Franny And Zooey Pdf Free Download

So, this semester I am teaching a course on postwar American novels. I am basically a former high school English teacher who became an English educator (preparing people to become English teachers themselves), and only relatively recently have been asked to teach "straight" lit courses at my university as I usually have taught methods (of teaching) classes (though also YA and Graphic Novels) in the past quarter century. I just turned 61, and have not read many of these novels for this course for So, this semester I am teaching a course on postwar American novels. I am basically a former high school English teacher who became an English educator (preparing people to become English teachers themselves), and only relatively recently have been asked to teach "straight" lit courses at my university as I usually have taught methods (of teaching) classes (though also YA and Graphic Novels) in the past quarter century. I just turned 61, and have not read many of these novels for this course for literally decades, many of them since I was in my early twenties, when they were truly identity-forming for me as reader, teacher (less so this because I have almost taught none of them in all my nearly forty years of teaching), and person, for sure. I see them now as Great Books, but not quite in the classical canon sense, because when I think of the Canon I think of Shakespeare and Milton and not Kerouac and Heller. Prior to teaching this course I thought of the period (1945-1980) as basically the Beats (fifties, drugs and self) and Hippies (sixties and early seventies, drugs and social causes) and Beyond (some postmodern stuff, less chemical and more fictional experimentation), basically.

When I first began choosing the books for this course I went to Goodreads lists and picked out maybe 75 American novels I thought were "important" for one reason or the other in the years 1945-1980. I knew we could only read 12-14 of them, and I knew some of them might be pretty long, so I starred ones on my list that I really wanted to re-read, books I had loved, and came up with maybe 18-20. My thinking at this point was that the course would be kind of about ME, a kind of Re-reading My Self course, reading as autobiography, as in: What do I recall these books meant to me then, how did I understand them, and how do I read them differently now? Who do I think I was then, who do I think I am now, and how did/do these books figure in the process? Shoshana Felman wrote a book called What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference? which among other things makes the point that with some books, they are essentially autobiographical, that we read ourselves in and through them so much that we see them as telling our own stories. In her book she illustrates this by telling stories about some of her favorite books. I like that. Reading a book through your life, in part, with some books, at least. And for the process I even have some old copies of texts with underlined passages and margin commentary from the old days! Cool, right?

Most college courses are probably usually like that in some ways, in that they are all about the teacher's project or research or obsessions, so it wouldn't be weird for students to experience a class like that (though most college English classes have nothing to do with reader response or subjective readings of texts, they are all about close readings or some postmodern theoretical frame for the reading), but I have not usually done things this way, thinking it as kind of narcissistic, so I changed my mind and did what I often do, I invited the registered students to help me choose the books. About half of the students enthusiastically participated; I went with their enthusiastic choices of certain books even if they were not on my primo list, though I did keep a couple from my own original list. I also ended up with a couple on the final list I had never read, which is cool. Oh, the list? Salinger's Franny and Zooey, Nabokov's Lolita, Kerouac's On the Road, Plath's The Bell Jar, Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Heller's Catch 22, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow {which was our last book, so we only began reading it, maybe half], Capote's In Cold Blood, and Mailer's Executioner's Song [which we did not end up reading]. Lots of white men, you say? Guilty as charged, but then a lot of male and female students helped me! What follows is the first book we read in this course.

Postwar Novel Story #1: Franny and Zooey is usually the book you read after you join the 60? 90? million people who have read Catcher in the Rye. If you hate Holden, this will end your Salinger journey, but for those of us who felt/feel he speaks for us in naming all the phoniness in the world, we next read the somewhat kinder, gentler Franny and Zooey, and especially fall in love with Franny, the female Holden, a fragile, driven-to-nervous-breakdown early twenties kid, more like Holden than Zooey, Franny's somewhat harsher but also more insightful older brother. In fact (and this is a Salingerism to say things like "in fact" and interjections like this) you see Holden (and probably Salinger himself?) in all the Glass family (suicidal Seymour; Buddy, the writer/recluse who retreats to the New Hampshire woods; 20 something drop-out, "nervous breakdown" actress Franny, and commercially successful but self-and other-loathing 25 year old Zooey).

