SOURCE: "A Cloister of Reality: The Glass Family," in J. D. Salinger, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1979, pp. 115-50.

[In the following excerpt, Lundquist traces the emotional development of the main characters of Franny and Zooey.]

The book [Franny and Zooey] actually consists of two long stories put together into what almost, but not quite, becomes a novel. An abrupt shift in narrative technique from omniscient point of view in the first story (originally published in The New Yorker, 29 January 1955) to having Buddy serve as the narrator in the second (also published in The New Yorker, 4 May 1957) gives the book an awkward structure. But despite the narrative shift, the two stories are best considered as one unit, not only because the second story serves to resolve the first, but also because the two of them taken together mark an essential change in Salinger's fiction. Through his use of the Glass family as an organizing concept for his vision, and through his increased reliance on Buddy as the narrator in that portrayal, Salinger attempts to more firmly capture the paradoxical splendor and squalor of life, while concurrently presenting a vision of twentieth-century America that is ultimately positive. The source of that vision is something that comes as a relief after the occasional overemphasis on the efficacy of Oriental thought in Nine Stories, and Holden Caulfield's apparent attainment of Buddhahood at the end of The Catcher in the Rye. What we perceive through Salinger's ventriloquial act (his own vaudeville role, so to speak) is a deeper awareness engendered by the paradox itself—that there are no pat answers to the problems of existence—not even Zen—and that the paradox of splendor and squalor, or of the nice and the phony, can be resolved only through character and being. Franny and Zooey thus places emphasis on character rather than action, and clearly shows Salinger moving from the well-made structures of his early stories to the discursive narrative insights of Buddy Glass working from his position within the conceptual and focusing frame of the family.

Franny and Zooey opens on the morning of the Yale game at an Ivy League school, with Lane Coutell, a pretentious senior English major of the sort who believes that someday he will own a hotline to PMLA, waiting on a railroad platform for Franny, his date for the weekend. Salinger quickly gives us two insights into Lane's character. The first is when one of his classmates in Modern European Literature wants to know what "this bastard Rilke is all about." Lane nonchalantly claims to understand the German-Bohemian poet (1875-1926), but it is soon apparent that someone with Lane's coldness of spirit could never comprehend Rilke's personal soliloquies, the Duino Elegies, which celebrate the poet's intense emotional reaction to his existence. The second insight provided by Salinger reinforces the idea of coldness. When Franny's train arrives, Salinger delineates Lane's personality in a sentence that is a reminder of F. Scott Fitzgerald at his best: "Then, like so many people, who, perhaps ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expressions that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person."

Franny, by contrast, greets Lane warmly, but she immediately feels guilty about expressing affection for him, and Salinger carefully establishes a mood in which both partners sense that everything is unaccountably going wrong with their weekend from the start. They go for lunch to a restaurant called Sickler's, a place where one was careful to order snails, not steak. Lane holds forth pompously, and Franny soon realizes that he epitomizes the self-centered, pseudo-intellectual qualities that have caused her to become hypersensitive and acutely critical of people like him. "I'm just so sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers I could scream," she says. They get into an argument over poets and poetry, and in the first of several discussions concerning bad writing versus good writing that is almost a major theme in the last two books, Franny says, "I don't know what a real poet is. . . . I know this much, is all. If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything." The poets she knows on the faculty of her college do not do this; they simply leave what she calls "syntaxy droppings."

This discussion literally makes her sick. She excuses herself from the table and goes to the ladies' room, where she breaks down and cries. She takes a little green book she has been carrying with her out of her purse and presses it to her chest, regaining her composure almost at once. She returns to the table and tries to explain what is bothering her. The main problem is ego and self-centeredness. She tells Lane that she has even dropped out of the play she was in because she could not stand all the ego. "All I know is I'm losing my mind," she tells Lane. "I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego." And then she reluctantly begins to tell him about the little green book, The Way of a Pilgrim, written by a Russian peasant in the nineteenth century who wanders across his country until he meets a starets, a seer who teaches him a method of praying without ceasing. The method involves repeating the "Jesus Prayer"—"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me"—until the prayer becomes self-active, and something happens: "You do it to purify your whole outlook and get an absolutely new conception of what everything's about." The same process is used in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions to gain a sense of religious peace and transcend the self, but it means nothing to Lane. As Franny talks about The Way of a Pilgrim, he is intent on dissecting the froglegs that are on his plate, and tries to shut her up by asking her if she really believes in that stuff. She replies that it is a way of seeing God: "Something happens in some absolutely nonphysical part of the heart—where the Hindus say that Atman resides, if you ever took any religion—and you see God, that's all." Lane may have taken some religion, but he seems incapable of responding to religious ideas, looks at his watch, and ironically says, "God. We don't have time." He means that they might not be able to get to the game on time, but he also indicates that he has no time for Franny's mysticism concerning apprehending the divine. He tries to tell her that religious experiences of the type she describes all have a simple psychological explanation.

