Ashé Journal, Vol 5, Issue 1, 34-48, Winter/Spring 2006.

The Pineal Auras of J.D. Salinger & James Joyce:
A Study in Neo-Classic Ribaldry by P.G. Hoeven

Farrell R. Davisson

Good morning, class.  Are we all here?  Miss Hornung, would you close the door, please?  The dean wears sneakers.  Sorry—that’s an earlier generation joke.  Now let’s see.  Oh yes.  We’re going to put aside for this period our discussion of the Roxburghe Ballads as an example of the lusty longevity of pre-Victorian folk humor.  Instead, we’re going to digress, and not entirely irrelevantly, I trust you’ll see.  That’s why I’ve asked you to bring to class copies of Franny and Zooey, written by Mr. J. D. Salinger.  An author, my graduate assistant informs me, who enjoys a considerable following among the college population.  My assistant also tells me that this installment of the longrunning Glass family serial first appeared in a periodical renowned for its impeccable taste, and that the young writer has been memorialized in a collection of critical studies, and has been given the stamp of respectability by what I believe is known as the cover treatment in Time magazine.  All of which strengthens my doubts that Mr. Salinger’s audience has fully comprehended and properly appreciated the pithy nature, the pungent bite of his art.

These two volumes on the desk?  No, this little pea-green book isn’t Franny Glass’s Way of a Pilgrim.  It’s the Compass edition of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  The large red volume, literally a modern giant, is, of course, Joyce’s Ulysses.  We’ll have occasion to refer to them both this morning as we delve beneath Mr. Salinger’s highly glossed veneer in an attempt to unearth at least a portion of what he’s really saying.

I must confess…a measure, I’m sure of the density of the ivory in my tower walls…that I hadn’t encountered any of Mr. Salinger’s works until a few days ago.  Last Thursday, in fact, when at the end of my Chaucer seminar a perceptive young woman came up and drew this well-thumbed copy of Franny and Zooey from her handbag.  She said she’d be interested to know how I thought it compared with Ulyesses.  Frankly, I was at a loss.  But thanks to an impish twinkle in her eye, it dawned on me almost at once that she was referring to the Celtic adaptation of the great pilgrimage, not the Hellenic version.  Some days before I’d told my Chaucer group that to refresh my cloyed vision I make it a practice to reread Joyce’s masterpiece at least once a year, usually during the Christmas holiday.  It’s an avocation I heartily recommend.  Be that as it may, the young lady’s suggestion seemed so farfetched that I was intrigued.  So I took Mr. Salinger’s book home with me to dip into over the weekend.

Agenbite of inwit!  I couldn’t put the curio down; I read it in one sitting.  Despite the skimpiness of its canvas, it’s a tour de force, make no mistake about that, a delightful spoof of consummate artistry.  It’s been a long time since I’ve had the pleasure of savoring such an exquisite play on polygonal words, the reverberating nuances, the palpitating undercurrents, the adroit circumventions, the thinly veiled asides which make up the musculature and the ganglia of Mr. Salinger’s stories.

One is tempted to say he’s pulled off a literary prank in the grand tradition that goes back to Aristophanes, that he’s craftily finessed those who take him seriously for the wrong reasons.  I would like to believe that more of his fans, like the bright-eyed young woman in my Chaucer class, got at least a glimpse of his unsentimentalized vision of reality.  But I fear that the extent to which he has succeeded in hoodwinking the myopic reader is the most telling comment he could make about the aseptic hypocrisy, the neo-Puritanism of that segment of American society he set out to describe—and to titillate.

