A “Morbid Attrait to Beauty” Elements of Aestheticism In

Home , Franny and Zooey, Glass family

A “morbid attrait to beauty”

Elements of Aestheticism in J.D. Salinger’s Glass Fiction

by:

Amy Lynn Robinson

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (English)

Acadia University Spring Convocation 2017

April 24, 2017.

The examining committee for the thesis was:

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Dr. Rachel Brickner, Chair

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Dr. David Heckerl, External Examiner

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Dr. Michael Dennis, Internal Examiner

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Dr. Lisa Narbeshuber, Supervisor

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Dr. Jessica Slights, Head

This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree Master of Arts (English).

I, Amy Lynn Robinson, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to reproduce, loan or distribute copies of my thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I, however, retain the copyright in my thesis.

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Author

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Supervisor

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Date

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Key for Parenthetical References ...... iii Introduction ...... 1 Ideological Foundations ...... 12 Biographical Origins ...... 12 Salinger, American Transcendentalism, and the Turn to Aestheticism ...... 19 Aestheticism ...... 28 Aesthetes and Phonies: Aesthetic Subjectivity in the Glass Stories ...... 40 Two Types of Subjects ...... 40 Phonies ...... 49 American Aesthetes ...... 60 The Sick Man ...... 76 Children, Salinger’s Ideal Aesthetes ...... 82 Idealization and Loss ...... 82 The Glass Siblings as Children ...... 85 Children in Buddy’s Fiction ...... 96 The Use of Religion in Glass Stories ...... 109 Art and the Artist in the Religion of the Glasses ...... 114 The Integration of Art and Life ...... 127 Philokalia: A Love of Beauty ...... 132 Desire and Bananafever ...... 139 Conclusion ...... 149 Bibliography ...... 152

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Abstract

This thesis examines the ways that J. D. Salinger’s later short fiction focusing on his

Glass family characters draws on elements of Nineteenth-Century aestheticism as a means of claiming that the artist occupies a privileged spiritual position. Over the course of his Glass family stories, Salinger develops a coherent philosophy of art that emphasises individual experiences of the beautiful giving meaning to life and art as the means by which these transitory experiences can be given permanence. Via the American Transcendentalist tradition, Salinger gives religious significance to the aesthetic impulse, producing a religion of art out of a love of beauty that posits the artist as a spiritual “seer” (SI 105) and art as a mystical calling. Although this spirituality has often led to interpretation of Salinger’s later work as religious, Salinger diverges from the democratic and levelling elements of American transcendentalism, asserting the spiritually privileged position of the artist while simultaneously contradicting the generally agnostic character of aestheticism, merging the universalistic and individualistic religious faith of the transcendentalists with aestheticism’s fixation on the beautiful. This transforms the artist who pursues aesthetic experience into a

“God-seeker,” an aesthetic saint who locates the divine in the actualization of their artistic vision.

Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been possible without the guidance, encouragement, and patience of my thesis supervisor, Lisa Narbeshuber, to whom I am deeply grateful. I would also like to express my thanks to the faculty of English and Theatre at Acadia for their enthusiastic support and for the innumerable conversations and lessons that shaped this thesis; to the staff of the Vaughn Memorial Library for their invaluable help and their generosity; to Christine Kendrick, for always helping me to navigate the chaos of my paperwork; to my fellow students, for conversations both challenging and reassuring. I would also like to express my deepest thanks and love to my family for traveling on this journey with me; my brothers for their humour and our life-long discussions (debates) about books; my Nanny and Poppy for their love and care throughout this process; my Robinson, family for all of their encouragement and support. I am also so grateful to my parents for their love and belief in me, even when I was unsure of myself, and for fostering my love of literature.

And finally, I would like to thank my husband, Andrew, for his love which kept me going through the stress and doubt; if I were to number the ways you have helped me, it would be another 140 pages.

This thesis is dedicated, with love, to my Aunt Lorie.

Key for Parenthetical References

RHRC: Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters

SI: Seymour an Introduction

F: Franny

Z: Zooey

PDBF: A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Introduction

In J. D. Salinger’s short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, Seymour Glass tells a little girl named Sybil a story about bananafish who, driven by an insatiable appetite for bananas, eat until they are so glutted that they are imprisoned by their own consumption and die. Shortly after this, Seymour returns to his hotel room and shoots himself. The creation of Seymour Glass marked a significant turning point in Salinger’s career; as he wrote to his editor and long time friend Whit Burnett, he felt he had finally found a suitable vehicle for his artistic vision and afterward focused his attention almost exclusively on stories about Seymour and his family. Seymour’s worldview, obliquely presented here, becomes the foundation upon which Salinger, through his Glass fiction, develops a spiritual philosophy of art. The insatiable desire of the bananafish is Salinger’s first indication of what he comes to view as the central evil in the world and the greatest threat to real art. Through Seymour’s legacy and his surviving siblings, he develops a philosophy that posits the aesthetic as a spiritual escape from desire, producing a developed religion of art that attempts to transcend desire through a spiritualized dedication to beauty.

In order to understand why Salinger considered desire a serious problem, a general understanding of how Salinger conceived of the self is necessary. Salinger placed a high value on individuality and locates the subject’s value in an immanent self, called the “true ego” (F 167) that is inherently connected to the divine. In opposition to the true ego are the conforming forces of commodity culture that trade in desire and that commodify the subject, creating a false ego. The true ego in Salinger is insulated against conformity through experiences of the beautiful which act as spiritual epiphanies, but

1 ones that reflect the subject’s ‘true’ self rather than the divine image. The immanent self, when developed, possess an idiosyncratic perspective on the world; its impressions of the beautiful are not merely their taste but a reflection of this divine, unique identity. This identity can be destroyed by gluttonous consumption or ‘desire’. Importantly, Salinger divides people into two categories: aesthetes (his Glass characters) who are sensitive to beauty and phonies, or commodified subjects, who are not. Desire, either for commodities (phonies) or new, intense experiences (aesthetes), is a problem for both character types.

The term ‘beauty’ in this context does not refer to objects, places or persons conforming to specific aesthetic criteria but the unique sensual pleasure experienced by the subject when they1 encounter something pleasurable. Salinger conflates the beautiful and the divine, using the two interchangeably and conferring moral and spiritual significance on refined aesthetic taste since aesthetic moments serve as both an encounter with God and with the immanent self. Beauty is for Salinger, after the tradition of Walter

Pater, an undefinable concept best described as “an ever-changing pageant of extraordinary experiences” (Iser 64) that mirrors the image of the subject, reflecting their subjective experience. The religious life for Salinger constitutes the artist’s complete dedication of life to the pursuit of the beautiful and its crystallization in form, again reflective of Pater’s “noble conception of beauty and art” which saw “sacred and obedience to its stern mandates as ennobling and uplifting” (Bowen 282). The height of refined aesthetic taste in Salinger’s work is the capacity to find everything beautiful, that

1 The gender neutral pronoun “they” will be used throughout instead of he or she for the purposes of inclusivity.

2 is, to discover in each moment something new that enriches experience, what Iser calls the “aesthetic potentials in the empirical world which must each be realised individually”

(64), thereby recognizing the divine and the self reflected in every part of creation2.

Salinger has a Kantian understanding of the Beautiful as “that which without any concept is cognized as the object of necessary satisfaction” (Kant); thus beauty can only be appreciated with disinterest, for its own sake, without desire, and the maintenance of a detached perspective is integral to being able to know one’s own impressions of beauty.

This does not mean aloofness or disinterest for Salinger but rather an appreciation of things with no ulterior motives. For him, as for Pater, the end of life is a “certain disposition of mind” which is the “principal of all the higher morality” (Pater). The

‘certain disposition of mind’ in Salinger’s Glass fiction, like Pater’s work, is

“detachment” [sic] (Z198), the detached eye of the artist selecting material for their art.

To consider the world with a detached perspective, cultivating and contemplating one's own impressions of its beauty is the highest calling of the aesthete subject. Impression for

Salinger, again apparently drawing on the work of Pater, is an important branch of knowledge because it is knowledge not of the world but of the self. To know one’s own impressions is the only means of developing and affirming the self, and happiness, peace, and self-actualization can only be achieved by affirming and cultivating this perspective.

This is precisely the juncture where desire becomes a threat to the subject. To possess desire is simply to look at the world with ulterior motives; desire is to cease appreciating beauty for its own sake and instead to look at the world as means to other

2 Whether this is possible is uncertain. Zooey claims to find everything beautiful, and many of the aesthetic epiphanies turn on this realization, but Seymour Glass suggests at one point that to fully realize this goal is impossible (RHRC 74).

3 ends. A subject riddled with desire gradually loses their capacity to see beauty in the world (something innate to children in Salinger’s work) because they cannot appreciate it for its own sake, but constantly look for what they can gain from it desiring and doing rather than contemplating and experiencing. This makes it impossible for them to fully submerge themselves in sensuous experience because desire makes them look to the future instead of content to exist in one moment of pure experience. Since the subject’s novel impressions of the world are the only means to self-knowledge, the loss of detachment results in self-alienation. Without knowledge of its own impressions and experiences, the subject is imprisoned by a normative perspective of the world as a commodity imposed on them by their culture. Thus, desire in life, as in the bananfish parable, leads ultimately to a loss of freedom and the destruction of the self.

The problem of desire is especially complex for Salinger’s aesthete characters since the difference between seeking beauty and general desire is left underdeveloped.

The detachment necessary to experience moments of intense consciousness brought on by the sensuous pleasure of the beautiful requires the transcendence these moments enable, resulting in aesthete characters sometimes seeking the beautiful for the escape it provides through transcendence rather than for its own sake. This tendency to stray into aesthetic solipsism is addressed by the Glasses themselves, especially in Franny and

Zooey but also in Seymour’s stories, but a solution is never satisfactorily developed beyond the resolution to re-enter the world which characterizes Salingerian conclusions generally. This lack of definition also accounts for the unique way the sensual is presented in Salinger; movement, gesture, and sensation are symbolic and spiritual in his work yet strangely divorced from traditional notions of the sensual and pleasure. There is

4 a sense that in order to claim that the sensual could produce contemplation, Salinger felt it must be separated from the sexual. Salinger appears aware of this difficulty, since he presents the artist not only as a mystic but also as a “Sick Man” whose existence is characterized by pain and struggle.

Although the primary emphasis in PDFB is the destruction of the self by desire, desire in Salinger’s fiction also problematizes intersubjective relationships. Compassion and love for others figure in Salinger’s work as an exercise of creativity; it is through the imaginative identification with the other that Salinger believes the unique self can appreciate and love other selves. This artistic act of love must be founded upon and inspired by the subject’s cultivation of their unique perspective, their novel encounters with beauty. Desire results in alienation from others both because it causes alienation from the self and because it conceives of other people as competition for what it desires or as means to its particular end. This understanding of relationships develops into a problem in his fiction since this imaginative identification, in practice, is a projection of the self’s image over material reality that constitutes a denial of things as they are rather than a real appreciation of them.

That Salinger identified consumer culture as a contributing factor to the problem of desire is evident through his repeated criticisms of it, both in his work and in his life.

Although he conceived of desire as natural to the subject, he believed American consumer culture inflamed desire and commodified the subject. The conforming influence of commodity culture turns the subject’s attention away from the “inherent” self, what Salinger calls the “true ego,” preventing the cultivation of a unique subjective perspective. This leads the subject to pursue material gain by conforming to the standards

5 and values of the world around them. Since Salinger views aesthetic experience as the only means of resisting this influence, those without natural aesthetic taste become little more than a replication of all of the other commodified selves, vapid, selfish, and defined by mass-produced objects rather than unique characteristics. Furthermore, the spirit of competition encouraged by capitalism produces alienation and isolation. The identification of the self with the commodity effectively prevents the actualization of a unique, individual perspective, something that Salinger views not only as the highest calling of every person but also as the only means of escaping the destruction of the self brought on by desire.

Since aesthetic experience is the only site of resistance, the scant hope Salinger offers the subject caught in the trap of desire is individual and available only to gifted, aesthete subjects such as his Glass siblings. For the author, with his deep distrust of large- scale institutions, the solution to the problem of desire is as individual as the damage it enacts. Although the capitalist system exacerbates this transformation of the unique individual into a replicable commodity to be bought and sold, Salinger never attempts to address the capitalist system as a whole or suggest large scale solutions. This is due to his extreme individualism and his suspicion of collective action. Hope seems to lie in self- actualization, the affirmation of what he calls the “true ego,” but no character in his fiction ever fully realizes this goal. Even a largely detached and self-realized subject has difficulty escaping desire. Furthermore, as will later be explored, the detached subject faces a different but equally dangerous temptation towards desire, one that is hidden within the very sphere of life that Salinger looks to for hope and respite from desire.

The answer to the problem of desire lay for Salinger in intense moments of consciousness, as it did for nineteenth-century aesthetes. In his work Aestheticism: The

Religion of Art in Post-Romantic Literature, Leon Chai argues that nineteenth-century aestheticism conceived of the central problem of life in terms similar to Salinger, treating disinterest as freedom from the desire that problematizes intense experience, stating

“we become too passionate in pursuit of our different objectives...to appreciate the beauty of those moments of intense consciousness that shed their radiance on our existence” (Chai 87). That Chai formulates this central problem for nineteenth-century aesthetes in a manner reflective of Salinger’s is hardly surprising given the influence aestheticism had on the Transcendentalist religious philosophy he employs. As for aesthetes and transcendentalists, Salinger’s characters who resist their desire do so through the cultivation of a detached perspective that facilitates these intense moments of consciousness that take place in the face of the beautiful, often literature or art. For

Salinger, this act constitutes an escape from destructive consumer culture; as Adorno notes, “happiness in the presence of works of art is a feeling of having made an abrupt escape” (22) and it is through experiences of the beautiful, especially in art and poetry, that the aesthetic subject temporarily escapes desire.

This transcendence of desire is not the end goal but merely the first step, since it is impossible to achieve permanently. To give some kind of lasting form to these moments of intense consciousness that connect the subject with the divine, one that can sustain the subject during the in-between periods of desire and misery, is of primary concern. For Salinger, art plays this role since it is defined by its capacity to “leave something beautiful” (F 19) and is created free of desire and for its own sake. Its purpose

7 is to crystallize those moments of intense beauty, a view that again parallels that of nineteenth-century aestheticism. The individual nature of moments of intense consciousness and what Salinger’s calls “true art” is consistently emphasized. For this reason, the Glass family is composed of artists. And Salinger’s Glass stories are predominantly concerned with the problem of desire as it inhibits each character’s development of a detached artistic perspective and a unique style that can represent these moments.

Self-actualization is thus foundational to “true” art in Salinger’s system, with the cultivation of one’s unique, inherent identity taking on spiritual significance in the Glass stories. To transcend desire is both an artistic and a moral calling, not only in terms of intersubjective relationships but also spiritually. This accounts for his critique of traditional education and of conformity in general as both spiritually and artistically stifling. Foundational to Salinger’s concept of the subject is that everyone is carrying “the

Kingdom of Heaven” inside of them (Z 171), possessing an inherent connection to the divine that is developed through self-actualization, a spiritual belief shared with many transcendentalists. Salinger further deviates from Pater’s aestheticism by equating the beautiful and the divine, so that refined artistic sensibilities offer access to both. While most people are “too stupid and unimaginative to look” (Z 171) for the divine within,

“true artists” are “God-seekers” and “seers,” artist-mystics whose “inherent morbid attrait to beauty” (SI 101) lead them to pursue spiritual experience because it is beautiful.

Beauty is an expression of the divine in the world and to relinquish desire and fully experience it is to momentarily encounter the infinite. Thus, in Salinger’s system it is

8 self-actualization via aesthetic experience through which the self can connect with the divine.

This equation of religion, the divine, and beauty and the legitimization of every individual’s unique vision of them is problematic in its blurring of the very differences the Glass siblings claim to espouse. While Salinger celebrated the individuality of the subject, his belief in an immanent “true” self means that his fiction obscures differences of race, class, and gender in its attempt to universalize a particular kind of experience as the most important. Because the aesthetic attitude for Salinger is not merely a way of seeing but the means by which the subject re-shapes their world, this essentially means that each individual is given power to regard everything as the material for making their own life into art. Religion, class, race, gender, and historical realities become little more than manipulatable elements in the artwork that each of his aesthete characters attempts to make of their lives, draining these qualities of their actual significance in order to give the individual power to conform their world to their artistic vision. The result is that the

Glass’s belief system licences them to disregard the significant differences between people in order to see them as beautiful, isolating them in their own very fragile and imaginary world of one.

Salinger attempts to correct this problem by making love a foundational element of his philosophy. The aesthetic epiphanies suggest that a part of living without desire is loving people unsentimentally and with detachment, even those philistines or ‘phonies’ riddled with desire who are unable to experience transcendent moments of beauty.

However, this love is ultimately an illusion since it makes no contact with people as they are. Salinger’s characters arrive at this detached love by aestheticising certain tolerable

9 elements of people and moulding and incorporating them into their own artistic vision of life, making everyone into a version of Seymour’s “Fat Lady” for whom they are spiritually obligated to perform. Salinger cannot correct this problem since it is located within the concept of transcendental experience. The moment of transcendence experienced when beholding beauty transforms not the world but the seer’s vision of it, and thus what Salinger’s characters encounter is effectively an artistic projection from their own minds, since the perpetual maintenance of an artistic perspective is dependent on the erasure of a natural desire that can never be fully conquered. Thus, Salinger’s characters are doomed to a perpetual cycle of intense moments of beauty that are fractured by the painful realization that the world does not, cannot be entirely mastered by their visions of beauty. Nevertheless, Salinger calls this suffering the “stimulating companion” (SI 103) of the artist, suggesting it is what gives life meaning even if the attempt is ultimately futile.

