Seeing as how the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Catcher in the Rye occurred on July 16th, there’s been the usual amount of “honoring” the book and its ongoing legacy. But it seems that one legacy about it that still doesn’t get talked about enough is just how much Holden Caulfield served as a blueprint for the type of male now commonly referred to as an incel (a.k.a. involuntary celibate). The “subculture” of society (particularly American society) that has become so mainstream that much of its vocabulary has saturated everyday parlance (whether attaching “-maxxing” to a word or calling another man a “Chad”). Even a “feminist” like Lily Allen can’t help but incorporate “manosphere vocab” into her West End Girl Tour, donning a dainty pink apron that reads “CUCK” while performing “Dallas Major” (likely a nod to the way she allowed herself to be cucked by David Harbour, gender norms of that word be damned).
All of which is to say that, maybe the first notable time that “incel culture” truly permeated the mainstream was with The Catcher in the Rye (consistently billed as one of the greatest American novels ever written). Yet, at the time, of course Holden wouldn’t have been “received” that way. Of course Holden would have instead been viewed as a long overdue “totem” for alienated youth. Someone to “identify with.” Particularly for the men of the time who didn’t exactly “jive” with the whole “expected trajectory” of the 1950s-era male.
Indeed, the book was released right at the outset of the fifties, when WWII was still fresh in the cultural consciousness and American society was in the final stages of “recalibrating” from wartime life (to instead embrace modern capitalism on steroids). Which is why certain takes on the text posit that Holden Caulfield was J. D. Salinger’s way of reframing the disaffection and alienation that happened to men like him who saw active combat during the war and then had to somehow “fit in” again with society after seeing and knowing too much.
Maybe, to an extent, that interpretation holds true. And so, the symbol of Holden, it could be argued, shouldn’t be “faulted” if the intention was never to open some kind of floodgate for deranged men looking to take all their frustration out primarily on women (and, for a curveball, John Lennon). And “society.” Which itself naturally treats women as second-class citizens anyway. Though that belief is contrary to what incels are convinced of, which is that “women’s liberation” destroyed a so-called Golden Age of patriarchal and monogamous relationships (even if what is meant by “monogamy” in this regard is a kind of Don Draper approach to it reserved strictly for the husband, but not the wife). And that, because women presently have too much “freedom,” including the ability to determine which men they’ll allow entry into their vaginas, things have gone to shit.
As for Holden himself, he exists within the theoretical “Golden Age” of patriarchy, when men could be “men” and have their way with whatever girl (because the word “woman” isn’t as arousing to them) they wanted, regardless of whether she reciprocated those feelings or not (for another factor of this era to consider is women themselves were conditioned to believe they had to get married by a certain age, otherwise their options would dry up). And someone taking advantage of that is Holden’s roommate, Ward Stradlater, who is most definitely a Chad. So naturally, the contempt Holden has for Stradlater (in addition to just about everybody else) is manifest in every description he gives. For example, “He went out of the room with his toilet kit and towel under his arm. No shirt on or anything. He always walked around in his bare torso because he thought he had a damn good build.” This followed by the additional dig, “The reason he fixed himself up to look good was because he was madly in love with himself. He thought he was the handsomest guy in the Western Hemisphere.”
But the “annoying” quotient of Stradlater really amplifies for Holden when he learns that he’s going on a date with a girl named Jane Gallagher (more on her in a moment). And in the midst of being blindsided by this, Stradlater also has the cheek to ask Holden for the favor of writing an English paper for him that’s due the next day (even though Holden himself is being kicked out of school for failing his classes). Holden’s inner response to that is, “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 hotshot, and they’re always asking you to do them a big favor. Just because they’re crazy about themself, they think you’re crazy about them, too, and that you’re just dying to do them a favor.” Well, Holden might not be dying to, but he does it anyway. Just another instance of revealing how his outward obsequiousness is tied to his ever-expanding interior resentment.
As for Jane, there are two girls in Holden’s life that represent a kind of “a woman has to be a bitch or an angel” trope (sometimes otherwise known as the Madonna-whore complex). In the former category is Sally Hayes and in the latter is Jane Gallagher, who Holden is reminded of when he hears that Stradlater is about to go on a date with her. It’s obvious from the moment he starts prattling on about Jane (who mentioned to Stradlater that she knew him from when they lived next to each other) that he’s got a tongue-tied way about him. That, clearly, he still has some kind of crush on her. But, because she represents some sort of “purity” and “virtuousness” to him that can either 1) never be touched or 2) he is too afraid to approach, he doesn’t end up going down to say hello to her, as he keeps talking about doing to Stradlater while her gets ready for the date. This, too, is in keeping with incel behavior, with manchildren like Holden constantly getting overly in their head about the simple act of talking to a girl. For the fear of experiencing rejection—in whatever shape that might take—is too great for them to bear.
As for Sally, she’s the “chopped liver” option, as made apparent when Holden, already off to New York City for his “three-day bender” by this point, says, “Then I thought of calling this girl I used to go around with quite frequently, Sally Hayes, because I knew her Christmas vacation had started already—she’d written me this long, phony letter, inviting me over to help her trim the Christmas tree[,] Christmas Eve and all.” And yes, “trimming the Christmas tree” does have a euphemistic sound to it (as emphasized by both Eartha Kitt and Madonna’s versions of “Santa Baby”). In another hateful moment, Holden also adds, “I wasn’t too crazy about her, but I’d known her for years. I used to think she was quite intelligent, in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they’re really stupid or not.”
