This is kind of a crazy observation. But I happened on Kurt Cobain's suicide note. There was a link to it in a story I was reading online. And some of the wording — the stuff about empathy and pity and sadness — reminded me so much of some of the stuff going on in "Franny and Zooey," especially the stuff about being too sensitive. I guess the received wisdom was that Cobain was just terribly depressed.
Is Franny just terribly depressed?
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I don't know. This seemed open to so many interpretations. Interesting point!
ReplyDeleteIf it was just depression, though, would it have been brought on by the book she was reading? Or had it been a long time coming, and the book just amplified what was already there?
I'm mixed on Franny's mental state.
ReplyDeleteMostly I think I sympathized with what it's like to be 20(ish) and to realize that you're going to be dealing with phonies and probably be forced (or tempted) to be one yourself as an adult. And if she were all hot and bothered about Lane's talent (which Zooey said was a sex thing) and the dazzle has faded, there's the blow of realizing he's a phony, too -- rather a big one. I'm thinking of that slightly pathetic letter she wrote him, trying to convince herself she loved him and trying to sublimate her tastes in literature and so on to please him. Or more so because she really hoped he was right about everything.
Plus, if she's this precocious kid in a family of gifted siblings, she's not supposed to be conned by anybody, ever. And the prayer book is like an out -- she doesn't ever have to be conned again; she can just beg perpetual mercy and hope people make good decisions for her.
And then I also reread Zooey's first argument with her and think about how she's 20 and an aspiring actress, and with that kind of character makeup one does not have a halfway kind of breakdown. So Zooey was unsympathetic but got that this all would pass.
Is that cold?
Even if it's cold, I'm with you. I don't have a lot of tolerance for "breakdowns" (unless caused by a legitimate medical condition, of course). Franny just seemed disillusioned. She expected college to be full of enlightened scholars and instead found a bunch of pompous blowhards, which made her lose hope for humanity. I can relate to that, really, but you have to suck it up. Like cl, I think this has a lot to do with being 20 and an actress.
ReplyDeleteGreat insights.
ReplyDeleteIt did seem like Franny's mental state was more situational than "biological."
It's understandable that someone of that age and of those extraordinary sensibilities would be poised for some kind of breakdown or radical disillusionment — to fully comprehend that the world, as you guys noted, is profoundly different from what she was expecting.
Do you think Zooey was right that Buddy and Seymour were somehow to blame for Franny's and Zooey's inflated expectations? Was their "education" a good intention gone awry?
Also, it really stood out to me that, in her letter to Lane, she says Sappho is the only author she could read (I don't have the book here and don't remember her exact wording). I thought this was significant because Sappho is someone we think of as outside the world of men, i.e., outside the conventional power hierarchy that elevates male accomplishment over all else. As Franny sits there listening to Lane brag about his undergraduate paper and his intellectual prowess, she's completely incapable of assuming the traditional female role of stroking his ego. She just can't play that game anymore, as you noted, cl, when you mentioned her realization that he's a "phony" despite her best efforts to believe otherwise. It's a watershed moment for her.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the Sappho reference is interesting because all that survives of Sappho are fragments of poems. And Franny's mental state is kind of fragmented and seemingly capable of dealing only with small, isolated bits of wisdom, like the Jesus prayer. Just latch onto one easy, true thing and keep it continually in mind as a kind of mantra instead of trying to grasp the world on larger, scarier terms.