Re: franny & zooey

Jim said:
"So which authorial intent is correct? What Salinger intended when he wrote
"Franny," or how he intended "Franny" to be understood when he wrote
"Zooey"? You can't have both in this case."

I think you can have both. When reading Franny, we know nothing of the
Glasses. As it is a short story, written to stand as a unit (and later
collected into something bigger, as the publishing history tells us), we can
read it alone, and the name "Glass" is superfluous.

If we want to read the whole series as a unit, we need to read Franny a
little differently to be a part of the unit. Salinger intended that, too.

Nevertheless, I don't really care. Partly this is because I don't think the
Glass family saga is very good, and while I don't think that valid
interpretations of Salinger can be utterly removed from his own head, when I
have been talking in the Intent conversation about the validity of different
readings I have most usually had in mind the Great writer (for lack of a
better name), a very rare breed.

Also, whether the Franny in the short story of the same name has the surname
Glass, or a brother called Zooey, cannot be extracted from the story and is
not very substantive anyway. It doesn't show me anything beautiful or
human. It's just a detail and only becomes important if you're trying to
really tie the threads to the whole saga together, in which case you can
assume that she's the same girl. (The author plainly wants you to)

-robbie
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Received on Wed Oct 30 02:12:59 2002