be such a curious thing, given that the nature of written communication is social.

Language, H. P. Grice says, was created to facilitate understanding between people. 

So writing books upon books without the Griceian intention of sharing them with people is a proposition full of contradictory impulses and goals -- but vide, "Grice without an audience," a brilliant essay by Hyslop in "Analysis" (of all places).

It’s like a gifted chef cooking incredible meals for forty years and never inviting anyone over to share them.

My own pet theory is that he dabbled with stories for many years, maybe finished a handful, but as the distance from his last published work grew longer, it became more difficult to imagine any one work being the follow-up.

The pressure on any story or novel would be too great. 

And thus the dabbling might have continued, but the likelihood of his finishing something, particularly a novel, became more remote. 

And so I think we might find fragments of things, much in the way “The Original of Laura” was found. 

But there’s something about the prospect of actually publishing one’s work that brings that work into focus. 

That pressure is needed, just like it’s needed to make diamonds from raw carbon.

Of course, the possibility most intriguing—and fictional-sounding—would have J. D. Salinger having continued to write for fifty years, finishing hundreds of stories and a handful of novels, all of which are polished and up to his standards and ready to go, and all of which he imagined would be found and published after his death. 

That, in fact, he intended all along for these works to be read, but that he just couldn’t bear to send them into the world while he lived.

I guess we shall see. Or I guess we shall not.