[In the following excerpt, Detweiler analyzes the spiritual crisis at the heart of Franny and Zooey.]

A study dealing with the individual religious experience cannot ignore that most discussed of crises in recent American fiction, namely, Franny Glass's slightly suspect nervous breakdown in Salinger's Franny and Zooey. Salinger even more than [Philip] Roth appears fascinated by the individual crisis and particularly by the crisis that has religious origin or result. Holden Caulfield's trouble in The Catcher in the Rye has been given theological interpretation, in later stories we learn that the suicide of Seymour Glass ("A Perfect Day for Bananafish") had religious connotations, as did the quasi-breakdown of Sergeant X in "For Esme—with Love and Squalor." . . .

Salinger cannot be interpreted in terms of a specific theological position. He reflects instead a typically American religious attitude which, at odds with the traditional creeds and swept by winds of doctrine, fashions a faith from pieces of popular movements. Speaking for the Glasses in the novel at hand, Zooey points out emphatically the diversity of religious conviction in his family. The gospel of Seymour is informed by Christianity (Protestant, Catholic, mystic varieties), a large dose of Zen Buddhism, a smattering of existential terminology, and a flavoring of Jewish tradition. Although I do not think that the net result as applied to Franny's problem is altogether convincing, the following analysis should at least demonstrate once more the central religious concern of a popularly received "secular" novel and should underscore the significance of religion as a serious consideration in our latest fiction.

The plot of Franny and Zooey, such as it is, can be sketched in a few sentences. In the forty-odd pages of "Franny," Franny Glass, youngest of the Glass geniuses and a college coed, has a mild nervous breakdown in a restaurant with her date at the beginning of a big Yale football week end. The illness is provoked mainly by Franny's reading a small book about a Russian pilgrim and the Jesus Prayer. In "Zooey," about three times as long, Franny is at the parental Glass apartment in New York nursing the collapse. Zooey, next oldest Glass and a television actor, has a discussion about his sister with Bessie (the Glass mother) in the bathroom, and then two sessions with Franny herself in which he half talks, half tricks her out of her emotional and religious crisis.

Franny's underlying difficulty, the fundamental cause of her breakdown, is not just that she is disgusted by her own ego or overcome by phoniness, although these are her initial complaints. The crisis, long in coming, is the result of a confused concept of sainthood. As one learns in the epistle of Buddy to Zooey, written on the third anniversary of Seymour's suicide, Zooey and Franny were subjected as children by Seymour and Buddy to regular doses of mysticism, Oriental and Western. Believing in the direct confrontation with reality, the ecstatic experience, the two elder brothers wished to tutor the younger children in the doctrines of the mystics. Buddy's letter, in fact, lists the names of the masters, ranging from Christ and Buddha and Ramakrishna down to Blake and Whitman.

The sessions on metaphysics were apparently successful; at least both Zooey and Franny learned from them a certain aloofness from things that contributed to the contemplative life and a reverence for the omnipresent supernatural. The trauma occurred with Seymour's suicide, the death of the saint in the Glass household. Seymour's death is the blow from which the Glass children have never recovered. They suffer the incongruity of his great vision and the apparent self-betrayal of his suicide. Buddy was able to stand the shock; Zooey was also far enough along to hold up, but Franny, thirteen at the time, had her faith shaken and damaged. Buddy admits his failure to come to her aid in the year following Seymour's death (he was ashamed and afraid to) and worries about her. And rightly so, for Franny's frustrated attachment to Seymour is obvious. The two pilgrim books which are the immediate cause of her breakdown she has taken from Seymour's room, now a holy place and generally taboo for casual entry. Most indicative of all, when Zooey asks her, in the midst of her breakdown, if a long distance call to Buddy would help, Franny replies that she wants to talk to Seymour. In her devotion to her older brother, Franny reveals a false conception of sainthood that infects her total religious perspective. She becomes obsessed with the idea of imitatio instead of revelatio and through the mechanics of the Jesus Prayer intends to force the ecstasy, the satori, or whatever label one cares to give the mystic experience.

