The American Novel After Ideology, 1961–2000

Laurie Rodrigues

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501361876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Claims of ideology's end are, on the one hand, performative denials of ideology's inability to end; while, on the other hand, paradoxically, they also reiterate an idea that 'ending' is simply what all ideologies eventually do. Situating her work around the intersecting publications of Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology (1960) and J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey (1961), Laurie Rodrigues argues that American novels express this paradox through nuanced applications of non-realist strategies, distorting realism in manners similar to ideology's distortions of reality, history, and belief. Reflecting the astonishing cultural variety of this period, The American Novel After Ideology, 1961 - 2000 examines Franny and Zooey, Carlene Hatcher Polite's The Flagellants (1967), Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2001) alongside the various discussions around ideology with which they intersect. Each novel's plotless narratives, dissolving subjectivities, and cultural codes organize the texts' peculiar relations to the post-ideological age, suggesting an aesthetic return of the repressed.

1

Cliché and Modern Womanhood: J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey

In Franny and Zooey (1961), main character Franny Glass realizes herself to be trapped. An unwilling pledge to external forces that define and seek to refine her, Franny finds herself caught between social choices that offer her no choice at all. On the one hand, she seems to half-heartedly participate in specific feminine stereotypes and clichés (particularly through her fashion choices); but on the other, Franny reacts to the contexts created by these clichés, as well as the auxiliary expectations placed upon her by them.¹ As a result (following a ladies room breakdown, fainting spell, and a retreat home to Manhattan), the remainder of Franny and Zooey dismisses Franny and her cliché predicament in a fashion uncannily resonant with Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology (1960), particularly Chapter 13 (“Mood of Three Generations”).

Bell’s text offers scant consideration of women in American society, only exploring their social, civic, and cultural experiences insofar as their roles in the family’s social organization and “dynastic” marriages.² Bell’s lack of commentary on women’s social circumstances, or the Second World War’s impacts on their lives (beyond sexual “emancipation”) is reprised in “Zooey,” the concluding narrative that comprises the bulk of Franny and Zooey. Published within a year of Salinger’s composite novel, The End of Ideology observes the bureaucratization of institutions and the dissolution of social ties that followed the end of the Second World War; this, Bell claimed, resulted in widespread social feelings of dependency and disillusionment in America. According to Bell, a college-aged “after-born” generation was formed, who misconstrue personal experiences according to psychological impact and importance.³ These young adults, Bell claimed, subsequently misidentify the causes of their psychological discomfort due to the inaccessibility, to their generation, of “a genuine experience that transform[s] one’s life” (which had, presumably, once been provided by ideologies). An American citizen of Franny’s generation could thus only reach “infinite regress” via ineffective or partial expressions of revolt (such as the ladies room breakdown, or her recitations of the Jesus Prayer).⁴ At this compelling historical moment, I claim that Salinger uses “Franny” to reflect and critique clichés that assemble postwar womanhood; and “Zooey,” to probe the operations of these cultural clichés. To do this, Salinger transforms “Franny’s” nameless, mass culture-reminiscent narrative voice to “Zooey’s” dismissive, socio-politically mature narrator, Franny’s eldest living brother and writer, Buddy Glass.

In the context of this chapter, my use of “cliché” refers to the work of literary and cultural critic, Marshall McLuhan. According to McLuhan, the “cultural cliché” appears and proliferates through various media, contributing to the construction of cultural environments: cliché may appear as an homage implied by character wardrobe, in the composition of a letter, or may manifest as setting.⁵ Thus, clichés are pervasive and, through the environments they construct, can eventually forge breakthroughs in cultural understanding. McLuhan’s work with cliché began with his first book, The Mechanical Bride (1951), an analysis of the sexist distortions of postwar images promoting better living; and his later work explores the cliché’s various roles, uses, and effects on American society and culture. McLuhan’s work on the cultural cliché echoes an implicit ethos of Salinger’s notorious Glasses, asserting that America’s culture demands “greater exertions of intelligence and a much higher level of personal and social integrity than have existed previously.”⁶ McLuhan’s work on the social effects of mass culture gained prominence around the time of Franny and Zooey’s release, and McLuhan’s relevance to the text resides with its popularity among general readers in 1961 (a New York Times bestseller). McLuhan’s work explores paradigm shifts in interpretive values that are stylistically reflected in Salinger’s prose; and both McLuhan and Salinger use their work to express (and sometimes ironize) the centrality of the cliché to American culture, society, and the relation between the two. Importantly, McLuhan did not seek to offer a theory of communications, but to probe the effects of mass communications on American culture and subjectivity.⁷

