[In the following excerpt, Wenke explores the theme of personal identity in Franny and Zooey.]

With its sense of heightened expectation in relation to a facile reality, the opening scene of "Franny" evokes the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ivy League undergraduate men wait at a train station for the arrival of their dates. Once the train pulls in, the football weekend—the opponent is Yale—can begin with its rounds of expensive lunches, cocktail parties, postgame receptions, and fancy dinners. It will be a carefully choreographed public exhibition. The college boys cannot wait to perform their parts in the pas de deux, a strained display of confected elegance. Behind his urbane narrator, Salinger directs all his contempt for Ivy League phonies into his mocking depiction of their pseudointellectuality. They speak in "voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries." Salinger's general target is phoniness. More precisely, it is the pretentiousness associated with smug intellectuality, the presumption of analytical superiority.

Among the collegians waiting on the platform is Lane Coutell, Franny Glass's, boyfriend. He whiles away the time rereading what might appear to be a conventional love letter. Actually it reflects the tensions that exist between the smooth surfaces of their romantic discourse, on the one hand, and those disquieting forces which undermine the idyll, on the other. As a correspondent, Franny is both affectionate and resentful, laudatory and critical, adoring and irritable, effusive and retentive. Lane reads words that express ardor: "I just got your beautiful letter and I love you to pieces, distraction, etc." On the one hand, she longs to see him; she cannot wait to go dancing. She tries to allay his apprehensions over whether her parents heard them come in and, apparently, make love: "[Y]ou can relax about that Friday night. I don't even think they heard us come in." Her complimentary close reads "All my love," followed by sixteen X's.

On the other hand, this breathless letter contains material that ruptures the sense of romantic rapture. While she "absolutely adore[s] [Lane's] letter, especially the part about Eliot," she goes on to write, "I think I'm beginning to look down on all poets except Sappho. I've been reading her like mad, and no vulgar remarks, please." Assuming that Lane praised Eliot—a reasonable surmise given Eliot's preeminence among conservative intellectuals in the mid-1950's—Franny's quotation of decidedly nonmodernist lines reflects a radical divergence in the couple's artistic tastes. Furthermore, Franny is both compliant and complaining. She accepts Lane's advice about using a dictionary but chides him for his machismo: "I hate you when your [sic] being hopelessly super-male and retiscent (sp.?). Not really hate you but am constitutionally against strong, silent men." In the P.P.S. her self-effacement betrays lurking insecurity: "I sound so unintelligent and dimwitted when I write to you." Behind this feeling is her dislike for Lane's tendency to analyze "everything to death."

Like any piece of prose, Franny's letter is a text awaiting interpretation. It directly reflects her divided mind, yet Lane construes the text as a placid sign of stable love. Later, at lunch, for example, when Franny admits to having felt "destructive" all week, Lane reveals himself to be a selective reader: "Your letter didn't sound so goddam destructive." Franny replies, "I had to strain to write it," a remark that undercuts the authority of Lane's one-dimensional reading. The letter indeed reveals "strain" and self-division. It offers signs of Franny's inchoate breakdown. She even writes, "I've been going i.e. crazy lately." This sentence could mean "crazy in love"; it could mean "emotionally disturbed." It might mean both. Throughout the Glass stories, Salinger continues this practice of incorporating texts-within-the-text—letters, quotations, diary entries, poems, book titles—in order to highlight the thematic context. Franny's letter marks the beginning of her attempt to recast the meaning of her words, not in relation to Lane or T. S. Eliot but in relation to what she considers real poetry, a literature of spiritual fulfillment.

Salinger presents Lane as a shallow, fatuous performer. When the train arrives, for example, he "empties" his face of expression. By affecting nonchalance, he prepares a face to meet the face he is about to meet. He takes great pleasure in kissing Franny's coat, a pathetic, if comic, gesture that reduces Franny to a sensation he has sequestered in his mind. Similarly, when he takes her into Sickler's, the "highly favored place among, chiefly, the intellectual fringe of students at the college," he appreciates Franny's appeal as an admirable object. The narrator mocks Lane's self-satisfied hauteur: he "briefly looked around the room with an almost palpable sense of well-being at finding himself . . . in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl—a girl who was not only extraordinarily pretty but, so much the better, not too categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt." When Franny perceives his "momentary little exposure . . . she elect[s] to feel guilty for having seen it, caught it, and sentence[s] herself to listen to Lane's ensuing conversation with a special semblance of absorption." She is a victim of her own consciousness. For her to perceive that she is perceived as special is for her to be doubly punished: first, by the tacit admission of vain superiority, the conviction that she is worth being seen in such a way, and, second, by the masochistic decision to torture herself by faking interest in the bore's heady lucubrations.

