More than twenty years ago, walking into a foreign bookstore in Tokyo, the first thing I noted was a slightly musty yet soothing scent. It came from the paper used for these books and magazines, which had been shipped from overseas—the paper either thicker or thinner, and certainly rougher, than its counterpart in Japanese publications. Breathing in the unfamiliar smell, I walked through the dimly lit aisles lined by stacks and shelves with a somewhat disorganized feel. I had ventured into this well-known bookstore to buy a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.
I found one and flipped the pages of the paperback, feeling the texture on my fingertips, my joy inexpressible. But I wouldn’t tell anyone about this visit to the store, let alone my excitement to “hear” Holden’s voice in his language instead of the Japanese translation I’d read. People around me, family or friends, would only see my interest in reading a foreign book in the original language as another sign of my weirdness. Whatever people had to say about this delight—intense yet quiet, and deeply felt—I was certain I found love.
That language fails to capture experience is no cause for disappointment, as it is not in the business of doing any such thing. If we can manufacture a linguistic representation of an experience, one that gives an idea of it without presuming to go proxy for it, then it has done its work. If more is wanted, if representation won’t suffice for the purposes at hand, well, you’re going to have to be there.
Satire, in the right hands, is nobody’s friend. It should make you wince, maybe even disgust you, at least as often as it makes you laugh. We’re now living in the best, and most dangerous, time for satirists — if, that is, you recognize that satirists are not advance agents for social justice, not benign tellers of parables designed to make you giggle politely at someone else’s foibles and misguided views, but never, ever, your own.
That’s where Blue Movie, Terry Southern’s guided missile of a dirty book, now bravely reissued by Grove Press, comes in.
A rich history woven with insights from four generations of the Grinker family’s research, “Nobody’s Normal” shows how a society’s needs and prejudices shape how it deals with mental illness, from the regrettable asylums and lobotomies of past centuries to the recent corporate trend of recruiting employees with autism. Grinker makes an edgier point, too: that cultural circumstances — whether in combat or on a college campus — can influence how someone expresses psychological pain.