Read through the discourses in which Salinger’s composite novel is couched, Franny Glass’s crisis emerges as a derivative trope, reminiscent of middlebrow culture; and this likely contributed to critics’ dismissal of Franny as worthy of scholarly engagement. Upon its initial release, Alfred Kazin, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Leslie Fielder, John Updike, and other major figures in American literary criticism negatively responded to J. D. Salinger’s second, long-form fictional work.⁸ Franny and Zooey emerged in a historical context framed by intellectual and popular debates focused on the topic of women’s problems. Although none of Salinger’s literary contemporaries engaged the implications, causes, or results of Franny’s crisis in their articles on Franny and Zooey, from the mid-1950s to early 1960s the general subject of women’s problems (i.e., some women’s experiences of despair and anxiety in adult life) was a popular boon among America’s (largely female) general readership, and discussions of the implications, causes, and results of women’s problems were topics that found broad engagement in popular media. For instance, in “women’s films” (a genre dating from the 1930s through the 1960s) women’s problems were presented, explained, and resolved within the neat parameters of mainstream social values.⁹ A “leading lady” was transferred from a conflicted or troubled state, to “a state of normal, ordinary womanhood”—usually in the name of love for a man.¹⁰

However, as Jeanine Basinger explains, a major difficulty of women’s film was its framing of women’s problems as inevitabilities of the female gender, often couched in an idiom that implied a woman’s “irresponsibility” (sometimes explained as emblematic of delayed “sexual responsiveness,” or immaturity), defined by her presumed negligence of her “true” concerns as a woman.¹¹ In this way, suffering beyond the concerns of one’s prescribed feminine roles (Freudian experts explained) indicated a gendered abnormality.¹² On television, in magazines and American paperbacks, working women were depicted discarding successful careers or leaving college if married or, in some cases, if presented with a proposal of marriage.¹³ Via popular media, women were often urged to conform to their presumed feminine instincts in order to attain self-fulfillment. And this may contribute additional cause for Salinger’s contemporaries’ repulsion by the text; Salinger plays the role of narrator in Franny and Zooey’s shorter, “Franny” section, applying a third-person voice that occasionally adopts Franny’s perspective. Readers gain an understanding of her general sense of things, but are denied access to either Franny’s interiority or the story’s world through her eyes. By adopting this anonymous narrative voice, Salinger is able to occasionally “impersonate” Franny while still directing the scene through his performance of her perspective.¹⁴

In “Franny,” Salinger’s narrative stylization creates a unique context through which Franny Glass and her dilemma are made central, but not resolved; indeed, the titular character of the text’s opening narrative falls sharply out of focus in its concluding story, “Zooey.” Salinger turns over narrative authority to Franny’s elder brother, Buddy, in “Zooey” and his overall discourse on his sister reads as a dismissal of her social and personal concerns. Indeed, Buddy’s tone and framing of Franny are comparable to (and seem to anticipate) a 1962 review of Franny and Zooey that appeared in The Partisan Review; here, Leslie Fielder drolly compares Salinger’s readers to Franny, mocking them for expecting Salinger’s work to answer their most pressing social questions: “Does my date for the Harvard weekend really understand what poetry is?” and “Is it possible that my English instructor hates literature after all?”¹⁵ Buddy’s perspective in “Zooey” reflects a philosophy of pragmatic compromise, sharply contrasting with Franny’s (presumed) crusading idealism, which he reads in her breakdown at Sickler’s, and precipitating crisis at home in Manhattan. Buddy’s narrative reflects an interpretation of “Franny” that perceives no cause(s) for his sister’s outburst and/or fainting; further, Buddy’s interpretation is inflected by prevailing sociological and historical discourses of the time.

According to my reading, as Franny is nearly done with college, her breakdown reflects an inability to face the limited options (as a first-generation woman college student in the humanities, c. 1955) that she faces: that is, marrying Lane or refusing marriage to become a professional actress (neither she claims to desire). Buddy’s narration and Bell’s claims frame breakdowns like Franny’s as invalid and incapable of authenticity comparable to “the Christian trials of conversion.”¹⁶ Yet, like Bell, Buddy’s narration does not reveal attentiveness to the gender-specific, historical, and social forces bearing upon Franny—and my aim is not to critique his narrative for this. Rather, this narrative blind spot opens up new avenues by which readers may explore the context in which the text emerged, as well as the deeper textures of the values and ideals portrayed therein.¹⁷ For instance, Buddy’s failure to provide a resolution to Franny’s crisis illuminates an additional cultural cliché: intellectuals’ failure to critically engage the importance of clichés to American culture and identity formation.