At the outset of the story Franny upholds surface expectations only through her capacity for repression. On the platform, upon making her entrance she does not reveal her "impatience over the male of the species' general ineptness and Lane's in particular" but instead squeezes his arm with "simulated affection." After claiming to have missed him, Franny takes mental note of the falsity of her words. She then feels guilty for not feeling as she thinks she should. The scene at the train station introduces the story's pervading thematic conflict between public form and private consciousness, between public action and private conscience.

The primary action of "Franny" takes place at Sickler's restaurant. It provides a forum for a dialogue on competing intentions and alternative principles. In this debate Lane Coutell is a cardboard player—Zooey describes him as a "big nothing"—a self-absorbed bore, impressed by his snobbish "A"-paper analysis of Flaubert. In Lane's company Franny questions the ground of being. Torn and disturbed, she is coming emotionally undone: she is disgusted by her culture's artistic, educational, and religious forms of self-making. Salinger presents the conflict between Lane's attempts to maintain (and advance) bourgeois conventions through his self-congratulatory social performance, on the one hand, and Franny's insistent challenge to these postures, on the other, first, through her withering critiques of them and, second, through the introduction of spiritual correctives. Lane wants not only to maintain conventional surfaces but to orchestrate her movements across these surfaces. He wants her to be an extension of himself, an appendage who is also a worshipful audience. The restaurant—"Sickler's was snails"—epitomizes Lane's world. He can drink martinis with a right-looking girl and mime the manners of adult, upper-class sophisticates. With hearty appetite, Lane orders Sickler's haute cuisine of snails, frogs' legs, and salad, while Franny orders a chicken sandwich, which she does not eat. With Franny across the table, Lane pontificates on Flaubert's lack of "testicularity." Such a perspective on the master novelist no doubt informs his essay, which he wants to read to Franny. In summarizing his views Lane talks nonsense—a mixture of psychobabble, cant, slang, aspersion, and namedropping: "I think the emphasis I put on why he was so neurotically attracted to the mot juste wasn't too bad. . . . I'm no Freudian man or anything like that, but certain things you can't just pass over as capital-Freudian and let them go at that. I mean to a certain extent I think I was perfectly justified to point out that none of the really good boys—Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Shakespeare, for Chrissake—were such goddam word-squeezers. They just wrote. Know what I mean?" Franny does not know what he means; she has not been paying attention, though she acts like she has. When she asks for his martini olive she deflates the impact of his grand conclusion: his professor thinks Lane "ought to publish the goddam paper somewhere."

Franny's abstraction precedes her explicit refusal to play the role of supportive, adoring female. She accuses Lane of sounding like "a section man"—an instructor or graduate assistant who runs "around ruining things for people." Franny hates the process of reducing the experience of literature to dry, analytical terms. She is torn between "self-disapproval and malice." While loathing herself for speaking up at all, she nevertheless levies blast after blast at the "pedants and conceited little tearer-downers." Franny's attack on pedantry is but one aspect of her dissatisfaction with the university intelligentsia, a class that includes poetasters and egotists. Franny reviles the pedagogical structures that support a glorification of Self as an autonomous intellectual agent. As G. E. Slethaug points out [in The Canadian Review of American Studies, Spring, 1972], Franny "strenuously objects to the various kinds of hollow formalism evidenced by students, academics, and poets." Franny dismisses, for example, the well-published Manlius and Esposito: "[T]hey're not real poets. . . . 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." This affirmation of the poet implies her love for her brother, Seymour; she sees him as the apotheosis of the pure poet.