This problem is exacerbated by Salinger’s false universalization of the transcendent experience of beauty. While the term ‘beauty’ is used frequently, there is an absence of any delineation of what constitutes beauty; rather beauty is presented as a kind of universal truth and people either inherently possess the refined taste that enables them to recognize beauty or do not. The Glass siblings are unanimous in their tastes, and anyone who does not appreciate the things they declare to be beautiful or fails to appreciate them in the correct way are phonies. By conceiving of the pleasure of the beautiful in this way, Salinger unknowingly presupposes an affirmative response to

American social norms (Adorno 237) and then attaches this falsely universalized definition of beauty to morality, claiming that only those who recognize this definition of

10 beauty encounter the divine. Anyone without the Glass’s taste in beauty is blinded to the divine and is as a consequence selfish, commodified, and phony. This in essence creates a hierarchy legitimized by religion that places a chosen few sensitive and creative artists above the ugly masses.

The very attempt to render his concept of beauty universal limits the degree to which it can speak beyond the very specific white, American, middle-class consciousness of which Salinger and the Glass characters are a part. Since Salinger seeks to transcendentally achieve a transformed vision of the world that corresponds to his art, he cannot adopt a critical perspective on the worldview that his fiction promotes and he is blinded to the way his notions of beauty and of the divine are highly influenced by factors such as culture, race, religion, and class. He insists on the primacy of the individual perspective, rejecting the definition of the self by any external referents as false since not immanent. This another kind of projection, one which seeks to subordinate the claims of history, culture, and class on the individual in order to make the art that they make of their lives entirely autonomous.

Salinger’s aesthetic religion was crystallized in his Glass fiction but evolved as a response to circumstances the author experienced in his own life. His development of a philosophy of aesthetics that closely resembles the nineteenth century art for art’s sake movement, even in the wake of the rise of fascism that he fought against, began with a rejection of consumerism and a desire to spiritualize the role of the artist that drew him to the uniquely American Transcendental philosophy and an extreme individualism.

Salinger’s expansion of the role of art in the subject’s spiritual journey in the transcendental religious philosophy placed aesthetics at the heart of one’s experience of

God, and created a hierarchy that set artists over and above the world he grew progressively disdainful of, even as he sought to make love the centre of his work.

Chapter 1: Ideological Foundations

1.1 Biographical Origins

Certain facts of the writer’s life illuminate the problems Salinger intended his religion of art to address. The author’s move to spiritualize art and his rejection of commercial artistic success in favor of strict adherence to artistic and religious principles finds its origins in his secular, upper-class childhood and, later, in his experiences with the publishing industry and the trauma of the Second World War. The progression of his artistic philosophy paralleled developments and crises in his personal experience that made imperative an understanding of art as both the subject’s highest calling and spiritual reprieve. Salinger’s experiences in the Second World War, a part of his life often ignored by critics of his work, and his troubled relationship with the publishing industry, account for the dramatic shift in his writing from commercial pieces for popular literary magazines to experimental and spiritual work.

The spirituality and anti-materialism of the author’s later work had no part in his upbringing, although scorn for the financial and social aspirations of his father may have sown the seeds for the author’s later rejection of desire. Salinger was born into a middle- class family in New York and his parents, Solomon and Miriam Salinger, were resourceful, ambitious people. The Salingers were a Jewish family, and protestant-born

Miriam, born Marie Jillich, had changed her name upon her marriage in order to better fit with her new husband’s family (Slawenski 6). This was, however, not an indication of

12 religious devotion on the part of either of Salinger’s parents. Kenneth Slawenski states that Salinger and his sister Doris were raised “with a mixture of lukewarm religious and ethnic traditions,” celebrating both Christmas and Passover, but never requiring their children to attend church or synagogue (9). Eventually, even these traditions were abandoned by the family.

The Salingers’ secularization paralleled their financial and social gains. As Sol worked his way up in the food importation business and, subsequently, New York society, he found it necessary to conceal his Jewish heritage in order to achieve social status, something he did quite willingly. Slawenski notes that “in the 1920s, religion and nationality became increasingly important the higher one climbed the social ladder” (9) and that “as he rose in status, Sol came to identify with the world of his neighbors, for the most part wealthy businessmen and stockbrokers” and that as the Salinger’s advanced socially, the family “grew increasingly secular until, by the mid-1930s, the family had abandoned all displays of religious affiliation” (Slawenski 13). Sol Salinger’s life was the very antithesis of the worldview that J. D. Salinger developed in his fiction; as

Slawkenski observes, “Sol came to represent the very values that his son scorned, traits that Salinger’s future characters would condemn as phoniness, concession, and greed”

(Slawkenski 10). The artistic perspective that Salinger elevated in his work is precisely the antithesis of his father’s practical and materialist worldview, and while, by all accounts, Sol Solomon’s life was a contented one, J. D. Salinger’s resolution to become a writer rather than follow in the footsteps of his father, despite Sol’s deep disapproval, show that from an early age he sensed that these qualities would be spiritually and creatively destructive for someone like himself.

Despite his later condemnation of desire, J. D. Salinger did inherit his father’s ambition, and his early career as a writer is a testament to this. Following the suggestion of his writing teacher and mentor Whit Burnett, Salinger began submitting short stories to

“slicks” such as Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, and Burnett’s own Story as well as a variety of women’s magazines that were common publishing platforms for short fiction during the 1930s and 1940s (Slawenski 30). The spring edition of Story marked Salinger’s entrance into professional writing, but the following eight months were filled with rejection letters as Salinger strove to gain recognition in the literary world. Slawenski notes that early in Salinger’s career “his ambition was directed toward recognition and literary success. In years to come, the goal of his ambition would change, but the instinct itself would never desert him” (Slawenski 35). Salinger’s experience with the publishers of the slicks would prove to be one of the catalysts in this eventual shift in ambition, as Salinger sought justification for elevating art above the status of commodity that he felt these magazines relegated it to.

During 1941, Salinger produced two distinctly different types of stories: one commercial, modeled on what was already popular in the slicks, and the other more reflective (Slawenski 36). The year was incredibly productive for him, and his work at this time reflects both his search for his own distinct writing style and his ambition to construct pieces that were attractive to magazines, to gain the recognition he yearned for

(Slawenski 42). In 1942 he entered the army following the Pearl Harbour attack, but he continued to write and by 1943 he was hungrier than ever for recognition and had embraced commercialism, hoping finally to be published in The New Yorker (having received multiple rejection letters from the magazine by this time, making him

14 increasingly bitter) and perhaps even write for Hollywood (Slawenski 56-7). Despite being in the army, Salinger continued to write and submit stories for publication at a remarkable rate. It was during this period that Salinger’s mistrust of the publishing industry began to grow.

The first of these difficulties began with the magazine whose approval Salinger craved most of all: The New Yorker. In October of 1941, the magazine finally accepted one of Salinger’s submissions, a short story entitled “Slight Rebellion off Madison” which was a precursor to The Catcher in the Rye. However, after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, The New Yorker decided to cut the story and suspend its publication indefinitely (Slawenski 47). They then subsequently rejected Salinger’s next two submissions (Slawenski 48). Salinger was concerned and eventually infuriated with the frequency with which editors demanded their writers to conform their style to one that was consistently marketable with the ‘average’ American reader. Even as he continued to receive rejection letters, he was becoming more resistant to what he saw as the publishing industry’s attempt to transform art into a marketable commodity. This is why, after submitting yet another story to The New Yorker, Salinger insisted that it not be altered in any way (Slawenski 78) despite having struggled for years to break into the magazine.

Following this, two stories that had been accepted for publication by The

Saturday Evening Post were altered without Salinger’s permission while he was overseas.

Slawenski’s description of the author’s reaction reflects the developing importance of aesthetics to Salinger as well as his notion of the sacredness of art:

As he flipped through the pages containing his stories, he was further incensed by

what he found around them. Garishly coloured advertisements overwhelmed them

on all sides. Stories he had intended to ignite reflection were shouted down by

movie-star endorsements and ads for Calox Tooth Powder. Salinger was furious.

He swore never again to deal with the slicks, regardless of how much they paid.

“Let us be broke and obscure,” he pouted. (82)

This anecdote reflects both Salinger’s conviction of the importance of aesthetics and his philosophy that life should be made to conform to art. Salinger would afterward insist on a simple and tasteful presentation of his work, eschewing sentimental or tacky cover art and promotional materials. While this was often viewed as an eccentricity by the people with whom he worked, it proves the degree to which Salinger felt his aesthetic philosophy should direct every aspect of his life. The strong reaction that Salinger had to the presentation of his work would carry on throughout his career, both in his life and in his fiction. His post second world war fiction, including his novel, novellas, and Glass family stories consistently identifies consumer culture not simply as a social problem, but as a moral, spiritual, and artistic one, suggesting that the insatiable appetites it encourages result in alienation of the subject from the self and others, and producing false art that is subservient to external conditions.

Salinger’s experiences with The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post took place as the writer was beginning to conceive of writing as a spiritual practice rather than as merely a career. It is well-documented that Salinger wrote whenever he had a chance during the years he spent fighting Germans and, later, liberating parts of the Dachau camp, and that the practice offered him a kind of solace and escape from the world around him. Slawenski locates a thematic shift in Salinger’s writing during this time and identifies two stories written during this period, “The Magic Foxhole” and “A Boy in

France” as the beginning of Salinger’s equation of poetry and writing with spirituality, noting that the former appears to question the existence of God, or, at least, his interest in human lives while the latter affirms both God’s existence and Salinger’s own spiritual quest (Slawenski 119). Writing, for Salinger, became a way to find faith and hope in a world marred by greed and death, a means of coping with the horror of battle that

Slawenski states “would brand itself upon every aspect of Salinger’s personality and reverberate through his writings” (90). The beauty in life that art crystallized became

Salinger’s way to continue to believe in God. That he found God in art would become a defining part of his religious attitudes and his work for the rest of his life.

It was at this point in Salinger’s career that he began to develop two key ideas that would later become foundational elements of his religion of art. The first is that beauty is what gives life meaning and the second, related idea is that it is through beauty that God begins to reveal himself. Notably, the hero of “France,” Babe Gladewell, encounters God through the beauty of his little sister Mattie’s innocence, the inherent connection that children have with the divine being another element of Salinger’s writing that he later explores and develops. As Slawenski notes, despite his rather secular upbringing, it is hardly surprising that Salinger had a religious experience on the battlefield given the horrors of D-Day and the eleven months of continuous combat that followed, as well as the liberation of the German concentration camp at Dachau. What he witnessed in the war is key to understanding both Salinger’s philosophical and spiritual conception of the

Subject and the nature and origin of human suffering. For Salinger, the subject is inherently connected with the divine, but if the self is not actualized by following its

‘calling’ it would be eroded by large-scale institutions like the army or the capitalist

17 system that obliterated the subject’s individuality, the unique perspective on the world that enabled them to see beauty, thereby separating them from the divine and resulting in spiritual death.

Salinger’s experiences in the Second World War had not obliterated his belief that people could be good, or that the world had beauty in it, but it had shaken his trust in institutions of any kind. His encounter with fascism did not change his belief that individuals could reflect the divine and pursue spiritual goodness, but it convinced him that collective action that eroded a person’s individuality, humanity, creativity, and their capacity for love. The war not only permanently eroded Salinger’s earlier appreciation of the military and destroyed any faith he had in large institutions in general, but it also caused him to doubt that the majority of people had the capacity to retain the goodness and innocence he idealized in children once they grew into adults. In peacetime, Salinger would direct his suspicion of large-scale institutions towards the publishing industry, and finally toward American society in general, with which he was becoming increasingly disenchanted, and his pessimistic view of people would be played out in the antagonism between his aesthete characters and the world around them. Although he continued to seek success and recognition for his writing, in the post-WWII period his writing became a spiritual rather than professional practice.

The more that art became a religious practice for the writer, the more Salinger pushed back against the editors who treated it like a commodity, to be altered at their whim in order to make a more palatable product for consumers. Salinger came to believe that ‘real’ art -- that is, art inspired by the divine and by real encounters with beauty, should not only be separated from and elevated above American consumer culture, but it

18 supplied the antidote to a system that was rapidly and effectively transforming real people into phony commodities defined by a lifetime’s accumulation of products and social currency.

1.2 Salinger, American Transcendentalism and the Turn to Aestheticism

J. D. Salinger’s twentieth-century worldview is founded on a nineteenth-century philosophy of art follows what Brian M. Barbour calls a long tradition of American writers and thinkers seeking “corroboration” from Europe, noting that “their central drive was native; only their idiom was borrowed” (3). Jonathan Freedman argues convincingly in his essay “An Aestheticism of Our Own: American Writers and the Aesthetic

Movement” that “if aestheticism may be generally defined as the privileging of beauty and art in the face of the demands of morality and utility, then it was always present in

American literature and criticism” (Freedman 386). Among the writers he identifies as participating in this American aestheticism was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a favourite of

Salinger’s whom he often quoted in letters. While American writers embraced art for art’s sake, they did it in a distinctly American way, with a continuing rejection of aestheticism’s more eccentric forms (Freeman 391). In Emerson’s work, this produced a more spiritual attitude and one that was, to an even greater degree, committed to exalting individualism and personal freedom.

That Salinger extracted and amplified the aesthetic influences within Emerson’s

American Transcendentalist philosophy while still retaining many of the religious attitudes unique to the American movement is evident in the correlations between the religion present in Salinger’s later fiction and the work of the Transcendentalists. Where

Salinger departs from the work of Emerson and the Transcendentalists is the point at

19 which he becomes distinctly aestheticist in his philosophy. A brief overview of some of the tenets of American Transcendentalism will reveal parallels with aestheticism that correspond with Freedman’s claim that the Americans indeed had an ‘aestheticism of their own’. This aestheticism manifested itself in an intense individualism that prioritized self-knowledge, the development of an aesthetic attitude toward reality, and an emphasis on the apprehension of intense moments of experience as a means of altering one’s perspective on reality.

American Transcendentalism was a philosophical and religious movement that arose in the eastern United States during the late 1820s and 1830s in reaction to

Unitarianism, a liberal movement within Congregationalism that had evolved from

Calvinist origins in the eighteenth century. Unitarianism “gradually stripped itself of traditional dogma and ritual” (Hochfield 38), eventually viewing Jesus as a type of human perfection rather than the incarnation of God. The Transcendentalists felt that

Unitarianism had become stale and unfeeling, having failed “to make religion a vital part of the lives of their communicants” (Hochfield 37) and that the Lockean ideas which the sect drew on were ultimately incompatible with spiritual truth (Hochfield 39). George

Hochfield argues that the Transcendentalist’s idea was that “consciousness itself [as opposed to the senses] is a reliable source of spiritual insight, that in man’s mind… fundamental truths of religion can be found” (39). They called this super-sensory faculty

Reason; Hochfield argues that transcendentalist Reason was “simplified from Coleridge who had derived it, with suitable modifications, from Kant and his successors in German philosophy” (41). However, as Lawrence Buell notes, it is unwise to ascribe to the movement a united belief system since “the Transcendentalists had no specific program

20 or common cause, and their beliefs were often in a state of flux” (3). By the 1840s, this lack of definition, among other factors, led to the movement is dying out.

The aestheticist influence on American Transcendentalism is a product both of the existing American aestheticism that Freedman identifies as well as the fact that the

Transcendentalists drew loosely from philosophical sources common to aesthete thinkers, although their knowledge of these sources was frequently second or even third-hand

(Barbour 3). Linden Peach argues that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle introduced German influences such as Kant to American literature via Emerson, who used his work for his own creative purposes (58), including a variety of German thinkers and some French philosophy. The Transcendentalist’s concept of the individual subject drew heavily from Romantic and German concepts of subjectivity, sources they shared with the aestheticist thinker Walter Pater who contended that self-knowledge was the highest branch of knowledge. The German Romantic conception of individualism,

Individualität valued the uniqueness of the individual and self-realization (Lukes 18) and the American Transcendentalists endowed this concept with “an exalted moral and religious significance” (29), as will Salinger in his writing.

The American Transcendentalist desire to integrate the spiritual attitude into every aspect of life via intense self-actualization mirrors the aestheticist blurring of the distinction between life and art. George Ripley, founder of the Transcendentalist commune at Brook Farm, stated the goal of the movement thusly: “[as establishing] a mode of life which shall combine the enchantments of poetry with the facts of daily experience” (Hochfield 50). The obviously Paterian note in this statement was common to the transcendentalists, and as Henry Nash Smith observes of Salinger’s touchstone

Emerson, his discourse seems “almost fin du siècle in its subordination of life to art”

(231). While generally the transcendentalists were much less interested in art than fin du siècle aesthetes, their efforts focused on integrating the spiritual with every aspect of their lives, attempting to have every part of their experience reflect the principles of spiritualized Individualität.

As it was for Salinger, the subordination of life to art or transcendental spiritual pursuits was, for these American thinkers, inspired by a radical individualism that identified consumerism as a primary threat to the self. Searching for a deeper meaning in life, they sought a way to blur the distinction between philosophy and religion (Miller 2) as a means of giving man a new perspective on the world beyond the competitive capitalism that they conceived of as a threat to the self. Tony Tanner identifies the central question of the transcendentalists as “how should a man look at the world to recover and retain a sense of its ‘actual glory’? and notes that “for many of them the answer was - behold it with wonder, like a child” (Tanner, Barbour 57). This emphasis on altering the subject’s perception of the world rather than the world itself is certainly one point of overlap for American Transcendentalism and aestheticism, and it is one which Salinger adopted for his work as well. It is also a distinctly transcendental note in his fiction since he tends much more to emphasize the child-like quality of the detached perspective of the artist. This is most evident in his characterizations of the Glass siblings, who are childlike and their striving to see everything as beautiful.

One element of American transcendentalism that Salinger drew on was the levelling of all thought and belief systems. The same democratizing impulse that led the

American Transcendentalists, and subsequently Salinger, to blend philosophy and

22 religion also produced a problematic understanding of truth as universal. Perry Miller notes that their philosophy “declared truth to be forever and everywhere one and the same, and all ideas to be one idea, all religions the same religion, all poets singers of the same music in the same spheres, chanting eternally the recurrent theme” (Miller 65).

