Innocence and its inevitable loss preoccupy J.D Salinger in ‘The Laughing Man’: it permeates the structure of the narrative and is foregrounded in the narrative itself. The state of innocence is not one of purity but of ignorance: nostalgia and an unsettling incompleteness of knowledge are intermingled through the presentation of multiple competing narrative voices. The story is undermined from both within and without its narrative frames by a series of disruptions – Mary Hudson’s arrival and departure, and the end of the Laughing Man story – which are constructed by Salinger as both formal interruptions of the intricate sets of framing narratives as well as substantive disturbances prompting the narrator to confront the inadequacy of his recollection of the past. An overarching scepticism towards the construction of genuine meaning also persists throughout the story, as the ostensible stability of the narrator’s account is undermined and an understanding of his account through straightforward symbolism and parallelism is rejected.
The self-questioning structure of the story refuses the possibility of a single, stable narrative, offering in its place one that is enclosed and intruded upon by others. ‘The Laughing Man’ is rather like the narrative equivalent of a set of matryoshka – Russian nesting dolls – with several framing narratives that each contain narratives within them. The catch is the coexistence of both obvious and hidden sets of framing and framed narratives. These hidden sets cast doubt on the veracity of the narrative in the more obviously matched pairs and – by extension – the mirrors and parallels between the obvious pairs that are suggested to exist.
Three frames are evident within the narrative: the Laughing Man narrative, the narrator as a child, and the narrator as adult presenting an account as if he were the child-narrator, while making corrections and adding explanations. The first set of narrative frames is explicitly marked out – the Chief’s telling of the Laughing Man story, which splits the narrative into the fictional world of the Laughing Man and the reality of the Chief. In turn, the Chief’s story and his telling of the story are themselves being related by the unnamed child-narrator. But Salinger does not delineate the contours of every one of the different narrative voices as obviously as he has done here: there is the suggestion of a further frame that encloses the child-narrator, the Chief (as narrated by the child-narrator) and the Chief’s story (ostensibly narrated by the Chief, but marked with the narrative voice and preoccupations of the child-narrator). This larger and ostensibly final frame is that of the adult-narrator, who offers comments (sometimes in parenthesis) alongside the narrative that is presented as that of the child-narrator. The artificiality of this division between adult- and child- narrator becomes evident as one realizes that there cannot exist any unmediated account told solely by the child-narrator, untainted by hindsight and the subsequent experience of the adult-narrator. Once the existence of an older version of the child-narrator is posited – as it is by the use of past tense and the very beginning of the story (“In 1928, when I was nine…”), which marks a recollection of the past – the authenticity of that narrative voice comes into question.
The use of asides by an older version of the narrator, supplementing the perceptions of a younger self, qualifies the account of past experience in ways that diminish it. A number of the parenthetical additions are pedantic and are full of unnecessary detail: that the activity the Comanches engaged in was determined “(very loosely)” by the season, for instance, or that Mary Hudson’s cigarettes were “(cork-tipped)”, are additions in the vein of an impulse towards qualification and exhaustive detail, both of which detract from the child-narrator’s account with the suggestion that it is insufficiently accurate. Other additions undermine the account in more fundamental ways. An aside at the beginning of the story – “(according to his financial arrangement with our parents)” – tempers the nostalgia of the account with the reminder that the cherished childhood memory was made possible by a commercial arrangement – that the surrogate parent the Chief became to the narrator was at its heart a matter of money paid. The additions within the Laughing Man story point out the flaws that the narrator’s younger self has uncritically accepted, threading sarcasm (“mysterious little breakdowns”) into hyperbole (“genius”): “(Some of the minor mechanics of his genius were subject to mysterious little breakdowns.)” Another seemingly needless addition, in parentheses – “[t]he story ended there, of course. (Never to be revived.)” – reinforces the presence of the outermost narrative frame. The two sentences report the end of the Laughing Man story with what appears to be pleonasm but is in fact a pairing that forces a re-evaluation of its combined meaning. The first sentence clearly demarcates the world of the Laughing Man from the real world of the narrator: it is a “story”, which ends as a matter of “course”. The second sentence, in contrast, is ambiguous: “revived” could refer to the reintroduction of the story or (the sense that the word choice more readily evokes) the resurrection of the Laughing Man; the uncertainty is added to by the absence of a clear grammatical subject. While the implied subject of the second sentence may seem to be “the story”, a reexamination of the first sentence throws this into doubt. The rhetorical affirmation supplied by the conversational “of course” equates the death of the Laughing Man as fictional character to the end of the story: the Laughing Man is the narrative.
