Would Holden Benefit From Alt Culture? (Semi-)Serious Speculation over a Bizarre Question.
EDIT 2: I made more The Catcher in the Rye... things... on my other blog.
EDIT: In retrorespect, I should probably apologize to Mr. Mitchell for doing this topic despite my relative ignorance of counterculture.
In The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger, the protagonist Holden Caulfield spends much of the book in a state of alienation from his surrounding culture, and believing, as teenagers are wont to do, that he is the only person to ever feel this way (something Mr Antolini specifically calls him out on when trying to convince him to put effort into his studies). This alienation from the mainstream is a defining feature of alt cultures such as punk, goth, and emo. I don’t know so much about goth culture, but I know a smattering about punks and emos, so they will be the main focus of this post.
Having considered the matter, I personally think that Holden would have at least some reservations about emo culture. While artists such as Evanescence’s Amy Lee (Friedman) and My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way (2) (sidenote: Way might not consider the band emo, but emos do) have had genuine mental health struggles that inform their work as artists, and there exist emos out there who have also had genuine mental health struggles, I think there’s also a group of emos who view cutting and the like as more performative, which Holden would think is really phony. Honestly, considering his diatribe about Ernie in chapter 12, where he says “If I were a piano player, I’d play in the goddam closet,” (Salinger p95) he may consider those singers adopted by emo culture as phonies as well. Holden is prone to making generalizations, so to him, “there exist phony emos devaluing your legitimate emotional hardships because they think it’s edgy and cool,” may be equivalent to the statement “emos are phony and their playacted depression means no one will take me seriously even if they were ever willing to before, and it makes me even more depressed.”
It’s also worthwhile to consider punk music. My process on this was fundamentally tied to the thoughts of anti-administration songs like Green Day’s “American Idiot,” and Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” While Holden isn’t particularly political, his attitude towards education is at least somewhat similar to what is spelt out in “Another Brick in the Wall.” For example, Holden is critical of his Oral Composition class with Mr Vinson, and the latter’s attempt to prevent students going on digressions he personally finds interesting, while “Another Brick in the Wall” likens education to thought control, and asks teachers to leave kids along. Most interestingly, Green Day has a song called “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield,” which is about Holden, at least in part. I cannot imagine a world in which Holden would ever be happy that anyone other than Phoebe wrote a song about him. This would be worse than emos. This would be non-consensual fame.
My Chemical Romance and Green Day also both star gender non-conforming members who wear eyeliner, despite being generally masculine-presenting during most of their 00’s concerts, and Evanescence is headed by a woman. Holden is in the 40s, which has very strict gender roles, but even for his society, he is in a uniquely regressive place, as he is in an all-boys school, where Holden considers himself defective for respecting other girls’ consent. The sexist views Holden has been exposed to have made him willing to objectify women in discussions with his peers (see his argument with Stradlater) and when he goes to the Lavender Room, where he repeatedly insults the intelligence of the women he interacts with, thinking of them as “dopey” and “morons” (Salinger, p80). Even with Jane Gallagher, Holden clearly respects her, but still casts her in the stereotypically nurturing role of nurse when fantasizing about his epic movie-style confrontation with Maurice. This, combined with Holden’s (at least partially Carl-Luce instilled) fear of gay people and being gay, as shown when he says “[Carl Luce] used to scare the hell out of us. I kept waiting to turn into a flit or something,” may give him another reason to be skeptical of emo and punk bands. That being said, on the off chance that Holden actually wouldn’t think of said bands as phony, they may help somewhat counteract the toxic masculinity he has internalized at his prep schools, an environment he already hates.
Considering punk songs also reminded me of anti-authority songs from the sixties, particularly The Turtles’ “Down in Suburbia.” While “Down in Suburbia” is a counterculture song, and thus also more political than many of Holden’s rants, it does nitpick the performativity of suburban culture with lines like “nobody ever dresses sloppy in suburbia” (The Turtles) while also taking potshots at deeper issues like affairs that the hypocritical inhabitants of its song might want to hide. We can take this idea of wanting to look good without doing good as phoniness, and we can see—especially in Holden’s musings on the nuns he meets—why he might not like this in particular, even though the titular suburbias did not really become common until the fifties, and The Catcher in the Rye is set in 1949. However, this critique of society does not necessarily tap into the depression and alienation that Holden feels.
Friedman, Michael. “Why Amy Lee Knows That Broken Pieces Shine | Psychology Today.” n.d. Accessed January 31, 2026. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brick-by-brick/202106/why-amy-lee-knows-that-broken-pieces-shine.
“Gerard Way - ImNotOkay.Net.” 2012. February 25. https://web.archive.org/web/20120225144954/http://www.imnotokay.net/my-chemical-romance/gerard-way.
Salinger, Jerome D. 2014. The Catcher in the Rye. Little, Brown and Company.
The Turtles - Topic. 2016. Down in Suburbia (Remastered). 4:05. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2gz2Xj-ZDY.
Note: I used Zotero (https://www.zotero.org/), an open-source application that to my knowledge doesn’t use AI by default/in the config I’m using (although I think there exist AI plugins for it, which I’m not using) to create these citations.
I agree with a lot of ideas here, and I think it's very interesting to think of Holden in the context of the punk/emo-sphere. I will however say that I think Holden is a very political person. He may not see himself as that, but the fact that he's so anti-society is a firm political stance. He wants to escape the system, escape education, escape work, escape the mundane. Inherently this is a political criticism.
ReplyDeleteNo apology necessary at all--I've had similar ideas myself over the years. In many ways, Holden seems "ahead of his time," or to anticipate certain directions that the culture would move in. We're relatively used to the idea of the smart, cynical outcast as a "lane" or identity that a person can assume (especially in the formative high-school years, when we are experimenting with identity more than any other time of our lives), and it's hard to imagine a time when this isn't yet a thing. I have to remind classes that Holden feels like he's the first person on earth to ever have these feelings, and Esther Greenwood is in a similar situation. Part of Antolini's aim is to inform Holden that he's "not alone," but Antolini is talking about writers and artists who have explored their various discontents with the world. Popular music at this time is still not going near these themes--Holden is seeing jazz performers playing standards on clarinets and pianos so the audience can dance. He's never heard rock-n-roll, let alone punk.
ReplyDeleteMaybe Holden would have found a community of sorts if he were coming of age ten or twenty years later--but it's just as likely that he would be discontented even with the artists and communities that embrace this alienation. I could imagine him ranting about the ironic conformity in a culture where everyone tries to appear "nonconformist," and there's certainly plenty of room for critical pushback against "phonies" in "alternative" cultures as well. Maybe this guy is simply impossible to satisfy, or maybe he would have found a home in more tolerant and diverse alternative subcultures.