No plot summary will I write, but the two separate but related stories that comprise this collection are the separately published (in The New Yorker, 1955) "Franny" which is about a meeting with her current hilariously phony boyfriend Lane in The City, focusing on Franny in spiritual/psychological crisis, and "Zooey," published two years later, (also in The New Yorker) focusing on the family's attempts at intervention into Franny's crisis, while also addressing Zooey's very related crisis. Both are kinda early twenties stuck, wondering how to live their lives with Purpose and Meaning, as I was then. There's very little plot to tell even if were to try, actually; most of both stories are a series of extended dialogues, broken up mainly by a lot of chain smoking, but the dialogues are amazing, sometimes exasperating in that the Glass family is pretty messed up, and self-absorbed, but also sometimes quite moving in that their struggles are spiritual, in response to a messed-up world, where the Glass kids find they are lost and struggling to find themselves in what Salinger and they saw as "pure" versions of spiritual truth such as Buddhist and Hindu notions of self-lessness (ideas Salinger was steeped in since the late forties until he died), which Franny finds imbedded in two books on "Christ-consciousness," books about a pilgrim learning "the Jesus Prayer" ("Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me"),which are also books about what it means to pray without ceasing, to become prayer/Christ/Buddha/Dharma/Satori, and so on. Basically the concern is how to live a life of integrity, if not quite ethical commitment. Though it's still more about self (and the goal of artistic perfection Salinger wanted for himself, free of Fame and Media and Buzz) than ethical commitment, though, really. It's what you should do for yourself. Individualism, one siren song of the fifties after all that patriotism and the war. But also spirituality, after a horrific world war. Back to life as usual? Salinger hopes not.

When I first read this book I had "borrowed" (and still have) it from the bedroom Marthena Bosch had vacated in what became my sister Shirley's house in Holland, MI. Marthena was maybe fifteen years older than me, and had broken from the Dutch Reformed faith I was basically also raised in. She had books on her shelf like an edited collection of The Beats, On the Road, all of Salinger, Hesse, and books on Zen Buddhism. I consumed these books in the late sixties, in my late teens, and probably read Franny after Catcher in my junior or senior year in high school. What political and spiritual turmoil the late sixties were for me, starting with books about race (from the sixties race riots, Black Like Me, Nigger by Dick Gregory, Dr. King's works, Malcolm X); the women's movement (I actually read Marthena's copy of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvior at 16 to find out something about feminism, all this bra-burning and female anger I was startled to see, and this type of person--a girl--that aside from my sisters and mom I had absolutely no experience with); the Vietnam War (I drove to Ann Arbor to encounter the SDS, Weatherman, Black Power, Marx, Mao, anti-war protests, and read books on all these topics), and great psychedelic and angry and ecstatic folk rock music, always going to concerts. Dylan, Joni, CSNY. I had been raised to attend this very conservative Calvinist church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, going to church twice every Sunday, went to a Christian high school and Calvin College and even started out my teaching in Christian high schools, but all my teens and twenties were more about spiritual struggle, about doubt, than pure faith, and ultimately I sought how to live a spiritual and ethical life without the shackles of Calvinist religion. Or any religion, having left the church finally at 28, though at 18 I was pretty God-haunted, wanting to live as Christ, which for me was something like what I learned from Franny and Zooey, to live without ego, to live for others. Franny's cry against ego, ego, ego was a struggle for me because I liked acting and writing stories and getting published and had set a goal to have a book of fiction published in my twenties, and Zooey's commitment to living a life focused on perfecting a devotion not to fame but to art (for him and Franny, acting, for Buddy and me, writing) made sense for me. I struggled with the inherently self-ish nature of art/writing (writing fiction was really all about me in many ways) versus the Dr. King-commitment to changing the world (through teaching), and I still write and teach and try to balance these things. Is it okay to write a poem about myself or would it be better to write a story about students in an urban classroom? Are both okay?