Salinger, reflecting on the calling of the artist, makes a parallel comment that “one pure poet’s voice is absolutely the same as another’s and at once absolutely distinctive and different” (122). Salinger’s frequent, abstract use of words like ‘pure,’ ‘true,’ ‘beauty,’ as well as his appropriation of multiple creeds including Buddhism, Taoism, and

Christianity, reflect the transcendentalist view of all religion as ultimately identical.

Salinger uses the terms truth and beauty without qualifiers because to him these are unchanging absolutes, a position that ignores the way truth and beauty are conditioned by cultural norms and creates a hierarchy that states that a subject either has a positive response to these norms and is a ‘true’ artist, or differs and is not. Similarly, his aesthetic use of Eastern art and faith, and his attempt to obscure the differences between these creeds and Christianity, seems appropriative, as he colonizes the elements of other cultures that are useful to his artistic vision.

Salinger’s emphasis on self-knowledge and actualization as a spiritual practice is

Transcendentalist in origin as well. Barbour notes that the American Transcendentalists believed that immersing oneself in impressions of the world was the path to God rather than through the established church, and the uneducated child symbolized their faith that spiritual truth was immediately available to all (Barbour 2). Salinger’s views on education are drawn from this principle, and the priority it lends to the subject’s impressions of the world has an aesthetic element that Salinger extends. Salinger

23 frequently idealizes children and suggests that formal education is destructive to individuality. Furthermore, he conceives of resistance to desire-ridden culture as self- assertion, the striving to actualize the essential self, modeling Emerson’s contention that self-assertion was to resist domination by the other, which was culture (Wolfe 79).

Charles R. Crowe asserts that “the Emersonians thought of liberty as the freedom to develop creatively” (Crowe 149) and believed that “the maximum self-development led to a soul motivated by love” (152). This notion of freedom as a kind of creativity that develops into love is at the heart of Salinger’s philosophy, and arguably the most significant element of transcendentalism that he adopts.

Creativity as a means of self-affirmation that also fosters love for others is not unique to the Transcendentalists but is yet another parallel between their thought and that of the aesthetes. Oscar Wilde was a proponent of this view and his fairy tales reflect this.

The point at which it can be said that Salinger blends elements of transcendentalism, as well as aestheticism is, again, in the spiritual dimension that he adds to this conviction. In his work the subject develops itself through encounters with beauty that enable it to respond creatively, but in these moments it engages both with its own response to sensuous pleasure and its connection to the divine. Thus Salinger’s aesthetic moment functions to fulfill the transcendentalist longing for divine and self unity. Like the transcendentalists, in Salinger it is “through the beauty, truth, and goodness incarnate in the natural world, [that] the individual soul comes in contact with and appropriates to itself the spirit and being of God” (162), although the type of beauty that prefigures the subject’s contact with the divine is predominantly focused on sensuous pleasure and formal beauty rather than the beauty of the natural world.

The Transcendentalist understanding of spiritual self-actualization heavily influences Salinger’s concept of the subject. The Transcendentalists conceived of the self as longing for unity, both with itself and the divine. Salinger’s subject is Transcendental in its twin impulses to both assert and transcend itself, “acknowledging its oneness with and obligation to something higher than itself, yet ever cherishing its uniqueness and independence as a distinct being” (Bowers 14). In Salinger’s work, this acknowledgement comes out of a transcendental perspective that is adopted through experiences of the beautiful, called Christ-consciousness (Z 172) and this new consciousness helps the subject to work from their “true ego” (Z 178), the source of both

‘true’ art and detached love for others. This renders his characters’ pursuit of making their lives into art and realizing their personal vision a spiritual one, something his aestheticism relies heavily on for moral justification.

Salinger does not share the Transcendentalists’ optimism concerning the attainability of this unity nor does he suggest, as the Transcendentalists do, that anyone can achieve the unity of self and the divine (Barbour, Bowers 18). While Salinger asserts that everyone carries the Kingdom of God within (Z 171), his fiction contains a spiritual hierarchy built on the concept of artistic genius, and suggests that the beauty of the divine is inaccessible to those without the aesthetic taste to dedicate their lives to its pursuit.

Salinger’s portrait of the artist as the “Sick Man” is the antithesis of the well-rounded, actualized Transcendental subject. Furthermore, Salinger has a low opinion of material reality and privileges the individual’s imagination over it, especially his aesthetes whose expression and style enable them “to reduce the world to [their] own dimensions, and by adapting the world to the needs of the mind the self brings about its own unity” (Iser 74).

Salinger’s work tends to lean more towards this adaptation of material reality to the needs of the imagination, following Pater, who also conceived of the subject as longing for unity, but one that could only be achieved imaginatively and temporarily.

Salinger diverges from the transcendentalists by taking both individualism and the implicit hierarchy of subjectivities further. Salinger’s perspective is more aesthetic in that his subjects do not strive to know all of reality through the self but rather feel superior to it and seek to improve it by modeling it after an idealized self; the self does not seek to master reality but rather to use spirituality as yet another means of refining sensation.

Furthermore, only a select few “gifted” subjects are even capable of this. Although extremely individualistic, the Transcendentalists through their spirituality strove to build the democratic ideal in America; the only ideal Salinger pursues is that of beauty and to subordinate it to a social purpose would violate art’s supremacy in his worldview. As a result, unlike the Transcendentalists, Salinger does not, indeed cannot, offer any kind of programme, even an individualistic one, for improving the social ills of America, but can only offer a respite for those select few he considers to be sensitive and brilliant enough to be real artists.

Salinger’s morality is Transcendentalist in that it reduces the divine and the moral to an “immanent principle implicit in man everywhere, and man himself thereby was made the true source of the moral law” (Bowers 12), a concept the Transcendentalists adapted from Kant. Despite the ubiquity of religion in Salinger’s work, there is an absence of striving to adhere to an external moral law. The religious life, or “God- seeking” as it is called in the Glass fiction, is a pursuit of self-knowledge through

26 moments of intense impression; the individual seeks out self-affirming intense experiences and discovers the divine within.

In Salinger’s work, like that of the Transcendentalists, this understanding of morality enables him to push his hyper-individualisation into the ethical sphere, making self-knowledge and self-actualization a moral rather than simply intellectual pursuit. The parallel with aestheticism, especially the work of Pater, is again evident; the Glass siblings’ dedication to their own aesthetic pleasure makes them religious pilgrims in

Salinger’s system. By equating self-knowledge with the knowledge of the divine, both

Salinger and his forerunners attempt to transform conformity to moral law into a individualistic act of pleasure and self-expression, apparently trying to evade the relativistic elements of such extreme individualism.

Ultimately, American Transcendentalism was a deeply flawed system, and

Salinger’s work contains many of its problematic elements. Wolfe states that the

Transcendentalist’s work featured “a peculiarly American absence of any structural concept of class,” avoiding class-based antidotes to the social problems they tried to confront because class effaces “the all important individual” (Wofle 46). Salinger’s work similarly relies on an absence of class in order to universalize his idealism. His suspicion of large-scale organization made him sceptical of large-scale changes, resulting in his complete recourse to the individual. His eschewing of class issues to reinforce the significance of the individual, and thereby art, reflects Arthur M.Schlesinger’s criticism of the Transcendentalists as “seeking to erect into a virtue” their “flinching from politics” and the failure of their escape into the pursuit of perfection (Schlesinger 140). As Adorno states in Aesthetics, “nobility in art must be preserved, but its culpability, its collusion

27 with social privilege must also be reflected” (341), a collusion Salinger never shows awareness of. Salinger’s insistence that art is entirely autonomous from the social sphere condemns his work to deal only in the imaginary, never making contact with the real world as it actually exists, and so powerless to confront the problems they identify in any meaningful way.

However, transcendentalist universalizing can only be maintained through an incredibly vague conception of spirituality that depends on individual emotional response and interpretation rather than concrete doctrine, essentially becoming willfully blind to the real contradictions in their faith. As Tanner astutely observes, the consequence of this is that “by relying so much for his poise and faith on fervent but vague feelings and generalizations, [the American Transcendentalist] does expose himself to the risk of a shockingly abrupt disillusion, a very sudden sense of blighting deprivation” (Tanner 57).

Salinger’s characters tend to go through precisely the same cycle. Since their ‘faith’ is not constructed on concrete doctrine, which would place art in a fixed hierarchy of a fixed world order (Iser via Pater 34), they can only entertain devout feelings that abandon them in moments of depression, leaving them utterly desolate.

1.3 Aestheticism

Using American Transcendentalism, J. D. Salinger develops his own aestheticism which confers spiritual consequence on art, making it a spiritual calling rather than a profession. His solution was limited and problematic, reflecting the author’s pessimism regarding the capacity of average people to transcend the chaotic, self-interested, materialistic culture of the modern world. At the centre of his aestheticism is love, connoted by the term philokalia (literally, “a love of beauty”), a term which in Franny

28 highlights Salinger’s conviction that a love of beauty and a love of God are essentially the same. Eberhard Alsen argues that Buddy’s authorship of the Glass stories reveals his progression as he comes to accept this “notion of the intimate relationship between art and religion” (Alsen 7) that enables artists who love beauty to adopt an artistic perspective of detachment that frees them from desire, enabling them to appreciate things and people for their own sakes. Through art, fleeting moments can be extended, their insights partially preserved in order to help subjects reaffirm their unique subjectivity and maintain the detachment necessary for art and for love. However, Salinger’s fiction provides no evidence that this respite is available to anyone other than the incredibly gifted, and even his aesthete characters fail to reach a permanent solution, suggesting an ultimately pessimistic view of the subject generally.

For Salinger, spiritualizing aesthetic experience and art is a means of elevating it above capitalism and conferring on the artist an exalted position. Speaking of the aesthetic, Terry Eagleton astutely observes that it is often used by artists as a kind of spiritual compensation for the degradations of the marketplace, stating that it is “just when the artist is becoming debased to a petty commodity produced that he or she will lay claim to a transcendent genius” (Eagleton 65). After years of having his own work

‘degraded’ by the American publishing industry, Salinger sought a means of elevating art and artists out of the commercial sphere to what he viewed as its rightful place as the highest ideal to which life should conform. A testament to this is the fact that the Glass stories often enact such a pattern; the crisis of the novellas is the degradation of the beautiful by phony materialistic people, and it is through the aesthetic sphere that the aesthete characters affirm the primacy not only of beauty but of their own calling to

29 detach themselves from the world and devote themselves to art. The tension that this produces is a result of the fact that, for Salinger, the artist must remain in the world that would debase their work, and even love that world, because without these experiences, this pain, art could not be produced.

That Salinger’s philosophy so closely paralleled fin-du-siecle European aestheticism is unsurprising when these diverse influences are taken into account.

Elements of aestheticism had been present in American literature and culture and had been since the development of aestheticism in Europe. Furthermore, Salinger’s use of the spiritual and religious philosophy as a springboard into full-fledged aestheticism is patterned after the American Transcendentalists themselves. David S. Reynolds contends that virtually all American writers of the American Transcendentalist tradition had

“mixed aesthetic appreciation with philosophical or religious commentary” (Reynolds

45), and he notes that often they were religious “in a completely aesthetic sense, divorced from truth” (46). This is precisely the sense in which religion is employed in Salinger’s fiction. The spirituality of the Glass family, is characterized by its subordination to art. It is one of the many means by which they project the form of their art into their lives, attempting to pattern their lives after their art in a manner reflective of the mystics whom they study, by dedicating their whole existence to the development of a new perspective.

The distinctly aesthetic elements of Salinger’s philosophy are constructed upon this native foundation and developed by his encounters with the roots of Pater’s aestheticism. It is probable that during his time in Germany, Salinger encountered many of the thinkers that nineteenth century aesthetes drew on for their own philosophy of the aesthetic and combined them with elements of the aestheticism present in the work of

30 writers like Hemingway, Emerson, and Pound but that, ultimately, his valuation of art and the aesthetic originated with himself. Kenneth Slawenski observes that Salinger’s extensive time spent in Germany, both in 1937-38 when he was sent by his father to learn the family business, and, later during and after the Second World War, had a dramatic impact on Salinger. He notes that “while living in Europe during 1937-1938, Salinger came to embrace German culture, the German language, and the German people, and he learned to distinguish between Germans worthy of admiration and the Nazis among them” (Slawenski 23). That Salinger, already committed to developing his own art, encountered and was influenced by European philosophies of art and the aesthetic during his time living in Germany is feasible, given that he elected to stay there even after the army told him he could go home.

The German philosophy that appears to have most influenced Salinger was the same that extends into both American Transcendentalism and Aestheticism: the German idea of individuality. The transcendentalists drew directly from these sources for their

Romantic notion of the individual, and Kate Hext has argued that the individual as a romantic ideal was at the heart of Pater’s aestheticism (1). Similarly, Salinger adopts this

Einzigkeit or individualism of uniqueness, taking it almost back to its roots as a “cult of individual genius and originality, especially as applied to the artist, stressing the conflict between the individual and society and the supreme value of subjectivity, solitude and introspection” (Lukes 19). Steven Lukes, in a passage quoting Thomas Mann at the close of the First World War, argues that German individualism is unique due to its compatibility with ethical socialism, something that would have appealed to Salinger with regards to his love doctrine even if he was too aesthetically apolitical to enact it.

This concept of the individual, originating in the work of many German thinkers including Wilhelm von Humboldt, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich

Schleirermacher (Lukes 18) was still influential during Salinger’s time in Germany, emphasized the self-realization of the subject’s “incomparable image” (Lukes 18) and complete freedom in morality and in truth. Like Pater, the notion of the individual is at the heart of Salinger’s aestheticism, and its moral dimension helps contribute to the love doctrine in his philosophy.

Another reason to believe that Salinger encountered aestheticism during his time in Europe is his relationship with Hemingway. Hemingway and Salinger spent time together in Europe during the Second World War while the former was working as a war correspondent, developing a friendship in Paris that would continue for years to come

(Slawenski 101). In his book, Hemingway and Nineteenth-Century Aestheticism, John

Gaggin convincingly contends that Hemingway incorporated many elements of the art for art’s sake movement into his work after his time as an expat in Europe. He also argues that Hemingway had exposure to aestheticism through Ezra Pound (a favourite of

Salinger’s as well), not only through his poetry but also through their personal friendship

(Gaggin 14). It is therefore likely that he passed on many of these views during his talks with Salinger, including the supremacy of the artistic perspective and detachment, the formation of intense impressions that these enabled, the mot juste, and the injection of formal correctness into activities, something made tangible in the physicality of

Salinger’s prose.

That his time in Europe had a profound impact on his view of art and resulted in the development of his aestheticism is evident from the dramatic shift that took place in

32 his writing after he returned to America. Although The Catcher in the Rye reflects some of these elements, because it was conceived of and planned by Salinger before the war, it lacks the developed philosophy of art that begins to emerge in his later works. It is when he directs his attention specifically to artistic subjectivity via the Glass stories that

Salinger develops his concept of the aesthete subject and his religion of art. Eberhard

Alsen has convincingly argued in Salinger’s Glass Stories as a Composite Novel that, taking into account Salinger’s revelation in the later Glass stories that his alter-ego aesthete character Buddy Glass is the ‘author’ of the Glass fiction, the novels and novellas become a meta-narrative on the religious nature of art and the artist’s calling.

Although Alsen’s insight into the Glass stories is helpful, he makes the same error as

Salinger’s critics before him in that he fails to see that Salinger’s view of art is not that it is “religious in nature” (3) but rather that art is the religion to which the Glass family characters devote themselves, and it is through the Glass characters that Salinger develops his concept of aesthetic subjectivity.

The near-exclusive focus on artists and aesthete characters as negatively defined by the phony, philistine people around them is a clear indication of the aesthetic rather than religious focus of these stories. Salinger is not offering a religious programme for the common person; rather, he is exploring how aesthetic detachment can be maintained with an attitude of love. This is difficult because the aesthetic self in Salinger is defined by its difference from the world rather than its similarity, and his aesthete characters find themselves isolated from common humanity by their gifts. Like the transcendentalist self, it relies on self-assertion, but this opposition does not confirm that the world reflects it, but rather defines itself in opposition to the world; its singularity is highlighted through

33 negative responses, through its dissatisfaction with the world as it finds it and its unfulfilled longing to re-make it into a unified and cohesive whole that reflects its superior self. Iser, in his study of Pater’s aestheticism, conceives of this longing as the desire for what he terms a “poetic reality” whichis one that can be mastered since it is formed by the desires of the individual; “ideal” moments may be extracted and preserved in such a way that everyday “debris” is cast aside, and herin lies the transforming power of the world (Iser 136). The Glass siblings’ dissatisfaction with reality develops out of their longing to have the world conform with their aesthetic taste, to be more beautiful, pure, and perfect than it is. Major crises of the novellas and stories take place when they are confronted with the ugly and phony, the living proof that the world is less than what their aesthetic visions would form it into. This longing to re-make the world, and the knowledge of the impossibility of realizing this goal, is their melancholy, their moments of transcendence the only respite.

This is yet another site of Salinger’s turn from Transcendentalism to aestheticism.

In opposition to the American Transcendentalists who believed that the actualization of the individual would lead to an ideal society, Salinger is concerned with how the aesthetic self can reconcile with the impossibility of its dream while retaining that dream, how love for beauty can become a love for humankind that prevents melancholy from sliding into despair. Seymour’s suicide in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is the self- destruction of an aesthete who realized that his subjective self could never transform actual reality, only his imaginative conception of it. Once Buddy’s fictional authorship of the Glass stories is taken into account, the Glass stories can be read as concerned with how Seymour’s surviving family members can come to terms with his suicide and failure

(as Alsen contends) while still putting his aesthetic conception of art and life into practice. This corresponds with Iser’s description of Pater’s aesthetic, which is “always manifested as dissatisfaction with existing experience, without ever being able to change it and fashion a new and real ideal” (Iser 165). Salinger’s characters, like Pater’s, never really reach a resolution of their struggle since this would be in opposition to the aesthetic attitude which thrives in multitudinous possibility, thereby prohibiting the making of any decisions which would necessarily exclude other possibilities.

