Franny and Zooey Book Review: The Paradox of Reason

Image taken from: https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2019/05/franny-and-zooey-by-j-d-salinger

I recently finished Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. This provocative novella occurs in Salinger's universe of the brilliant and precocious Glass children. Franny and Zooey are the two youngest, with Franny being the youngest and Zooey the brightest. Like some of his other work, F&Z is an attempt by Salinger to respond to superficiality and phoniness in society. 

From a young age, both Franny and Zooey are instructed by their older siblings in spiritual knowledge (a conglomeration of Zen Buddhism, Hindu Advaita Vedanta, and Eastern Orthodox mysticism), as they believe that secular knowledge should be grounded by spiritual wisdom. Equipped with their keen intellects and high moral standards, both Franny and Zooey perceive  superficiality, selfishness, and stupidity as the mode de faire among humans. People are acquisitive for money, pleasure and status, and seem to fit predictable cookie-cutter patterns of lifestyle. But from their upbringing of being treated as brilliant know-it-alls (albeit correctly), F&Z inherited arrogant attitudes. While they are correct in their critiques of society, they themselves are arrogant, judgmental and self-righteous. 

Franny, in particular, is disgusted by society, and feels the need to detach herself from the world. She begins repeating the Jesus Prayer to connect with God. But then she hyper-analyzes her motivations for attaining spiritual enlightenment and wonders if she is just as acquisitive as everyone else. She wonders how wanting to store up for herself treasures in heaven is in principle different from wanting to store up for herself treasures on earth. How is chasing enlightenment and peace less egotistical and self-seeking than chasing money and prestige, she asks. The possibility that she is just as acquisitive and greedy as the society she condemns and alienates herself from sparks existential despair. She has a nervous breakdown during a weekend date with her shallow boyfriend, and then curls up on the Glass’s family couch repeating the Jesus Prayer, not wanting to eat or interact with anyone.

Then Zooey, worried about Franny’s health, walks in and begins lecturing her. Zooey doesn’t tell her not to say the Jesus Prayer, but he addresses her potential motives for saying it. 

First, Zooey argues that Franny’s hatred of society is actually hatred of individual people. It’s okay to hate the stupid things humans do, but Franny hates the people themselves, as evidenced, for example, by her disdain for a personal quirk one of her professors exemplifies.

Second, Zooey argues that Franny’s attempt to connect with Jesus is disingenuous because she ignores the parts of Him she doesn’t like. She makes Jesus to be more of a stereotyped St. Francis of Assisi hippie than the all-powerful Son of God; she ignores those parts when Jesus overthrew tables in the synagogue and said humans are more valuable than sparrows.

Third, Zooey argues that Franny’s standards for egoism are hypocritical. Under her standards, no artist could publish work because it could always be related back to ego. Zooey points out Franny’s inability to apply her own standards to her favorite artists, such as Emily Dickinson.

Fourth, Zooey argues that citing the Jesus Prayer should not replace exercising her respective duties. She should perform to the best of her ability -- whatever it is she’s doing.  If it’s connection to God that she wants, she should do her due diligence in trying to the best of her ability to understand the God she prays to. Pray to the real Jesus, not to the one she imagines.

To summarize: Zooey says that if the point of the Jesus prayer is Christ-consciousness, not to simply "pray away" people you hate, then Franny should act like it.

Zooey ends with a series of advice:

• You cannot claim to be spiritual in lofty matters when you, first and foremost, ignore the religious action in the more mundane parts of living. This hints at the idea that all aspects of living is sacred. It responds to the notion that the spiritual response to a corrupt world is complete detachment.

• However, the most important thing is to maintain detachment through desireleness. How this comports with the previous advice is not clear.

• But act, for God if you want.

• Shoot for perfection on your own terms.

But here’s the most revealing part. Franny’s later conversation with Zooey shows that nothing he said truly registered with her. He failed.