Such self-superiority and misogyny aimed at Sally is representative of how the incel mind works. This in addition to that mind being fueled by such intense loneliness. To be sure, the number of times Holden mentions feeling lonely are numerous, including saying, “I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead” and “New York’s terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed” (not to mention pretty much everything else about New York).
Even prior to Holden arriving in NYC for his three-day “reprieve” (before his parents realize that he’s been expelled…again), he makes his difficulty with the opposite sex overt based on the his “offhanded comments.” This extends to the ones he makes about the other boys who attend Pencey Prep, of which he critiques, “You probably heard of it. You’ve probably seen the ads, anyway. They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hotshot guy on a horse jumping over a fence. Like all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time. I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place. And underneath the guy on the horse’s picture, it always says: ‘Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.’ Strictly for the birds. They don’t do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didn’t know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all. Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably came to Pencey that way.”
His scorn for his fellow male students hardly stops there. Even though, during that last day as part of Pencey, it’s his fellow male students who have all the scorn for him. This confirmed by Holden giving an early indication that he’s not exactly a “popular guy” (least of all an athletic one) with the others when he mentions how he fucked up his one job for the day as the manager of the fencing team by accidentally leaving all the equipment on the subway while the team was on the way to a match in New York against the McBurney School. Alas, after Holden’s snafu, “The whole team ostracized me the whole way back on the train. It was pretty funny, in a way.” “In a way,” being the operative phrase. In fact, the manner in which Holden phrases things is what makes it such a dead giveaway that he’s an unreliable narrator. Lying to himself as much as to the reader. And yes, that’s what incels must do in order to function as well (in addition to “converting” others to their “cause”). At one point, Holden even flat-out says, “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life” (incidentally, that form of speaking—complete with the use of the word “terrific”—sounds decidedly Tr**p-esque).
Holden soon moves on from his fencing equipment debacle to complaining about the lack of “girl availability” at Pencey, even at the football games. For, as Holden notes (with not an unhorny tone), “I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they’re only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something.” But Holden, awkward and socially inept as he is (other hallmarks of the proverbial incel) can only adhere to the adage, “Look, don’t touch” when it comes to women. Even when he musters up the courage to pay for the company of one. As he does with a “prostitute” (the word continually bandied) named Sunny once Holden sets up in the seedy Edmont Hotel.
His reasoning for securing a sex worker? “I figured if she was a prostitute and all, I could get in some practice on her, in case I ever get married or anything.” Granted, many incels won’t even try to hire a sex worker to mitigate some of their frustrations as 1) most of them have way too many issues with any kind of intimacy and 2) they think only “betas” would deign to “pay for it.”
Yet, like Holden, incels have the same sexual ineptitude, with the former admitting, “Half the time, if you really want to know the truth, when I’m horsing around with a girl, I have a helluva lot of trouble just finding what I’m looking for, for God’s sake, if you know what I mean. Take this girl that I just missed having sexual intercourse with, that I told you about. It took me about an hour to just get her goddamn brassiere off. By the time I did get it off, she was about ready to spit in my eye. Anyway, I kept walking around the room, waiting for this prostitute to show up. I kept hoping she’d be good-looking. I didn’t care too much, though. I sort of just wanted to get it over with.” And yet, he can’t bring himself to.
And why not? Because “sexy was about the last thing I was feeling. I felt much more depressed than sexy.” Probably because it’s depressing him that he has to pay for sex and that Sunny is acting so “transactional” about it despite it literally being a transaction.Yet this is the case with most men of the incel variety who feel they “shouldn’t have to” shell out any cash to get a woman to let him stick it in. To his regret, Holden ultimately does pay for something: to get Sunny to stop trying to be sexual with him at all. Since he’s generally “skeeved out” (probably because, at his core, he hates women—not unlike Salinger) by this entire exchange. His desire to be “with” a woman outweighed by his ostensible disgust for women in general (though, naturally, some readers will point out that Holden is what’s called an “equal opportunity hater,” and that it’s not specific to women).
The nature of Holden’s character, however, is rarely examined in relation to his incel-esque qualities. Even though it’s long due for a reframing. And possibly as yet another source of “inspiring people in the worst way” literature (along with the Bible, The Satanic Bible and [for a which one of these is not like the other? effect] The Secret Agent). And yes, the horrid actions that The Catcher in the Rye has thus far incited and/or influenced were, uncoincidentally, perpetrated by the book’s male readers (see also: Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley Jr. and Robert John Bardo).
And so, there is, in a sense, a question of whether unleashing Holden Caulfield onto the world has done as much good as it’s done harm. For, yes, on the one hand, he is—and especially during the period when the book first came out—a beacon of light for the youths that felt (and feel) alienated by a society that not only doesn’t “get” them, but so patently wants them to ignore all of their own personal emotions and aims in favor of falling in line to become a proverbial cog in the wheel. Yet there is an element of this book that leads one to believe Salinger, like Oppenheimer, should have said at some point, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Or, in this instance, “Now I am become Incel, the destroyer of worlds.”