The solution to the dilemma presented in Seymour’s suicide (to the extent to which Salinger offers one) is the purpose of his blending of transcendentalism and aestheticism: the incorporation of religion as a means of enabling aesthetes to conquer despair through detached love. In order to develop and preserve their poetic realities, to extract the ideal moments that offer temporary reprieve, Salinger and his aesthete characters turn to religion as a means of extending form into everyday life and as a source for a detached perspective and holds as a goal the capacity to see aesthetic beauty in their uniqueness as created subjectivities, no matter how degraded these subjectivities may be by the “bananafever” of consumerism.

Such a solution is problematic in the paradigm of aestheticism since, as Iser notes of Pater’s exploration of the necessity of religion in Marius the Epicurean, “confronted with religion the aesthetic attitude finds its lack of commitment challenged” (Iser 147).

Religious creeds make a claim to absolute truth, and this truth has to be adopted by its adherents. If the Glass siblings, as pursuers of new and refined sensations, are to remain open to the experiences that invigorate their art, they cannot tolerate the multiple possibilities of life’s moments being reduced to a single religious framework.

Furthermore, adherence to a single creed would necessarily subjugate their art to religious purposes. This is where American Transcendentalism’s universalizing of truth and leveling of religious creeds becomes integral to Salinger’s aestheticism. In order to employ religion without destroying the indecision of the aesthetic attitude, his aesthetes must be able to alternate between religions, never committing entirely to one, unifying them only subjectively, according to their individual purposes. The use of religions as objective confirmation of the subjective self in Salinger’s fiction has often been misunderstood by his critics as mere misinterpretation and ignorance. While there is no denying the dubious nature of Salinger’s use of religion, particularly his use of eastern mysticism, must be recognized as an aesthetic use of religion.

An aesthetic attitude towards religion defines the “god-seeker”, a term used throughout the later Glass stories to describe Seymour and his siblings. It reflects the subjective nature of faith in Salinger’s work and emphasises the subject or “seeker,” not the creed; the Glass siblings are not Christians or Buddhists but individualists on a quest to affirm their unique subjectivity. The inconclusive nature of the word further reflects the aesthetic nature of religion in these stories; god-seekers are characterized by longing and they exist in a constant state of suspension between the ideal that they look towards and the reality they are imaginatively trying to master through form. Furthermore, although God-seekers are always amateur scholars of religion, their path towards God is not through exterior knowledge but through knowledge of the self and of beauty obtained through sensuous experience of the world around them. The moment of resolution in the

Glass stories, what Martin Bidney has termed Salinger’s “aesthetic epiphanies” (117), always turns on a sensuous experience of beauty rather than a spiritual experience.

The conception of sensual experience in religious terms is achieved through mysticism, both Christian and Eastern, which b promote an intense life and a detached perspective. By drawing again on transcendentalism as the bridge between his aestheticism and his spirituality, Salinger can assert that self-knowledge is also knowledge of the divine, and is arrived at through individual impressions of the sensual world in which the divine is also reflected. Thus the sensuous experience of beauty can function as a religious as well as aesthetic epiphany in Salinger’s fiction, since the transcendental sensuous experience of the beautiful is an encounter with the self and therefore the divine. By maintaining a detached perspective presented as analogous to the retreat of the mystic from society, cultivating an attitude of intense observation, the Glass characters inject their everyday lives with a formalism that mirrors their art. Adorno observes in his Aesthetic Theory that “form is the secularized version of the theological notion that God created the world in his own image” (207) and it is through a blending of religious and aesthetic formalism that Salinger’s aesthetes imaginatively re-create the world in their own images, lending an imaginary formal structure to a world they perceive as chaotic and out of control.

Of course, the problematic elements of aestheticism are present in Salinger’s work just as they exist within the works of nineteenth century aesthetes, despite Salinger’s faith-based attempt to maneuver around them. Adorno states aestheticism relied upon a nineteenth-century conception of art as universal that was ultimately imaginary because

“specious in the face of art’s class character” (Adorno 293) and art can and should be noble, but this nobility must never obscure its collusion with social privilege (Adorno

341). In his insistence on elevating art above consumer culture, Salinger uses his religion

37 of art to obscure issues of class and privilege. The Glass siblings’ upper-middle class lifestyles are near-magically sustained by a fortune earned through childhood performances on a radio program called “It’s a Wise Child” that hired them as regular contributors due to their extraordinary brilliance and precociousness. That art produced without recourse to the market is only possible for those artists who can afford to neglect monetary concerns is a fact that remains entirely unexamined by Salinger or the Glass family.

Because the very real economic situations that contribute to the ugliness that the

Salinger’s aesthetes abhor remain unacknowledged, the Glass siblings are paralysed in an aesthetic and impotent state of suspension that prohibits contact with the real world. This is a frequently identified issue with aestheticism. Adorno’s critique of the fin-du-siecle art for art’s sake movement as naiveté is applicable here. He chastises the aesthetes for beautifying life without changing it, and in a critique easily levelled at Salinger’s work asserts that “the phantasmagoria of an aesthetic world unperturbed by purpose provided an excuse for the real world to stay as it was” (Adorno 365). While the Glass stories culminate in aesthetic epiphanies, they are invariably individualistic and subjective and never lead to any change since this would be decisive action, which is the antithesis of the aesthetic attitude of detachment. In Salinger’s fiction, the perspective of his aesthete characters change, but the real world always remains the same.

The Glass characters’ philosophy of love produces an implicit hierarchy to which they and Salinger seem entirely blind. Salinger’s fiction is well known for dividing the world into two camps: the authentic and the phony, but what is remarkable about his later fiction is the absence of movement between these two categories. Because aesthete

38 subjectivity defines itself negatively via innately heightened sensitivity and brilliance, only those born gifted, like the Glass siblings, can be aesthetes and the rest of the world is apparently condemned to bananafever. Furthermore, as already observed, the life of detachment from material or economic purposes can only really be lived by those who are born into an economic situation that renders concern for money unnecessary. The spiritual dimension of Salinger’s aestheticism makes this all the more troubling. The life of the art-mystic, the god-seeker, that Salinger promotes is essentially only available to those who already possess the material wealth necessary to ignore quotidian concerns.

Anyone who works to earn money is guilty of desire, yet Salinger provides no tangible solution for people not born into economic privilege.

While Salinger’s system has serious flaws, through the Glass fiction he conceived a subjective and personal solution to the desire for recognition for fame and success that he saw as plaguing his own artistic development. His method of blending aestheticism with a native American Transcendentalism that already contained elements of the art-for- art’s sake movement, combined with his own convictions regarding the supremacy of art produced a unique and coherent worldview that thematically unites his later fiction. An understanding of Salinger’s aestheticism sheds new light on the often-misunderstood

Glass family stories, and this dialogue on the nature of art and the subject is a testament to Salinger’s development as an unique American author.

Chapter 2: Aesthetes and Phonies: Aesthetic Subjectivity

in the Glass stories

2.1 Two Types of Subjects

In Salinger’s work, characters can simplistically be divided into two categories: the intelligent, creative, and often eccentric artists and the materialistic, vain, and phony characters. While these two types have rightly been criticized as unrealistically facile and idealized, the tensions and antagonisms that are produced between these two groups are the central conflict of the novels and function as a representation of the ravages exercised upon art and the artist by the marketplace. The refined aesthetic sensibilities of his aesthete characters, their ideals and their love of beauty, are continually intruded upon by average, commodified people who lack the aesthetic taste necessary to understand or appreciate “true” artists. The continual presence of the philistine and phony, and the failure of the real world to live up to artists’ visions of it are obstacles to experiences of beauty and a continual source of pain. Martin Bidney observes that this pain usually terminates aesthetic epiphanies, noting that it is “likely to be brought on by some vulgar

‘philistine’ intrusion or gesture or noise” (119); however, to avoid these intrusions altogether would be to forfeit their varied experiences which are the raw materials of art.

That the imperative to create necessitates living amongst these intrusions reflects

Salinger’s understanding of the writer’s imperative to publish with capitalism’s tendency to use art as a means to its end of profit.

The use of subjects to represent the importance of art’s autonomy from the marketplace is fitting given the influence of individualism on Salinger’s aestheticism.

Salinger’s aestheticism, like Pater’s, places the individual at the centre. His concept of the subject draws on the tenets of philosophical individualism, following Steven Luke’s definition of it as “respect for human dignity, autonomy, privacy and self-development”

(125). It specifically reflects Individualität, “the notion of individual uniqueness,

40 originality, self-realization” (Lukes 18). These ideas were brought to America through the adaptation of work of German thinkers, including Shopenhauer (whom Salinger directly references), and by the American Transcendentalists. They can, like Salinger, be broadly described as philosophically religious and epistemologically individualist.

Salinger’s work contends that affirmation of one’s unique self is a spiritual necessity and that art is the most direct path to self-actualization as well as religious knowledge; as

Buddy famously asserts, art is not a profession but a religious calling (SI 161). In this way self-actualization is a kind of art made out of life.

Commodification of the subject and their art is problematic precisely because of this intense individualism. Commodity fetishism ‘purges’ the specificity of things

(Eagleton 205) and people, making it a threat to the subject whose primary goal must be to affirm and augment their idiosyncratic experience. Steven Lukes has observed that during the twentieth century, individualism had a resurgence as a reaction to fascism

(Lukes 48). Combined with his existing view of capitalism as threatening the subject,

Salinger’s experiences during the rise of fascism in Germany drew him to such a German romantic conception of an essential self. Just as the subject ought not to be made answerable to external moral or social requirements, so art, in production and experience, must also be autonomous. Salinger’s fight to have his art set apart from the world of consumer culture is dramatized by the Glass siblings, who function as personified art, ravaged by the ceaseless consumption and competition of phonies. Their ideal of integrating life and art is consistently frustrated by a world which demands that they conform, sacrificing their curated individuality for what consumer culture has deemed valuable. Seymour’s suicide and Franny’s breakdown present the human consequences of

41 the commodification of art; both siblings have been damaged by over-consumption. This is not only the destruction of beauty (or its transformation into ugliness or phoniness) but the erasure of the self through conformity, thereby obscuring the specificity which gives each subject its value.

The consequence of desire and subsequent commodification is alienation both from the self and from others. The subject becomes distanced from their essential self as they attempt to conform to their culture in order to satisfy desire. Salinger suggests that affirmation of the self through art facilitates communication that is otherwise fraught with difficulties. However, this solution is idealistically individualist, and his refusal to acknowledge the material influence of class on the self, and his very American reluctance to force the unique self to sacrifice anything for collective action or large-scale change, mean that while art does promote communication between aesthete subjects, it never convincingly enables meaningful communication between phony and aesthete subjects.

As Cary Wolfe observes,

alienation in Marx is fundamentally not a phenomenological but an economic

category; it is not a matter of volition, self-transformation, or having a good

attitude but is instead a built-in feature of the relations of production in which one

person’s labor may be abstracted and owned, as a commodity, by another. (47)

Like the American Transcendentalist whom Wolfe critiques, Salinger’s American faith in the individual to transcend what he considers the contingencies of class and economic conditions blinds him to the truth of Wolfe’s observation, compounding the risk of self- alienation faced by his aesthete characters who must retreat further and further into their own imaginations, exchanging alienation from the self for alienation of the world.

Salinger thus addresses the problem of desire not from a social perspective but from an aesthetic one. Terry Eagleton asserts that desire in aesthetic systems of thought

“denotes our inability to see anything straight, the compulsive referring of all objects to our own sectarian interests” (162) and this “appetitive egoism” is a defining characteristic of phonies. Sick with “bananafever,” phony subjects, through the acquisition of material objects and social recognition, attempt to artificially produce this sense of unity by identifying the self with the commodities and values of consumer culture. In the same way, art that is produced to serve the ends of commodity culture constructs a false unity between the subject and the world by making everything, art and subject included, a commodity. This erodes individuality of the subject, or the work of art, by making consumption rather than knowledge and affirmation of the subject’s idiosyncratic perspective the goal of life. It furthermore problematizes interpersonal relationships, since failing to become unified with the self, phony subjects tend to become self- absorbed and materialistic so as to be unified with their culture. Unable to appreciate things and people for their own sake, they treat everything as means to other ends, constantly seeking that which will fulfill their insatiable desire.

Salinger’s suggestion that aesthetic experience is the means of transcending this problematic desire appear to reflect Pater’s work. Wolfgang Iser contends that liberation from desire was the function of the aesthetic for Pater because “expression and style enable the subject to reduce the world to his own dimensions, and by adapting the world to the needs of the mind the self brings about its own unity” (Iser 74), whereas capitalism expands the power of the world and reduces the subject. By imaginatively projecting form into the world, the aesthetic subject creates a world that reflects its idiosyncratic

43 style, fulfilling its (in Salinger, spiritual) goal to be unified both with the self and with the world by transcending empirical reality and entering a world that reflects its own taste.

Terry Eagleton identifies the aesthetic as an alternative to appetitive egoism noting, “in its very dispassionate morality, [the aesthetic] teaches us to shed our disruptive desires and live humbly, ungreedily, with the simplicity of the saint” (164). For Salinger, the notion of the aesthete as saint-like is literal since transcendent experiences of beauty are one in the same with religious experiences. Thus, the aesthetic moment’s temporary transfiguration of the subject’s perspective takes on the spiritual consequence of an epiphany, something Martin Bidney notes in his work on Salinger’s aesthetic epiphanies.

Aesthetic experiences make possible transcendent moments in which the subject is imaginatively liberated from empirical reality and their disunity with the self and the world, enabling an imaginative recognition of common ‘humanity’ with all of creation.

Aesthetic experience thus fulfills the role of religion in the life of the artist, but unlike true religion it is subject-centred as opposed to being focused on a deity. This contradicts a common misconception among many critics such as Josephine Jacobson, who present

Salinger as a religious novelist (Gunwald 13). Buddy explicitly denies this, stating that “I am neither a Zen archer nor a Zen Buddhist, much less a Zen adept” (208). Buddy is not a

Zen adept because these kinds of subject categories are not immanent and therefore not

‘real’ in Salinger’s system. Encounters with religion or with the divine for Salinger function to bring the subject more wholly into unity with itself rather than with an exterior ideology or even a deity. By using religion for aesthetic ends Salinger takes one step further the parallel Eagleton highlights between aesthetic life and its goal of projecting the form of art into life in order to give it meaning and the mystic mission to

44 wholly integrate prayer and spirituality with the fabric of everyday life, asserting that the mystic and the artist are ultimately the same.

The mystic-aesthete’s goal of projecting the form of art into life extends the

‘dispassionate morality’ of the aesthetic moment into all aspects of their empirical life; by transfiguring their own life into art, that is, being-for-itself, the aesthete strives to liberate themselves both from desire and the conforming influence of commodity culture.

Expanding on the moral element of the aesthetic, explored by thinkers like Kant,

Schopenhauer, and Eagleton, the aesthete saint in Salinger views the life of the artist as one kind of religious calling that offers a transfigured perspective on the world, the same approach Salinger applied to his own art. This approach bolsters the spiritual and moral consequences of the work of artists, but it also impoverishes the real claims these religions make and performs a kind of erasure of the cultural contexts that produced them, rendering Glass spirituality a kind of appropriation; even Zooey quips that

“everybody in this family gets his goddam religion in a different package” (Z 154), noting these characters’ tendency to select elements of various faiths based on their individual aesthetic, rather than adhering to the doctrines of one faith, since this enables them to make even their religion individualistic.

The centrality of art in Salinger’s worldview is also reflected in another defining difference between phony and aesthete subjects: artistic genius. Salinger draws from both aestheticist and American transcendentalist sources for his concept of artistic genius. The selection of elements from the real world to reflect the subject’s own image as discussed above reflects Pater’s definition in The Renaissance in that it is the subject’s imaginative capacity to put

a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of our common

days, generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction,

reflecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the

choice of the imaginative intellect. (Pater 4)

Pound’s concept of virtú is also helpful here. Drawn from Pater’s The Renaissance, it is another example of the influence that aestheticism exerted over American writers.

Pound’s virtú is the essence of individuality; the artist who discovers their virtú sees it in others (Wolfe 72). Salinger’s aesthete characters share this individuality that transforms their experience of the world, as well as the ability to recognize this genius in others, the so-called “true ego” in his texts. Where Salinger differs from the transcendentalists is that his “true ego,” the imaginative capacity of his artist characters can be understood in the

Hegelian sense as “an active and creative power [that] presupposes a natural gift” (vii

1/11) that only a few possess. For Salinger, this ‘natural gift’ of creativity is a religious calling, but the divine never usurps the individual who remains at the centre of Salinger’s worldview.

The possibility of the actual (rather than imaginative) realization of this ideal unity with the self and the triumph over desire is ambiguous, in part because it is only available to those who possess the natural taste and genius necessary to construct an imaginative unity. The transcendentalists, drawing from common German Romantic sources, applied the hope contained within Christianity and claimed that the spiritual act of self-actualization enabled the subject to confirm their unique place in God’s creation, producing unity with the self through self-knowledge. But their system lacked the emphasis on the aesthetic which renders artistic genius imperative for transcending

46 disharmony. Salinger, like Pater, is sceptical that such unity is possible, despite integrating religious and spiritual elements into his aestheticism after the tradition of the

American Transcendentalists, and the ‘average’ person seems condemned to the ravages of bananafever, with their only respite the inability to fully register its damage.

Regardless of whether or not Salinger’s aesthetes can imaginatively transform their perception of the world through transcendent experiences of the beautiful, the real world not only remains the same but inevitably disrupts the form that aesthetes project into their lives, proving it to be little more than a comforting illusion.

