SOURCE: Bidney, Martin. “The Aestheticist Epiphanies of J. D. Salinger: Bright-Hued Circles, Spheres, and Patches; ‘Elemental’ Joy and Pain.” Style 34, no. 1 (spring 2000): 117-31.

Strangely, no attempt has yet been made to find a pattern that can unite the epiphanies of characters in the works of J. D. Salinger. The books and articles about him that have appeared in the last thirty-five years include only a single item with “epiphany” in the title, and even there the word is used in a loose and general way.¹ Sources and parallels for Salinger's literary epiphanies have been sought in many religious traditions. Picking up the hints provided by the “recommended home reading” of “the Upanishads and the Diamond Sutra and Eckhart” that the two older Glass boys, Seymour and Buddy, urged on Franny and Zooey (FZ [Franny and Zooey], 60) critics have looked for influences and analogues in Hinduism (Alsen), Taoism (Antonio), Zen (Goldstein and Goldstein, “Zen”), and Christianity (Panichas, Slabey).² But such references to other people's imaginings cannot reveal—may even distract from—what is distinctive about Salinger's own vision, the epiphanic pattern that underlies his characters' moments of revelation.

These moments are nonsectarian. “The thing with Franny is strictly nonsectarian,” Zooey says at one point (FZ 95), and although there is an aura of the “seer” (Zooey's own self-characterization [FZ 140]) about all the Glass siblings and even about Holden Caulfield, the type of “seer” they all embody at privileged moments is the modern post-Wordsworthian, secularized, and exploratory kind. Salinger is a gifted maker of modern literary epiphanies that need to be investigated for the unique pattern they reveal. A useful beginning has been made in a few studies that focus, in rather isolated fashion, on certain favored objects: Holden's hat has been studied in terms of his psychological history (Vanderbilt, Roper), and Phoebe's carrousel has been compared to its partial source in Rilke (Stone, McCort). But only a comprehensive look at Salinger's epiphanic pattern can offer what the reader of such a skillful post-Wordsworthian inward quester would like to have: the portrait of a distinctive epiphanic sensibility.

In a recent book (Patterns of Epiphany), I worked out a method for studying the distinctive epiphany patterns of writers and applied it to a series of nineteenth-century authors. Here, I will apply the method to the epiphanies of Salinger. My guiding assumption is that the epiphanies produced by any given writer will manifest a pattern unique to that writer. I define an epiphany in general as a moment in a literary work that affects the reader as (1) intense, (2) expansive in meaning (that is, seeming to mean more than such a brief experience would have any right to mean), and (3) mysterious (its resonance or vibrancy exceeding any apparent explanation offered in the author's text).³ In creating epiphanies, authors work with contents I have found discussed in the work of the French phenomenological theorist Gaston Bachelard. From Bachelard, I derive three basic components of epiphanic patterns: elements (in the ancient sense: earth, air, fire, water); patterns of motion (irrespective of whatever it is that moves); and shapes (most commonly, geometric), together with certain recurrent features that are occasionally linked to the above (thus, in one Salinger epiphany the color green is linked to earth in springtime, but patches of bright, pure color appear often, without requiring any “elemental” cause). Having identified in a writer these distinctive components, I next locate the author's “paradigm” epiphany. The paradigm is the one epiphany that manifests the author's recurrent pattern most completely and vividly. Thereafter, I study the pattern in its less elaborate variant forms and note, where appropriate, implications (psychoanalytical insights, for example) that the pattern may suggest.

In Salinger, epiphanies usually involve a combination of two or more elements, but one of these sometimes will be suggested only vaguely by a color-link (as the mention of a gold medallion may suggest the fiery sun). Salinger makes air, earth, and water his favored elements; though actual fires are absent, a patch of sunlight appears in one of his epiphanies. Motion, too, is quite variable in Salinger's privileged moments: we see either complete stasis, the motion of an epiphanic object, the movement of a person or animal toward such an object, or simply the movement of the observer's eye. But one very important motion-pattern recurs often enough in these epiphanies to be specially noted: the frustrating disappearance of an object that the observer tries in vain to follow with his or her eyes; or else the sudden, happy reappearance of an object that the observer had thought was lost (both of these features combine in Zooey's paradigm epiphany).

The geometric shape Salinger prefers in his characters' epiphanies is always something round: circle, sphere, or cylinder. Sometimes a shape determines a motion, as when a sphere turns: a woman carrying a round jug moves it semicircularly over a hill, or a girl turns her doll's face to the side. In his characters' epiphanies, Salinger also likes to use a varied range of colors, but they are all simple and pure, and (except for the first one in my list) all are bright: navy blue, green, gold, white, red. Sometimes, as noted above, the pure, bright colors may suggest or imply links to elements. On occasion, such colors may appear in small patches or blotches rather than in circular forms. Finally, in Salinger, the epiphany usually generates within the observer, and vicariously in the reader, a vivid mixture of pleasure and pain, of joy and grief.

