A week ago, a hundred thousand candles of memory twinkled across the world, on Facebook statuses, on literary blogs, in earnest conversations between sixteen year olds. J.D. Salinger, iconic novelist, eternal convert and Charlie Chaplin’s cuckold, had died at the ripe old age of ninety-one. Yet many of you could be forgiven for asking just what all the fuss was about. So he wrote a book encapsulating teenage angst and then went into hiding for sixty years; what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that throughout his career Salinger kept the one thing that is essential to every cultural legend: mystique. The Catcher in the Rye itself is as much of an enigma as its author. Its narrator is Holden Caulfield, a rebellious schoolboy who despises the weak figures of authority and ‘phony’ kids around him. Expelled from his prep school, he takes the train to New York, where he spends three days in a blur of loneliness, encountering girls, museums and his old English teacher, all the while his disaffection increasing. He dreams of becoming a noble savage guarding children from the lousy hypocrisy of the adult world: he will wait at the edge of the rye field to ward them away from the cliff.

The book was a Molotov cocktail cast into the middle of postwar America. Caulfield’s instability, his encounter with the prostitute Sunny, and above all the graphic language of his narrative drew savage opprobrium and fanatic admiration to the boy hero. The Catcher in the Rye was the USA’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover: a teacher was fired for putting it on his curriculum, and there was a national censorship controversy. For his devotees, Caulfield was the original icon of teenage angst, and he is thought to have inspired cult films like The Graduate, Donnie Darko and Igby Goes Down. Billy Wilder, Jack Nicholson and Leonardo di Caprio are all thought to have begged Salinger for the chance to play Caulfield in a film adaptation.

Salinger, as laconic as his fictional creation, bluntly refused. He published more than thirty stories during his long career, but something of Caulfield’s wariness and misanthropy clung to him, and he was a notorious recluse. After fighting in the D-Day campaign alongside Ernest Hemingway, he was admitted to an army hospital with severely shaken nerves. It was in that same year that Caulfield made his first appearance, in a short story simply titled I’m Crazy. The Catcher in the Rye followed in 1951, and spent thirty weeks on the bestseller list. From then on, he isolated himself and his young wife in New Hampshire and dabbled in short stories and a bewildering sequence of faiths, from Buddhism to Hinduism to Dianetics. He stopped publishing in 1967, although he jealously hoarded a great wealth of unpublished material. He shunned attention so much that his family would not hold a service when he died.

He once remarked that he was ‘in this world, but not of it’: much of his cult came from this otherworldliness, this brooding, Byronic charisma that bled from his life into his books, or perhaps vice versa. Intransigent, brilliant, lunatic: the world tends to remember men who defy it, and Salinger will not easily be forgotten. 

Miroslaw Balka’s installation How It Is currently fills the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Perspective and identity fade as you disappear into the vast steel container, enfolded in a desensitising darkness. The Polish artist presents an excellent foil to this piece with his video-based exhibition Topography.

The first piece, Carrousel, sets the viewer in the middle of four large projectors playing whirling footage of a disused military base. You can sense immediately that this was once a concentration camp. The whistling of the wind past the video camera transports the viewer, who, glancing from one screen to the next, comes to feel part of the artist’s filmic process.

The footage spins around the barracks ever faster until it reaches a crescendo of disorientating intensity. Carrousel feels like a frantic search for meaning. You strain to impose some sort of narrative, but the looping video undermines any attempts to fix and comprehend the images presented. Balka seems to suggest that the atrocities of the Holocaust cannot be rationalised, but that it is the duty of the artist to record them nonetheless. As a final tease, the al-Jazeera logo is painted beside the far projector. Connotations spiral off in every direction – witness reliability, religious tension between East and West – and any stable interpretation is undone.

Such indeterminacy is crucial to Flagellare A, B, and C. The artist has filmed himself whipping a reflected beam of light onto a concrete floor, then projecting the footage onto three rectangular salt beds. The first is placed by itself; with the sound turned off, the low radiance of projection gently illuminates the room.

The other two are set in a small room to the side, and the effect is entirely different. The harsh crack of the whip, now at full volume, has an aggressive, unsettling rhythm. The positioning of the salt beds creates an awkward path between the two, and there is a real sense of claustrophobia. Is this a futile act of exorcism, or do the Christian references point towards a redemptive value? These questions apply throughout an exhibition so heavily influenced by the Holocaust.

In the main room, whose atmosphere is at once solemn and chaotic, Bambi toys with ideas of innocence and knowledge. We see a herd of deer playing in the snow around the buildings of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As the video focuses, it becomes clear that we are watching from behind a barbed wire fence, the jagged lines dissecting the field of view. Balka develops the black humour in Carrousel, revelling in the perversion of childhood associations. But there is something more profound at work. The film Bambi was made in 1942 while deer still roamed uncomprehending through the Birkenau woods as the trains full of prisoners arrived. The juxtaposition of the banal and the terrible reminds us that, for all this suffering, life goes on regardless. It is hardly a comforting thought.

Topography belies Adorno’s claim that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. This is hauntingly beautiful work, and puts Pawel Althamer’s lacklustre Common Task in the shade.

Topography is at Modern Art Oxford. Admission is free. 

Our Country’s Good‘ by Timberlake Wertenbaker is set in the eighteenth century and is concerned with a collection of characters united by one feature – their desire to put on a play. Set on a convict ship, bound for Australia, officers, pick-pockets, murderers and hangmen feature in this play. The script has been edited to allow for a smaller cast of eight actors who took on multiple roles – a decision which was largely successful.

The production, directed by Charlotte Mulliner and Chloe Courtney, handled the aspects of meta-theatre particularly skillfully. The absence of flats was an acknowledgement of the play present in the script, as visible costume changes helped enforce the differentiation between the actors’ multiple characters. This is a play which depicts the performance of another play and so the production’s exposure of its own theatricality was especially powerful.

The direction provided moments of very powerful imagery, especially in the first scene when the audience is greeted by the sound of a ship at sea and the quivering body of a flogged man. This violence was used again to great effect in one of the ‘rehearsal’ scenes with the sound of the whip adding to an already tense scene. Simple lighting provided a clear change of place between the gloom of the prison and the glare of daytime Australia and also created a stark and powerful atmosphere in the opening scene.

The acting was also of a very high standard. Character changes were generally handled with ease but could have, on occasion, been a little more defined. In one unfortunate case the multitude of roles led to over-characterisation and undue emphasis on external mannerisms. But, again, the success of the production as a whole meant that we can probably forgive them. The most notable performances were those of the actors involved in the ‘rehearsal’ scenes; it takes a good actor to act acting, but, it seems, an even better one to act acting badly. Rachel Bull was particularly good as the darkly troubled Liz Morden and portrayed this complex character with skill and understanding. Alex Jeffery and Ashleigh Wheeler depicted the relationship between Midshipman Harry Brewer and Duckling Smith with sensitivity and depth. The developing intimacy between Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark and Mary Brenham, played by Rhys Bevan and Anna Maguire respectively, was treated with equal skill.

Overall, this is a production worth watching, prompting laughter as well as serious thought. The convicts’ comedy of manners is contained within a play which is substantially darker, questioning justice, perceived inferiority and the destruction caused by enforced inequality. This production captures the moods of both ‘plays’ effectively and is, as a result, an engaging and entertaining piece of theatre.

Four Stars