Re: franny & zooey

Point was that his intention changed, though -- we can only say he "intended" it
to be read as part of a larger unit "after the fact" of the original composition
of Franny.

See, the point about authorial intent is that what the author had on his mind
_at the moment of composition_ is reflected in the text. That's what you've
been arguing all along. In this case the author seems to have changed his
intent after the fact, and incorporated the story into a larger whole after the
fact (a whole that had not been conceived of in relation to that story when it
was written). In this case, then, _after the fact_ the intent Salinger had "at
the moment of composition" was abandoned for another intent.

You can have both so long as you don't take intent "at the moment of
composition" seriously. So what's happening, really, has nothing to do with
reading "Franny" in terms of differing intent. It has to do with reading it in
terms of different "contexts." The original context was that of an isolated
short story printed in a magazine and unrelated, directly, to anything else
Salinger had written. The changed context was as a companion story to "Zooey"
and as part of the Glass family saga.

As I've been saying all along, then, "intent" is irrelevant and context is
everything.

Jim

"L. Manning Vines" wrote:

> 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 08:37:22 2002