Not only is there something very painterly about Salinger's epiphanies, but they also clearly imply a worldview we may call aestheticist, for they place a very high value on intense and refined aesthetic sensation. Aestheticism further accounts for the strong link of Salinger's epiphanies to both painting and poetry. The bright, pure colors listed above make one think of a watercolor box or palette of oils or acrylics. (Zooey's paradigm epiphany even highlights a reference to van Gogh.) But although the epiphanic scenes often resemble carefully composed paintings, as true epiphanies they arouse feelings mysteriously out of proportion to their meticulous arrangements. And although Salinger's epiphanies are often painterly, they more than once recall the works of poets. In them, we feel a recurrent undertone of pain that increases in direct relation to intensifying aesthetic joy. This undertone suggests the pathos of the cult of sensation found in Keats's odes: “Ay, in the very temple of delight, / Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine” (“Ode on Melancholy” ll. 25-26). We will see that three of Buddy's epiphanies are based on Seymour's three haiku poems, and that certain epiphanies of Zooey (remembering Buddy) and Buddy (remembering Seymour) contain allusions to Wordsworth and Blake. Franny, whose fainting and symptoms of anorexia are triggered by fastidious distaste for the phoniness of Lane, her date, finds still another aestheticist source. Although her obsession with The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way seems at first syncretically religious or metaphysical, the pilgrim Franny admires so much has derived his way of seeing from something called the Philokalia (FZ 33-34), a word that—revealingly—means “Love of Beauty.” Thus, in Salinger's epiphanies, the atmosphere generated by the manifold aesthetic references suggests that what gives meaning to life and even to death is the imaginative value of heightened and refined sensation. The pain accompanying Salinger's heightened epiphanic moments is likely to be brought on by some vulgar “philistine” intrusion or gesture or noise. All this betokens an aestheticist epiphanic sensibility.

In Salinger's epiphanies, the most interesting psychoanalytical implication arises from several factors that we will note: the absence of actual fire (suggesting an absence of ardent, adult passion), the predominance of children (suggesting nostalgia for a simpler state of being), and the association of the seer's death with a disappearing woman (perhaps alluding to a deep grief for Mother). In connection with this latter theme, we will also note the recurrence of the well-known fort-da or “gone”—“here!” pattern of motion described by Freud (in chapter 2 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle). The pattern in Salinger recalls the game Freud describes in which a child makes a spool, fastened to a string, repeatedly disappear when lowered over the edge of a cot and then reappear when suddenly pulled up again. A consolatory play-procedure, it suggests that the child is attempting to master, by symbolic means, the threat of parental disappearance or loss. All these features of Salinger's epiphanies combine to evoke a regressive nostalgia, with narcissistic implications (cf. Seitzman [both articles]; Mellard). This feature ties in with Salinger's aestheticism, for devotion to one's own aesthetic gratification is narcissistic at heart.

I

Salinger's paradigm is a composite epiphany. It starts with a “scene,” viewed by Zooey through a window, that “was being acted out sublimely” (in the romantic tradition, “sublime” is a traditional indicator of visionary power), and after a painfully unrefined or tasteless interruption it ends with a striking visionary memory. Offering Salinger's signature shapes, motions, colors, and elements is phase one of the epiphany:

At first piecemeal, then point-blank, [Zooey] let his attention be drawn to a little scene that was being acted out sublimely, unhampered by writers and directors and producers, five stories below the window and across the street. A fair-sized maple tree stood in front of the girls' private school—one of the fortunate trees on that side of the street—and at the moment a child of seven or eight, female, was hiding behind it. She was wearing a navy-blue reefer and a tam that was very nearly the same shade of red as the blanket on the bed in van Gogh's room at Arles. Her tam did, in fact, from Zooey's vantage point, appear not unlike a dab of paint. Some fifteen feet away from the child, her dog—a young dachshund, wearing a green leather collar and leash—was sniffing to find her, scurrying in frantic circles, his leash dragging behind him. The anguish of separation was scarcely bearable for him, and when at last he picked up his mistress's scent, it wasn't a second too soon. The joy of reunion, for both, was immense. The dachshund gave a little yelp, then cringed forward, shimmying with ecstasy, till his mistress, shouting something at him, stepped hurriedly over the wire guard surrounding the tree and picked him up. She said a number of words of praise to him, in the private argot of the game, then put him down and picked up his leash and the two walked gaily west, toward Fifth Avenue and the Park and out of Zooey's sight. Zooey reflexively put his hand on a crosspiece between panes of glass, as if he had a mind to raise the window and lean out of it to watch the two disappear. It was his cigar hand, however, and he hesitated a second too long.