The book ends like this. The siblings’ older brother Seymour told them to shine their shoes for the “Fat Lady” even when no one sees them. Neither understood what this cryptic metaphor meant. At least, until recently. Because Zooey realized that “There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.” In fact, the Fat Lady is Christ Himself. What I interpret Zooey/Salinger to be saying here is the application of the transitive property of equality. If we are to perform before the Fat Lady, but everyone is the Fat Lady, but the Fat Lady is really Christ, well, then to love (perform for) Christ is to love (perform for)  every individual person. This raises the sacredness of every encounter, every conversation, every play and scene Franny acts in, how they treat their mother, and so on. It’s all shoe-shining for Christ. It’s this insight, revealed mystery that appears to resolve Franny’s angst and give her peace. And so the book ends.

There are many possible interpretations to this novella, but here's what spoke to me.

Salinger is spot on in his identification of certain flaws of society, but more so in the Glass children. Specifically, the effect their brilliant thinking abilities have on their demeanor, attitude and behavior towards themselves and others. It raises interesting thoughts on the nature of Reason, which I’ve capitalized to indicate an idealized form of being gifted with or relying on logic, thinking, intelligence, rationalism, etc to navigate life.

In Franny and Zooey, both characters are among the most intelligent and bright characters in the world they inhabit. And they are recognized as such. They are rarely proven wrong. But this fame and success causes them to be arrogant, haught and judgemental. That’s the first effect Reason has on the human condition: elevation of pride.

One benefit of Reason is it enables great self-reflection and introspection in its user. Its user is more cognizant of other people’s actions, and hyper-analyzes their own. The downside is indecisiveness. The person imbued with excessive Reason is unable to make a decision or determine what is right because they overthink their actions and motivations. Are they making an action for a selfish reason or for a virtuous one? Franny faced despair when she could not determine whether her desire for peace wasn’t just as selfish as society. So Reason can be a crippling force.

Yet at the same time, Reason enables its user to create and justify elaborate moral standards that condemn other people’s behavior and gloss over their own similar behavior. Its user can convince themself that what they are doing is qualitatively different from other people, and that this difference creates substantial moral discrepancies.

Finally, and most paradoxically, Reason exposes its own limits. Reason cannot work on its own -- its existence relies on something other than itself -- but it is through itself that this is made known. We see this through the uber-introspection Franny puts herself through.

In “The Suicide of Thought” in Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton explains how exclusive reliance on reason alone is self-contradictory and debilitating. He uses reason to show how reason must rely on something other than itself to even exist and be useful.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself...Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"...There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped... In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved…

We know that Reason cannot conclusively prove nor disprove the existence of God -- and it is through Reason that we know this. We know that Reason does not give us happiness -- and it is through Reason that we know this. We know that Reason, if unreined, enslaves us and drives us mad -- and it is through Reason that we know this.

Reason points to its own limitations. Ironically, this statement is itself irrational. It is circular. 

Insert a few Pensées de Blaise Pascal:

“We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. We know that we are not dreaming, but, however unable we may be to prove it rationally, our inability proves nothing but the weakness of our reason, and not the uncertainty of all our knowledge as they maintain.”

When I first read this it blew me away.

Whether one thinks that the fact that we cannot prove we are not dreaming means that our reason is weak or that knowledge of first principles is uncertain is itself a matter of faith. 

There is no way of proving it either way. 

Here’s a fact: we cannot prove that our lives are not a dream or a simulation. I would contend we know “deep down” that this is not the case. But this is where the epistemology diverges.

Some would take this inability to prove such a foundational truth about reality as evidence that reason is limited in its ability.

Others would take this inability as evidence that we cannot trust any form of knowledge, that all truth claims are unverifiable, and therefore unknowable from an absolute or objective point of view.

But this latter view rests on the assumption that for a truth-claim to be held as true it must be proven logically, and that if it is not proven logically it cannot be considered true. Yet this statement itself is unprovable. 

In the words of G.K. Chesterton, this time some Philosophy from the Classroom: 

Every argument begins with an infallible dogma, and that infallible dogma can only be disputed by falling back on some other infallible dogma; you can never prove your first statement or it would not be your first.

Fundamentally, skepticism – including its underlying "reason-based" notions of epistemic proof – is a form of faith.

Thanks to the relentless eye of reason, we uncover the hidden assumptions behind every framework. After all that introspection and mental struggle, we landed back on square one. We realize that everyone – from the most devout religious disciple to the most devout agnostic – all have faith in something.