The Art of Literary Thieving: The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, ...

finally, dismissing any lasting value in Salinger's works. The persistent popularity of The Catcher in the Rye and the gushing stream of admiring comments flowing from its many readers became particularly irritating to critics such as George Steiner, who viewed the novel as having badly skewed the entire realm of literary criticism. “A new, probably rather minor achievement comes along, and at once critical language soars to sublimity. The result is a serious devaluation of critical coin” (Steiner 1959, 362). Struggling to be fair in his evaluation, Steiner added, “Of course, Salinger is a most skillful and original writer. Of course, he is worth discussing and praising. But not in terms appropriate to the master poets of the world, not with all the pomp and circumstance of final estimation” (363). Placing Salinger against the background of the world's best writers, Steiner viewed him as “a good minor writer with an audience which is, by any traditional tokens, largely illiterate…He demands of his readers nothing in the way of literacy” (360)—a remarkable oversight, as we will later see.

Salinger's novel was widely attacked for its apparent deficiencies, from the softer tones of the noted critic Arthur Mizener, who stated that “The Catcher in the Rye does not quite come off as a whole” (1953, 26), to the harsh condemnation of the Detroit Police Department, which branded the book “pornographic trash” (Kegel 1957, 188). Among professional critics, however, there appeared to be a general agreement that the novel was seriously lacking in literary form and meaning. R. D. Charques concluded that “the tale is rather too formless to do quite the sort of thing it was evidently intended to do” (1951, 224). David Leitch noted, “There is no plot to speak of and the reader's interest is held entirely by the narrator's internal monologue” (1960, 431). Mizener, having a similar view, stated that the novel “is primarily concerned neither with the working out