(FZ 151-52; emphases added)

In this passage, the red tam, as close as a Salinger epiphany ever gets to a flash of red fire, is a privileged circular shape, like a “dab” of paint from the prestigious van Gogh, and the same color as his “blanket” (itself suggesting bed, sleep, childhood, or babyhood). Other round shapes are shown in the trunk of the “fortunate” maple and the bright “green leather collar”—perhaps also the wire fence around the tree, and certainly the dachshund's “frantic circles.” The roundnesses are thus linked not only to pleasure (the suddenly recaptured sight of the girl in her red tam) but equally to pain (imprisoning collars and fences, frantic circles recalling the earlier “anguish of separation”). Even the mention of van Gogh makes us think at once of “ecstasy” and an “anguished” state. The cylindrical cigar frustratingly and crudely cuts short the aesthetic moment by preventing Zooey from opening the window to lean out and follow with his gaze the girl and her pet. The girl's hide-and-seek game with her dog, like the fort-da or vanishing-and-reappearing spool-on-a-string game, is one that babies are thought to enjoy particularly because, in Freudian terms, it is a symbolic affirmation of the mastery of loss: Mother is suddenly there again; she was really there all the time.

In the wake of these images, we understand why Zooey is so frustrated when the vision ends. For him, it has been a nostalgic return to an early childhood scenario in which a feeling of loss was symbolically mastered. As we will see, Zooey says the dog's joy has freed him from “ego.” But in fact it has momentarily reinforced Zooey's all-too-fragile ego, which soon reclaims its rights by projecting its anger at the cigar-caused interruption onto his hapless sister Franny:

“God damn it,” he said, “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.” Behind him, just then, Franny blew her nose with guileless abandon; the report was considerably louder than might have been expected from so fine and delicate-appearing an organ. Zooey turned around to look at her, somewhat censoriously.

Franny, busy with several folds of Kleenex, looked at him. “Well, I'm sorry,” she said. “Can't I blow my nose?”

“You finished?”

“Yes, I'm finished! My gosh, what a family. You take your life in your hands if you just blow your nose.”

Zooey turned back to the window. He smoked briefly, his eyes following a pattern of concrete blocks in the school building.

(FZ 152-53)

So ends the transition; some aesthetically unrefined noise has provided a pretext for a tension-relieving projection. Now the epiphanic scenario reappears in a new, condensed and intensified form as Zooey begins speaking:

“Buddy once said something reasonably sensible to me a couple of years ago […] He said that a man should be able to lie at the bottom of a hill with his throat cut, slowly bleeding to death, and if a pretty girl or an old woman should pass by with a beautiful jug balanced perfectly on the top of her head, he should be able to raise himself up on one arm and see the jug safely over the top of the hill.”

(FZ 153-54)

This fascinating remembered vision of Buddy's is the climax of Zooey's epiphany. What Zooey remembers is Buddy's revelatory speculation about a supremely devoted aesthete, a connoisseur of the beauty of a more-or-less spheric form (jug) and of its perfectly balanced, lovely semicircular motion up, over, and then gradually down the other side of a hill (we see the jug gently lowered until it vanishes). The remembered vision is pleasurable, but deeply painful, too: it is the vision of a dying man. And it is frustrating to Zooey insofar as his own cigar prevented his seeing the dog and girl to the end of the street and “watch[ing] the two disappear”; Zooey perceives a far-from-complimentary contrast between himself, the clumsy cigar smoker, and Buddy's hypothesized dying observer who is quite heroically capable of “see[ing] the jug safely over the top of the hill.”

Re-experiencing Buddy's vision in conjunction with his own, Zooey intensifies in equal measure the pain and joy Buddy had felt. Zooey's vision, too, involved a circular shape like that of the “perfectly” balanced “beautiful” jug; it was the girl's red tam. But while Zooey's initial vision was one of loss, he now blends it with Buddy's vision, which was one of death. The fact that the jug-carrier is first seen as a “pretty girl” allies Buddy's vision to Zooey's window-scene of girl and dog. But the disappearing jug-carrier's transformation into an “old woman” also movingly links the girl to the maternal figure of the Freudian fort-da scenario—here we see only the fort (“gone!”), not followed by any reassuring da (“here!”). Zooey's remembering of Buddy's vision climaxes both the joy and pain of his own: reenvisioning Buddy's scenario, Zooey can take comfort (joy) in the bravery of facing a mother image's disappearance, but, as he pictures an aesthete like himself who is bleeding to death, he is surely filled with self-pity, with a sense of irreparable loss. The reenvisioned earthen jug (reminiscent of the pitcher balanced on the head of a woman in Wordsworth's visionary Prelude⁴), is laden with emotion because of its link to a mother image seen as descending into earth. The aestheticist epiphany of Zooey-remembering-Buddy implies a powerfully resurgent memory of loss.