Even if it cannot change the world, the artist’s imagination in Salinger is spiritually powerful and the site of resistance to the dominant culture’s conforming influence on individual freedom. Aesthete subjects process external stimuli in order to integrate it with their artistic perspective, so that the objective world appears to reflect their subjective state, lending meaning and purpose to their suffering. This is evident in the deeply symbolic significance that the Glasses find in everyday life, and the way they see their own emotional state reflected in the world around them. Although an imaginative projection in moments of intense consciousness, the moment of seeing the self reflected in the world constitutes a momentary escape on the part of the aesthete from capitalism’s means and ends to a state of being-for-itself. In contrast, phonies tend to have very little interiority and the object world shapes their interior one, and they operate according to the consumerist logic of capitalist America. The ‘real’ subjects in Salinger, those with interiority, can resist the hegemony of the dominant social order because they act according to their own values, attempting to maintain an artistic way of life.

Having relationships with phonies remains important, despite their destructive effect on aesthetes, since the aesthetic subjectivity defines itself negatively through its contrast with the world around it. Iser argues that aesthetic life is ultimately indeterminate and for shape it requires “constant negative delineation” (Iser 168). In Salinger’s fiction, this negative delineation takes place in the contrasts consistently created between the

Glass characters and the rest of the world which seems to function solely as the background that illuminates the genius and creativity of his aesthetic subjects. As in

Iser’s work, the aesthete subject in Salinger “lives in contradiction to reality … his approach breaks up existing, solidified forms of life” (Iser 168). Given Salinger’s emphasis on the individual that constrains his ability to speak to larger economic and social systems, the ‘existing, solidified forms of life’ that provide the background against which his aesthete characters are defined are almost invariably individuals, although occasionally his aesthetes define their Paterian view of self-knowledge as the highest branch of knowledge against the traditional educational system.

This aesthete practice of seeing the self reflected in the world as material for the self’s affirmation and expression constitutes, in part, the freedom the aesthetic life represents for Salinger, although this idea is not unique to him. Adorno defines form as the “law that transfigures empirical being” and notes that form “represents freedom whereas empirical life represents repression” (207). In contrast, phony subjects are neither free nor self-determining, since as a result of uncontrolled desire they are slaves to the laws of the dominant social order, lacking a developed interiority with which to resist. This liberation is not achieved by abandoning society, since both Franny and

Seymour’s stories serve as a warning against the life of the hermit, nor by materially

48 altering existing conditions, but by using sensuous, ‘real’ experience to produce an idiosyncratic aesthetic representation of the world, which like Benjamin’s aura appears to return the gaze of the subject as if it were created for the subject alone (Eagleton 78). The ugliness and meaninglessness of American consumer culture, when imaginatively given form, becomes meaningful. The chaos of competition and consumption becomes a parade of diverse sensations and experiences which are unified in the work of the artist.

2.2 Phonies

Phonies provide a negative definition against which Salinger’s aesthetic subjectivities can be outlined, and the relationships between phony and aesthete characters consistently assert the moral and spiritual superiority of aesthete characters, who act out of love and appreciation for things and people for their own sakes instead of using them as means to an end. Phony subjects often cause pain and frustration for

Salinger’s aesthete characters, but through the aesthetic experiences aesthete characters recognize their common humanity with phonies. Lacking in natural aesthetic taste or the

“morbid attrait to beauty” that characterizes their counterparts, they are, in Seymour’s description of his mother-in-law, persons “deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things” (RHRC 72). As such, they constitute lesser selves, representing one part of the damage enacted by capitalism and the conforming power of American popular culture. This hierarchy of selves is not unique to Salinger; representations of ‘inferior selves’ can also be found in the works of American writers like Pound. Salinger’s idealism ultimately strives to embrace these second-rate subjects, transcending judgemental perspectives on phonies to

49 see them as “human-sized and beautiful” (RHRC 72) rather than as embodiments of commodity culture.

Since desire impacts both types of subjects, phonies are differentiated from aesthetes by the degree to which desire influences them, and their awareness of it. Their desire manifests itself as an attitude of greed and vanity which is willing to employ people and objects as means to its own ends. The subject, always seeking to use one thing to gain another, cannot find anything to satisfy the appetite that drives them to immerse themselves in experience and thus lack self-knowledge. They are ‘phony’ because they have no knowledge of their innate self: their selfhood is taken from the dominant culture so it is not ‘real’. Salinger often characterizes phonies through objects, suggesting their self-identification with things, while aesthetes are characterized by their own interpretations of sensual experience. Salinger posits artists as impossibly autonomous from society, possessing unique, immanent selves that are somehow untouched by the material culture that produced them. Although they occasionally confess to desiring success for their art, their subjectivities remain unbelievably unaffected and uninfluenced by culture. While Salinger characterizes phonies as blind to their commodification by consumerism, his artist characters, in positing themselves as the near-innocent victims of consumerist America, fail to see the way that they are products of their environment and are unable to recognize their collusion with the system they claim they wish to escape.

The novella Franny illustrates this blindness to desire found in both types of

Salinger’s subjectivities. The novella’s third person narration oscillates between Lane and

Franny’s thoughts as they go on the ill-fated date that precedes Franny’s breakdown, and functions as a kind of dialogue on art. Lane’s philistinism regarding to the art that Franny

50 loves is the final straw before she collapses, but in providing the reader with Lane’s thoughts and feelings, Salinger provides insight for precisely how Lane comes to have what he considers to be the incorrect attitude towards art. Phonies cannot experience the transcendent moments of beauty which confirm the subjectivity of the viewer in

Salinger’s worldview. This means that when phonies like Lane approach art, they treat it as a commodity, a means to an end, and this attitude causes real aesthetes pain since art for them is a spiritual calling.

Phonies commodify not only art but people as well. When he first sees Franny on the train platform, Lane immediately identifies Franny with her coat. He remembers fondly that once “he had kissed her coat lapel, as though it were a perfectly desirable, organic extension of the person herself” (FZ 7). The sheared-raccoon garment, a trendy item during this period that is particularly associated with the collegiate crowd that Lane is a proud member of, represents the status of Franny and Lane as upper-middle class

New Yorkers and as members of the educated bourgeoisie. Lane’s affection for this coat is in fact a projection onto Franny of Lane’s desire for status. This is further developed over the course of their date, which Salinger notes takes place in a restaurant “highly favored … among, chiefly, the intellectual fringe of students at the college” (FZ 10) and by a “momentary little exposure” Franny catches Lane in as he looks around the room

with an almost palpable sense of well-being (he must have been sure no one could

dispute) in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl - a girl who

was not only extraordinarily pretty, but, so much the better, not too categorically

cashmere sweater and flannel skirt. (FZ 11)

Lane desires commodities that he feels will confirm his status as a member of the intellectual bourgeoisie. The ‘rightness’ that Lane feels in this moment is his attempt to construct the unity between himself and the world that Salinger defines the subject as longing for. His error is that he does this via commodity culture, by identifying himself and Franny as commodities, believing that a world with meaning and logic can be constructed simply by purchasing the ‘right’ clothes, eating at the ‘right’ restaurants, and dating a girl whose looks correspond to those promoted in advertisements. However,

Salinger’s aesthetes’ pursuit of perfect unity of the self through complete autonomy from this culture is just as illusory; as Jameson observes, “the primacy of the subject is an illusion, the subject and the outside world can never find such ultimate identity or atonement” (Jameson 75). Both Salinger’s phonies and his aesthetes strive towards this impossible “ultimate identity” and his fervent individualism prevents him from seeing

Franny’s equally futile desire.

Lane’s attitude towards art function as the negative definition of what Salinger considers to be the right approach to art. His treatment of Franny illuminates how art is treated like a commodity in the bourgeois culture economy and (through Franny) how this impacts true aesthetes. The idea that art should or can be objectively understood is the antithesis of Salinger’s subjective view of art, which shuns interpretation and valorizes the individual sensual experience of the beautiful as a transcendent moment.

Lane brags to Franny about an essay he wrote on Flaubert, observing with false modesty that “I think the emphasis I put on why he was so neurotically attracted to the mot juste wasn’t too bad. I mean in light of what we know today. Not just psychoanalysis and all that crap, but certainly to a certain extent (FZ 13). Salinger’s thought aligns itself with the

52 work of Susan Sontag in resisting interpretation in favor of a sensuous enjoyment of art for its own sake. Lane reflects Sontag’s contention that the “project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an open aggressiveness” (4). Through Lane’s use of Freudian theory

Salinger mirrors Sontag’s critique that such systems of interpretation, in seeking to

‘excavate’ a text, actually result in an impious act of violence or even destruction against the text. Salinger here takes quite literally Sontag’s implicit call for treating the text with a pious or spiritual attitude, by making the love of art a religious calling.

The aggressive act against Flaubert’s text that Lane’s criticism enacts is an example of the phony and philistine attitudes towards art at her college that Franny longs to escape, as well as representing Salinger’s view of the treatment of art and the artist in the marketplace. As Adorno observes, psychoanalytic criticism of artworks considers them factual and “neglects to consider their real objectivity, their inner consistency, the level of form, their critical impulses, their relation to non-psychic reality, and, last but not least, their truth content” (12). Franny’s intensely negative reaction to his speech, her psychological and physical breakdown, reflect the damage enacted on art by such an attitude when it is treated as something to be broken down and categorized in order to determine its exchange value. Lane’s appreciation of Franny as the “right girl” values her not for her specificity, but for her value in the marketplace, as an object he can exchange for the social capital he desires. Interpretation, either of art through criticism or people through psychoanalysis, both force contact and comparison with material reality, something which Salinger has a low opinion of.

Salinger’s aestheticist critique of modern academic criticism is also parallel to

Susan Sontag’s work on what she termed the “ravages” of interpretation. Lane insists on treating art as a commodity, making it into “an article of use” (Sontag 6) whose value can be evaluated objectively rather than as a subjective experience. In the words of Sontag,

Lane’s act of interpretation here is a “reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, [and] stifling” attempt to define the work by its content and in doing so expresses only his own lack of response (Sontag 3) to Flaubert’s novel, which is in Salinger’s worldview a deficit in artistic genius and self-knowledge, qualities of the phony subject. His reaction to art is based on what he has been taught and told by others because he lacks knowledge of his own taste, something he could only obtain if he ceased to treat art as something to be evaluated and categorized and instead respected its existence for its own sake.

Salinger characterizes academia and formal education as a culture-capital version of the market that uses art as a commodity. This includes those artists who have bought into the lie of interpretation, becoming willing participants in the sale of their art as culture capital. Franny’s definition of a “real” poet reflects this. In aesthete fashion, she negatively defines the work of the true artist by what it is not, contending that the members of her English department are “not real poets … just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place” (FZ 18). Collusion with these systems is the opposite of the individualistic and isolated nature of Salinger’s ideal production of art. A real poet must “leave something beautiful” (FZ 18), which must in this system be completely individual and self-referential, and in order to do that they must work without interest in the results of their toil rather than for recognition or publication, almost within a vacuum. These phony poets produce work that corresponds

54 to the notion of art as work to be interpreted, as content arranged in clever ways rather than as an attempt to crystallize an intense subjective experience of beauty. As such, their work achieves success because it is designed for categorization and interpretation; it is

“terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings” (FZ 20) that can be analysed in any number of ways, but does not qualify as “true” art to Franny.

Franny’s recourse to a negative definition of a “real poet” and her admission that

“I don’t know what a real poet is” (FZ 19) reveal the problematic assumptions and ambiguities that underlie Salinger’s concept of art. She struggles for words because

Salinger conceives of it as an experience on par with the divine -- something slightly beyond words but universally recognizable and undeniable to those with the spiritual vision to perceive. This is, in Jameson’s words, “cultural universalization,” the

“repression of the oppositional voice, and the illusion that there is only one genuine

‘culture’” (45), which is here Salinger’s American one. Not only is “beauty” used in an abstract, universal sense but it is separate from the processes of labor and production; thus, any artist involved in these processes is “unclean” in Salinger’s art religion. This overlooks Jameson’s insight that works of art merely conceal or “repress” the “traces of labor on the product” (66). Salinger believes this illusion, and posits the “something beautiful” left by the artists as pure form, separate from the labor of the for-pay writer.

His failure to recognize that “the aesthetic act itself is ideological” (Jameson 39) is at the root of his universalist view of beauty and his requirement that the artist be autonomous from capitalism.

Salinger’s insistence on an impossible autonomy for both art and artist from the corrupting forces of commodity culture is further modeled in another relationship

55 between an aesthete Glass and a phony, Seymour and Muriel. Although it is unlikely that

Salinger’s aesthetic views were as developed during the composition of PDFB as they were in his later Glass works, the purposeful integration of this story into the larger saga through Buddy’s claim that he wrote this story affirms that the ideology introduced here is carried through in later works. Unlike his siblings, who scorn phonies and struggle to recognize their common humanity, Seymour as ‘saint’ of the Glasses strives to value phonies, an effort which culminates and fails in his relationship with the vapid Muriel

Fedder, whose aesthetic ignorance he affectionately describes as an “undiscriminating heart” (RHRC 67). Although he seems to have believed he could love Muriel with detachment -- remaining autonomous from the culture she embodies for Salinger -- the anger displayed in his last moments suggests that he believed Muriel contributed to his spiritual collapse. While Seymour described his feelings as “love,” Muriel was a means to satiate his own desire for new, intense experiences; despite his best efforts, Seymour’s religion of art has only made him gluttonous for spiritual and artistic experience instead of the commodities that his wife desires. Thus, the bananafish metaphor he uses describes two subjects trapped by their own appetites, and affirms Salinger’s contention that for the true artist, compromise with commodity culture leads only to spiritual -- and in this case, literal -- death.

That Muriel is the representation of commodity culture, both its dangers to the artist and to the average subject, is made clear through the opening description of her, which is designed to suggest a spiritual void, a kind of idolatry of things instead of art, an identification with commodities rather than the essential self. Waiting for a phone call to be put through at her hotel, Muriel “washed her comb and brush… took the spot out of

56 the skirt of her beige suit...moved the button on her Saks blouse” (PDFB 3). This description of Muriel maintaining her things and her appearance offer insight into the story’s central metaphor of the bananafish: Muriel is consumed with consuming because it is the source of her selfhood. This is bolstered by an earlier description of Muriel at the movies in a letter from Seymour to Buddy that appears in Raise High the Roofbeam,

Carpenters. Seymour states that her “identification with Metro-Gold-Mayer tragedy [is] complete” (RHRC 67). She represents everything that the Glass siblings loathe and find painful, and Salinger uses her preoccupation with fashion and popular culture to show the way that materialism not only erodes the subject’s capacity to appreciate beauty or connect with others, but also the very fabric of identity: Salinger leaves the reader with the sense that there is little more to ‘the girl’ than the things that she surrounds herself with.

Muriel, whom Seymour nicknames “Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948” (NS 7), provides the negative definition of Seymour the “God-seeker.” Their relationship highlights the innate and permanent nature of aesthetic taste in Salinger; like Adorno’s description of the subject without artistic sensibilities, “it is quite impossible to explain to

[her] what art is… the reality principle is so powerful as to repress aesthetic behavior completely” (177). For Salinger, the division between aesthetic and phony subjects is permanent because, as Adorno observes, it is impossible to obtain this quality merely because the subject desires to have it. This is illustrated in PDBF after Muriel confesses to her mother that she lost a book of German poetry that Seymour bought for her to read by a writer he calls “the only great poet of the century [sic]” (NS 7-8). Muriel’s amusement at Seymour’s suggestion that she should have learned the language (NS 8) in

57 order to read the book reveals not simply her own disinterest in art, but the lengths to which Salinger believes true lovers of beauty will go for aesthetic experience. Seymour the “God-seeker” dedicates himself to the pursuit of beauty, his devotion extending as far as learning new languages, but his encouragement and teaching cannot give Muriel the capacity for aesthetic appreciation. Although Adorno states that it is possible to correct ignorance through aesthetic experience, for Salinger this division is permanent.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Muriel is a sympathetic character, especially as she is presented through Seymour’s writing in the later Glass stories such as

Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Alsen persuasively suggests that Salinger gives Buddy authorship of Bananafish to suggest that the piece has an unreliable narrator (9), so that the early animosity towards phonies that is later tempered by what David Galloway calls the “love ethic” in Salinger, the duty to live in and love the world (Galloway 32), becomes Buddy’s desire to hold Muriel at least partially accountable for Seymour’s suicide, something he later seems to rescind through his “Sick Man” passage. He does this after quoting many of his brother’s letters about

Muriel in both RHRC and Seymour that suggest Seymour pitied rather than hated Muriel, despite his decision to kill himself in front of her. In one letter, Seymour tellingly acknowledges that “Buddy would despise Muriel and her motives” but concludes that while “they must be… they seem to me so human-size and beautiful that I can’t think of them even now as I write this without feeling deeply, deeply moved…” (72). In the same journal entry, however, Seymour concludes that a person “couldn’t possibly learn or drive himself to like bad poetry in the abstract, let lone equate it with good poetry”

(RHRC 74), making suspicious his claims to love the girl whose motives his brother

58 would find despicable and suggesting that he could not learn to like phonies in the abstract, or equate them with his artist family. While Seymour may claim that Muriel longed for the consumerist trappings of marriage, and Buddy may admonish that she never understood her husband, her husband never loved her; Seymour only loved the experience of Muriel and, believing her aesthetic ignorance prevented her from becoming like him, abandons her, leaving her alone surrounded by the objects that are draining away her selfhood while he pursues his own self-destructive appetites.

Salinger tries to justify the behavior of Franny and Seymour by claiming that creativity and aesthetic taste are closely linked with imaginative empathy and compassion, and his phony characters tend towards self-involvement and selfishness. This selfishness is often presented as related to phonies’ lack of self- awareness; Salinger’s phony characters are consistently represented as unobservant or unconcerned with others because they lack the self-knowledge necessary to imaginatively identify with fellow humans. This is why phonies like Muriel and Lane are unable to register the pain Seymour and Franny are experiencing. Ironically, Salinger’s aesthete characters tend to be selfish, although for the opposite reason: the Glass siblings are often so concerned with the improvement of their own gifts and their pursuit of the beautiful that they cannot relate in any meaningful way with anyone who does not share their inherent taste. In both cases Salinger suggests (in Emersonian fashion) that art is what facilitates the difficulties of subjective relationships by promoting an appreciation of difference.