These narrative frames, therefore, are imperfectly nested – they cannot be entirely separated into distinct parts and narrative voices, nor are they entirely contained by their frames. While there are clear differences between the fictional world of the Laughing Man and the real world of the Chief and the unnamed narrator, an elision – or at least a muddling – of these differences is suggested both in the narrative structure and in the similarities of diction and style shared by two accounts. The emotional fallout in the real world bleeds over into the fictional world of the Chief’s story, and elements of the Laughing Man’s fictional universe, unable to be contained in their narrative frame, spill over into the real world. The day the Laughing Man story ends with his brutal murder is also the day the Chief’s relationship with Mary Hudson appears to have reached its end. The account of their argument on the field is interposed between the two segments of the Laughing Man story, the first of which ends with a cliffhanger (Dufarge firing his gun at the Laughing Man). Structurally the real world is therefore allowed to interrupt the fictional; for the other boys in the bus, the real world (insofar as it related to the state of relations between Mary and the Chief) is exactly that – an intrusion. The frame of reference that precipitates Billy Walsh’s bout of crying, for instance, is the fictional death of the Laughing Man; only the narrator seems to have noticed the exchange between Mary and the Chief. There is hence no hierarchy of reference concerning the frames of narrative: strictly speaking, the frame of the ‘real world’ cannot fully contain or constrain the frame of the fictional. That the inner and outer narratives are presented in the same tense, and that the story moves seamlessly between both, further suggests that they occupy the same frame of reference – and they do, in some sense, for the child-narrator, who conflates fiction with reality, observing at the end that “a piece of red tissue paper flapping in the wind… looked like someone’s poppy petal mask.”
The narrative mirrors this inability of reality to keep the fictional world in check. Reverberations are felt when the real world pushes up against the fictional: there is a pervasive sense of being off-balance in the story’s second half, as the narrative tracks the destabilization of the child-narrator’s otherwise neat world. Beginning with the regularity of being picked up every weekday and weekend, and the comfort of a predetermined series of activities, the narrative slowly admits a series of disruptions. Mary Hudson’s arrival is the first disruption, one that is reflected in the presentation of dialogue. Throughout the story, Salinger presents dialogue as a continuous block of words, alternating between one speaker and the other (“I bluntly asked… He hedged…I asked him…He added”), combining direct and reported speech, rather than following the convention of separating out speech with a paragraph break. This technique is used to mimic the immediacy of the back-and-forth exchange that takes place during the Chief’s conversation with the narrator about Mary Hudson, and again with the Chief’s attempts to convince Mary Hudson not to play (though the latter alternates action and speech rather than speech-speech). The narrator’s attempts to speak with Mary Hudson later on are also entirely in reported speech imitating direct speech – “I asked” alternating with an action performed in response. In contrast, the Chief’s first interaction with Mary Hudson in front of the Comanches is presented in conventional direct speech – which is in this context visually and formally a disruption. A second disruption is Mary Hudson’s abrupt departure – her leaving precipitates a change in the fictional world of the Laughing Man that had until then the quality of a story that would carry on forever: “[w]e were long past worrying about [the Laughing Man] – we had too much confidence in him for that”. The disturbance caused is spreading: the narrator, sent sprawling by the superfluity of an “extra or discarded sweater”, loses his chance at the best seats in the bus, and the immortality of the Laughing Man is ended.
The Laughing Man story is itself a disruption of the ordered world of the narrator, whilst simultaneously existing as a stabilizing element. Salinger makes this evident through varying sentence structures: a fixed range of options is suggested by the sentence structures at the beginning of the story, in contrast to the sprawling, surreal world of the Laughing Man. Within the first two paragraphs of the story, the terms of the narrator’s interaction with the Chief are set out in a series of sentences that suggest a hypothetical if-then structure: a condition, followed by the imposition of a range of options dictated by this condition. This structure is evident in the parallel phrasing of “[i]f we had straight athletics on our minds, we went to Van Cortlandt” and “[i]f our Comanche hearts were set on camping, we went over to the Palisades”. In the same vein the activities the Comanches engaged in are condition-determined – here the outcome (a fixed set of choices separated by “or”) is surrounded by the factors it depends on: “weather permitting, we played football or soccer or baseball, depending… on the season”. The paratactic “football or soccer or baseball” is at variance with the hypotactic relation to the rest of the sentence that “permitting” and “depending…on” suggests. In contrast, in the Laughing Man story, combinations of elements seem almost random and are only loosely tethered to reality, giving the sense of an open-ended list. This openness is reflected in the structure of the sentences describing the Laughing Man’s “befriend[ing] any number and species of animals: dogs, white mice, eagles, lions, boa constrictors, wolves” and his “freelan[cing] around the Chinese countryside, robbing, highjacking, murdering when absolutely necessary”: the quality of a never-ending list is suggested by the omission of “and” in the final element of the listed set.