II

Zooey's composite epiphanic paradigm will help us understand another remarkable fort-da epiphany, the one that climaxes Holden Caulfield's autobiographical narrative in The Catcher in the Rye. In Catcher, the girl's red tam that Zooey saw becomes Holden's red hunting cap; the girl's blue coat becomes the blue coat of Holden's little sister Phoebe; the epiphanic geometric form of a circle appears in the carrousel where Phoebe takes a ride—and even the familiar fort-da effect recurs in blue-coated Phoebe's repeated disappearances and returns as the carrousel makes its endlessly reassuring rounds:

“Here. Get some more tickets.”

She took the dough off me. “I'm not mad at you any more,” she said.

“I know. Hurry up—the thing's gonna start again.”

Then all of a sudden she gave me a kiss. Then she held her hand out, and said, “It's raining. It's starting to rain.”

“I know.”

Then what she did—it damn near killed me—she reached in my coat pocket and took out my red hunting hat and put it on my head.

“Don't you want it?” I said.

“You can wear it a while.”

“Okay. Hurry up, though, now. You're gonna miss your ride. You won't get your own horse or anything.”

She kept hanging around, though.

“Did you mean it what you said? You really aren't going away anywhere? Are you really going home afterwards?” she asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. I meant it, too. I wasn't lying to her. I really did go home afterwards. “Hurry up, now,” I said. “The thing's starting.”

She ran and brought her ticket and got back on the goddam carrousel just in time. Then she walked all the way around it till she got her own horse back. Then she got on it. She waved to me and I waved back.

Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn't get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking wet, especially my neck and my pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway. I didn't care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling. I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don't know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could've been there.

(CR 190-91)

There are only three more paragraphs in the book after this episode ends; it is intended as the novel's epiphanic climax, and it works. In “I don't know why,” Salinger conveys an epiphany's requisite feeling of mystery, while in the sudden surge of happiness even to tears he conveys the vibrant intensity and resonant expansiveness offered by a genuine epiphanic moment. Red hat and blue coat offer a suitable dialogue of Salingerian patches of pure, simple color. The carrousel is a beautifully childlike epiphanic circle. Again, as in Zooey's window-scene, a little girl is central; the sadness underlying Holden's joy arises, in large part, from nostalgia for a past, more youthful and freer self. But the fort-da theme (“Gone!—“Here!”) may also suggest that below the feeling of sister-love lies Holden's need to restore his fragile identity by being reassured of the continuing, recurrent if not continuous, presence of a nurturing parent. Phoebe has helped Holden to feel this presence by putting his magic hat on his head for him. Yet a good part of the joy Holden feels may equally well arise from his own ability to play the role of a supervisory parent here. For a precious moment, Holden has become the parent-figure with whom he wants to identify.

III

In “Seymour: An Introduction,” Salinger offers us three excellent epiphanic moments experienced by Seymour Glass, but because we learn of them secondhand through Buddy's accounts, Buddy's epiphanies are blended with Seymour's, much as Zooey's two-phase epiphanic paradigm incorporates a vision of Buddy's. The ease with which Salinger combines, blends, merges, synthesizes his characters' most treasured moments of vision reveals their unity in Salinger's own recurrent pattern of epiphanic feeling.

In Buddy's reenvisioning of Seymour's happiest poetic epiphany, the now-familiar little girl appears, this time on an airplane and holding a doll, a combination of the contrasting elemental themes of air and earth (though we don't know what the doll is made of). Most important, when the girl turns her doll's head so the doll can look at the poet, she reintroduces the central Salingerian epiphanic figure, the (re)turning sphere or circular from (tam, jug, carrousel). Buddy insists that the experience was a vision, not a mundane reality:

on the afternoon of his suicide Seymour wrote a straight, classical-style haiku on the desk blotter [=patch of pure color] in his hotel room. I don't much like my literal translation of it—he wrote it in Japanese—but in it he briefly tells of a little girl on an airplane who has a doll in the seat with her and turns its head around to look at the poet. A week or so before the poem was actually written, Seymour had actually been a passenger on a commercial airplane, and my sister Boo Boo has somewhat treacherously suggested that there may have been a little girl with a doll aboard his plane. I myself doubt it. Not necessarily flatly, but I doubt it. And if such was the case—which I don't believe for a minute—I'd make a bet the child never thought to draw her friend's attention to Seymour.