2.3 American Aesthetes

Art is for Salinger a spiritual calling not an occupation; thus, one can be a poet even if he “never wrote a line of poetry” (RHRB 60). ‘True’ artists (a term used frequently in his work) are defined by an “inherent morbid attrait to beauty” (SAI 101) that draws them to transcendent aesthetic moments as opposed to phonies who are

“deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things” (RHRC 72). Salinger only uses the term aesthete once, this is because of the significance of the spiritual dimension art has for him and the terms he uses most frequently highlight this, ‘God-seeker’, holy fool’ and ‘seer.’ The interchangeable terms, in combination with the ‘sick man,’ form the basis of aesthetic subjectivity as it appears in Salinger’s work. The terms represent both extremes of aesthetic life, both the religious pursuit of beauty for its own sake and the pain of isolating oneself from the world in order to achieve an ideal form. Seymour, the dead mystic genius of the Glass family, figures as the most legitimate God-seeker and the worst sick man of the group, an example of the risks of transforming one’s material life into autonomous art. As Alsen suggests, Buddy Glass’s stories about Seymour and his other siblings offer a means for him to explore the integration of religion and art that

Seymour advocated (7), as well as how pursuit of his ideal led to his suicide. Seymour’s life and death as a poet-mystic haunts his surviving siblings, and their stories represent their own struggle to put Seymour’s religion of art into practice without destroying themselves as he did.

Aesthete characters are presented as analogous to mystics in the Glass fiction due to the spiritual nature of artwork and beauty. Buddy asserts that a true artist is “the only seer we have on earth” (104) and Seymour tells his brother that writing “has never been

60 anything but your religion” (SI 160). For Salinger, to be an artist is to adopt a particular, transcendental perspective on the world that will facilitate their work in bringing every element of their experience into the form of their Ideal. This makes the artistic life comparable to that of the seer or mystic. Martin Bidney contends that “the type of ‘seer’ they all embody at privileged moments is the modern, post-Wordsworthian, secularized, and exploratory kind” (117), accurately observing the aesthetic purpose mysticism and religion have in Salinger’s work.

Since the Glasses equate beauty and the divine, the multiple faiths and creeds to which they subscribe are chosen largely for their aesthetic appeal. Each sibling simply selects those elements that best reflect their own idiosyncratic form: as Zooey observes,

“everybody in this family gets his goddam religion in a different package” (Z 154). The

‘package’ or form of the religion is what matters to the Glasses; the siblings eschew commitment to one spirituality, preferring to select elements from a variety of faiths that correspond with their particular aesthetic vision. This is also why Franny says that “you don’t even have to have faith in what you’re doing” for the Jesus prayer to transform your perspective and that “any name of God at all” works (F37-8). Longing for their own ideals, not God, is what drives the Glass fascination with religion. The term “God- seeker,” which is used interchangeably with “true artist” in the Glass fiction, refers not to traditional notions of mystics but rather someone who pursues the divine according to their own aesthetic taste rather than as a means to some end other than self-affirmation.

The goal of mystic-artists is to develop the essential self which is viewed as itself divine rather than to bring the self in line with the edicts of the divine, to become a

“heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty” (SI 104), giving the materials of the

61 world the form of their own mystic vision. The “true” self, also called the “true ego” by

Zooey (Z 167), is the source of “true art” and it is inherently connected with the divine, which is how Salinger spiritualizes his intense individualism. The true ego, given the disdainful references to psychoanalysis throughout Salinger’s work can be read in a

Freudian sense, although still heavily influenced by the German Romantic Individualität.

Given the influence of German Romanticism on Salinger’s concept of the self, it is likely used in the early Freudian sense of the subject’s sense of self (in line with the American

Transcendentalist’s emphasis on self-actualization) rather than the set of psychic functions his later work defined it as. The ego is the ‘real’, immanent self, the self that in

Salinger’s work must be actualized but can be displaced and even destroyed by the dangerous desires of the id if it begins to model itself after commodity culture, transforming itself into a commodity or phony self.

Diverging from Freud to American Transcendentalism, the true self in Salinger’s work is the self that is drawn to the beautiful and the divine in the world, the self which the divine created. Salinger’s veneration of innate aesthetic taste and artistic skill and his focus on the value of subjectivity also stresses “the conflict between individual and society and the supreme value of subjectivity, solitude, and introspection…” (19) following Luke’s definition of German Romantic individualism. For Salinger, this conflict between the individual and society is embodied in the subject’s struggle to resist the dominant culture’s influence, meaning that any claim that race, class, gender, or social influence has on the formation of the self is treated as a corruption of the true self.

This is why the “true artist-seer” (SI 105) has an “inherent” (SI 101) attraction to beauty and why Salinger is at pains to show the siblings as essentially the same from childhood;

62 they have retained their “authentic” selves. Their “inherent” aesthetic taste is differentiated from those who are “deprived for life of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things” suggesting that while phonies do, like aesthetes, possess a ‘true’ self or ‘ego’, it is this understanding of “the main current of poetry,” that is, experiences of the beautiful which are only available to those with aesthetic taste, that strengthens the true ego to resist the dominant culture.

The view of phonies as ‘weaker’ subjects enables Seymour to call them

“unimaginably brave” (RHRC 72) and the reason why Salinger’s philosophy of art emphasises the artist’s capacity to act with love toward a world incapable of experiencing beauty. This has a self-serving function as well since, as aesthetes, the Glasses require both a continuous stream of new experiences and an ugly world against which to contrast their beautiful lives. David Galloway calls this element of Salinger’s philosophy “The

Love Doctrine,” which contends that “mysticism is treated as a ‘fever’... an isolating and therefore unfruitful discipline that inevitably leads Western man away from the paths of significant human involvement”; “it is not through mysticism but through love that the

Salinger hero at last re-enters the world” (Galloway 32). Thus, while religious mysticism provides a vocabulary that enables the Glasses to describe their spiritual relationship with art, it is only one element of their larger project to make their lives conform with their art, producing a transcendent perspective that will enable the Glass siblings to live with love in the real world.

Gradually, the Glasses come to view phonies not as an obstacle to experiences of the beautiful but the culmination of the transcendent perspective they are each trying to achieve. This is highlighted in Zooey’s comments on “true egos” when he states,

“scratch an incompetent schoolteacher… and half the time you find a displaced first-class automobile mechanic” (FZ 168). Moving from a British aestheticist view of subjectivity to an American Transcendentalist one, Salinger here suggests that non-artistic subjectivities can also experience some degree of the beautiful and divine in the world through other work which functions like art if it reflects the idiosyncratic experiences of the subject in question. It is important to note that the Individualitat hierarchy remains in place; every subject has some kind of true calling that will actualize their immanent identity, but artists in Salinger’s world remain the seers and saints. It is also worth noting that “first-class” subjects who are not artists are absent from Salinger’s work and exist only in the speculative reflections of the Glasses.

The emphasis placed on right work as self-affirming and spiritual reflects yet another American Transcendentalist influence. American Transcendentalists like

Emerson had high regard for working people, especially artisanal workers and entrepreneurs, whom he saw as productive and self-reliant, therefore free and actualized

(Wolfe 53, 86). Salinger also attempts to dignify all kinds of human activity (Miller 11) by contending that any work can have the spiritual and moral dimension of aesthetes’ art if it affirms the self, rendering it work for its own sake rather than the product of desire.

Zooey here equates the job of an auto mechanic with Franny’s desire to be a ‘real’ actress because he considers both to be equal so long as they are done for their own sake and reflect the subject’s particular experience of the world. Terry Eagleton identifies this type of thinking as the ‘poor person's’ version of the aesthetic experience of the sublime, noting that “like the sublime, labour is a masochistic affair, since we find work at once painful in its exertion yet pleasurable in its arousal of energy” (56). Furthermore, any

64 work which enables this affirmation must consume the whole life of the subject; the individual must devote their entire life to whatever their calling is, allowing them no time for mere deviations or “hobbies” (Z 168).

To work out of the motivation of desires is the source of suffering in the world, producing competition, vanity, and greed. This is the assumed motivation for the ‘first class auto-mechanic’ becoming a teacher. But any work done solely for the pleasure of right action, purely because of the subjective pleasure one obtains by doing it, enables the subject to self-realize, producing in Salinger’s worldview more harmonious and loving relationships between subjects. The logic is that people who perform actions purely for their own sake affirm their own identity, gaining the self-knowledge that leads them to the divine, enabling them to act with love towards others instead of competing with them out of a desire to assuage a false, socially-produced ego. This notion is also reflected in the Buddy-authored short story “Teddy,” when Teddy asserts that the first step in properly educating people is to get them to “vomit up the apple of knowledge” (T 291); education for Salinger is a matter of looking within rather than outwards, and any identity acquired from sources exterior to the self is phony and damaging to the ego.

This ego or ‘true’ self is integral to the production of ‘true’ art because it enables the development of an idiosyncratic style and form. Seeing to realizing one’s artistic ideals is specifically differentiated from desire. Zooey critiques Franny for mistakenly conflating ego and desire, observing that this would prevent the creation of art: “you want your Emily [Dickinson], every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away?” (FZ 167). The subject must have ego (a sense of their unique self) before they can draw from this ego to produce art. This

65 unique ego enables the development of an individual style, something that Seymour and

Buddy are described as working towards. In Seymour: An Introduction, Buddy describes

Seymour’s development of a unique form of double haiku with thirty-four syllables

“from his own natural bent” (SI 127) and contends that “he found for himself a form of versification that was right for him, that met his most long-standing demands of poetry in general” (SI 126), and that what he did with a poem was “exactly what he was meant to do with one” (SI 128). Buddy, who over the course of the Glass novellas also works towards a progressively individualistic and experimental style of writing, follows Iser’s contention that in aestheticism, “autonomous art must be defined by newness” (Iser 33).

For Pater, as for Salinger, style “gives form to subjective reality” (Iser 47) and the purpose of autonomous art is to crystallize the subject’s unique experience of the world.

Like Salinger’s aestheticism, this notion of an immanent, essential self which produces art solely from itself, eschewing outside influence, is naive and antiquated.

Buddy and Seymour claim that true art makes no contact with exterior reality and is

“pure invention” (SI 132); however, as Adorno contends in a critique of nineteenth- century aestheticism, “the possibility of creating art freely on one’s own is… unreal because the individual is under the sway of the market to which he must adapt” (294).

The refusal to acknowledge the influence of the market and society in general on their identities and art produces much of the tension that exists between Salinger’s aesthete characters and the outside world, just as it did for the author personally. It also overlooks

Jameson’s contention that the separation between manual and mental labor upon which

Salinger’s hierarchy draws is itself a product of capitalism (122). As a result of the Glass’ attempts to insulate themselves from the debasements of the marketplace by transcending

66 material reality through experiences of beauty, while denying that their definitions of beauty have been conditioned by the culture they oppose, the vagueness that seems to obscure elements of Salinger’s philosophy also sustains it: only by leaving these problems unexamined and relying on impression alone can the Glass siblings sustain their aestheticism.

This lack of critical self-awareness on the part of both Salinger and his characters means that their criticism of phoniness and materialism seems petty, based solely on the

Glass siblings’ fine feelings about their own sensibilities. The very notion that there is an essential self which can produce art is just as illusory in the face of Foucault’s idea of the individual as a “fictitious atom of an ideological representation of society” (21). This concept of subjectivity as immanent is so difficult for Salinger to sustain in face of the modern work which discards it that even he occasionally slips and allows for the influence of external factors on the true self, frequently observing the influence of Buddy and Seymour on the other Glass siblings’ worldview. While problematic, this reveals both the essentially individualistic and artistic nature of Salinger’s concept of spirituality in contrast to those critics who claim that Salinger’s art was solely in service to his religion. In opposition to traditional conceptions of faith, spiritual or mystical life does not entail effacing or reforming the self or “ego” to conform to the law of a higher power; rather, a God-seeker needs a developed ego in order to fully perform the work that is their spiritual calling. Zooey’s assertion that the knowledge of God is already in the subject and the only activity needed to develop spiritual is to actualize the self is reflective of the

American Transcendentalist’s notions of spiritual growth.

For Salinger, this means that both faith and art become entirely subject-oriented: the goal of both is the realization of the ideals of the subject in every area of their life rather than the subject’s conformity to exterior principals of taste or doctrine. Both must be autonomous, free of the influence of anything not immanent to the subject. One result of this is that spirituality is largely the dominion of the remarkably intelligent, beautiful and/or talented; average people rarely encounter the divine in Salinger’s Glass works because, like philistines before great art, they lack the capacity to recognize or respond to it. This subject-oriented notion of art also enables him to expand what constitutes art to anything in which the subject’s self is autonomously expressed. The autonomy of the subject is the source of autonomous art, its sole reference the heterogenous experience of the subject; thus, subjects who are not autonomous cannot produce art. This kind of extreme individualism in religion and in art problematically dissolves the socially productive elements of both religion and art, leaving Salinger’s characters in an imaginary world; their art is not, as they intend, above or beyond reality, but a refusal to see that subjects with artistic genius are as much products of their social and material environments as anyone else and their work must always be a reflection of this.

The combination of this individualism with the universalizing impulse of

Salinger’s work makes complex, almost contradictory demands on both art and religion since both must affirm each subject’s inherent uniqueness and essential sameness. This tension is reflected in Buddy’s statement that “one pure poet’s voice is absolutely the same as another’s and at once absolutely distinctive and different” (SI 122). True art is

“pure invention” rather than from “the first-, second-, or tenth-hand experience” (SI 132), and Buddy prides himself on being able to distinguish from whence a writer or poet

68 draws their material, and holds Seymour up as the ideal poet who drew purely from his own imagination. Parallel to Pater, the unique sensuous experience of the subject is the content of art, but it is refracted and transformed by the imagination. Because the divine within artists is expressed through the creative power of the imagination, this spiritualizes art, making it a religious act that expresses a universal experience of the beautiful-divine idiosyncratically. The sameness of the poetic voice is the contact that authentic art makes with the divine which is also the beautiful, while the distinctiveness is the unique impression the beautiful makes on the artist. Thus, art for Salinger expresses the universal experience of beauty idiosyncratically, participating in the “main current of poetry that flows through things, all things” (RHRC 72) while still affirming the individual.

However, in attempting to claim that true art is entirely the invention of the individual and makes no contact with the existing physical, Salinger can only critique without offering solutions. Like the transcendentalists, Salinger relies on the strength of the transcendent connection of the unique self with the divine to endure beyond the transient marketplace, instead of an organized resistance. This emphasis on the individual at the expense of acknowledging the reality of outside influence produces what Cary

Wolfe identifies in transcendentalist work as a “peculiarly American absence of any structural concept of class” (Wolfe 46). While much of the Glass fiction addresses the issue of commodified art, it ignores the material needs of artists that are often the reason for compromise with consumer culture. Salinger wants art to exist in a separate sphere from commodity culture, separate from “the relations of production - relations of exploitation and domination within which mutually antagonistic classes with fundamentally incompatible interests confront one another” (Lukes 85), by pretending

69 that the money made by artists does not participate in these relations, thus ignoring the structures of privilege with which his ‘counterculture’ aesthetes collude.

For Salinger, the task of the subject is to resist dominant culture’s power, not in order to change it but to escape it. Unlike the American Transcendentalists, who viewed the individual as the origin of tangible social change, the subject in Salinger is too isolated to materially impact the exterior world. The aesthetic offers the possibility of creating a new reality which is controllable, if entirely unreal, and which serves as an escape from the world which cannot live up to their ideals. It is in beauty, rather than wholesome labor, that the subject is affirmed, and experiences of beauty are not only intensely individual but also isolating; self-assertion for Salinger must be accompanied by some degree of self-isolation, and his artist characters struggle to re-establish contact with the world they have sacrificed. This retreat into an imaginative re-creation of physical reality is aestheticist since, as Iser contends, in aestheticism, “experience transformed by art is the true reality, ideal because life is made controllable by art” (Iser

91). However, as Iser later observes, “the aesthetic attitude must eventually meet its own disillusionment” (149). This transformation is based on an illusion that cannot be perpetually maintained by even the most detached subject, resulting in the ‘sick man’ symptoms experienced by all of the Glass siblings.

The ideal (and ultimately unachievable because imaginary) life for Salinger is the integration of this spiritual view of art into every aspect of the subject’s life by spiritualizing aesthetic experience. Experiences of the beautiful and art then become a spiritual practice to be assimilated into the everyday with the extreme dedication of the mystic. The use of religion in this manner has often led critics to overlook the essentially

70 artistic message at the core of Salinger’s philosophy. In Franny, this integration of life and art is explored through Franny’s discussion of “The Way of the Pilgrim.” The book concerns the quest of a Russian peasant who sets out to learn how to follow the biblical command to pray ceaselessly by enacting the teachings of a book called the Philokalia, which as Bidney notes tellingly means “love of beauty,” until he perfects them, proceeding to travel around teaching others the same technique. The method of prayer focuses on the words “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” especially the word

‘mercy’ because “it can mean so many things” and it is repeated until the words “get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats” which has a transformative effect on the person’s outlook, giving them “an absolutely new conception of what everything’s about”

(FZ 37). Key to Franny’s re-telling of this story is the emphasis on the transformed perspective and of the integration of form (the prayer) with life (here, the very heartbeats of the pilgrim).

There are several elements of her retelling of the story which indicate the aesthetic purpose of the book in Salinger’s work. The story is framed by Franny’s critique of the ‘phony’ poets and art lovers at her college as well as Lane’s philistine view of literature, casting Franny’s choice of the book as a refuge in an aesthetic light.

