Franny and Zooey

Last night I finished re-reading J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey.  This book, like much of the other Salinger that I have recently read is pretty much what I remember it to be.  The characters are a little more grating to me than they were when I read this in college.  Having a little more distance, and reading more broadly since then, I think I have a better handle on what Salinger was doing.
In this novel and in much of his work there is a tension between maintaining a cool, ironic distance and sincerity.  In The Catcher in the Rye, and here, there is a lot of discussion of being a phony.  I think that there is a little better definition of what that means in this book, but it is still something ill-defined.  But this lack of definition seems more due to the struggle of sincerity itself.  If characters, or people want to be sincere, doesn't this undercut sincerity itself?  These works seem to ask the question whether one can try to be sincere.  This is a similar question that seems to plague Infinite Jest, but the irony is an even deeper one in that novel.
This book contains one short story titled "Franny" and a longer story, or novella Zooey, that are primarily about the two characters named in the titles.  In "Franny," the title character visits her boyfriend at his college and is disturbed by everything around her.  She tries to connect with the boy but finds his concerns juvenile.  She is irritable and distracted throughout their visit.  She collapses at the end of the story, presumably because she has not bee eating and due to the stress of her recent crisis of personality.  She is distanced from her studies and her own personal life.
This scene sets the stage for Zooey which falls into roughly three parts.  The first is a discussion between Zooey and his mother, Bessie Glass, while Zooey soaks in a bath.  In this section, Salinger does for Zooey much of what he does for Seymour in Seymour, an Introduction.  That is, he works to define his personality from Buddy Glass' perspective.  In the middle third of the piece, Zooey talks with Franny, who has returned to the family home to recover from her breakdown.  Zooey alternately comforts her and argues with her about her recitation of the "Jesus prayer."  The final third of the story is a continuation of Franny and Zooey's discussion, but over the phone with Zooey pretending to be their brother Buddy.  Franny realizes that it is actually Zooey and they are able to reach a sort of resolution to their disagreement.
The heart of this story lies in the Jesus prayer and Franny's search for meaning.  I won't go into detail here about the Jesus prayer.  I think there is something more interesting going on.  Zooey seems primarily worried that Franny is using the prayer for the wrong reasons.  The pair pretentiously judge others for wanting things for the wrong reasons, and for wanting things at all.  Franny dislikes professors who want to appear professorial, dislikes her peers for appearing to want to gain knowledge, and dislikes her boyfriend for being proud of an essay that he wrote.  Zooey warns her against this attitude, telling her that he had been guilty of the same judgements.
Zooey wants Franny to consider what her motivation is in using the Jesus prayer.  He wants her to have a knowledge of Jesus prior to using the prayer.  His concern over her intentions plays into the concept of phoniness that dogs so much of Salinger's work.  Zooey lumps a desire for knowledge into the same category as desire for prestige or desire for wealth.  These things are all superficial and those who desire them are phony.  This puts Zooey and Franny, and the other Glass children in a bind.  Franny is in crisis because she is having difficulty reconciling her desire for enlightenment and meaning against the charge of being phony.  She is blind to the true desires of those around her and is guilty of the same superficiality that she finds so off-putting.  Their discussion keeps circling these few points.
There is more to the story but I want to cap this off with a general observation.  This tension between sincerity and artifice will come to a boiling point in a lot of postmodern fiction.  The trouble with detached irony is that it has the ability to destabilize every utterance.  Franny can't tell when Zooey is being sincere and persistently begs him to just leave her alone.  Even when Zooey wants to help her, his own personality gets in the way.  Seymour is presented in Salinger's works as the paragon of sincerity.  He also kills himself.  Every other Glass child struggles with their own affectations and these discussions seem to keep recurring.  There does not seem to be a resolution.
Of course, the other possibility is that this is all just a reflection of Buddy's insecurity.  Buddy reveals himself to be the author of many of these pieces about the Glass family.  How much of this, one wonders, is just about Buddy himself?

Found Writings, Part 1

What follows is the introduction that I wrote for what I thought would become a blog focused on punk music.  I wrote a handful of posts, some of which may show up here at some point.  That blog idea grew into this blog and so, here are my initial thoughts on punk rock's appeal for me.

Post 1

I began listening to punk rock at a fairly young age.  When my brother introduced me to the music I didn't even know what it was called but it was fast, it was aggressive, and it engaged in a world that I knew.  I was a privileged kid growing up in the suburb of a major American city, so I was just like a lot of the people who performed this music.  We were angry about a well-being that bred complacency and had an inkling of our own entitlement, including the underlying unfairness.  We never worried about shelter or where our next meal would come from, but we did worry about maintaining a sense of integrity, being true to ourselves, and not losing sight of what we wanted to become.  Punk rock carried a negative connotation in the broader culture for a long time and it has been only relatively recently that it has started to become mainstreamed in a way that rehabilitates that image.  The rest of the world has begun to see that the nihilistic trappings of certain punk icons contained a critical depth that was easy to miss.

In a sense, I missed out on punk rock because the first wave happened before I was even born.  But in a broader sense, this music changed the shape of the culture, influencing multiple generations of young people to investigate the true nature of their surroundings and to investigate themselves.  In this sense, I experienced punk rock in its true essence.  I, and my friends, discovered community and  empathy.  We learned to care about other people's troubles and we learned what it meant to build a family of affiliation.  We learned how to think about the world in a different way.  

What appealed to me as a teenager still resonates for me.  Punk rock still excites me: both the punk that I listened to in my youth and the waves of punk that followed.  While my attraction to punk rock as a teen was more raw, I have come to a different understanding as I have grown older.  Punk is political.  Punk is rhetorical.  Punk is aesthetic.  And punk is visceral.  But most of all, punk is powerful.  Punk is powerful because it helped a multitude of angry young folks to recognize that we were not alone and that we could direct our energy in a positive way.  Punk is powerful because it redirected the lives of many of us and showed us that we could influence the world.  Punk was powerful for me because it showed me that I could embrace this critical, sarcastic attitude and bend it to shape the world around me.  It convinced me that I could be an intellectual and it helped inspire me to become a teacher.

I initially envisioned this blog to be exclusively about punk music, but as I developed the idea I recognized that this might not be sustainable just because my interests are more diverse.  I envision writing about movies, books, philosophy, food, teaching, and whatever else interests me.  I have also thought about engaging some of the ideas that punk rock has introduced me to and writing about the ways that this music has changed my life.  At base, I want to do what punk rock has taught me to do: engage.