(“SI” [“Seymour: An Introduction”] 133-34)

To Buddy it seems treacherous for Boo Boo to hint that Seymour's lovely vision was contaminated with fact. But even if the event really occurred just as narrated in Seymour's poem, the factuality of the epiphany is still thoroughly contaminated by, or infused with, vision. For the main point of the episode is that the girl is communicating her vision to an imaginary observer, the doll. The girl wants the doll to “see” Seymour, and Seymour wants the doll to “see” him; because the doll had been looking away and now her gaze meets his, it invokes the familiar fort-da effect. Although Seymour's sense that the gaze of the doll is all-too-imaginary⁵ may have helped precipitate his suicide, we cannot know that. Nonetheless, the fact that we learn simultaneously about the haiku and the suicide exemplifies the complex emotional effect of a typical Salingerian epiphany: grief underlies joy.

Seymour's other two poetic epiphanies contrast with this one insofar as the earth-air combination becomes a confrontation. The epiphanies are made more painful as the two elements are poignantly counterposed and contrasted. Buddy, who transmits and amplifies both epiphanies, numbers them among the ones he “wouldn't unreservedly recommend […] to any living soul who hasn't died at least twice in his lifetime” (“SI” 128). But this warning is really a compliment, for it quietly alludes to William Blake's vital statistics, as retailed by Blake in William Upcott's autograph album: “Born 28 Novr 1757 in London & has died several times since” (Blake 698).⁶ The epiphany-poems of Seymour's that Buddy summarizes and interprets are, as he says, “my own favorites” (“SI” 128):

The next-to-last poem is about a young married woman and mother who is plainly having what it refers to here in my old marriage manual as an extramarital love affair. Seymour doesn't describe her, but she comes into the poem just when that cornet of his is doing something extraordinarily effective, and I see her as a terribly pretty girl, moderately intelligent, immoderately unhappy, and not unlikely living a block or two away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She comes home very late one night from a tryst—in my mind, bleary and lipstick-smeared—to find a balloon on her bedspread. Someone has simply left it there. The poet doesn't say, but it can't be anything but a large, inflated toy balloon, probably green, like Central Park in the spring.

(“SI” 128-29)

Because I feel that Buddy (despite the lapses into verbosity that sometimes mar his narrative) has the true Salingerian epiphanic sensibility that it takes to understand Seymour's, I find his amplifications of Seymour's imagery helpful here. For me, they confirm the power of the recurrent pattern we are tracing. The bleariness and lipstick smears that Buddy imagines make Seymour's woman appear aesthetically unrefined—crude, earthy—a clear elemental contrast to the airiness of the balloon. But the green color Buddy gives to the balloon nicely connects it to spring in Central Park, not only to the airiness of fresh vernal breezes but also to the blossoming of earth. The balloon, an aesthetic, aerial, refinement of spring's own earthiness, is a reproach to the woman, but a reproof with a wonderfully light touch. Perhaps the touch is so light that there is no reproof at all, merely a suggestion that her companion—whether spouse or child—like the spring air outside, claims another kind of freedom. The woman can have her earthy loves; nothing of earth will last, everything floats away, this too will pass, even as the rising of the breeze and the budding of the sticky green leaves (not to mention—that's the point of this wonderfully suggestive, enigmatic epiphany, not to mention—their turning and fall). The best part of the vision is that the recurrent Salingerian sphere is filled with air. Lost love hardly weighs anyone down; the extreme of lightness is what's breathtaking. The sphere, static for now, has endless potential for motion upwards.

But Buddy is right: the epiphany can best be appreciated by readers who have themselves “died” several times; aesthetic pleasure here is inseparable from the pain of the absent individual who left the balloon on the pillow, and surely also of the “immoderately unhappy” bleary, smeary woman. The uncomfortable touch of misogyny in the episode is of a piece, perhaps, with the regressive idealization of little girls we note in Salinger's epiphanic moments: adult women are seen as far less attractive than younger female embodiments of the observer's own happier, lost childhood state.

Buddy's final epiphany is based on Seymour's third reported haiku poem:

The other poem, the last one in the collection, is about a young suburban widower who sits down on his patch of lawn one night, implicitly in his pajamas and robe, to look at the full moon. A bored white cat, clearly a member of his household and almost surely a former kingpin of his household, comes up to him and rolls over, and he lets her bite his left hand as he looks at the moon.

(“SI” 129)

Here, earth and air are contrasted and intertwined, much as in the previous epiphany, but this one, bereft of spring breezes, is sadder. The “patch” of presumably green lawn is a recognizable Salingerian shape of bright, pure color, and the moon's white sphere combines brightness with the predictably round geometric figure signaling a Salingerian epiphany. The cat's roundness is shown as it “rolls over.” The white cat on the earthly lawn shares its hue with the aery moon, itself a kind of elevated earth, so earthly and aery elements are as allied as they are mutually distant. The cat's painful bite mingles with the widower's pain of bereavement but also with his pleasure in seeing the moon; pleasure intermingles with pain so inseparably that a masochistic frisson arises.

