Despite what marketers would have you believe, angst isn’t just a gelled, chiseled, and perfectly sloppy product of the Twilight phenomenon. Holden Caulfield is the king of 20th-century angst, and he was doing the rounds with a trendy cut in the 1950s. Søren Kierkegaard set the philosophical bar for 19th-century angst, and he managed to do it in a top hat. And who can forget Prince Hamlet, the original European canon angst-er who wears skulls and pants?
Kierkegaard, of course, looked at heartbreak from a strictly Western Christian point of view, but literary figures like Holden and Hamlet have a much more universal register. (That is, unless you’re tired of all the agony and hesitation, in which case you should go read To Kill a Mockingbird for some of Scout’s wisdom: shoot first, ask questions later.) In fact, despite the potential language barrier (Hamlet: “What/is this quintessence of dust? Man doesn’t delight me”; Holden: “That fellow Morrow was as sensitive as a bloody toilet seat”) the two have a remarkable amount in common.
Both Hamlet and Holden are privileged young people in love scarred by the death of a family member. As a result of their mute suffering, they feel, and are bent on becoming, alienated from their respective communities. (Which isn’t much of a loss, considering they both think the world is full of hypocrites and impostors.) Lashing out through passive aggression, Holden and Hamlet lie/generally screw people over until their sanity becomes a matter of debate. And if that’s not enough to convince you of their strangely parallel lives, just consider the fact that they can both wield.
The main point of divergence arises when Hamlet sublimates his silent fury at the death of his uncle… not to mention his mother, his girlfriend, his girlfriend’s brother, his girlfriend’s father, his two closest friends, and himself. . He compares that to The Catcher in the Rye, which ends with Holden seemingly committed to a mental institution with all his frustrations alive and well.
If we take into consideration the fact that the Prince of Denmark is only a few races shy of, you know, the most powerful guy in the country, at a time when fencing and poisoning are still considered pretty commonplace, the apparent the audacity of his act diminishes, especially considering that it takes all five of Hamlet’s acts for him to even dare to do it. Holden, on the other hand, doesn’t hesitate to attack his male asshole roommate of his “right right on the toothbrush, so I’d rip his fucking throat open.” Even though the attack fails, this is pretty daring for a 17-year-old boy living in a prep school during the era in US history that coined the term “lice.”
However, Holden’s fighting spirit evaporates throughout the novel, and after losing his second fight, he imagines himself to be a gangster with a bullet in his stomach and his best girl by his side. “The damn movies,” he laments himself. “They can ruin you.” And maybe he’s right, considering that our modern, civilized notion of catharsis generally involves renting movies and letting the sets wash over you. Maybe Twilight is onto something after all.