Zooey's response is to enlighten her on two scores. The first is that the encounter with reality cannot be coerced by a semimagical conditioning of one's own spiritual reflexes, via, in this instance, the constant repetition of the pilgrim's petition. The second is that the unmediated experience of reality does not take place divorced from daily life but precisely through one's intercourse with society. Zooey does not disenchant his sister of the Jesus Prayer; he simply shows her (granted rather rudely) that the formula will not work if it is geared to the wrong power, and Franny's prayer is, in fact, directed more to her dead brother than to Christ. Following the pattern of the pilgrim in the little book, Franny is looking desperately for an East-West mystic to teach her how to use the prayer, in order to experience a direct encounter with reality. Her frustration stems from the fact that Seymour, who should be her teacher, is dead, but in his death he has become her surrogate for Jesus. Franny's imitatio is thus of the pilgrim but also of Seymour; her dead end lies in her identification of Seymour the saint with Seymour as the quintessence of sainthood, namely, as an incarnation of ultimate reality. Zooey becomes Franny's guru, and in showing her the right use and meaning of the Jesus Prayer, also helps her place Seymour in proper focus. He explains to her that the aim of the Jesus Prayer is to give one an awareness of Christ's presence, the sense of oneness with God, and implies thereby that Seymour's sainthood was based on an understanding of that oneness, not on a complete achievement of it.

Zooey's clarification of the other point is just as crucial. Franny wishes to have the holy life without the distractions of the crude, unenlightened worldly society. It is a dangerous desire and the one which caused Seymour himself to founder. Seymour (we learn from Buddy in "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters") had already achieved a kind of detachment which left him unable to communicate with the "normal" world. That, of course, is not good Zen, and Seymour tried to remedy the situation, but in attempting to relocate himself within society, through marriage and psychoanalysis, he cracked up and finally killed himself. Zooey saves Franny from the same potential fate. He discourages Bessie from sending her to a Catholic psychiatrist with the reminder that such treatment had driven Seymour to suicide. In that manner, by making her grasp the necessity of living one's holiness through one's vocation, he helps Franny to forego the conflict between sanctity and worldliness that killed Seymour.

Zooey's help comes at a fortunate moment, for Franny's reaction against normal society, the heritage of her Seymour-Buddy education, had already taken on pathological proportions. She has arrived at the place where her professors and fellow students all appear phony, where her projected acting career seems phony, where life itself is phony, and a fakery. Even though her feeling is exaggerated, it has arisen from a recognition of the shallowness of her fellows, and that is what makes her desperate. Within the existential context, her condition would be described as the sense of meaninglessness. It is prompted not only by her acute religious sensitivity but especially by the superficial values of the culture in which she moves. Zooey, in his bathroom satire, epitomizes the contempt the Glasses share for the comfortable and popular Protestantism that is blind to deep-seated spiritual needs. His sarcastic advertisement for a little inspirational book is a barely disguised reference to Norman Vincent Peale and the magic-formula Christianity he represents. It is that sort of phoniness that bothers Franny most, for she sees behind the façade of religiosity and is distressed to find nothing there. The apparent universality of meaninglessness drives her quite literally to despair. Zooey accuses Franny of deliberately having her nervous breakdown at home, and although he is somewhat unjust (her initial collapse was while on her date in New Haven), he indicates a certain truth: Franny comes home because it is the only place for her where there is no fakery. There, as Zooey assures her, she will find honesty if not solace. And it is, naturally, at home that she finds her cure, for the answer to phoniness is verity, and it is only in the atmosphere of truthfulness that she can find meaning.

Franny's cure, which is simultaneously the positive resolution of her religious crisis, involves a bigger dose of the truth than she had bargained for. The problem of phoniness has its seat in the individual ego, and the ego is as much Franny's trouble as it is the trouble of the phonies. The difference is that in Franny it manifests itself in what Zooey calls piousness, itself a form of hypocrisy, unconscious though it may be. To be sure, Franny is aware of her own self-centeredness; she cries out against the torture of her ego.

Her complaint echoes the existentialist disgust with the ego, and Salinger in fact plants the names of writers here and there who dealt extensively with that disgust. Kafka and Rilke are mentioned, existential expositors of the egotistical dilemma both, as is Kierke-gaard's Fear and Trembling, certainly one of the original works treating the problem of the individual and his being. Franny's ego-centricity takes a subtle turn. Her awareness of it leads her to abandon a promising acting career, obviously the ideal vocation for indulging the ego, and to turn instead toward a private saintliness. Yet her attitude has not really changed. Instead of becoming a good actress, she is determined to be a successful saint, and that by way of her gimmick: repeating the Jesus Prayer until she forces a vision of God. Franny misses the point of the prayer. The incessant iteration of the petition—a plea to Christ for mercy—is supposed to lead one first into humble contemplation of Christ and thereby into an unbroken consciousness of his presence, the classic goal of all Christian mysticism. Franny, in her self-centeredness, sees the prayer only as a means to a selfish end: making God show himself and thereby prove to her that he exists.