“Franny”: Cliché as Characterization

Salinger applies Franny’s “sheared raccoon coat” as a primary cultural cliché in defining his protagonist at the outset of Franny and Zooey. This cliché begins to formulate not only Franny herself, but readers’ initial interpretations of her environment and ensuing crisis:

[Franny] was wearing a sheared racoon coat, and Lane, walking toward her quickly but with a slow face, reasoned to himself, with suppressed excitement, that he was the only one on the platform who really knew Franny’s coat. He remembered that once, in a borrowed car, after kissing Franny for a half hour or so, he had kissed her coat lapel, as though it were a perfectly desirable, organic extension of the person herself.¹⁸

Acclimating readers to Franny and her environment, Salinger adorns his protagonist with an expansive cliché for 1955: the raccoon coat. Franny’s date, Lane Coutell spots her on a train platform where she arrives to spend the weekend of a Yale football game in an unnamed college town. Lanes’ reaction to Franny’s coat sparks Salinger’s expression of cultural work that the garment performs for his protagonist; the coat’s place in fashion is key to Salinger’s work in “Franny,” contributing to the narrative ground in which Franny’s crisis unfolds.

In 1955 (when Franny and Zooey is set), Franny’s coat (likely vintage, if not vintage reproduction) would have been considered very chic.¹⁹ Franny’s “sheared raccoon coat” recalls Sue Salzman, a New York socialite whose sudden desire to find “a true raccoon” turned her personal preoccupation with pre-Depression style into a short-lived craze.²⁰ A famous symbol of 1920s jazz age extravagance and rebellion, in the 1920s, raccoon coats became “lush symbols of a new democratic ideal of consumer luxury” during the decade.²¹ Favored among college-aged men (largely of the Ivy League), the growing black middle class, as well as some “spunky” college-aged girls, the coat fell out of fashion until it was revived by Salzman between 1955 and 1956. Importantly, Lane’s sudden awakening at the sight of Franny’s raccoon coat is inspired by the coat’s associations with 1920s excess.²² Like Salzman’s “true raccoon,” Franny’s signature, cliché garment calls to mind a subtext of opulence, recreation, and youthful frivolity. Franny’s coat thus reads as “a complement” to her personality and wealth or, as Salinger describes Lane’s affectionate kissing of the coat’s lapel, “a perfectly desirable, organic extension of the person herself.”²³

Salinger’s narrative voice in “Franny” frames his titular character in a manner that bears striking, discursive resemblance to the construction of leading ladies in women’s film.²⁴ The utility of this anonymous narrative voice, McLuhan would argue, is well-known to advertising agencies and Hollywood, who address audiences as passive consumers of information and imagery.²⁵ Women’s film often presented “an exaggerated [lead, woman] character, played by an extravagant beauty”; over the course of a film, this leading lady is galvanized in her dealings with “the emotional, social, and psychological problems that are specifically connected to the fact that she is a woman.”²⁶

Thus, Salinger’s anonymous narrative voice communicates the values, expectations, and priorities of Franny’s world using “folklore” (or, assumptions and stereotypes that append to clichés) that are familiar (drawn from various media) to Salinger’s general American readership. This speaks to Salinger’s narrative virtuosity, c. 1955, as the anonymous voice adopted in “Franny” appeals to a readership otherwise accustomed to receiving information from various media. In the Introduction to McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), Philip B. Meggs sums up McLuhan’s implicit relevance to Salinger’s fiction, particularly Franny and Zooey:

The rational world of print spawned by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type around 1450, McLuhan thought, would yield to a new world of audiovisual sensation. […] Generations who primarily received information from printed communications were influenced by this medium to sense things one at a time in the logical sequence found in a line of type, while those whose primary communications media are electronic discern multiple communications simultaneously, often through more than one sense.²⁷

Salinger constructs his narrative voice in “Franny” to maximize the story’s appeal to audiences who seek entertainment from not only books, but also other sources.

In a sly impersonation of Lane, Salinger informs readers that Franny is, not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Introduction: Ideology and American Literary Studies, 1950s–2000
• 1 Cliché and Modern Womanhood: J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey
• 2 Ideology and Nostalgist Aesthetics: Carlene Hatcher Polite’s The Flagellants
• 3 “Sorcery” and Historical Narrative: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead
• 4 Color-Blindness and the Trouble of Depiction in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain
• Conclusion: Toward Renewing Readers’ Experiences of American Novels
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint