Franny and Zooey, 1961, Little, Brown Books, ISBN 0-316-76949-5, by J. D. Salinger, takes the two youngest members of his precocious Glass family and exhibits them – as members of this family often are – struggling through their respective states of mental anguish. The youngest, Franny, has set herself on a path of religious inquiry and her closest sibling in age, Zooey, is cast to offer consolations when she, as inevitably many do, cannot find what she is looking for.
However, it is not that simple. The fact that this dilemma is taking place in modern America, and what’s more, through Salinger’s unerring eye, is enough to add sufficient complexity to the situation. That the book is divided into two sections, “Franny” and “Zooey”, originally published two years apart, allows an added level of complexity to flourish. The elucidations of the second section, “Zooey”, offer recourse from the issues presented in the first, and lead to an assured final conclusion.
Intellectualism
The novel focuses on Franny’s decent into a marginally self-indulgent nervous breakdown. The personal nature of the preconceptions which cause her to fall into such a state, and the religious undertones associated with it, are what cause them both to be, in the words of Zooey, ‘tenth-rate’. Her search for some holy absolute comes in response to all that seems false, hollow and conceited around her; her professors at college, the actors she performs with on stage, the girls in her dorm, the majority of the students at college, of the members of society in general, and herself.
Salinger’s fiction is populated with a litany of precocious, sensitive young people. In this novel, these characteristics are what make Franny and Zooey so aware of, and discomforted by, the incongruities in culture and society between what is true and pure and beautiful, and what merely claims to be so. It is these same characteristics that cause them to question whether they want to be qualified to make such distinctions, and to feel such self-loathing for having taken up the mantle so staunchly; issuing forth onto others the conclusions they have come to:
‘ “…especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else.” Franny made her voice stop. It sounded to her caviling and bitchy, and she felt a wave of self-hatred that, quite literally, made her forehead begin to perspire again.’
In a sense, Franny and Zooey are the conscience, the apologia, for intellectual superiority. Zooey proclaims himself and Franny as ‘freaks’, and lays the responsibility on his two oldest brothers, Seymour and Buddy, who took it upon themselves to educate and emancipate their siblings from ignorance. Though Franny and Zooey absorbed this education, they were not taught how to integrate such knowledge into their emotional lives or taught, in short, how to live with it.
Religiosity
Superiority and inferiority are personal sensations, if a person is going to exercise their intellect, Salinger states, it ought to be done with a sense of the universal, rather than being wedged deep with any internal or interpersonal grievances. Which returns the reader's focus, once again, to the spiritual, the ideological. What else can account for that which is not right, or pure, or meaningful, except faith?
It is interesting, and telling, that in all the cultural dilemmas of modern America, Salinger finds the answer to them all pertains to a certain religiosity – a search for meaning and purpose – and that in the superficiality present in a lot of the issues, the answer would be not be corporeal. Franny’s fevered repetition of ‘the Jesus prayer’, an intonation which after much persistence leads to mystical experience, is her attempt to break into such themes. This attempt, as previously mentioned, not successful.
She finds the solution is much closer to her, much more familiar and mundane. It is this, ultimately, that the novel champions. A faith in basic humanity, unrehearsed and unconcernedly flawed, as well as a faith in human guidance – a thing eventually performed by Zooey after a brief, slightly misanthropic, struggle – and its ability to move through disillusion into illumination.
J. D. Salinger is the author of three novels, including Franny and Zooey and The Catcher in the Rye, he has also published a book of short stories.
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