We lost one of the American literary greats this past week. Fringe celebrates J.D. Salinger’s ineffable legacy with posts from writers who have been affected by his work. 

Bostonist co-editor Kerry Skemp writes:

I found out about J.D. Salinger’s death in that least Salingerian of forms: the Facebook status update. Discovering the death of a beloved but notably reclusive author of classic books through an always-changing, often-inane website was jarring, but not necessarily surprising: just the day before, another friend’s status update had alerted me of Howard Zinn’s passing. I was saddened by these deaths, but reassured, in a way, to know that others cared about these men too, that I was in a community of concerned individuals who wanted to carry on the legacy of these men. This saved me the responsibility of mourning alone, of living up to their legacy. I wasn’t alone. But was Salinger?

My first impulse after reading that status update was to run home and hug my copies of Salinger’s books—to make sure that they were okay, that they wouldn’t disappear in the wake of their author’s death. I continued, though, to feel strange about the disconnect between the painstakingly crafted, long-lasting works of a notoriously solitary author, and the ephemeral nature of Facebook’s online social environment. I wondered not only what Salinger’s death meant, but also about the significance of social media serving as a miniature stream of obituaries. Would J.D. have wanted to be discussed on Facebook? I don’t think he would have—but I don’t think he would have minded his work being discussed.

Authors leave so much of themselves behind when they die, enshrined in print and in readers’ minds; cemented in cultural consciousness. And perhaps few other writers are as tied up in their work as Salinger, because few other writers so viciously fought a public existence outside of it. Roland Barthes, though, famously points out that the author’s “death” actually begins with the act of writing:

“As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.”

Salinger was a famous writer, but famously resistant to publicity—going so far as to sue a potential biographer (Ian Hamilton) to keep him from using information derived from personal letters. His reticence had a primary aesthetic consequence—his work was able to deal with writing, not reality—and two main practical consequences. The first: he was labeled strange and reclusive. The second: he became the object of growing fascination.

So perhaps, expanding on Barthes, authors have multiple deaths. Maybe, in a sense, the true Salinger died not only when he began the writing process, and not only on January 27, 2010, but also the first time someone responded fanatically to his work. The true death of the author was caused, for Salinger, by the false conflation of “Salinger” with “Salinger’s work.” Excessive attention killed the person he could have been, forcing him to retreat into the role of recluse to preserve his work as he wanted it read: purely, for what it was, for how it was written. Imagine if he had been able to continue publishing for the 45 years (his last work was published in 1965) he remained silent. Perhaps he would have disappointed us—but, more likely, he would have given us so much more to enjoy. But our fascination with the “reality” of Salinger’s life denied us his fiction.

Our society’s apparent fascination with the “real” all too often ends up being an obsession with the manufactured. We love reality television, but it’s scripted. We love the lives of celebrities, but these are powered by more money and more intricate planning than most of us could imagine (e.g., any Lady Gaga outfit). We watch or read interviews with artists who repeat themselves nearly verbatim to multiple sources, blandly explaining what their work is “about.” We think there is something real in this fiction, even as we think actual fictional texts are too difficult to decipher when the author is not holding our hand.

Barthes sums this up well:

The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author “confiding” in us.

Salinger himself commented on this obsession with the “real” in Seymour: An Introduction. Buddy Glass, a writing professor, says of his students:

It would be absurd to say that most young people’s attraction to poetry is far exceeded by their attraction to those few or many details of a poet’s life that may be defined here, loosely, operationally, as lurid.

The “details” of his own life that Salinger gives us in his writing are actually quite numerous and richly detailed, but not exactly lurid. They come, primarily, in the form of quotations that demonstrate his broad reading, sharp mind, and unwavering curiosity—directed at ideas, not people. The prevalence of quotations has always been one of my favorite aspects of Salinger’s work. He doesn’t just toss off references to Fortinbras or “Ozymandias” to show that he’s well-read. He quotes from Chuang-Tzu and Sappho (among others): beautiful, classic lines; words that stand on their own and not simply for the name recognition granted to their authors.

Perhaps most importantly, Salinger showcases the fiction, poetry, and especially letters of his own characters. Buddy’s a writer; Seymour’s a writer. Large expanses of the Glass family books consist of notes (written on paper, written on mirrors) from one sibling to another. Esmé writes her sergeant a letter. The poems that Seymour makes up sitting on the lawn in his pajamas or as a prodigious eight-year-old have stuck with me for years, and even these poems-within-a-book have literary references:

John Keats

John Keats

John

Please put your scarf on.

The literary and epistolary elements of Salinger’s work thus underline the (beautiful) artifice of the overall effort. Salinger’s literary antedecents almost become characters in his books, reminding us of the writtenness of the work, silencing previous authors but for what they actually wrote down (as opposed to who they “were” in the public imagination). As Barthes puts it,

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash… the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.

Salinger was a master of this mixing, but he did it in context with dynamic characters whose personalities almost overwhelmed their literary counterparts. The Glass family is insane, but lovable; genius, but depressive. The combination of these seemingly contradictory elements makes for a sublime drama of intense thought and feeling that maintains a high comedic element. In contrast to Salinger’s public reticence, his characters prattle on, but prattle on brilliantly. Despite Holden’s depressive reputation and Salinger’s own near-pariah status, Salinger’s fiction is often supremely enjoyable; an absolute delight to read: truly engaging, and possessed of a literary connectedness found in few other works. This, here, is the real Salinger: he is not the hermit that media has made him into.

So now that Salinger has died not only in the act of writing but in reality, what do we do? What’s a fitting response to the death of this author? Barthes muses:

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing… the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Perhaps, then, the best tribute to Salinger’s death is to rebirth ourselves as readers, however odd it sounds. (We have born-again Christians, why not born-again readers?) We can start approaching reading from a new perspective: not “What can this book do for me?” but “What can I do for this book?” Not “Who wrote this book?” but “How can I read/write this book?” We can think more deeply about the content, not the creator. We can do research, make connections, have thoughts. We can challenge ourselves, not just entertain ourselves.

And perhaps, most importantly, we can respond to works. Many of us, even self-proclaimed writers, probably go through days without writing down anything but what we had for breakfast, how long we waited for the train or in traffic, how bored we were at work: all of these writings submitted as Facebook status updates that churn the morass of the “real,” rarely hinting at a larger truth. What if we read harder, thought more, really engaged? Would we make something more lasting than a status update?

Well, we can at least try. We won’t know what we’re doing when we set out. As Salinger quotes Saigyo:

What it is I know not

But with the gratitude

My tears fall

Let your tears fall for Salinger, but don’t stop there: read better, write more, think harder. Let there be something more than the “real.” Let it be meaningful. That’s all J.D. was asking for.