Furthermore, it is the form of the practice and the pursuit of its perfection, not the spirituality behind it, that matters. Franny tells Lane that “nobody asks you to believe a single thing when you start out. You don’t even have to think about what you’re saying… later on it becomes quality by itself. On its own power… any name of God… has this peculiar, self-active power of its own, and it starts working after you’ve started it up“ (FZ

37). This self-active quality which begins with the subject taking the prayer and using it

71 in their own manner reflects Salinger’s notion of the subject and aesthetic experience: although Franny uses the term ‘self-active,’ her description contradicts this in that it requires the interaction of the prayer and the subject. The subject must perform the prayer or “start it up” in order to achieve the transfigured perspective it promises.

The self-active nature of the prayer when it is spoken functions as a cipher for

Salinger’s concept of the relationship between art and the subject which is also his view of religion. After a person begins reciting the prayer, Franny says that “something happens… the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing” (F 37). The subject takes the prayer, whatever name of

God suits them, and performs it ceaselessly until it is their own, synchronized with the most minute details of their life. As this takes place, the subject is able to transcend their original perspective. If Franny’s comments are contextualized by the ongoing conversation about the nature of art and the artist that she and Lane are having, one can conclude that true transcendent experiences of the Beautiful/Divine through art have the spiritual power necessary to make art and life into one seamless unity. The relentless pursuit of aesthetic experience, the definition of Salinger’s love of beauty, is supposed to synchronize the life of the individual with beauty, “the main current of poetry that flows through things” (RHRC 72).

The enactment of an artistic perspective on life, like Franny’s Jesus prayer, affords the subject a new perspective, in this case one which is both more intense and more loving (although this second claim fits uncomfortably with Salinger’s aestheticism and is never convincingly executed in his work). Franny’s description of the Jesus prayer makes this transfigured perspective seem permanent, something she seems to believe at

72 this time, but as the philokalia philosophy continues to be developed in “Zooey” and later stories, it becomes apparent that this transfigured perspective is ephemeral and its permanence, like the crystallization of the aesthetic moment, is an ideal striven for but never executed.

The problem of how to avoid retreating from phoniness into one’s own internal world while still accessing some measure of the “spiritual power” of art is a central theme of the novellas Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour:

An Introduction. To move away from the discriminating taste that has led her to scorn phonies and even her art, Zooey tells Franny the “terrible secret” that every single person is “Christ Himself, buddy” (FZ 202), asserting the value of phonies through a claim of inherent spiritual sameness. However, in Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, Seymour suggests that there is a limit to this transcendental change in Franny’s perspective since the aesthete subjectivity must always discriminate between itself and the world. For an aesthete to truly love beauty and ugliness equally, “it would mean that he would have to dispossess himself of poetry, go beyond poetry… he couldn’t possibly learn… to like bad poetry in the abstract, let alone equate it with good poetry” (74). Thus the “health and a kind of real, very enviable happiness” that Seymour claims are the products of indiscrimination are only available to aesthetes if they ‘dispossess’ themselves of art by ceasing to negatively define their unique, ‘good’ subjectivity against the ‘bad’ and phony; real happiness means learning to ignore the manifold ways the world fails to live up to their individual artistic ideals; in other words, aesthetic ignorance. This makes sense since the material conditions that produce the unhappiness of the Glasses are never changed at the point of resolution; the turning point of each story is brought about by a moment of

73 transcendent beauty that makes life once again (temporarily) bearable, but this relief is perpetually shadowed both by Seymour’s conviction that real health and happiness are beyond the true artist and his own act of ‘dispossessing’ himself of poetry through his suicide.

In the same passage, Seymour admits that requiring a discriminating man to dispossess himself of poetry is “putting it as only a perfectionist would” (74).

Perfectionism is the fatal flaw (quite literally in Seymour’s case) of all the Glass siblings and this passage is Seymour’s (and Salinger’s) confession that those born with

“discriminating” tastes can never fully move beyond the taste in beauty that defines them, and that this ideal that can never be realized has consequences for those who remain unwaveringly dedicated to its attainment. It is perfectionism that both prevents the

Glasses from accepting the world as it is, with all its phoniness, ugliness, and desire, or changing the world, thereby becoming active, desiring subjects themselves. These impossible demands are married to the love doctrine which also requires aesthete-seers to act with love and compassion in the world, effectively to suspend the aesthetic judgements Seymour asserts they cannot. Seymour’s relationship with Muriel is an example of the mental gymnastics required by this perfectionism: Seymour loves Muriel because of her aesthetic ignorance, which he considers to be “human-sized and beautiful”

(72), but this condescending love of “her simplicity, her terrible honesty” (73), especially when contrasted with Buddy’s less idealistic description of her in the opening section of

PDFB, is really a love of Seymour’s imaginative recreation of Muriel in which she is transformed into the beautiful, simple, ‘normal’ partner who can help him leave his isolation and re-enter the world beyond the boundaries of his family. The inevitability of

Muriel’s violation of this imaginary reconstruction of her is the inevitability of the Sick

Man.

2.4 The Sick Man

While art and aesthetic experience are idealized in Salinger’s work as the only respite for true artists who are constantly being battered by a world that demands conformity to its ugly consumerism, the aesthetic taste that enables such experience is also a major source of the suffering it alleviates. The term ‘Sick Man’ only appears in the novella Seymour: An Introduction, but each of the Glass siblings display various degrees of the symptoms described in the novella, and all of their stories follow their struggle to remain loving and artistically productive in spite of their ‘sickness.’ The true painter or poet may be a seer in Salinger’s work, but they are also “invariably a kind of super-size but unmistakably ‘classical’ neurotic’” (Bidney 103). As Martin Bidney observes, in

Salinger’s work “grief underlies joy” (124); aesthetic pleasure is inseparable from pain since the aesthetic moment must conclude. While all the Glass fiction addresses this pain, and moves from a moment of crisis (like Franny’s collapse) into a moment of beauty that provides a transcendent perspective, Seymour: An Introduction centres around the question of where “the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come[s] from” (SI

104) and how the aesthetic experience that heals also harms.

One element of the pain of aesthetic experience for Salinger is that the sublime experience of the beautiful is always underwritten by the knowledge of its eventual loss;

Martin Bidney observes this even in the motion-patterns of Salinger’s epiphanies, which

75 he claims centre around the “frustrating disappearance of an object … or else the sudden, happy reappearance of an object” (118). The aesthetic moment presents a beautiful image of a world that returns the viewer’s gaze because made for her but it will dissipate, rendering the reality it leaves behind even uglier in its contrast. Furthermore, these transcendent, perspective-changing experiences produce the kind of refined aesthetic taste, what Seymour calls his perfectionism, that makes the Glasses unable or unwilling to “dispossess” themselves of poetry; that is, relinquish the aesthetic judgement that produces this contrast in the first place. This is why Buddy states that a sick man “is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience” (105). The aesthetic moment presents a version of the world which appears to conform to the aesthete’s ideal form, but the real world cannot compare to these “blinding shapes and colours” and so the aesthete is “dazzled to death” by a vision that can never be actualized. Their lives take on a pattern of intense, refined sensation followed by loss.

This is further complicated by the spiritual power that Salinger assigns to both art and artists in order to sever art’s connection with reality, making it autonomous. For the

Glasses, art lifts the subject above quotidian preoccupation and liberates them from their self-destroying desire and (subsequently) the appetitive chaos of American consumerism. However, the qualities of this ideal world which offer both unity and specificity are only revealed through negative definition that, for Salinger, delineates aesthetic subjectivity; it remains obscured behind vague spirituality punctuated by euphoric experiences of the sublime that do little to clarify its nature. In his exposition of

Hegel’s aesthetics, John Steinfort Kedney identifies this “nebulous conception of the

Ideal” as one held in modern times and contends that it leads to the erroneous conclusion, as in Salinger’s work, “that Art ought to rupture all connection with the world of the relative and the finite under the pretext that what belongs to external reality is … something low and trivial” (V/23). But if one adopts this view, “one must retire into the internal world of conscience, and then, in an absolute inaction… turn his regard unceasingly towards the heavens, and affect, or attempt to despise, terrestrial things”

(Kedney 23-4).

Kedney’s work shows that the view of external reality as “something low and trivial” and the disdain for earthly things that must follow a retreat into one’s own internal world, symptoms of the sickness the Glass characters attempt to cure in themselves, are products of their spiritualization of art and the aesthetic. The Glass siblings privileging of the imaginative over reality, as in Buddy’s comment that it was

“treacherous” of Boo Boo to suggest that Seymour’s poetry was drawn from real life (SI

134), reflects this view of external reality as “trivial and low” and in harmony; but at the conclusion of the aesthetic moment upon which Salinger’s narratives turn, this new perspective fades, leaving the old reality just as firmly in place. Iser describes this in his treatment of the aesthetic moment, noting that “art removes the intentionality of a challenging reality, and replaces it with a transitional reality that neither rejects the old nor defines the new, but remains a mood in which contrasts lose their firm outlines and begin to merge into one another” (Iser 40). Even in the moments when the Glass siblings achieve their goal of making life into art, this leaves them suspended between an imaginative reality that is less difficult than their quotidian life, but also too undefined to effectively replace it .This is why the Glasses cannot offer any proactive solutions to the

77 problems they encounter beyond using aesthetic experience to transcend the difference between phony and real subjectivities, and why their epiphanies (including Franny and

Zooey’s in their self-titled novel and Buddy at the end of Seymour: An Introduction) culminate in a blurring of the lines between themselves and everyone else, like Zooey’s claim that everyone is Christ Himself.

The second reason why pain always underlies aesthetic experience is that the individual is so central to Salinger’s aesthetic philosophy that his aesthetes often stray into solipsism by privileging of their imaginative world over the real one. Salinger’s concept of the individual is centred around the individual’s intrinsic value; to be oneself autonomously is the highest goal, and yet the world becomes so “low and trivial” in comparison to the individual that it undermines any scale upon which the value of the individual could be assessed in comparison to the value of other things, which only have value if useful to the artistic subjectivity. This problem often shows itself in the way that the Glasses speak of the non-aesthetes in whom they see something valuable, including

Muriel and Bessy Glass. Buddy encounters an aesthetically pleasing deaf-mute when trapped in a taxi and thinks, “I noticed, almost with gratitude, that his feet didn’t quite touch the floor. They looked like old and valued friends of mine” (26). Buddy is projecting his own form (meaning) on to this man in response to the aesthetic pleasure he experiences in noticing his feet, but the form he projects gives him the sensation that these feet are for him, or “old and valued friends.” Terry Eagleton observes this phenomenon in Ideology of the Aesthetic, noting,

The subject needs to know that it is supremely valuable; but it cannot know this if

its own solipsism has cancelled out any scale by which such value might be

assessed. What is this subject privileged over, if the world has been steadily

dwindled to no more than an obedient mirror image of itself? (Eagleton 70)

The self-criticism of the Glass siblings, as well as their moments of despair and anger, can thus be read as the loss of their capacity to negatively define themselves against the world they disdain, resulting in a collapse of the aesthetic identity they sought to strengthen.

A second consequence of steadily dwindling down the value of the world is that since ordinary subjects are “deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry” (RHRC 72) then they cannot aid those whose understanding of this current harms them; aesthetic ignorance renders aesthete pain inaccessible to the average subject. Including any non-aesthetes who might try to ameliorate the pain of the sick man. Buddy tells the reader in Seymour: An Introduction that such people are “a peerage of tin ears. With such faulty equipment, with those ears, how can anyone possibly trace the pain, by sound and quality alone, back to its source?” (SI 104). Buddy’s use of a musical metaphor here is telling in light of Pater’s comment about art aspiring to the condition of music; the sickness is artistic in nature, and so those without refined taste cannot access it. This is one of several disparaging such comments regarding psychoanalysis that Salinger inserts throughout the Glass fiction, and this example is consistent with the main message of these comments which is that psychoanalysis cannot interpret art or artistic subjects. Adorno makes a similar contention, noting that “to psychoanalysis works of art are factual. It neglects to consider their real objectivity, their inner consistency, the level of form, their critical impulses, their relation to non-psychic reality, and, last but not least, their truth content” (Adorno 12). Because psychoanalysis

79 focuses on the factual, something considered trivial by the Glasses, it cannot register the sickness as part of aesthetic consciousness or its role in the life-art of the Glasses.

The Glasses, however, do recognize this. Salinger’s Sick Man “gives out terrible cries of pain, as if he would wholeheartedly let go of both his art and his soul to experience what passes in other people for wellness”; however, he “only occasionally, and never deeply, wishes to surrender his aberration….[because] he, lucky man, is at least being done in by the most stimulating companion, disease or no, he has ever known” (SI 103). This description of the Sick Man reflects John Gaggin’s paradox of the aesthetic consciousness in which an “artist’s preoccupation with their own gifts of perception becomes all consuming, creatively invigorating and yet debilitating” (4).

Given Salinger’s consistent individualism, it is likely that he conceives of this

“stimulating companion” as a part of the “true ego” that Zooey asserts is the source of

‘true’ art, rather than something exterior or accidental to the subject. Just as refined taste is described both as access to a spiritual current and as “morbid,” so the Salingerian essential self is double-sided, providing both the heightened sensation that gives life meaning (Bidney 119) and the isolating, self-destructive pursuit of an impossible aesthetic perfection. It is significant that while all the Glass siblings espouse high ideals for art, none of them ever feels as if they have met these ideals.

Ironically, in attempting to assign to art greater spiritual power, Salinger takes away from this power instead. Art that is entirely immanent to the subject and prohibited from even hinting at a desire to change the world can offer little more than a fantasy and a temporary escape. Iser observes this problem in nineteenth century aestheticism when he notes that the negative definition the aesthete requires is “without the dynamism that

80 might open up new realms” (Iser 104), limiting its power to effect change. Salinger strives to present art as the antidote to the ravages of phoniness and consumer culture, a means of creating a new, ideal world that gives meaning to the subject’s existence and suffering, but he ascribes to art more spiritual power than it can actually possess in his system. Iser identifies this use of the aesthetic as a “form of wish fulfillment” and argues that “without art transforming reality, [one] must clearly place a limit on the degree of assurance that it can offer, for the world as an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’ has never occurred in history but has always remained a dream, at best of a postulate” (Iser 92). This limit on the degree of assurance the aesthetic provides is at the heart of the pattern of breakdowns and epiphanies that characterize the Glass saga.

Chapter 3: Children, Salinger’s Ideal Aesthetes

3.1 Idealization & Loss

Salinger’s work is filled with children, both in body and in spirit. Of all the elements of his fiction, none has been so widely criticized as his sensuous portrayal of children, and the childishness of his aesthete characters, the Glass siblings. That Salinger idealized children and felt distinctly the loss of childhood, both his own and others, is clear in his representation of children as natural aesthetes, born artists with a natural aesthetic taste that rivals that of his seer-artists. Although the Glass siblings are fully grown in the majority of their stories, the consistency with which they all reminisce about their childhoods, and their longing to return mentally to the state of childhood betray a deep sense of loss that for Salinger accompanies aging.

This idealization of childhood and of children stems from his belief that children naturally embody many of the traits his aesthete characters try to develop in themselves.

This is rooted in his romantic belief in an immanent self that is gradually corrupted by exterior forces, rather than a self that is developed as it encounters the world. Salingerian children are characterized by a heightened sensitivity to beauty and sensory experience, creativity, and playful imaginative recreation of the world. This is especially true in

Buddy’s representations of his brother Seymour. Furthermore, since the self in Salinger is innate, children are less phony and more likely to use their “true egos” since they remain detached from the desires of commodity culture. As yet uncorrupted by conforming forces, Salinger presents children as predisposed to place a high value on their unique experiences over and above the conditions of material reality. The detachment that the

Glass siblings pursue can be read, in part, as a desire to return to a state of childhood physically detached from the adult world’s expectations and temptations.

The idea that children are their ‘true’ selves and that adulthood is merely a corruption is a product of intense, idealized individualism. This recalls Emerson, who also used the child as a model of what he sought to achieve, and who endowed individualism with “an exalted moral and religious significance” (Lukes 29); and the tradition of Christian mysticism which conceived of the individual as needing no mediation between them and God, and possessing a secret knowledge. Thus children, like artists, are kinds of seers who can perceive things as they really are, since they have this access to divine truth, as with Sybil and Teddy’s insights into the character or “true egos” of those around them. As in Salinger’s work about adult aesthetes, the ideas of the beautiful, good, and divine are all conflated and vague, but the seer-like quality of

82 children, and the way that his fiction consistently connects aesthetic and spiritual experience, suggests that children are innately close to the divine through their close connection with the sensuous world. In general, the ideals children model for Salinger are reflected in a knowledge and affirmation of their own impressions, a capacity to fully immerse themselves in sensuous experience, a tendency to privilege their imaginative experience over the ‘low’ material world, and an open, unsentimental love.

Thus, Salinger’s children retain the capacity to recognize the true value of objects and experiences for their own sake, to take unbridled joy in beauty rather than using it as a means to some other end. This is further modeled in a Taoist tale child-Seymour reads to Franny as a baby, which describes the wisdom of the man who can see “what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those things that need not be looked at” (RHRC 5). Sent to find a superlative horse, the man describes the animal as a dun colored mare but it is a coal-black stallion.

Nevertheless, the horse is superlative because he “keeps in view the spiritual mechanism.

In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details” (RHRC 5). Children, and the child-like Seymour, are able to disregard the distracting trappings of modern life and find the beautiful, essential, and spiritual in the world around them.

Childhood, like everything beautiful or pleasurable in Salinger’s work, is marred by loss. With the exception of Seymour, all of the Glass siblings have already passed through their childhoods and feel keenly the pain of the loss of innocence and freedom from the demands of the adult word. Seymour, portrayed as a child in spirit, if not in body, kills himself because of the impossibility of realizing his childish ideals for his adult life, and his siblings are left doubly bereft. His life and near-permanent childhood

83 remain the focal point of all his siblings’ lives and Buddy’s fiction, which centres around children, further emphasizes this near-neurotic fixation on childhood. The stories about children that Salinger has Buddy take responsibility for are also marked by loss; both

Sybil and Teddy contain violent deaths that thematically suggest the trauma of loss. The implication of an inherent, innate selfhood, a “true ego” rather than a self that is gradually developed through socialization and experience add to this sense of loss, since the true self is lost as one passes into adulthood. Such a romantic concept of the self makes childhood the most important, authentic period of life, but it ignores Foucault’s insights into selfhood.