Now as we proceed, I’ll be drawing a good many parallels with Joyce.  But you mustn’t think I’m implying that Mr. Salinger has intentionally cribbed from the Dublin genius.  I mean only to bring out the similarity of their approaches to the truth—past ‘the corporate watchman’s sentry box’ and ‘through a prism of language, many-coloured and storied.’  Like Joyce, Mr. Salinger has an irrepressible sense of the lighter, the antic side that saves human nature from absurdity.  Yet he never lets us forget the dark dank bogwaters immediately below where the eels lash and writhe.  And he possesses with his Irish forbear that nobler insight that refuses to see the eels as evil merely because they are unpretty.  Most importantly, he seems endowed with a Joycean compassion, a generosity, if you will, toward humanity and its foibles that rescues satire from caricature, parody from scorn and ridicule.

Professorial dignity demands that I make one further point before we attempt to unpeel the several layers of significance in these tales as intimate as the dermis of a scallion.  You’re all upperclassmen and/or honors students, supposedly mature.  I trust that now we’re this far into the semester in our survey of Medieval Literature, you’re aware that such mean-spirited, lip-pursing latter-day labels as lewd, obscene and scatological have no place in my critical lexicon.  Are we understood?  Excellent.

I have to admit it took me some little while to appreciate Mr. Salinger’s candor in telling us that this is a ‘compound, or multiple love story, pure and complicated’ and in saying the characters use a ‘kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry.’  On first reading of Miss Franny Glass’s celebrated trip to the ladies’ room of the college community restaurant, all that occurred to me was that the writer seemed to be straining for effect in providing such an off-beat setting for the climactic scene.  The writing takes on a certain diuretic urgency during this interlude which has the highstrung girl communing with her soul, so to speak, but I assumed only that she was stricken with some sort of an emotional indigestion.  A psychic upset that seemed somewhat strident and out of proportion to the rather banal conversation with her weekend escort that preceded it.  I likewise failed to detect the allegorical import of her reviving after he faint in the manager’s office.  We’ll go into that a bit deeper in a moment.

When did I begin to wonder if Mr. Salinger, to use Stephen Dedalus’s expression, was as innocent as he sounds.  Or, to borrow a bit of doggerel Joyce from W.S. Gilbert, tha the might be writing ‘on a cloth untrue/ with a twisted cue/ and elliptical billiard balls.’  Open the text to Page 88.  Mr. Cunningham would you be so kind as to share yours with Miss Treadwell?  Fine.  We again find one of the characters—Mother Glass—ensconced on the toilet stool.  This is more than coincidental poetic license—it begins to smack of burlesque.  It was at this juncture that I began to feel my leg being mischievously pulled.  The pull, in my case, anyway, led me back to that wonderfully feeling passage in Ulysses here on Page 68 where Leopold (Poldy) Bloom makes himself comfortable ‘asquat on the cuckstool’ of his backyard privy.  A tenuous connection with the spic and span fixtures of the Glass chapel where so much of the plot unfolds?  Much depends on one’s empathy.  There are those, I’m told, who consider Mr. Salinger a religious writer.  I’m reminded of a germanely sardonic biblical paraphrasing of Joyce’s: ‘It is meet to be here.  Let us build an altar to Jehovah…It is meet to be here.  Let us construct a watercloset.’

Moreover, Mr. Salinger appears to be deliberately encouraging a comparison with the master as he describes Mrs. Glass’s enthroned mannerisms: ‘Distinctly, her way of holding it tended to blow to some literary hell one’s first, strong (and still perfectly tenable) impression that an invisible Dubliner’s shawl covered her shoulders.’  I did a double-take and asked myself:  What is Mrs. Glass, a decidedly down to earth creature, really doing?  To put is a genteelly as possible, if a shade facetiously:  Is the lid actually up?  It is my conviction as a scholarly ‘word-squeezer’ that it may well be.  It is my further conviction that to overlook the sub rosa events of this passage is to miss the whole point—the Rabelaisian mockery—of Mr. Salinger’s genius.  I’ll go so far as to say that if this intime domestic vignette isn’t an artfully masked lampoon of the hard-dying cultural prissiness, the last stand of the modern blue nose, that holds as indecent and an improper literary concern something as vital to life as an everyday bodily function, I’ll turn in my key to the Heuristic Society.  Speaking of that, I found most amusing Franny’s line later on when she cautions Zooey during their exceedingly personal heart to heart talk not to bang the keys too hard.