Furthermore, the narrative of the Laughing Man is a strange gallimaufry of ludicrous elements, taking place in a heightened reality that does not conform to the spatial contours of the real world. The “Paris-Chinese border”, for instance, is an impossible geographical feature in the real world, and the idea that the Laughing Man had “emerald vaults… [in] the Black Sea” is nothing short of laughable. The real world, however, is anchored firmly in time and space, as the recurring references to time indicate: “every afternoon””; “by that hour”; “Saturdays and most national holidays”; “[i]n 1928, when I was nine”. The Laughing Man universe is more diffuse and improbable, relying on markers that are inexact in comparison: “the Laughing Man was kidnapped in infancy”, “[s]oon the Laughing Man was regularly crossing the Chinese border…”. Strange details in the story also lend it spontaneity, a sense that it is being filled in on-the-fly through a surreal combination of archetypes and tropes: the “monks… who had dedicated their lives to raising German police dogs”, for instance, combines the higher moral sensibilities of asceticism and charity with the bathetic detail of rearing animals.
The existence of multiple points marking disruptions of order undermines the notion that the end of innocence consists in a single irrevocable break from naïveté: there is no singular instance that afflicts the narrator with a clear and undeniable knowledge. What he is left with instead is a vague and “fairly low, intuitive sense” of what has happened between the Chief and Mary Hudson. Narrative incompleteness in ‘The Laughing Man’ is hence traceable to both deficiencies in knowledge and in understanding in the chosen point of view: the child-narrator is not privy to all of the exchanges between the Chief and Mary Hudson, and remains in the position of an eavesdropper or an observer, always on the outside looking in. The narrator interprets signs rather than words: the repeated descriptions of the Chief’s movements and clothing over the course of the afternoon are relayed as if they were the key to the inaccessible conversation – but they are either left un-interpreted or interpreted erroneously. That the Chief had “his hair combed wet” and “had on his overcoat instead of his leather windbreaker” does not, as the narrator guesses, mean that “Mary Hudson was scheduled to join us”: while the guess can be construed to be accurate in the broadest possible sense (Mary does show up on the baseball diamond that afternoon), the details are incorrect. The narrator’s surmise is true, yet devoid of meaningful content: their regular “schedule” is not adhered to, and Mary never “join[s]” the Comanches as she usually does. In the same way a later grasp at meaning is unsuccessful, even if the intuitive sense of the narrator seems approximately right: after observing the Chief’s hands in his encounter with Mary, first “in the hip pockets of his trousers” but quickly adjusted “down to his sides”, the narrator finds himself “wishing the Chief had gloves”. The narrator appears to intuitively understand the vulnerability of the Chief’s uncovered hands, but mistakes the sign (hands) for the underlying meaning (emotional disturbance) and reacts with hope for a remedy of the appearance, whilst missing its deeper significance.
The story’s chosen point of view and formal structure – a series of interlocking frames shot through with disruption, foregrounding the narration of a figure external to the action – are also mirrored in its focus on insider/outsider dynamics and Otherness. Salinger’s construction of figures of the Other and the incompleteness of their assimilation posit a substantive, rather than merely formal, series of disruptions which act in counterpoint to and in reinforcement of the formal structures of the story: these disruptions both oppose the inward-proceeding set of framing narrators by suggesting a proliferation of other possible points of view, and undermine an already self-questioning narrative. Otherness is constructed in several ways: gender (Mary Hudson), disability (the Laughing Man), and culture (the elements of the Laughing Man story). These unfamiliar influences are assimilated to differing degrees, and often without full understanding. Oddly enough, the heightened adventure-story unreality of the Laughing Man assimilates far more easily to the narrator’s own reality. With Mary Hudson, he admits to a lack of understanding, even with the benefit of hindsight.