Franny cannot take anymore. She tries to return to the ladies' room but faints before she can get there. She wakes up on a couch in the restaurant manager's office with Lane looking down at her and saying that he is going to take her to the room that he has reserved for her. And then, in his selfishness and blindness (also revealing that they have been lovers), he assures her that he will later try to sneak up the back staircase. He leaves to get a cab, and the first part of the book ends as Franny begins mumbling the Jesus Prayer.

The Way of a Pilgrim and the Jesus Prayer are by no means being put forth as answers to anything by Salinger. Franny has reached the point of a nervous breakdown as Lane leaves her on the couch, and the Jesus Prayer is no solution to her problem. A major idea in Zen (and also in Plato's parable of the cave, and even in Emerson's Perennial Philosophy) is that people who are too critical of others, who are too concerned with the analysis of particulars, fail to reach an understanding of the oneness of all things, and eventually disintegrate themselves. This is what has happened to Franny, and the Jesus Prayer serves only to lead her deeper into her paranoid and hypercritical withdrawal from reality.

The condition Salinger leaves Franny in as she is lying on the couch (a condition that continues on into the second part of the book) indicates that Salinger has become more committed to what might be called the "wait" than to the "quest." Franny is a victim of her fate, not a ruler over it, and her subsequent experience becomes a "downward path to wisdom." From this point on in the story, Salinger pays minimal attention to plot. As in The Fall by Camus and Waiting for Godot by Beckett, conversation, self-analysis, and the search for meaning within the experience become more important than what happens, and extreme care is exerted to avoid pretending that value exists where it does not.

Franny's search for meaning involves, of course, the dissolution of opposites—good and evil, squalor and splendor, the nice and the phony—that figures so often in Salinger's fiction and is an inevitable result of Salinger's interest in Zen. The Zen neophyte (which so many of his characters, including Franny, resemble) begins by thinking about rational solutions to apparent opposites, including the distinction between self and others, and ultimately reaches an impasse that is created by the struggling ego. When the neophyte "lets go," gives up the struggle, and no longer distinguishes between acting and being acted upon, he is on the way to enlightenment. Once he has reached this state, he is free to be fully acted upon in every action he performs, and this means complete absorption in the process of loss of ego. As we have seen, many of Salinger's stories seem to be structured around producing this experience in some of his characters. Franny is thus a typical Salinger character on the road to enlightenment, wrestling with the problem of burdensome ego, isolated by continual criticism of others and of herself, something that is, in fact, the central dichotomy of the younger Glasses.

But her enlightenment is no simple process and it cannot be seen merely as another dialogue between Zen master and pupil with an easily discernible (if not solvable) koan at the center. Nor is it described by means of a tightly structured narrative as her experience in the "Franny" part of the book is. The "Zooey" section is narrated by Buddy, who opens by saying that he is not giving us a short story at all but "a sort of prose home movie," with what plot there is hinging on "mysticism, or religious mystification." The story does have some of the qualities of a home movie because it conveys the impression of an unedited glimpse into the private, and occasionally awkward, moments of life in the Glass household. The idea of the prose home movie is a dangerous metaphor, however, because home movies when viewed at length are finally of interest only to those who see themselves or someone they know intimately on the screen. And the effect often is one of self-indulgence, just the criticism repeatedly directed at Salinger's work from the "Zooey" section on. One does get the feeling in reading the later books that their final charm may be reserved, just as home movies are, for a chosen few or an inner group of initiates. As Buddy says of the leading characters in the story, Franny, Zooey, their mother Bessie, and himself, "We speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle."

As round-about as the dialogue in the story is, and as esoteric (and precious) as it sometimes seems, it does add up to a ventriloquist's act through which Salinger moves Franny toward a moment of self-transcendence that is as satisfying as anything in his fiction. But the process begins in indirectness and unwinds like an 8 mm film that has been spliced together at the kitchen table. After making his disclaimer at the start, Buddy introduces Zooey, who is reading a four-year-old letter from Buddy, in the bathtub, and Buddy then says that he will refer to himself in the third-person throughout the rest of the story. This does not give us quite the narrative stance that we have in "Franny," however. The presence of Buddy is felt during the rest of the story, and there is a sympathetic, insider's tone that gives the narrative more warmth and authenticity than we find in "Franny."