Her repudiation of Manlius and Esposito reflects her rage against whatever might be understood as conventional life. When Lane mentions having seen Wally Campbell, Franny launches a diatribe against affectation and money; she registers her disgust with safe and predictable social manners. Wally Campbell represents mere conformity. As Franny argues, once the individual has become co-opted by the mores of a self-consciously recognizable class, then that individual renounces the possibility of direct experience. Even Bohemians, in Franny's view, are conformists: their act is only apparently iconoclastic; they simply conform to a beard and black clothing stereotype. The Wally Campbells, essentially, are "tiny and meaningless and—sad-making."

In fact, as far as Franny is concerned, any action that projects a self in the costume of any social form becomes tainted. The actor necessarily involves what Franny denounces as "ego," a narcissistic preoccupation with the self as social (as opposed to spiritual) entity. Ego is to be condemned because it informs any self-conscious action that issues in social performance. Stage acting, then, constitutes an extension and intensification of the egotistical role-playing that Franny associates with conventional behavior in everyday life. Franny quits the theater in order to evade such vain self-dramatizations: "It seemed like such poor taste, sort of, to want to act in the first place. I mean all the ego. And I used to hate myself so, when I was in a play, to be backstage after the play was over. All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm."

Critics of the Glass children fault them for a presumption of vain superiority, the notion that they inhabit an Archimedean position of judgment. To give him a bit of credit, Lane accuses Franny early in their discussion of making "one helluva, sweeping generalization." It is her way. While Franny's diatribe attacks sterile convention, its "sweeping" virulence is in itself a reflection of pathology: she complains too much; indeed any form of behavior, under her strictures, can be abstracted, or generalized, into phoniness. There is no room for the possibility that someone circulating backstage might be sincere in tendering congratulations. Franny is afflicted with the Holden Caulfield disease so deftly identified by Phoebe: "You don't like anything that's happening." Crucially, Salinger presents Franny's eruption as a symptom of her breakdown. She would be the first to admit that her mind is not right: "All I know is I'm losing my mind. . . . I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's." Franny's diagnosis identifies a vexing problem that inhabits the center of Salinger's work: at one extreme, social roles can be phony evasions of genuine identity; at the other extreme, the abolition of all social roles coincides with one's annihilation. Over here, Lane Coutell preens his feathers; over there, Seymour Glass blows his head off. Franny's sickness leads her to the dichotomous conclusion that one is either an ego or a nobody: "I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody."

The pervading irony of the story is that Franny tenders both her diagnosis and her conflicted soul to a most unworthy audience. In listening to her, Lane feels "worried and vaguely, unfairly conspired against." He compensates by adjusting his demeanor so that he looks "attractively bored." On a number of occasions Lane perceives Franny's outburst as a "goddam bug" that threatens to "bitch up the whole weekend." Franny's jeremiad does not—and will not—wrest Lane from his impregnable self-absorption. In fact the long dialogue dramatizes the limitations of language. By meeting words with words Franny fails to make herself understood. Her discomposure, especially her fainting spells, is to Lane merely a symptom of her "bug." Franny's critique does not provide catharsis. In speaking her mind she becomes more self-divided.

Like Holden in Catcher, she thinks she might simply disappear: "Maybe there's a trapdoor under my chair and I'll just disappear." Such a wish points to the dark underside of Salinger's fiction: the desire to disappear coincides with a rejection of one's place in the social world. Disgusted with everything, one opts for invisibility, self-erasure. Holden and Franny want to disappear; Seymour commits suicide; the reclusive Buddy absents himself. The author himself drops way out of sight. The possibility of securing a balance between the extremes of solipsism and phoniness, the possibility, as it were, of securing peace so that Franny might find a way to live in the world, does not engage Salinger's attention in "Franny," though it does become the central focus of "Zooey." "Franny" dramatizes Franny's dis-ease with social performance as it issues in her longing for self-renunciation. The specific causes (and effects) of her breakdown are not made clear. Instead Salinger presents an accumulation of overlapping contexts—romance, guilt, pedagogy, art, and at the end, biology—any one of which provides access to a consideration, but not an explanation, of her tortured condition.