Since a proper understanding of what our text for the day is all about may be said to hinge on how one assays the ‘embedded ore’ of this compact section, let’s examine it bit by bit.  It seems to me we find here in capsule three of the ‘illusionist’s’ favorite ingredients of his dissembling technique.  Mrs. Glass orders Zooey, her twenty-five-year-old son seated waist deep in the nearby tub, to ‘Just be quiet a minute, young man, I’m thinking.’  A perfectly innocuous declaration at first glance.  At first glance—before one has caught onto the author’s flair for the suggestive, the vibratingly assonant word.  I’ve jotted down a few scattered through the book:  Fat old druid, the role of ‘Rick’ heavily underlined in the TV script with a soft-lead pencil, the aforementioned word-squeezers, the dean named Sheeters, Sickler’s, sunny old Athens, Mr. LeSage, the wicker chair in which Franny had her strange vision of the Fat Lady with thick veiny legs.  You may wish to gather your own store of nuggets to amuse your friends.

An interval of silence follows Mrs. Glass’s admonition, broken only by the ‘faint swush of it.’  The italics are mine.  The ‘it’ supposedly refers back to Zooey’s dutiful application of the washcloth in the preceding sentence.  Perhaps it does.  I call attention to the dangling pronoun only to alert those of you who may want to reread the book in its entirety to the writer’s frequent use of ambiguous antecedents.  A device also favored by Joyce that permits the necessary inferences to be drawn by the adept.  My research assistant showed me a poetically tender…the phrase is sincere…instance of the device in this pivotal paragraph in Mr. Salinger’s widely read A Perfect Day for Bananafish:  ‘The young man (Seymour Glass) suddenly picked up one of Sybil’s wet feet, which were drooping over the end of the float, and kissed the arch.’

To continue with Mother Glass’s thoughtful labors:  Nearly a whole page is devoted to her way of holding a cigarette, and to her comely limbs.  But note the permeating flavor of the double-duty adjectives: ‘extraordinary length and shapeliness,’ ‘elegant tremor,’ her calves were ‘still firm and evidently never had been knotty.’  As I read the oblique passage a second time I keep expecting to her Leopold Bloom murmuring in the background: ‘Pwee! Little wind piped wee.’  Sure enough.  ‘A much deeper sigh than customary—almost, it seemed, a part of the life force itself—suddenly came from Mrs. Glass.’  My assistant, a droll chap himself, suggests that’s undoubtedly the first time anybody had the temerity to break wind in the fastidious pages of The New Yorker.

Mrs. Glass gets up, drops her stub, her cigarette stub, that is, into the wastebasket and sits down again.  ‘The spell of introspection she had cast on herself and unbroken, as if she hadn’t moved from her seat at all.’  Now really, I ask you.  But you’ll notice if you turn to Page 112 that Mr. Salinger reserves the last laugh for himself as he has Zooey inform his mother with a great guffaw that he doesn’t ‘want any party poops around here.’

Are you still skeptical, class?  Hear me out, please.  Obviously I;m not basing my deciphering of Mr. Salinger’s message on this one circumlocutory scene rather cavalierly wrenched out of context.  Let us go back to Sickler’s and rejoin Franny and her weekend date busy with his snails.  Why snails?  In passing permit me to read what Dedalus, speaking about his mother, has to say about snails:  ‘But for her the race of the world would have trampled him under foot, a squashed boneless snail.’  You profligate young gentlemen might ponder that aphorism when next you flog the elusive muse.

But anyway, we’ll start here on Page 15.  Franny and Mr. Coutell are rambling on about Literature and Live and Everything.  Read attentively and you’ll pick up the deft, economical clues with which we’re prepared for Franny’s mystical tryst in the toilet.  She’s staring with special intensity at the blotch of sunshine on the table linen as if she were considering lying down on it.  Next, she’s staring beyond her young man at some abstraction across the room.  They’re talking all the while about real poets, beautiful poems and ‘terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings—excuse the expression.’