Buddy reproduces the letter in its entirety, and through it we can see the role he and Seymour played in educating Franny and Zooey—an education Zooey is not altogether satisfied with. After expressing his reservations about Zooey's choice of acting as a career, Buddy tries to explain why he and Seymour took over the instruction of the youngest members of the family so high-handedly. Because of the brilliance of Franny and Zooey on the quiz show, both Seymour and Buddy began to worry that the two child prodigies would turn into "academic weisenheimers." Seymour had become convinced, through his reading in Zen, that education should not begin with a quest for knowledge but with a quest for "no-knowledge," the realization that the state of pure consciousness known as satori involves being with God before he said, "Let there be light." So the prescribed reading included Max Mueller's Sacred Books of the East, and Franny and Zooey grew up knowing more about Jesus and Gautama and Laotse and Shankaracharya and Huineng and Sri Ramakrishna than they did about Homer or Shakespeare or George Washington. All of this had so much impact on Zooey at one time that he tried to get over an unhappy love affair by translating the Mundaka Upanishad into classical Greek.

Buddy apologizes for not following up on this early instruction after the death of Seymour, and explains that what prompted the letter was hearing a little girl in a supermarket say she has two boyfriends, "Bobby and Dorothy." This reminded him of Seymour's observation that all legitimate religious study leads to unlearning the illusory differences between boys and girls, day and night, and heat and cold. But this is not easy to unlearn, and the instruction has hardly been beneficial to Franny and Zooey—Franny has suffered an incipient nervous breakdown and Zooey has an ulcer.

Zooey puts the letter away and picks up a script for a television play he has been reading, when Bessie, dressed in a kimono and a hairnet, comes into the bathroom and opens the medicine cabinet. Here we are given a long list of what is in the cabinet—from Ex-Lax to three tickets to a 1946 musical comedy, "Call Me Mister." The list is distracting and does not seem necessary, but it functions (as do the later catalogs of the contents of the Glass family living room and the bulletin-board collection of famous quotations in Seymour and Buddy's room) not only to continue the prose home movie idea, but also to emphasize that there are objects, furnishings, and ideas that have an existence—are there—independent of the internalized concerns of the ego. This cataloging tendency continues through the next book and emphasizes the point that while it is necessary to see through external reality, it is still there, still real, and must be dealt with before any transcendence can take place.

Zooey carries on a long and irritable conversation with his mother from behind the bath curtain (another example of Salinger characters not addressing each other directly—it is as if there is a bath curtain separating all of them). Bessie is a great worrier, but her worry at the moment concerns Franny. Bessie wants Zooey to find out what is bothering his sister. Since she got home on Saturday night (it is now Monday morning), she has kept to the couch, has been unable to eat, and remains silent and withdrawn. Bessie does suspect, however, that the little green book might have something to do with Franny's condition, and Zooey indicates that she could not have made a better guess. He tells her that the book and a sequel to it, The Pilgrim Continues His Way, came out of Seymour and Buddy's bedroom, and it is because of Seymour and Buddy's educational system that both he and Franny are especially susceptible to such ideas. "We're freaks, the two of us, Franny and I," he announces. "I'm a twenty-five-year-old freak and she's a twenty-year-old freak, and both those bastards are responsible. . . . The symptoms are a little more delayed in Franny's case than mine, but she's a freak, too, and don't you forget it. I swear to you, I could murder them both without even batting an eyelash. The great teachers. The great emancipators. My God. I can't even sit down to lunch with a man any more and hold up my end of a decent conversation." And he adds that he cannot even sit down to a meal without first saying "The Four Great Vows" of Buddhism under his breath: "However innumerable beings are, I vow to save them; however inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them; however immeasurable the Dharmas are, I vow to master them; however incomparable the Buddha-truth is, I vow to attain it." Instead of being enlightening, the four vows have become obsessive.

With this attitude, Zooey ends his talk with Bessie, gets dressed, and goes into the living room to wake Franny up. Near the start of the dialogue, Zooey notices some sheet music on a stand. A sepia reproduction of Mr. and Mrs. Glass in top hat and tails is featured on the cover, and the title, "You Needn't Be So Mean, Baby," functions for Zooey as a beatific signal. He tells Franny that one problem with both of them is that they have "Wise Child" complexes, that they both cannot stop picking at others because of their own sense of superiority. He accuses her of using the Jesus Prayer for egotistical purposes, for laying up spiritual treasures for herself, without even praying to the "real" Jesus. He reminds her of the time when she was ten and came rushing into his room with a Bible in her hand saying she could no longer believe in Jesus because of the way he threw the tables around in the synagogue and because he said that human beings are more valuable to God than the fowls of the air. At that point, Zooey says, she quit the Bible and went straight to Buddha because of her inability to understand any son of God who might actually have said and done the things attributed to him. And now in using the name Jesus as a mantra in the Jesus Prayer with the idea, recognized in most meditative religions, that repetition of a word or phrase until it is automatic will lead to escape from external reality, she is continuing that tendency. But the Jesus Prayer that Jesus himself might have advocated would have a different aim—"To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen . . . go away and never come back." Wholesale adoption of the Jesus Prayer as a mantra is dangerous, Zooey explains, because it is entirely possible for someone to be blissfully reciting it while robbing the poorbox. Real Christ-Consciousness involves the realization that "You Needn't Be So Mean, Baby."

