ABSTRACT
It is no longer possible to say that all modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn. In a literal sense it was never possible, whatever éclat Hemingway’s famous hyperbole has had. In view of recent developments in the novel, it sounds with the resonance of another era. True, Salinger is oblique witness to the life of a tradition that includes Anderson, Hemingway, Lardner, and Faulkner, but the figure of the innocent initiate cannot be the only iconographic center of a literature which is focused on the adult genital ego in culture, and on its corresponding mental sweat. It was once possible to think of a pure adolescent heart as symbolic of hidden virtue still resident in the young country, a natural, redeeming reality deeper than all worldly appearances. But the difference between Huck and Holden Caulfield is instructive: solitude has become isolation, traumatic experience fullblown neuroticism, lighting out for the territory retiring to the mental institution. Adolescence is no longer an example but a case. Salinger is on Mark Twain’s side, on his far side-civilized life is scarcely worth living-but we no longer have the freedom
of the asexual idyll; we have urban, claustral impotence. Holden’s grey hair symbolizes the end of an American myth, a time when America comes of middle age.