Beneath the coyness we hear Franny’s plaintive, almost fervent inflections and begin to suspect she is taking refuge in euphemisms—a not uncommon guise in social intercourse.  We get the feeling that her college undertakings…I don’t think I need to underscore the word for you people…have not been all she has been led to expect.  It takes now great reach of perspicacity to gather that in Franny’s situation sex…that chilly, unvoluptuous three-letter word that can’t possibly convey the infinite aspects of love…has taken on the trappings of a religion with all the misguided piety that entails.  And though she has evidently done with normal amount of casual shopping around, she has yet to meet up with her Grand Passion.  If I were asked to make a curbstone diagnosis of her Problem, I’d say she is suffering from the lack of soul-satisfying…fudging a bit myself, I’ll say consummation.

Franny says as much on Page 20 where we’re about to find out just how exalted her requirements are, and the extent of her confusion.  ‘…I’m sick of just liking people.  I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.’  With that, she suddenly excuses herself and heads for the ladies’ room.  When she reaches the seclusion of the apparently unoccupied quarters, her brow is beaded with perspiration, her mouth is slackly open.  She is very pale.  She locks herself in a stall and assumes a tense ‘almost fetal’ position.  She holds the pose for a ‘suspensory’ moment then breaks down in a good old fashioned cry.  This clause—‘a partly closed epiglottis’—is a gem.  Here’s a portion of Joyce’s description of a similar mind versus matter, spirit versus marrow crisis Stephen Dedalus experiences at about the same age:  ‘And the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips.  It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of suffers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal.’

When Franny’s ‘violent outburst-inburst’ stops, it is as though ‘some momentous change of polarity had taken place inside her mind, one that had an immediate, pacifying effect on her body.’  Young Stephen went through much the same phenomenon:  ‘He was in another world; he had awakened from the slumber of centuries.’  Having seen the light, he proceeds to a Dublin brothel where he sheds his physical virginity.  But sweet Franny, having already been initiated when a sophomore one guesses, has only her spiritual chastity to offer as she keeps her rendezvous with the Holy Ghost.  Or whomever it is—no doubt a composite of all the mystical heroes picky, romantically inclined young women dream up these days to partner with in a nice clean, sweatless immaculate conception.  A sterile, unabrasive union she must sense as a well-schooled child of the scientific century will bring no lasting joy and bear no fruit.  Perhaps she’s also read, along with Dedalus, Meredith’s definition of a sentimentalist as one who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.  It’s now wonder she goes into a decline for the rest of the book.

We might inject a word here about the Jesus Prayer in the little pea-green book Franny’s latched onto and which looms so large in her travails.  A more elaborate explanation of the prayer is found on Page 112 where Zooey attempts to describe it to an unimpressed Mrs. Glass who says she knows what’s at the root of Franny’s troubles:  ‘The subject doesn’t really come up in either of the books, but, in Eastern terms, there are seven subtle centers in the body, call chakras, and the one most closely connected with the heart is called anahata, which is supposed to be sensitive and powerful as hell, and when it’s activated, it, in turn, activates another of these centers, between the eyebrows, called ajna—it’s the pineal gland, really, or rather, an aura around the pineal gland—and then, bingo, there’s an opening of what mystics call the “third eye.”  It’s nothing new, for God’s sake.’

Hardly.  Listen to the sport Joyce has with the subject:  ‘Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers.  Isis Unveiled.  Their Pali-book we tried to pawn.  Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma.  The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship, ringroundabout him.  Louis H. Victory T. Caulfield [sic] Irwin.  Lotus ladies tend them I’ the eyes, their pineal glands aglow…In quintessential triviality/For years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt.’  If nothing else, class, I hope our discussion this morning arouses your curiosity about James Joyce, certainly one of , if not the, most influential, seminal poets of the modern era.