The dialogue between Franny and Lane has its climax in the examination of the efficacy of an alternative way of life. Franny's obsession with The Way of a Pilgrim and the Jesus Prayer presents in a literary and religious paradigm a potential corrective to the horrors of ego. The Way of a Pilgrim is an anonymous personal narrative that Franny claims she found out about in religion class. (Later Zooey reports that she got the book and its sequel, The Pilgrim Continues His Way, from Seymour's desk.) The Way depicts the quest of a 33-year-old Russian peasant who in the nineteenth century wanders the countryside in order to discover what it means "in the Bible when it says you should pray incessantly." Franny's enthusiastic report on his progress culminates with her account of the Jesus Prayer. One can pray incessantly, she reports, by repeating, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me." Franny's celebration of the pilgrim contrasts with Lane's analysis of Flaubert. Through prayer the pilgrim achieves oneness with the mystical rhythms of life; through pedantry Lane abstracts literature into an egotistical display. The Jesus Prayer offers an antidote to the entanglements of ego. The repetition of the prayer subsumes the self in the reflexes of spiritual process. The prayer, Franny explains, "becomes self-active. Something happens. . . . and the words get synchronized with the person's heartbeats, and then you're actually praying without ceasing. Which has a really tremendous, mystical effect on your whole outlook." Franny insists that the quantity of rote repetitions "becomes quality by itself." This process is not limited to one's sectarian affiliation. Rather, the effacement of ego as a means of transcendence can be achieved in either Western or Eastern religious traditions. She links the experience of saying the Jesus Prayer with a similar practice in "the Nimbutsu sects of Buddhism."

Franny's account of the pilgrim does not relieve her psychological distress. The story offers, perhaps, the form within which her self-therapy might be achieved. It is inviting, certainly, to see Franny's celebration of the pilgrim as authorially endorsed. Salinger would, then, be affirming the pilgrim's narrative as a self-help book. However plausible this view might be, it must be qualified by the underlying psychological reality of the story: Franny is having, as Bessie and Zooey so clearly recognize, a nervous breakdown. The Jesus Prayer reflects both her genuine desire for spiritual fulfillment and a dangerous symptom of mental instability. To merge one's very being with a self-active prayer would eliminate identity. This condition should not be understood as the goal of the surviving Glass children, most notably Franny, Zooey, and Buddy. Rather, what one does with personal identity is the tortuous dilemma with which they wrestle.

Certainly Franny's quest for the spiritual life seems preferable to Lane's fatuous lit. crit. sensibility. Ironically, and comically, Lane can view the self-active Jesus Prayer only as inducing "heart trouble." His most obtuse and reductive contribution is the notion that "all those religious experiences have a very obvious psychological background." Salinger hates psychoanalysis, especially for its tendency to demythologize religious sensibility into self-inflated wish-fulfillment fantasies and to transform creative idiosyncrasy into white-bread normality.

Shortly after Lane's reductive summation, Franny faints on the way to the lavatory. After this incident Salinger proposes another explanation for her discomfiture: she may be pregnant. Throughout the story Franny suffers from poor appetite, and she feels waves of nausea. After she revives, Lane is solicitous: he insists that she rest all afternoon in her room. He hopes, he tells her, that he "can get upstairs somehow." Franny does not reply. Lane laments their dearth of sexual activity: "You know how long it's been? . . . When was that Friday night? Way the hell early last month, wasn't it? . . . Too goddam long between drinks. To put it crassly." In no subsequent published piece has Salinger addressed the issue of Franny's possible pregnancy. It does not come up in "Zooey." The events of "Raise High" and "Hapworth" precede 1955. In Seymour Buddy makes no mention of Franny having ever been pregnant. The intimation of pregnancy, while it does not mitigate her attacks on the conventional life, certainly does remind us that Franny is a creature of flesh as well as spirit. Salinger's teasing implication seems to be a playful gambit designed to stir debate, a way of unsettling the issues the story addresses. The story ends, therefore, on a note of irresolution. Salinger depicts Franny in terms of motion and silence: "Her lips began to move, forming soundless words, and they continued to move." The narrator stays outside Franny's mind, letting the story trail away into the repetitions of the Jesus Prayer . . .