Othering proceeds in ‘The Laughing Man’ by a specificity of reference, setting up ostensibly stable lines of differentiation that are subsequently disrupted – thus highlighting the simultaneous fixity and instability of this categorization implicit in the chosen narrative point of view. The names with which characters are identified clearly divide them into distinct groups: the undifferentiated mass of the Comanches, and the outsider Mary Hudson. Except for the adults, the characters noticeably lack names – the other children in the group and the narrator remain largely unnamed until the end, and are often referred to as a collective “we”. Where they are named – the narrator briefly references an “Edgar something, whose uncle’s best friend was a bootlegger” – the name is truncated and the label given indicates the terms of his relation to someone else rather than a position in itself or a stable referent, unlike ‘Chief’. Notably, the Chief is always referred to with that designation except for a single-paragraph interlude detailing his life “in his hours of liberation from the Comanches”. The repeated use of the designation facilitates the construction of the Chief by the narrator as untouchable – as some element of fantasy and authority combined (“The Chief always found us”, “If wishes were inches…”) – and as both part of and apart from the in-group. Mary Hudson, in contrast, is singled out by the use of her name – always the compound “Mary Hudson”, never only her first or last name. The collective identity of the Comanches, however, is fractured when the story of the Laughing Man ends, and – for the first time in the story – the full name of a Comanche, “Billy Walsh”, is mentioned. The status of Mary Hudson as Other is also altered by her assimilation into the group by a demonstration of her ability to play baseball, the game that connected all the Comanches.
The story also borrows cultural features that, against the All-American baseball story in the frame narrative, are understood to stand for exoticism and strangeness, and are hence marked by an Otherness – but that are nonetheless associated with the familiar. Again this hints at possibility of alternative points of view, challenging the (admittedly already compromised) dominance of the chosen point of view while suggesting the possibility of assimilation. This duality is evident in the name of the Comanche Club, which is taken from a Native American tribe but used for a group participating in the quintessentially American activity of baseball. The Laughing Man story is filled with exoticising detail fused with elements of the familiar: that the Laughing Man subsisted on “rice and eagles’ blood”, for instance, suggests transference of the mythological status of “eagles’ blood”, an evocation of the American emblem, to “rice”; the heightened dramatic situations in the story, populated with figures like the “lovable dwarf” and the “giant Mongolian”, draw from overused tropes such as the twice-repeated instance of mistaken identity (the substitution of the bandits’ mother for the Laughing Man, and the false Black Wing). The Laughing Man, owing to his physical deformity, is another obvious element of the Other. But he is a figure of the Other that the narrator willingly assimilates: the narrator aligns himself with the Laughing Man and believes himself his “direct descendant” – which parallels his role in the framing narrative of an outsider who does not understand fully the events he witnesses and narrates.
There is a further complicating multivalence in the presentation of Otherness: in both the real and fictional frames of ‘The Laughing Man’, Otherness simultaneously attracts and repulses. The Laughing Man himself is lionized (his “ingenious criminal methods, coupled with his singular love of fair play, found him a warm place in the nation’s heart”), but his unconcealed face causes strangers to “[faint] dead away”; Mary Hudson is first referenced as an object of fascination, a girl of “unclassifiably great beauty”, but the Comanches soon begin to tire of her, glaring at “her femaleness”, “[w]here before [they] had simply stared”. Acceptance, then, is for the Other predicated on assimilation, which is itself a shifting and unstable ground of referents. The Laughing Man’s appearance is monstrous, but it can be concealed with a poppy-petal mask; Mary Hudson may be a girl, but she can prove herself by demonstrating good “stickwork” in baseball. The poppy-petal mask, evoking associations to the drug produced from it, is an opiate that relieves pain, concealing the Laughing Man’s face from sight and sparing him the horror of others. But it is also a means of suppressing his power: the face of the Laughing Man, unconcealed by this mask, is turned outward as a weapon in his final showdown with Dufarge. Further, the mask – described as a “gossamer mask made of poppy-petal” – is an ornament made functional, suggesting a parallel to Mary Hudson’s photograph in the bus, which takes on the same ornamental-utilitarian duality: it is first a decoration, but “gradually [takes] on the unarresting personality of a speedometer”. Mary Hudson’s use of the catcher’s mitt is another instance of this duality, but with the relation between adornment and practical utility reversed: she insists on wearing the mitt because “it was cute”, despite it impeding her fielding. This rapidly shifting nature of Otherness is attributable both to the inherent hazard of a concept defined through contrast and to the possibility of assimilation.
Salinger hence repudiates a straight one-to-one correspondence between the fictional elements of the Laughing Man story and the real world through the interlocking narrative frames and voices, the imperfect parallels between the two frames of reference, and the ambiguity of the construction of the Other, thwarting attempts to construct the Laughing Man as a symbol. Any reading founded on resemblance, it is suggested, is a foolish delusion, like the narrator’s “illusion” of being “the only legitimate living descendant of the Laughing Man”. Just as the narrator is unable to read from the line of the Chief’s jacket or the position of his hands the state of his relations with Mary Hudson, there is no meaning to be gleaned in a reading that posits the Laughing Man as a signifier with a fixed signified.
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