Incidentally, I understand many readers imagined the queasy Miss Glass to be pregnant, goodness gracious.  Her young man seems to have grumpily assumed quite the contrary.  But you’ll see if you read between the lines when he’s comforting Franny after her faint that she has hopes the Big Weekend he’s been saving up for won’t come entirely to naught.

That brings us to Franny’s famous collapse.  You’ll remember the stress put on the fact that there was no room for her in the local inn.  She comes to in the manager’s office.  Drop the second ‘a’ from manager and what do you have?  Franny’s face and that of her host suspended above her have a remarkable pallor, we’re told.  Mr. Coutell says they’ve just run out of ammonia.  Ammonia?  Don’t you detect more than a faint whiff of the Bethlehem stables?  And aren’t you beginning to admire the fecundity of the bewildered young lady’s imagination?  Less then two martinis and she fantasizes a spiritual seduction complete with the Nativity Scene.  And it takes a writer with a marvelous sense of the bizarre to have his heroine a few days later being metaphorically delivered of a flea-ridden ‘altered’ tomcat who answers to the name of Bloomberg, of all names.

I submit that from one angle, Franny’s hallucinations can be translated as a cunningly contrived parody rigged for the Serious reader by a Serious author about a Serious heroine who takes life far too seriously.  I also offer for your consideration the possibility that it is with this very parody that Mr. Salinger reveals his understanding of the genuine pathos of Franny’s plight and that of the superficially erudite generation she personifies.  That desperate search—which one surmises has much to do with the popularity of these outwardly intellectual adventures—for the tidy explanation, the trustworthy definition of love, the oven-ready formula for living.  A vicarious, unrisky search for enlightenment and wisdom requiring no more physical exertion than that needed to turn a page.  A quest we may assume from Franny’s syncretic background that has led her through the Great Books:  The biblical Old and New Testaments, as well as Joyce’s Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, Reich, Krafft-Ebing, Heidegger, Proust, Zen, the Puranas, with especial emphasis on the blood rites of Kali, the malevolent mother goddess.  The list is endless, thanks to the paperbacks.  And plainly baffling in Franny’s case.

It’s only a fifty-minute hour so we must skip along over the high spots, leaving the perplexed youngster gazing up at the ceiling, lips moving.  A supine position in which she spends an unconscionable amount of time, I might add.  Let’s pause again with Zooey and his mother and their marathon tetea tete in the Glass bathroom.  Here on Page 79 I’ve marked a touching exchange that captures, it seems to me, the intensity, the inescapable nostalgia of the classical mother and son romance.  An affair that dates back to the reverential, tactile intimacy of infancy.  The sensuous delights of the bathinette, diaper rash freshly powdered, the soothing croon of Rockabye Baby, terrible hungers in the night assuaged palatable flesh to ravenous lip—need I go on?  Keep in mind the author’s warning that this is a ‘complicated love story.’  Holding a clean washrag in her hand, Mrs. Glass patiently repeats:  ‘Do you or don’t you want it?’  Zooey answers from behind the showercurtain:  ‘Oh, my God!  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.’  The triple assent throbs from the very depths of his cleft being.  As does Molly Bloom’s unforgettable ‘yes, I said yes, I will Yes’ which ends Joyce’s masterwork and one of the most truly wholehearted acceptance speeches in all literature.  To frown distastefully, Miss McCarty, is to miss the artistic integrity.  Who’s to decide, be he doctor, cleric or merely voyeur, where the filial bond ends and incest begins?