Franny's cure is a painful one, for in effecting it, Zooey makes her see her selfishness. The positive aspect of his scolding is in showing her the transforming element that she lacks: a right understanding of love. Salinger, alias Buddy, informs the reader at the beginning of "Zooey" that what follows is not religious or a mystical tale but a complex love story. That is more than Salinger's double talk. Franny's cure involves three steps concerned with love. First the explanation of what love is not. Second is the realization that Franny is already surrounded by love through her family. Third is the revelation that genuine love means the love of mankind.

Zooey first exposes Franny's false concept of love—the saintly, sentimental kind—by referring her to an adolescent experience in which she, age ten, loudly rejected Jesus for his rude manner of cleansing the temple and turned to Buddhism. Franny has mistaken lovableness for love, and in her tenderheartedness has been shocked at the New Testament Jesus who employed love as a powerful, transforming force. Franny's repudiation of that kind of love is necessarily related to her self-love; it is again the ego at work, for she has not really wanted a love to change her life. Instead, she has been trying to force the religious experience to take place on her own terms, more as a confirmation of her personal philosophy than as the introduction to a new perspective of life.

Having properly shaken his sister with that analysis, Zooey goes on to argue that she doesn't recognize genuine love in action when she sees it. Since being home she has been catered to and fussed over by her parents, but she has used their concern mainly to further nurture her breakdown. For Zooey, the parental love is as religious as real love can be, even though expressed in everyday gestures. Having established the locus of love in daily existence and in normal surroundings, Zooey takes the final, and revelatory, step. Talking to Franny on the telephone from Seymour's room (the holy place), he convinces her that her threefold problem of the ego, of phoniness, and of sainthood can be solved by the right understanding and use of love: by serving, and thereby loving, her fellows in the vocation she has chosen. The way to cope with the ego, she learns, is to take its force and sublimate it to its good and natural end. Since her desire is for acting, Zooey encourages her to go at it with religious dedication, to develop her talent for all it is worth. To counter phoniness, he advises her to work for professional perfection. Most important, he tells her that she will find the road to sainthood not in communing with lovable people, but in acting before all kinds of individuals, no matter how unlovable they may be. Zooey refers to the statement of Jesus that the Kingdom of God is within one. What Franny has to learn is that it is around one as well.

Franny's experience takes place through a symbolism, both conscious and unconscious on the part of those involved, that provides the necessary emotional dimension. At the core of the symbolism is Seymour. Christ figure or not, Seymour is the one who has gone away so that he might be with his loved ones more fully, and it is by his vision that they live. The saving advice that Zooey gives to Franny is not really his own at all but goes back to Seymour, who had transmitted it to Buddy. Further, it is the ritual aspect of Zooey's telephone call to his sister that helps her as much as the message. Having made the proper preparations (the handkerchief on the head, the meditation, reading the Seymour scripture), Zooey calls from the shrine of Seymour's room, and even when his impersonation of Buddy (the next best to Seymour) fails, the words from the room are the ones that heal Franny. Finally, the reconciling vision of the Fat Lady as Christ is Seymour's. He had transmitted it to both Zooey and Franny; now it becomes Franny's vehicle of reentry to meaningful existence. It is Seymour's ideal of love, then, transforming the ego, disarming the phonies, exemplified in his own kind of saintliness, that heals Franny. In learning Seymour's ideal she is freed from the ghost of Seymour himself and can pursue her new life in spiritual freedom.

If Salinger's story, for all its ingenuity, does not quite ring true, it is because he finally falls prey to the sentimentalization and superficiality that his characters claim to despise. That double fault focuses upon one point: Salinger's inability or unwillingness to see the existence and power of evil. The Glasses are all saints from the start; their problem is not in achieving goodness but perfection. They do not experience the fundamental maliciousness of human nature, only a malingering nastiness that can be overcome by new attitudes. It is too bad that Salinger's solution at last is little more than a variation of the power of positive thinking. Franny's conversion is just a transference from one kind of illusion to another. Her ego was simply the wrong kind of ego; the phoniness she abhorred is exorcized by another sort, couched in the duplicity of Zooey's telephone call; the love itself that "saves" her is a projection of the Glass narcissism that Seymour and the others have mistaken for a univeral force. Franny's little breakdown gets only the cheap cure it deserves, and no amount of first-rate prose can make the situation as persuasive as those in the other novels. Salinger is certainly free to present his own kind of religion, but the spirits he evokes desert him. The story is not good Christianity and not good Zen and not good existentialism. The result is not an achieved eclecticism but an amalgamation that loses in depth what it gains in breadth. One is, in the end, doubly disappointed in a fictional attempt at depicting the religious crisis that is overwhelmed by its own religiosity.