What Zooey is getting at here is the old problem of dichotomies in Salinger's thought. Religious mysticism can be nice, but it can also be phony. At the time the stories were written, Zen had become not only fashionable but downright faddish as had other mystical ways of seeking transcendence, and the dialogue between Franny and Zooey seems clearly to be a reaction to this phenomenon. Seymour may have reached the state of enlightenment through his studies in Oriental wisdom, and Buddy may nearly have gotten there, but for Franny it has led to a breakdown and for Zooey an anxiety-caused illness. What Salinger is doing is something that seems inevitable in American thought. He is cautioning that we must take pragmatism into account in judging any religious approach or philosophical notion. We should ask the question, does it work? Simple mysticism simply accepted does not. Nor does an educational approach that forces the learning of the East on unsuspecting subjects as the young Franny and Zooey were.

Retreat from external reality, whether it be undertaken simple-mindedly through the Jesus Prayer or the necessity of it forced upon us by would-be gurus, can be just as phony as blindly pursuing material wealth and pleasure. And besides, Zooey realizes that external reality is not always so bad, and it is a mistake to lose touch with it. In the midst of his discussion with Franny, Zooey looks out the window and sees a little girl playing a trick on her dachshund. She is hiding behind a tree waiting for the dog to pick up her scent and find her. When the dog does, the two experience an immense and playful reunion. Zooey cannot help saying, "God damn it, there are nice things in the world—and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked. Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos."

Franny starts to cry, and Zooey realizes he is not getting anywhere with her, perhaps because he is being too critical. He goes into Seymour and Buddy's room, where Seymour's separate-listing telephone has been kept all these years. He sits in front of the telephone with a white handkerchief on his head and thinks for awhile. Then he picks up the phone, dials the apartment telephone, disguises his voice as Buddy's, and asks to speak to Franny. He makes use of his acting ability not to draw attention to himself, nor to flatter his own ego as most actors do, but instead he acts out of kindness, out of concern for Franny. He thinks it will help her if she can hear Buddy's voice, but he makes a slip and she recognizes him. He tells her that she can go on with the Jesus Prayer, that he has no right to criticize her, but that she should realize that the only thing that counts in religious life of any sort is detachment and selflessness. But she should realize that "desirelessness" is not the same thing and is not necessarily good. It is her desiring to be an actress that has made her a good one. "You're stuck with it now," he reminds her. "You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect." So what can she do? For her, he says, the only religious thing she can do is to act: "Act for God, if you want to—be God's actress, if you want to." But what she cannot do is act for herself, for her own ego, or even rave about the stupidity of the audiences. She has to act selflessly in the theatre, the world, as it is. This is part of Christ-Consciousness, something the Jesus Prayer can never give her.

He tries to explain to her what this means in another way by telling her how he resisted shining his shoes before one performance of It's a Wise Child because he thought the studio audience, the announcer, and the sponsors were all morons. Not only that, his shoes could not even be seen by the audience from where he sat. Seymour heard all this and told him to shine them anyway, to shine them for the "Fat Lady." Seymour did not tell him who she was, and Zooey had a picture in his mind of a cancerous woman sitting on her porch all day swatting flies and listening to the radio, but it somehow all made sense to him, and he shined his shoes. Franny confesses that Seymour had said the same thing to her. Zooey says to her that he is going to tell her a terrible secret. "There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady" he says. "That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know—listen to me, now—don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? , . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy."

This emphasis on the need to give love to others, on the need to practice a selfless and lonely benevolence, gives Franny a sudden moment of joy, a satori based not on retreat from external reality but of acceptance of her place within it. Like the Sergeant at the end of "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor," she falls into a deep dreamless sleep, the squalor in her life resolved through love.