We can't blame the cat; it, too, suffers a loss, the deprivation of being only “former” household kingpin. Whiteness is delusive; purity, unspotted bliss, is impossible, or at least not lasting, either “here” or “there.” One's lost purity comes back and “bites,” a literal remorse.⁷ For this reason there is a heaviness as well as a brightness to the solid upper sphere. Together with the white cat's aggression, this heaviness counters the hints of hope we get from the patch of lawn. All these suggestions make this one of the richest, most troubling and loveliest, of Salinger's strange, ambivalent epiphanies.

IV

Finally,⁸ Franny's two “solo” epiphanies (not counting the highly attenuated, fragmentary one she shares at the book's end with Zooey) produce a comparable intensity of mixed emotions, particularly when juxtaposed. In “Franny,” the protagonist is plagued with self-disgust over her hatred of ubiquitous phonies (most jarringly, Lane, her date):

“I'm sorry. I'm awful,” she said. “Ive just felt so destructive all week. It's awful. I'm horrible.”

“Your letter didn't sound so goddam destructive.”

Franny nodded solemnly. She was looking at a little warm blotch of sunshine, about the size of a poker chip, on the tablecloth. “I had to strain to write it,” she said.

Lane started to say something to that, but the waiter was suddenly there to take away the empty Martini glasses. “You want another one?” Lane asked Franny.

He didn't get an answer. Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.

“Franny,” Lane said patiently, for the waiter's benefit. “Would you like another Martini, or what?”

She looked up. “I'm sorry.” She looked at the removed, empty glasses in the waiter's hand. “No. Yes. I don't know.”

(FZ 15-16)

There is a realization here that Franny cannot verbalize; it remains mysterious, expansive in meaning, with a “special intensity,” as Salinger puts it. Her epiphany is the sudden, powerful wish to lie down in a “little blotch of sunshine,” a Salingerian epiphanic patch of pure brightness. The blotch even resembles a “poker chip,” a circular counter, the appropriate round geometric figure. Franny could only lie down “in” this area imaginatively, in a deep waking dream, one deeper than metaphor. With immersion in a patch or circle of sunlight, particularly as linked to sleep through the idea of lying down, comes a mystical feeling but also overtones of a fatal consummation, of a death. As entrancing and alluring as they are self-effacing and annihilating, the images here dramatize the inseparability of pleasure from pain or loss that recurs in Salinger's epiphanies.

This epiphany leads (in “Zooey”) to Franny's dream-epiphany of immersion not in fire but in water, a “spidery nightmare” suggesting a web that is really an entrapping, deadly whirlpool:

“Oh, God,” I remember it now!” she said. “It was just hideous. I was at a swimming pool somewhere, and a whole bunch of people kept making me dive for a can of Medaglia d'Oro coffee that was on the bottom. Every time I'd come up, they'd make me go down again. I was crying, and I kept saying to everybody, ‘You have your bathing suits on. Why don't you do a little diving, too?’ but they'd all just laugh and make these terribly snide little remarks, and down I'd go again.” She gave another shudder. “These two girls that are in my dorm were there. Stephanie Logan, and a girl I hardly even know—somebody, as a matter of fact, I always felt terribly sorry for, because she had such an awful name, Sharmon Sherman. They both had a big oar, and they kept trying to hit me with it every time I'd surface.” Franny put her hands over her eyes briefly. “Whew!” She shook her head. She reflected. “The only person that made any sense in the dream was Professor Tupper. I mean he was the only person that was there that I know really detests me.”

(FZ 126-27)

As Franny talks the dream over some more with Zooey, it turns out that she despises pompous Professor Tupper far more than he could possibly detest her. The people who are pushing Franny under are the crass philistines, the unbearable fakes or pitiable unfortunates whose very names (the “awful […] Sharmon Sherman”) are offenses to the aesthetic ear.

Yet below the spidery nightmare lies a fulfillment fantasy. Such repeated immersions are escapes from pomp and pretense, downward flights away from what can no longer be tolerated. And in an odd twist of imagery, down equals up: the coffee can is the Salingerian epiphanic circle, or cylinder; and “Medaglia d'Oro,” a symbolic name not chosen by chance, means Gold Medal, another circle of brilliant, pure color, like Seymour/Buddy's green balloon or Franny's poker chip of sunlight. Here, circles of earth (metal) and firebright gold are the goals of a watery immersion that comes to resemble Franny's “lying down” in a patch of sunlight—something Franny wanted to do. This is an epiphany that defies, and exceeds, all the analyses poor Zooey (that would-be psychotherapist) can muster. As a Salingerian epiphany of pleasure-pain, of willed-unwilled motion toward an epiphanic circle, it allusively combines a recurrent geometric form with an equally recurrent idea of bright, pure color, all in a context of several contrasting-merging elements.