I was struck in this present reading of the book that Salinger has two basic "ghosts" in the "machine" of his art; one is the war, since he served in WW II and was part of the liberation of concentration camps and fought at D Day and other significant battles. His turn to Zen and Hinduism is a turn away from the enlightenment Reason that had led to the Holocaust and Hiroshima, that Drive to Certainty that led/leads to Corporate America and the Military-Industrial Complex. So much Darkness. So he writes of Buddy's retreat from consumerism and mass media that became his own retreat, and Franny and Zooey help us see self-lessness as a remedy for the madness of the world. A second ghost in Salinger's work is Innocence, Beauty, something the War ended for the world in many ways, and very specifically ended for him personally when the girl he had loved at 20, 16 year old Oona O'Neill, left him for Charlie Chaplin when he was abroad fighting the War. Salinger is severely criticized by some for his lifelong interest in younger women, but the way I see it work out in his fiction is that young children, and maybe particularly girls, okay, come to symbolize innocence for him, beauty, things that got destroyed by the war and the adult world, generally, so in this book you see Buddy, Seymour, Zooey, all notice young girls and sort of hold them up with some frail hope as what we must in some sense hold on to (innocence, I mean): ("We got to get ourselves back to the Garden," Joni Mitchell says). Holden wants to play catcher in the rye to save children from growing up and going crazy from phoniness and materialism and selfishness and Franny is just entering adulthood and is seeing the emptiness of much of the (post war) self-absorbed world and so is Zooey who has had five years of "success" in it. It's hard to have integrity in this world, they seem to say, and I feel the same way as I did then about this: I agree with them.

When I first read this book I think part of my attraction to it was class envy, too. I was a working class kid whose Dad worked himself to the bone every day, long days, all his life, and I wanted a more contemplative, artistic live with plenty of time for reflection. Franny and Zooey were messed up in certain ways, sure, but they seemed to have enough leisure to spend time talking about Big Ideas and Purpose and the Meaning of Life, and because they were educated, and in the upper middle class, they had time for that. My parents and siblings were high school graduates and weren't into reading or the arts (except sis Nancy, an artist) or serving the world like social workers or teachers did, and like I was considering doing. I knew I needed college to help me carve out a scholarly/artistic life. When I read Franny now I can see that class envy I had. I wanted that life of privilege, though I wanted some kind of authentic spiritual life, too. I was still In the Church and hoping to find a way to Be Me in it. So I didn't think of the Glass family as merely rich and privileged whiny kids as many do now in reading them; I saw them as having a life of ideas I wanted for myself.

Now as I read Franny and Zooey again I feel a little nostalgic for the explicit struggles with faith and religion that I had then. Franny's struggle makes me long for that, moves me, makes me realize my life is missing something. Maybe, I think, I need a little of that praying-without-ceasing stuff that my friend Tony is experiencing in his Grand Rapids urban ministry. Zooey inspires me to live that better spiritual life, anyway. While I did not choose it, Salinger's retreat from NYC makes perfect sense to me now. The struggle for Salinger and Buddy and Zooey was to live life without arrogance (okay, Zooey's a little blunt and even a little mean to Bessie, and Franny, even when he is right), without being judgmental, which I find pretty difficult to do in this Tea Party world.

What do I learn or relearn about teaching and learning from it? I relearn there's a big difference between knowledge and wisdom, and that schools generally teach the former without the latter, which is what gets us in so much Trouble. I relearn that sometimes the Eastern "no knowledge" or unknowing would be better for us than the certainty that leads to arrogance. That being good and doing good teaching and writing and art without ego if at all possible is better than any honor or award or accomplishment or even paycheck. There's a Dr. Tupper that teaches Franny who is actually a fraud, a fake, a pretentious academic phony. Having read of him, how can I not resist being like him as I teach this class, this book? I loved this book then and love it even more now as I think I understand it better. It's a kind of preaching/teaching book with a moral to it, but it's one I like.

And what gorgeous writing there is in this book, with terrific dialogue, especially, completely convincing and real to me. The Glass family is a kind of prototype for the Royal Tenenbaum family, too, in many ways, all these precocious, f'ed up rich kids never really quite adjusting to the world. Dealing with the madness of the world in ways that bring them close to madness. My reading and teaching have come full circle back to issues of self (in good ways) they hadn't really seen in any focused way for decades. I'm glad for the trip back and forward now through the reading. Oh, and I just saw the recent Salinger biography after I read it which I thought was terrible on the whole but still sometimes interesting. Leave him alone, we say, it's his choice, but we still obsess about him and want to talk with him.

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