But we must be careful in reading this story not to assume that Salinger is naively advocating the acceptance of Christianity through Zooey's long discussion of the nature of Christ and the incarnation of Jesus in the Fat Lady. If we look at the story this way, as an argument for Christianity, the resolution of Franny's breakdown at the end appears to be too sudden and without clear explanation. It is difficult to see how Zooey's theological and ethical arguments, taken simply by themselves, could bring about a conversion in anyone as intelligent as Franny is. We must remember, however, that despite his attack on the Jesus Prayer, Salinger is still writing with the Zen ideas found in Nine Stories in mind, although considerably more cautiously expressed, in Franny and Zooey. What happens at the end of the book is quite in keeping with Zen teachings. Zen enlightenment is often the result of a ridiculous gesture of the master or an absurd answer to a serious question. So one way of understanding the ending is to realize that Franny gets over her break-down by the very absurdity of Zooey's equation of Christ and the Fat Lady. Salinger thus does not prescribe an all-encompassing love for the predicament of modern man, but suggests that the solution lies in the Christ-Consciousness that is the result of enlightenment through absurdity.

This positive view of the possibilities for enlightenment amid the splendor and squalor of modern life does not depend, however, on an acceptance of either the ideas of Zen or the beliefs of Christianity. It is a statement in favor of seeking the ultimate solution through character. Franny and Zooey lacks overt rendering of action. In fact, the single most dramatic action is Franny's falling asleep at the end. But through dialogue, Salinger has Buddy show us how Franny moves away from the pat answer of the Jesus Prayer to the moment of release when she overcomes the problem of ego. Her enlightenment represents a growth in character that is permitted and encouraged by the family circle within which it takes place and which affords a range of possibilities. "Everybody in this family gets his goddam religion in a different package," Zooey says. But the problem for all of them is to deal with hypercriticism, with the ego. And this is the message they all apparently sooner or later discover out of the legacy of Seymour's wisdom and the fact of his suicide.

The message does not arrive very speedily or with much economy of statement. And the same commentary might be made on the entire "Zooey" part of the book that is made about the letter from Buddy that is read in the bathtub: "virtually endless in length, overwritten, teaching, repetitious, opinionated, remonstrative, condescending, embarassing—and filled to a surfeit with affection." It is difficult to defend the book structurally other than to use Buddy's metaphor of the prose home movie (a metaphor that implies a lack of structure), and the book did come as something of an embarassment to readers who had defended and admired the earlier books. But Franny and Zooey has an unusual quality in contemporary fiction—it deals with characters the author actually likes. At times there may indeed be a surfeit of affection, but the affection nonetheless is transferable to the reader. Earnestness is, of course, no justification for a lack of style and structure, but the narrative warmth that comes through this book justifies Salinger's use of the Glass family as a means of delineating the sources and range of his insight and stability.

Salinger's love for the Glasses left some reviewers uneasy, however. John Updike, for instance, writing in the New York Times Book Review [September 17, 1961], objected to the uncomplementary jangle of the book's two parts, and then complained that "Salinger loves the Glasses . . . too exclusively. . . . He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation." And in stronger language, Alfred Kazin went at much the same thing in the Atlantic [August, 1961]. The Glass children are not only "cute," he wrote, but they "do not trust anything or anyone but themselves and their great idea. And what troubles me about this is not what it reflects of their theology but what it does to Salinger's art."

But just as many, if not more, critics were taken by the book's warmth, although the seeming lack of control remained disturbing. Time [September 15, 1961] responded to Kazin's charge by stating, "Critics . . . have suggested that the Glass children are too cute and too possessed by self-love. The charge is unjust. They are too clearly shadowed by death, even in their wooliest, most kittenish moments, to be cute, and they are too seriously worried about the very danger of self-love to be true egotists." The very tenderness of the book appealed to the reviewer in The Christian Century [October 6, 1961]: "The cumulative effect is bright and tender rather than powerful, and poignant rather than deep: these are the strengths and limitations of Salinger as a writer. These granted, he has an almost Pauline understanding of the necessity, nature, and redemptive quality of love. In Salinger, probably more than in any other serious contemporary writer of fiction, the modern college generation seems to find a mirror of its problems." It was the treatment of love that also impressed A. E. Mayhew in Commonweal [October 6, 1961]: "These two stories are about love. . . . For all their faults, they have a pleasing toughness and positiveness in their intent, something more than the verbal sleight-of-hand for which Salinger is justly famous." Granville Hicks, in The Saturday Review [September 16, 1961], replied to the many attacks on the book by writing that "Some critics have charged him with priggishness, and have said that he always has to put his heroes and heroines in the right. This is manifestly untrue. He dares to create characters who have virtue as their goal, but both Franny and Zooey are agonizingly conscious of their shortcomings, and both have a horror of self-righteousness. . . . In Franny and Zooey he is at the top of his form."