Although Salinger makes a curious attempt at story's end to resolve Franny's problems, the epiphany he designs to achieve this resolution is regrettably attenuated and fragmentary. Even as a child radio star, Franny, as Zooey reveals to her in his therapy-counseling, was always right to be peeved by the “stupidity of audiences,” the “goddam ‘unskilled laughter’ coming from the fifth row” (FZ 199), but Seymour was also right when he told all his siblings to “shine” their “shoes” for the “Fat Lady” (FZ 200), to dedicate their performances precisely to all the unskilled laughers and crass philistines. Franny and Zooey, it further turns out, had both imagined Seymour's symbolic “Fat Lady” as cancerous and as having her “radio going full-blast all day” (FZ 201). So there was an occult empathy between the two siblings, as Franny—“looking extremely tense” (FZ 201)—suddenly realizes. And now Zooey tells her that “There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady”—the Fat Lady is “Christ Himself” (FZ 201-02). After this revelation, even the dial tone on the telephone seems to Franny “the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself,” and she ends the book “in a deep, dreamless sleep,” “quiet, smiling at the ceiling” (FZ 202).

Except for the reference to Christ, this episode reads like one of Salinger's customary secularized epiphanies, but it is a greatly weakened one. True, the Fat Lady's radio entertainment and cancer combine pleasure and pain in a way we have learned to expect. A shined shoe will presumably show a boss of light on the toe, and the Fat Lady offers another somewhat rounded shape. I am trying to help Salinger out here, but in fact he mentions no polished boss, nor is the fat lady easy to see as circular. The epiphanic pattern is only hinted at; shoes and lady hardly reflect each other so clearly or convincingly as Seymour's cat and moon mirror whitenesses, or as Holden's red hat and Phoebe's blue coat share the bright color-patch motif. Elements, colors, geometric shapes are vague in the “Fat Lady” episode if they are present at all. Can Franny, Zooey, or any other Salingerian aesthete believe for long that the unskilled laugher in the fifth row is a transcendent being? Perhaps the painful discomforts of aesthetic narcissism cannot so easily be cured. The statement that the Fat Lady is Christ is a declaration, or an implicit exhortation (“Behave as if she were”), but it cannot create, or replace, a genuinely effective, well-developed Salingerian epiphany like those of Zooey, Holden, Buddy, Seymour, or the earlier two epiphanies of Franny herself.

Salinger's best, most typical epiphanies, as presented by an outstanding literary artist, are powerful, and the responses they call forth are implicit in the visionary moments themselves. In the best ones, we have not needed to invoke Zen, Taoism, Hinduism, Christianity, or even the traditional techniques of haiku in order to elucidate Salinger's personal style of epiphany. That style is induplicably his, and its meanings reside in the individual features Salinger gives it. Bright, pure color—in full, circular or spheric forms or vivid painterly dabs and patches—suggests both the brightness of childhood and the heightened sensation of the aesthetic moment: red tam, green balloon, gold medal, blotch of sunshine, white moon, balanced jug, doll's head, colorful carrousel, red hat, blue coat, patch of lawn. But in Salinger's most characteristic epiphanies, these emblems of pure pleasure are threatened, partly or temporarily counteracted, or annoyingly displaced by unaesthetic intrusions: a loud sneeze, an awkwardly held cigar, a boring young man who talks about martinis, a girl with an awful name. Also, in these epiphanies, the bright, pure, painterly colors are attacked or contrasted, more simply and deeply, by the sloppiness and sorrow of “earthy” life itself: a bleary-smeary unfaithful spouse; an aggressive cat that reminds one of a bitter loss; the wish-and-fear of drowning in light or water; the fact that an aesthete, too, can bleed to death at the foot of a forbidding hill.

Awareness of such contrasts ensures that pain will be inseparably mixed with pleasure in Salingerian moments of heightened sensation. In Salinger, life's ineluctable complexity arouses the nostalgia of characters for an idealized childhood, with its play-techniques for the symbolic reparation of loss. Thus the fort-da motion pattern—“It's gone!” “No! there it is! I can still see it!”—unites many epiphanies: the reappearance to Holden of Phoebe's blue coat, the turning of a doll's head toward Seymour, the woman-with-a-jug vision of Buddy, the girl-behind-the-tree vision of Zooey, even the repeated dives toward the submerged coffee can in Franny's spidery dream. Psychological fascination and painterly-poetic lyricism combine to make Salinger's visions among the most rewarding aestheticist epiphanies of our era.

