This note is based on the assumption that in a text all foregrounded intertextuality has a definite formal function. The text in such a case can be seen as insisting that the reader bring a prior understanding of the invoked texts in order to grasp its meaning. Salinger's story “Franny” (1955) in Franny and Zooey (1961) depicts a lunch which is supposed to mark the start of a happy weekend for Lane Coutell, a literature undergraduate, and his date, Franny Glass. The lunch is a fiasco and at the end the “unimpeachably right-looking girl”¹ faints from nervous tension. Lane is a pretentious young man who wants Franny to hear his paper on Flaubert. The paper has fetched him an A from his specialist teacher, and he believes—and wants Franny to believe—that it is an earth-shaking event in the world of Flaubert scholarship. Franny is not impressed; in “Zooey” (1957) she tells her brother that it was “some perfectly harmless test-tubey paper on Flaubert.”² Covering over two pages, the Flaubert-paper episode is important in the structure of the story. It precipitates a discord between the two characters. Lane's aggressive harping on his “incisive” talents wears Franny out and she rebukes him for talking like the section men in her own department. There seems to be considerable authorial self-reflexivity at work behind Lane's references to Flaubert, and it is this that the present note seeks to highlight.

In “Franny” allusions are made to many authors besides Flaubert, but apart from those to the Russian author of The Way of a Pilgrim, they have only local significance as part of the characterization. Not the authors as such, but the way Salinger's characters handle—or drop—their names becomes a means of discriminating between his characters. By contrast, the allusions to Flaubert have far larger implications. This is partly because Salinger is the Flaubert of American fiction, insofar as he is religiously committed to style. Flaubert, says Alan Russell, “devoted more care than any novelist, even any French novelist, had done before him to the actual writing of his sentences.”³ Stylistic virtuosity is the single most pronounced feature of Salinger's works, and it manifests itself right from the first sentence of the story: “Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather. …” It is not accidental that Lane's psychoanalytical paper should concentrate on Flaubert's attraction by the mot juste.

But—I don't know—I think the emphasis I put on why he was so neurotically attracted to the mot juste wasn't too bad. I mean in the light of what we know today. Not just psychoanalysis and all that crap, but certainly to a certain extent. You know what I mean. I'm no Freudian man or anything like that, but certain things you can't just pass over as capital-F 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?⁴

The Freudian theme apart, Lane's remarks about his paper are couched in a style that is revoltingly anti-Flaubertian. It is clumsily redundant (“but certainly to a certain extent”), rhetorical and clichéd. As if this were not sufficiently damning, the authorial narrator has prefaced the episode with such unlikeable details in Lane's behaviour as his monopolizing the conversation, his use of the trendy neologism, “testicularity,” and his slouching posture. At the end of the episode, the narrator once again makes his attitude clear through a remark accompanying Lane's speech:

“This guy Brughman thinks I ought to publish the goddam paper somewhere,” he said abruptly. “I don't know, though.” Then, as though he had suddenly become exhausted—or, rather, depleted by the demands made on him by a world greedy for the fruit of his intellect—he began to massage the side of his face with the flat of his hand, removing, with unconscious crassness, a bit of sleep from one eye.⁵

Subtle moral discriminations and the narrator's deflationary observations accompany Lane's style, which is a bad inversion of Flaubert's (and Salinger's) mot juste. Franny and Salinger notice—and judge.

So much seems obvious even to a reader who has only some rough knowledge of Flaubert. However, the entire episode is Flaubertian because the method it uses is derived—or adapted—from the famous agricultural show scene in Madame Bovary. The scene achieves devastating ironic effects by mixing Rodolphe's bogus romantic jargon and Monsieur Derozerays' speech, itself a pastiche because it is a mixture of praise for the government, farming and religion. The mixing of Rodolphe's sickly romantic rubbish and the public speaker's announcement of prizes is meticulously designed to mock the “conquest” scene on the first floor of the Town Hall:

While Rodolphe was talking to Madame Bovary about dreams, presentiments and magnetic attraction, the speaker went back to the infancy of society, to those savage times when men lived on acorns in the heart of great forests. … Rodolphe had led on gradually from magnetism to affinities; and while the Chairman alluded to Cincinnatus at his plough … the young man was explaining to the young woman that the cause of these irresistible attractions lay in some previous existence.

“We, now, why did we meet? What turn of fate decreed it? Was it not that, like two rivers gradually converging across the intervening distance, our own natures propelled us towards one another?”

He took her hand, and she did not withdraw it.

“General Prize!” cried the Chairman.

“Just now, for instance, when I came to call on you …”

“Monsieur Bizet of Quincampoix.”

“… how could I know that I should escort you here?”

“Seventy francs!”

“And I've stayed with you, because I couldn't tear myself away, though I've tried a hundred times.”

“Manure!”

“And so I'd stay tonight and tomorrow and every day for all the rest of my life.”⁶

Here too the scene presents two incompatible sets of characters, one including the lovers and the other the public speaker and the Show crowd. Irony is devastating, for Rodolphe's promise is juxtaposed with manure and his delight in escorting Emma with seventy francs. In “Franny” Lane's conceited nonsense is juxtaposed with Franny's behaviour which consistently deflates that nonsense. Certain details are remarkably effective because they are unexpected and in the context produce Flaubertian effects. The result is that communication breaks down whenever Franny makes a short remark of her own. Also, it is made clear why Franny regards food or a cigarette as being more real than Lane's lengthy panegyric on his paper:

“I mean, God, I honestly thought it was going to go over like a goddam lead balloon, and when I got it back with this goddam ‘A’ on it in letters about six feet high, I swear I nearly keeled over.”