While we’re on that, we might briefly examine Zooey’s particular bent, his Achilles heel that has him playing ‘Martha to somebody else’s Mary.’  The allusions are so overt that I wondered if perchance Mr. Salinger wasn’t baiting a trap with a redherring.  There are the young man’s emphatic puffin and blowing on a panatela, a stock lingum; his celibate rabbits; Dick Hess’s monogrammed attaché case; the powertools and vises in Mr. Le Sage’s basement—shades of the Marquis.  But then I realized that Zooey had to be a hail-fellow-well-met disciple of the Athenian school or these two lines would be robbed of their essence:  Speaking about his television (a suspect usage) confers, he says, ‘Nothing’s final—nothing’s ever final with these guys.’  Think about that for a moment.  What’s that but a succinct summation of the intrinsic futility of such grimly gay male pursuits set in the mis-en-scene of 1950’s America.  The other line is let’s see…here is on Page 173:  ‘A Philadelphia highboy had been moved out into the hall, and, together with Mrs. Glass’s person, it blocked Zooey’s passage.’  Infectiously tongue in cheek, isn’t it?

I can’t resist calling your attention to the intentional coupling of the volumes in the Glass family library listed on Page 119, particularly Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase which lay atop Fear and Trembling.  You may also wish to scan more closely the quotations, starting on Page 176, which Zooey’s older brothers penned on their bedroom door.  Ring Lardner’s in my favorite.  And if you’re looking for the Primal Scene, apparently a must for any conscientious novel these days, I suggest you reexamine the paragraphs, originally written in blue-lead pencil, at the bottom of Page 180.

Professional circumspection inhibits me from dredging too deeply into the submarine substance of Franny’s off little aquatic dream she tells Zooey about on Page 126.  Have you found it?  A whole bunch of people, it says, keeps making her dive for a can of coffee at the bottom of a swimming pool.  ‘Every time I’d come up, they’d make me go down again.’  Franny says it’s hideous—testimony to her innate good taste, one may guess.  As the priest told Dedalus during their discussion of esthetics:  ‘Many go down into the depths and never come up.  Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.’  Especially, as in Franny’s dilemma, if there’s a brace of dormitory mates ready to clout her with a big oar every time she breaks waters.

You can almost hear the master chuckling approvingly at the graphic sketch on Page 128, further setting the stage for the heated brother and sister dialog to follow.  ‘Under the stimulus of Zooey’s investigating finger, Bloomberg abruptly stretched, then began to tunnel slowly up toward the open country of Franny’s lap.  The instant his unprepossessing head emerged into daylight, sunlight, Franny took him under the shoulders and lifted him into intimate greeting distance.’  Joyce’s observation about a Dublin midwife seems more than a little apropos:  ‘…he is reported as having stated that once a woman has get the cat into the bag (an esthetic allusion, presumably’…I’m still quoting…‘to one of the most complicated and marvelous of all nature’s processes, the act of sexual congress) she must let it out again or give it life…to save her own.’

That brings us down to the nub of the matter, as it were---Panditji Zooey’s longwinded lecture to his befuddled little sister that makes up the revealing last part of the book.  An exhortation that she cease her bootless pining for the Ideal, the Perfect One, and, to put it quickly and colloquially, that she Wake Up and Live.  ‘One life is all.  One body.  Do.  But do,’ Poldly Bloom exclaims paraphrasing Hamlet paraphrasing Ecclesiates paraphrasing Yahweh only knows.  You may recall in this connection Franny pointing out that the ‘mercy’ in the prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me’ is really an enormous word that doesn’t have to mean just mercy.  And as Zooey declares:  ‘Everybody in this family gets his goddam relgion in a different package.’

It should be apparent by now that Franny and Zooey’s facile glibness, their incessant verbalizing, their supposedly cerebral orientation, their forlorn sublimations, may be construed as a wry indictment of the folkways of the milieu Mr. Salinger is holding up to the light.  And once again he erects signposts warning the reader not to be dazzled by the prismatic rhetoric.  I refer to the drollery of having Zooey fiddling with a glass paperweight filled with snowflakes when he launches into his harangue.  Is the sland expression ‘snow job’ still extant?  I prefer Joyce’s:  ‘To make the blind see, I throw dust in their eyes.’

