Re: Franny Bashing


Subject: Re: Franny Bashing
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Fri Oct 19 2001 - 12:23:50 GMT


Paul Miller wrote:
>
> All Franny does is faint on the couch -- how appropriate an action for
> an actress (oh wait, I forgot, she'd given it up) -- and listen when
> Zooey lays it all out for
> her.--------------------------------------------------------
>
> But what does Zooey lay out for her really? That we are all the fat lady and
> she is christ so we are all christ or ie Shirley Mclaine running on the
> beach shouting out I am god, I am god, ugh I'm a little nauseous just
> thinking about it. Salinger could have left out the last three pages or so
> and it would have been a better story I think, gotta make sure and salt a
> few I thinks in there, and just ended with an artists duty type of thing.
>

Eh...this is probably a reasonable contextualization of Christ's teachings
given Salinger's own beliefs (and quotes from the Gita spread around F&Z as
well), but I don't think you really need to buy into Vedic monism to
identify yourself with the people around you. There are, of course,
Christian readings of Christ's teachings that don't read it as a claim that
"we are all God," but rather that Christ personally identifies with
everyone the way, say, a parent would personally identify with his or her
child (insulting my children bothers me more than insults to me).

At any rate, you don't really need to understand these ideas as "Shirley
McLaine crap" to get something out of them...given the things going on
these days, a little bit more of "we're all us" and a little bit less of
"us vs. them" may be in order...

> Salinger after his exile in Cornish began to take his characters lives and
> problems and try to answer them with sterile ideation which more often than
> not reflected his current reading. I still think Zooey was written because
> Salinger no longer looked at the pilgrim's prayer the same way and wanted
> to write Zooey at least partly as a corrective.
>

heh...that's a pretty interesting thesis...I could almost buy it. Do you
have any references?

> The scene in Catcher where Holden realizes you have to let them try to grab
> for the ring even if they may fall off shows his growth and acceptance of
> change and it's change and loss of innocense that he's been resisting. After
> this scene he is no longer the catcher in the rye field. At the end his
> "missing" of people like Ackley and Maurice is an acceptance of people with
> their flaws, the difference here between catcher and F&Z is that this
> acceptance is of people as they are and not through some hokey phoney
> ideation that deserves to stay on new age book shelves.
>
> Paul

I don't quite know that you can go from "missing people" to "accepting
people with their flaws." Do we know, for example, that had Holden been
with Ackley again he wouldn't have just started complaining about him being
a moron and a phoney? I think Holden's change certainly points in this
direction, but it's sure spelled out a lot more clearly in F&Z than it is
in Catcher. I see more of a mood swing in Catcher than a change in
thinking...where in F&Z I see a mood swing (and a wider one at that) along
with a specific way of seeing the world differently...

Jim
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