Franny again cleared her throat. … “Why?” she asked.

Lane looked faintly interrupted. “Why what?”

“Why'd you think it was going to go like a lead balloon?”

“I just told you. I just got through saying. This guy Brughman is a big Flaubert man. Or at least I thought he was.”

“Oh,” Franny said. She smiled. She sipped her Martini.

“This is marvellous,” she said, looking at the glass. “I'm so glad it's not about twenty to one. I hate it when they're absolutely all gin.”

Lane nodded. “Anyway, I think I've got the goddam paper in my room. If we get a chance over the weekend, I'll read it to you.”

“Marvellous. I'd love to hear it.”

Lane nodded again. “I mean I didn't say anything too goddam world-shaking or anything like that.” He shifted his position in the chair. … Lane looked at Franny somewhat expectantly. She seemed to him to have been listening with extra-special intentness.

“You going to eat your olive, or what?”

Lane gave his Martini glass a brief glance, then looked back at Franny. “No,” he said coldly. “You want it?”

“If you don't,” Franny said. She knew from Lane's expression that she had asked the wrong question. … “This guy Brughman thinks I ought to publish the goddam paper somewhere. … As a matter of fact, I don't think there've been any really incisive jobs done on him in the last—”

“You're talking like a section man. But exactly.”⁷

Franny's “wrong” questions are really “right,” in that they provide a momentary stay against Lane's self-inflation; her whimsical interruptions like her praise of the martini or remark about the time are not only welcome but also a proper judgment on him. They puncture his pride, just as the reference to manure or seventy francs in Flaubert deflates Rodolphe's clichés and passes a judgment on their worth. Salinger's material is altogether different, but it can be claimed that he repeats Flaubert's method of anomalous and ironic juxtapositions to judge Lane and to distance the reader from him.

The truth is that Lane has no style. Thus, what at first appear to be a couple of printing errors in Franny's letter to Lane Coutell: “I hate you when your being helplessly super-male and reticent”⁸ are revealed as her sophisticated parodies of Lane's clumsy English. The “retiscent” is deliberately misspelt and “your” is a stylistic parody of his way of using “you're” for “your” as in “You're letter didn't sound so goddam destructive.”⁹ One understands why in a devotee of style like Salinger, aesthetic and stylistic norms get converted into moral ones. At the self-reflexive level, the value that is style points to the text's wish to be appreciated for its style. Flaubert is the norm; Lane suggests its inversion, the more grotesque because he sits in judgment on both Flaubert and the norm.

It is outside the scope of this note to build a comparison between Flaubert and Salinger. However, since self-reflexivity involved in intertextuality does promote comparative speculation, two contrary possibilities can be noted here on this issue. The first is obvious: indirectly the references to Flaubert express Salinger's desire that the reader should reflect on the connections of his fiction with Flaubert's. This kind of a suggestion is not unusual in fiction and can also be legitimate: The Assistant and several other novels by Malamud hint at their desire to be related to Shakespeare and Dostoevsky; Roth's The Breast wants to be seen as a latter-day “Metamorphosis” or “The Nose.” Intertextuality in the form of allusions and quotations signifies affinities, aspirations, ambitions. It may be difficult to relate Salinger to Flaubert, even at the level of style; except in a conceptual sense, there is little else in common between them. But the intertextual use of Flaubert in “Franny” represents one direction that Salinger's ambitions take.

The second possibility is that perhaps something altogether contrary is being suggested through the references to Flaubert in the story. Salinger is a sophisticated ironist, quite capable of putting certain beliefs dear to himself in the mouth of somebody whom his whole method sets out otherwise to ridicule. This procedure too is fairly common in fiction. A nasty character may be given several crucial authorial truths to articulate. It is possible that Lane is articulating certain deeper anxieties and self-doubts in Salinger himself. Is style really such an absolute value? If so, then what about “the really good boys—Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Shakespeare”?¹⁰ In “Seymour: An Introduction” (1959) a far more likeable character than Lane depreciates Flaubert and suggests that while writing, one should follow one's heart: “Please follow your heart, win or lose.”¹¹ The suggestion is that too much of “style,” especially if it is at the cost of the heart, is not a good thing, and this accords well with the issue involved in Lane's clumsy offensive against Flaubert. If this were taken to be Salinger's own position, then it is possible that he is all too aware of the Flaubertian streak in himself but hates it all the same. Self-reflexivity thus becomes a means of expressing one of two feelings: the author's anxiety over his devotion to style and all that this devotion implies; or his belief that he can be both a latter-day Flaubert and a latter-day Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or Shakespeare. The way Salinger teases us with such contradictory signals sounds clever rather than inspired or profound. This is only an opinion. But should it be tenable, at once the authorial self-reflexivity of the Flaubert references in “Franny” would start clamouring to be linked to other self-reflexive details contrasting a poem and intellectual, syntaxy droppings, inspired productions and competent ones, beauty and ingenuity, genius and cleverness.

Notes

1. J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961; rpt., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 15.

2. Ibid., 110.

3. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Alan Russell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), 7.

4. Salinger, 16.

5. Ibid., 17.

6. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 161.

7. Salinger, 15-17.

8. Ibid., 10.

9. Ibid., 18.

10. Ibid., 16.

11. J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction (1963; rpt., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 120.

Jai Dev is Reader in the Department of English, Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla 171 005, India.