To grasp fully this penultimate scene, pitting brother against sister, you must pay close heed to the convoluted drams, the subliminal total recall of things past, that is taking place in the wings.  We’ve reached extremely sensitive ground here on which we must tread delicately lest we corrupt with our tribal attitudes this reenactment of the time honored, perfectly natural explorations of childhood.  Those pioneering, exhibiting excursions with next of kin down the exciting bypaths of physical attraction that probably commenced when inquisitive tykes first began romping and jostling together in the sunlight at the mouth of the cave.  It’s a matter of faith, but I trust you young people will recognize that this implicit reengagement, jus sanguinis, is handled with the loving tolerance of the authentic poet.

I sense from your restiveness that you’re eager to do the rest of the digging on your own—beyond, in Joyce’s words, ‘the portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian, softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous.’  If any doubts remain as to the subjective intimacy of the history the close-knit pair is reliving, scrutinize closely the culminating paragraphs on Page 171 where Zooey breaks off and stares at Franny’s prostrate, for once face-down position on the couch, her back to the fray, to borrow Ovid’s terminology.

I devoutly hope, as I believe Mr. Salinger does, that any atavistic chords the tableau may strike in your memories ring not with guilt and remorse and an assumption of sin, but with the sounder, more basis knowledge that the call of nature, the lure of adjoining flesh, is felt by all of us early in life before we quite know how to respond and can only experiment with those nearest to hand.  With that understood, we can only sympathize with the Glass offspring for their needless scars, their imaginary snake bites—above all, the topical…I believe the fashionable word is angst…of their ex post facto apprehensions that what was done in primeval innocence was done in wickedness.

Maybe that’s neither here nor there, but it’s worth thinking about, surely.  The scene shifts.  For the peroration of his sermon on the mount, Zooey gets in touch again with his sister via the telephone which in the Glass ménage, as in many another, apparently serves as an electronic umbilicus.  Franny takes the call in her parents’ bedroom.  The handpiece (of the phone) lies detached from its catch on Father Glass’s pillow where Mother Glass left it with symbology aforethought.  ‘To get to it, to redeem it,’ Franny has to shuffle through a quantity of newspapers and sidestep an empty paint bucket.  Emptied of whitewash?  Perhaps.  Perhaps some of you will be reminded of King Lear saying: ‘Nay, and you get it, you shall redeem it by running,’ and the Gentleman observes, ‘Thou hast one daughter who redeems nature from the general curse which twain have brought her.’

Zooey in an anticlimactic burst of vehemence by remote control tells Franny who the Fat Lady really is besides Momma and Papa Glass and Professor Tupper, et al.  Their name is legion.  After that democratic appeal to love thy neighbors, the pure with the dross, awful neckties and all, Franny slips into the bed to ‘lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.’  You may rest assured our petite chou isn’t thinking about tangerines.

It’s nearly time for the bell.  I’ll just say in closing that it takes a brave story teller in this analytical age to challenge the snickers of the capital-A Amateur Freudians by dropping the final curtain on his heroine peacefully snuggled down in her dad’s bed, balancing the familial equation.  One if left with the melancholy premonition that Franny, like Cordelia before her, is not to arise from her deep, dreamless sleep.

To end on a less somber note.  My assistant tells me this Zen koan figures prominently in connection with Mr. Salinger’s works:  ‘We know the sound of two hands clapping.  But what is the sound of one hand clapping.’  One doggedly earthbound reply suggest itself:  The marveling cadences of Leopold Bloom’s applause as he admired a stone’s throw away the preening adolescent Gerty MacDowell that eventide on the Sandymount strand.

Happy word squeezing, class.  I do hope our little exercise in exegetics this morning has whetted your appetites for chapters of the Glass family saga still to come.

Farrell R. Davisson worked for years as a staff writer, critic and editor for daily Variety in Chicago.  His journalism, criticism and poetry have appeared in Variety, Avante Garde, The American Fisherman and The Maine Times.

Photo: Rebecca Ellis

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