Notes

1. Lyle Glazier writes, “In his two double-jointed books (Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction) Salinger included a poetic epiphany as the first narrative in each book, a more prosaic argument for humanism as the second” (251). Most people think of an epiphany as a sudden, illuminating breakthrough of intensity, mystery, vibrancy. By describing the entire first narrative of each book “as” an epiphany, Glazier makes it hard for us to know what the word means.

2. I cite here only a sample or two representative of each group.

3. I borrow the criteria of expansiveness and mysteriousness from Nichols (Poetics of Epiphany 28).

4. It is worth quoting from The Prelude part of Wordsworth's vision, whose mysterious pathos may have deeply affected Salinger:

   Then, reascending the bare common, [I] saw
   A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
   The beacon on its summit, and, more near,
   A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head,
   And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
   Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth,
   An ordinary sight; but I should need
   Colours and words that are unknown to man,
   To paint the visionary dreariness
   Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,
   Invested moorland waste, and naked pool,
   The beacon crowning the lone eminence,
   The female and her garments vexed and tossed
   By the strong wind.

   (12.248-61 [1850])

5. Because Buddy's comments on Seymour's poem make us think and feel deeply about the imaginary status of the doll's gaze, and because this focus of attention gives added pathos to his epiphany of Seymour's poem, Buddy's account is a more fully developed epiphany than would be offered by Seymour's poem simply presented in English translation without comment. The poem itself, as cited by Zooey elsewhere, is as follows: “The little girl on the plane / Who turned her doll's head around / To look at me” (FZ 64).

6. Neither this reference to Blake nor my earlier citation of Wordsworth's young woman carrying a pitcher is noted in Strauch; his sense of a “romantic background” is a highly generalized one.

7. A contrast between Seymour's epiphanies and traditional haiku poems has been usefully noted by the Goldsteins:

   What seems immediately obvious in Seymour's poems is that there is perhaps more action or movement than one expects to find in Japanese haiku: A girl turning her doll's head, a mother returning from a tryst, a widower having his finger “chewed” by a cat. In addition, the human element is stressed by Seymour, though the seasonal element remains in spite of not being easily apparent. [Yet the authors admit that] in the doll poem, one would be hard pressed to insist that it is winter (or soon-to-be-hot weather on a Florida vacation).

   (“Seymour's Poems” 345-46)

   The word chewed comes from the final section of Buddy's commentary, a portion I did not quote (SI 130-33) because in it the epiphany has lost power and has fizzled out into pointless prolixity. “I apologize for that verbiage,” says Buddy in the middle of it. “Unfortunately, there's probably more” (SI 131).

8. I exclude Nine Stories from my discussion because I find no true epiphanies in them; one certainly can write works of distinction without literary epiphanies as I define them. While the receipt of the watch in “For Esmé, With Squalor” is affecting, it offers no epiphany because it is rationally accountable and so lacks mystery. The crushing of the vial of eagles' blood in “The Laughing Man,” with its patch or dab of bright, pure, Salingerian color, comes closest to offering one of Salinger's typical epiphanies, but the mysterious shudders it gives the youthful protagonist are offset by the comic-grotesque ambience of the tall tale.

Works Cited

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Antonio, Eugene Dale. “The Fiction of J. D. Salinger: A Search through Taoism.” DAI 52 (1992): 8.

Bidney, Martin. Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1997.

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Glazier, Lyle. “The Glass Family Sage: Argument and Epiphany.” College English 27 (1965): 248-51.

Goldstein, Bernice, and Sanford Goldstein. “Seymour's Poems.” Literature East and West 17 (1973): 335-48.

———.“Zen and Salinger.” Modern Fiction Studies 12 (1966): 313-24.

Keats, John. “Ode on Melancholy.” The Poems of John Keats. Ed. Miriam Allott. London: Longman, 1970. 538-41.

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———.Franny and Zooey. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961.

———.Nine Stories. 1953. Boston: Little, Brown. 1954. New York: NAL.

———.Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction. 1963. Boston: Little, Brown. 1965. New York: Bantam.

Seitzman, Daniel. “Salinger's ‘Franny’: Homoerotic Imagery.” American Imago 22 (1965): 57-76.

———. “Therapy and Antitherapy in Salinger's ‘Zooey.’” American Imago 25 (1968): 140-62.

Slabey, Robert M. “The Catcher in the Rye: Christian Theme and Symbol.” College Language Association Journal 6 (1963): 170-83.

Stone, Edward. “Salinger's Carrousel.” Modern Fiction Studies 13 (1967): 520-23.

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Vanderbilt, Kermit. “Symbolic Resolution in The Catcher in the Rye: The Cap, the Carrousel and the American West.” Western Humanities Review 17 (1963): 271-77.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979.