Salinger’s portrait of childhood is fraught with problems, including his highly romantic and unrealistic child characters as well as the uncomfortably adult interactions these children have with others. Nevertheless, like the other elements of his fiction,

Salinger’s child characters reveal the deep influence that both American

Transcendentalism and aestheticism have on his work. Tony Tanner argues that, according to the American Transcendentalists, the only way for a subject to look at the world and “recover and retain a sense of its ‘actual glory’... was - behold it with wonder, like a child” (Tanner 56) and this principle is reflected both in the imaginative perception of Salinger’s child characters and in the childishness of his God-seeking characters.

Following the aesthetic tradition, children in Salinger’s work are by their very nature bound intimately to the sensuous world (Pater 66), and as a result possess a heightened sense of beauty which inspires their own imaginative and moral vision and has a moral as well as sensual dimension. If he commits many of the same errors as his predecessors, his child characters present one of the most developed pictures of his philosophy of art and

84 of life, one in which beauty and joy are constantly marred by the knowledge of transience and loss.

3.2 The Glass Siblings as Children

One of the major goals of the Glass “religious life” is to preserve, to some degree, the openness, naturalness, and sense of wonder with which Salinger believes children are naturally endowed. Their rejection of the phoniness, ugliness, and materialism of

American culture is in essence a refusal to shift value systems, a rejection of an adult world which privileges social correctness and materialism over honesty and beauty, and a longing to revert to the state of childhood, before destructive desire complicated their love of beauty. This is shown, in part, through their continual referral back to the period of childhood, and the way they strive to emulate their childhood selves, particularly

Seymour. As the ‘author’ of the Glass saga, Buddy draws on anecdotes from his childhood to illustrate the principles of God-seeking and detachment and it is particularly striking because in these memories the Glass children frequently adhere much more faithfully to their values than they do in adulthood. His work is reflective of Schiller’s romantic description of children as “what we were; they are what we ought to become once more. We were nature as they, and our culture should lead us back to nature, upon the path of reason and freedom” (Schiller). This ‘naturalness’ in children remains a vague idealism in Salinger’s work that could never be borne out in reality, and it is this longing for an impossible return to the state of childhood that contributes to the Glass siblings’ unhappiness, yet it remains a central, if problematic, element of their characterization.

Salinger’s romantic notion of childhood is especially clear in Seymour: An

Introduction, where Buddy shows his brother “almost exclusively as a child and a young boy” and notes that “while I’m with him on the page, I’ll be a child and a young boy, too” (169). The reason for Buddy’s focus on Seymour’s childhood, his manifold references to his other siblings’ childhoods, and his attempt to reconnect with his own childhood self, is that the purpose of religious life for the Glass siblings is not to develop detachment and a spiritual love of beauty but to retain or return to this state. Buddy’s descriptions of his siblings as children present them as ‘natural’ aesthetes who intuitively adhere to the values of the Glass religion of art. Salinger suggests that children are naturally sensitive to beauty and that they commonly privilege their individual, imaginative experiences over the material world because childhood is a state of detachment from the phony world and its pretensions. In contrast to adults, children are artless, honest, and compassionate, in possession of their ‘true egos,’ and inherently possessed of wisdom because they have yet to lose connection with the kingdom of God that, according to Salinger, is within everyone. Salinger’s error, again, is to posit an inherent self that is only ‘true’ when uncorrupted by desire and its vehicle, commodity culture. While he sees the passage from childhood to adulthood as the gradual formation of desire and therefore of a ‘false ego’ in the subject, children’s selves are of course a product of their upbringing and their culture, and not immanent and autonomous.

Salinger credits his aesthetes with an immanent subjectivity that is basically fully formed from childhood onwards, uncritically positing an inherent, uncorrupted form of the self. Buddy suggests that Seymour was the most successful at actualizing his inherent self from childhood. Seymour was a poet from childhood who “wrote and talked Chinese

86 and Japanese poetry all the thirty-one years he stopped with us” (122), and that he approached even minor tasks such as shopping for clothing as if they had spiritual significance, “like a young brahmacharya, or Hindu-religious novice, picking out his first loincloth” (188). As the eldest child in his family, Buddy credits Seymour with an inhuman capacity for love and patience, and even the misbehavior of his younger siblings brought him “quantities of joy” (SI 165). Seymour remains essentially the same into adulthood. Buddy claims that “he had no social smile whatever” (173), and that “[w]hen he was to manhood grown… he had about the last absolutely unguarded adult face in the

Greater New York Area” (174). Seymour himself suggests an essential continuity of his selfhood after his father asks him if he remembers being given a ride on the trick bicycle of a vaudevillian friend of the family, and he answers that “he wasn’t sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson’s beautiful bicycle” (SI 149). Seymour as a child in Buddy’s recollections is almost identical to Seymour as an adult, which is presented as a positive quality, the preservation of the true, immanent self even in the face of conforming consumer culture.

Seymour’s life is the model for the “religious life” of the Glass siblings, and his child-like perspective has spiritual and artistic benefits according to Salinger.

Specifically, it is through the creative act of love that one can find beauty (God) in everything and everyone. Buddy describes Seymour as a person who looked for God

“apparently with enormous success, in the queerest imaginable places -- eg., in radio announcers, in newspapers, in taxicabs with crooked meters, literally everywhere” (SI

108), a passage strikingly similar to Tanner’s description of the Transcendentalists’ search for God beyond “barren facts” by striving to “see God everywhere” (Tanner,

Barbour 58). Like the Transcendentalists, Salinger believes that “through the beauty,

87 truth, and goodness incarnate in the natural world, the individual soul comes in contact with and appropriates to itself the spirit and being of God” (Goddard 162), and it is by seeking God in everything that Seymour becomes an “advanced religious non-sectarian”

(109). Seymour’s successful apprehension of the divine around him means in Salinger’s system that he takes on the divine qualities of loving detachment, creativity, and wisdom not through rites, sacraments, or a traditional religious life, but by affirming his immanent identity from a young age, remaining connected to the divine within him.

This process is the model for the kind of self-actualization that Salinger values because the self of the true ego is capable of true detached love, while the phony self can only be sentimental, as with Seymour’s wife Muriel, who is sentimentally attached to him for selfish reasons but does not truly love or understand him. This is again reflective of the American Transcendentalist belief that “the maximum self-development led to a soul motivated by love, an emotion which was the very essence of the human personality”

(Crowe 152). Buddy suggests in another childhood anecdote that Seymour has always been self-actualized and therefore loving, even as a child. Buddy says that during a party his parents held when he was eight, “by watching the guests for some three hours, from grinning at them, from, I think, loving them” (SI 120), Seymour was able to bring each guest their own coat. Buddy relates this careful observation and the love he feels it divulges to Seymour’s skill as an artist, stating that “if a Chinese or Japanese verse composer doesn’t know whose coat is whose, on sight, his poetry stands a remarkably slim chance of ever ripening” (SI 120). Seymour’s skills as a poet are related directly here to his capacity to love other people, which Salinger believes is only possible by shedding the desires of the false ego to love people unsentimentally, with detachment. This is also

88 related to Seymour’s successful search for God in everything: his poetry is true art because he loves the beauty he sees in everyone, appreciating them for their own sake.

While the imaginary quality of the Glass love doctrine has already been discussed, unaddressed within the Glass stories is Seymour’s inability as an adult to have a loving relationship with his wife. Buddy’s reproduction of Seymour’s letters declaring his love for Muriel and his retellings of various childhood stories only serve to further highlight Seymour’s apparent inability to participate in mature romantic love. His decision to spend his second honeymoon playing on the beach with a little girl instead of with his wife, no matter how vapid Buddy makes Muriel seem, suggests not a spiritually enlightened artist who has maintained his inherent connection with the divine but a pathological fear of adult intimacy. The absence of romantic love between adults in

Salinger’s work is striking given how frequently love itself is addressed, and the failure of both the romantic relationships that do appear (Franny and Seymour) suggest an underlying need to purify love of problematic sexuality through spiritual/aesthetic experience and through a retreat into childishness. Seymour is comfortable when idealistically and imaginatively representing his love for Muriel in the form of his larger project of making life into art, calling marriage “the joy of responsibility” (RHRC 91), but there is no sense that there is any joy in the mature love between husband and wife.

Eagleton suggests that the aesthetic can function this way for the subject, arguing that

The beautiful representation, like the body of the mother, is an idealized material

form safely diffused of sensuality and desire, with which, in free play of its

faculties, the subject can happily sport. The bliss of the aesthetic subject is the

felicity of the small child playing in the bosom of the mother, enthralled by an

utterly indivisible object which is at once intimate and indeterminate, brimming

with purposive life yet plastic enough to put up no resistance to the subject’s own

ends. (Eagleton 91)

Love is thus a beautiful representation in Salinger’s work, a spiritually idealized form of pleasure that takes refuge from adult sexuality in the attitude of the child. The unity of projected form replaces the symbolic unity of the sexual relationship without requiring the aesthete to compromise their vision to accommodate another person in any way.

Buddy also claims Seymour develops many of the tenets of the Glass religion during his childhood by “sheer intuition” (SI 209), and that his appreciation of the value of right action and his appreciation of the beautiful for its own sake came naturally to him. In a long section describing himself and Seymour playing marbles as children,

Buddy states that Seymour has an aesthetic epiphany at ten “with the canopy lights behind him...immensely conscious himself of the magic hour of the day” (202), as he tells

Buddy not to aim when playing marbles. Buddy reluctantly compares this principle of

Seymour’s to the Zen archery principle of “aiming but no aiming [sic]” (207). What this principle emphasizes is the imaginative value of action for its own sake; aesthetic detachment that fosters refined taste in the beauty of the world. Seymour is detached from the results of his actions, and without a desire to win he can simply enjoy the sensuous pleasure of his actions for their own sake; thus, “he would be all smiles when he heard a responsive click of glass striking glass, but it never appeared to be clear to him whose winning click it was” (209). To pursue beauty for its own sake, with no regard to external consequences or rewards, is the model of Salinger’s artistic detachment, and it is

90 this detachment that Seymour naturally possessed, which insulated him from desiring the trappings of commodity culture, giving him no reason for phoniness.

Seymour is not the only Glass sibling to display this otherworldly childish wisdom. One of the twins, Waker, after being given a brand new Davega bicycle, gives it away to an unknown boy simply because the child wanted it, although it is Seymour who mends the rift between Waker and his parents in the aftermath of this spontaneous generosity (SI 206). Waker’s saintly generosity is, like Seymour’s love for others, a result of Salinger’s conviction of the inherent connection that children have with the divine in them, which renders them more compassionate and creative. Franny is praised by her older sister Boo Boo for privileging her imaginative experience of the world over material reality when, during an episode of “It’s a Wise Child,” she goes on “at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home” (RHRC 9). After she is told by the announcer that this must have been a dream “the baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs” (RHRC 9). Children in Salinger’s work are naturally predisposed to privilege their own imaginative experience over reality, and through Franny, Salinger suggests that it is the interference of adults, insisting on the superiority of objective reality over subjective experience, that undermines this inherent inclination.

The implication behind the representation of the Glass children as innately wise, spiritual, and creative is that children already possess all the knowledge they need because of their close connection with God. It is only when this truth is lost to the desires

91 of adulthood that individuals need to re-discover this truth. This mystical conception of children is drawn from the American Transcendentalist conviction that

man is the spiritual center of the universe and that in man alone can we find the

clue to nature, history, and ultimately the cosmos itself… all knowledge therefore

begins with self knowledge. (Bowers 16)

Self-knowledge, for Salinger, is rooted in the aesthetic and the capacity to know one’s own impression as it is experienced. This is why the Glass siblings look down on formal education but make manifold references to the literature they love; Salinger suggests that through exposure to these works of art, they obtained this self-knowledge through the development of their unique taste. While Salinger does suggest, through Sibyl, that all children are more in touch with their true selves because they have yet to be corrupted by desire, the special status he confers upon his Glass family as “bona-fide underage wits and savants, of an uncommon, if unenviable, order” (54) still sets them apart from average children. It is the same refined sensitivity to beauty that has inspired them to retain and deepen this wisdom, while the ‘normal’ children around them passed through this period of intimacy with the self and the divine and into a phony, commodified adulthood.

This is the principle that guides Buddy and Seymour’s ‘education’ of their two youngest siblings, Franny and Zooey, designed to enable self-actualization through exposure to literature and religious texts in order for them to formulate their own impressions of beauty and the divine. The disapproval and distrust of formal education that they all express stems not only from their suspicion of individuality-killing large- scale institutions, but the belief that the subject is born with the capacity to learn from

92 personal experience everything they need to know. Thus, education merely gives children the “false” egos that Zooey claims are responsible for “half the nastiness in the world”

(167). The “education” Franny and Zooey are given is described as a quest “as Zen would put it, for no knowledge” (65). It is important to read this comment in light of Buddy’s later assertion that he is “neither a Zen archer nor a Zen Buddhist, much less a Zen adept”

(208); the Glass siblings view Zen as containing useful wisdom, but ultimately it is still inferior to the wisdom of the immanent self. The quest for no-knowledge is a quest for no socially conditioned knowledge; that is, like God-seeking, it is primarily a quest for self- actualization, which is for Salinger an unlearning of false egos in order to discover the

God-given subjectivity, the kingdom of heaven that we are all carrying around inside of us (Z 171).

Their education is primarily through “recommended home reading” that includes the Upanishads, the Diamond Sutra and Eckhart “and all our other old loves” (Z 62) as well as Epictetus, De Caussade, Tolstoy, “The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna,” Kafka, St.

Francis de Sales, Emily Dickinson, Mu-Mon-Kwan, and others. As the beaverboard of favourite quotations in their childhood home suggests, “no attempt whatever had been made to assign quotations or authors to categories and groups of any kind” (Z 176); rather, the religious and literary texts’ coexistence in the Glass home suggests the essential likeness of art and spirituality for Salinger. No distinction is made because, for the Glasses, there is no distinction: there is only the beautiful and the not beautiful, and the “education” of Franny and Zooey is designed to foster a religious dedication to the beautiful, to refine their natural aesthetic taste. The results of this education are presented ambivalently: Buddy says that Zooey would make “a damn site better-adjusted actor” (Z

60) if he and Seymour had not given him all of these books to read when he was so small, and Zooey tells Franny that those “two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards” (138). Nevertheless, as Zooey’s admonishment “don’t tell me I’m not sensitive to beauty...to me, everything is beautiful” (82) makes clear, while this education has alienated the Glasses from average humanity, it is a primary source of their self-defining aesthetic taste, the spiritual love of art they have retained from childhood.

While Salinger attempts to present the childishness of the Glass siblings as a virtue, their rejection of adulthood is a retreat from the reality of their failures rather than a moral achievement, and it makes them incapable of functioning in the real world.

Arthur M. Schlesinger’s criticism of the American Transcendentalists, from whom

Salinger inherits many of his religious attitudes, including those concerning children, presents a cogent argument that in practice the Transcendentalist pursuit of child-like spiritual perfection, like Salinger’s aesthete’s pursuit of “some kind of perfection” (Z

199), functioned as a kind of escapism, noting that,

The exigencies of responsibility were exhausting: much better to demand

perfection and indignantly reject the half loaf, than wear out body and spirit in

vain grapplings with overmastering reality. The headlong escape into perfection

left responsibility far behind for a magical domain where mystic sentiment and

gnomic utterance exorcised the rude intrusions of the world. (Schlesinger 141)

Like the transcendentalists, Seymour, “as only a perfectionist would” (RHRC 74), pursues his ideal, child-like spiritual state, leaving behind the responsibilities of adulthood until he is completely incapable of relationships with other adults, even his

94 own wife, mirroring Schlesinger’s descriptions of the Transcendentalists who were sometimes “incapable of effective human relations, terrified of responsibility, given to transforming evasion into moral triumph” (141). His surviving siblings’ pursuit of the near-magical degree of wisdom they attribute to their child-like and saintly brother carries them down this same path away from the responsibilities of adulthood, but also away from reality.

3.2 Children in Buddy’s Fiction

Although artists are the only seers we have on earth (SI 104), Salinger endows his child characters with some degree of spiritual vision as well. Salinger presents children as yet uncorrupted by the phoniness and ugly materialism of the adult world, existing in a state of ‘natural’ aesthetic disconnection, and for this reason endowed with a capacity for pure aesthetic experience which adults, too absorbed in meaningless pursuits, cannot recover. This makes them embodiments of the state which his adult aesthetes long to return to, existing as aesthetes, objects of beauty and a constant reminder of the painful temporality of experience. Another dimension of Salinger’s representation of children is

Buddy’s ‘authorship’ of several short stories, including A Perfect Day for Bananafish and

Teddy, both of which directly or indirectly deal with the Glass family saint and near- permanent child, Seymour. As Arthur Mizener observes, the special insight with which

Salinger endows the Glass family “is at its purest in children, whose wonderful directness fascinates Salinger” (Mizener 212). Children are Salinger’s lost ideal, and a great deal of the longing that underlies his texts reflects a yearning to return to this imaginary state.

The natural receptivity to sensual experience and beauty that Salinger endows children with can be best understood through Naomi Wood’s work on the “morally

95 sensual child” (156) in Wilde’s fairy tales, which has distinct parallels to the values expressed in Salinger’s work. Wilde’s stories “abjured children to be ‘childlike’- to repudiate adult values in favor of fantasy, play, and joyous anarchy” asserting that rather than teaching children to be good adults, adults ought to hold children up as an “artfully artless ideal” (Wood 159). These stories, like Salinger’s, embody a “particular focus on sensual experience and moral enlightenment” (Wood 157) since physical sensation serves as “an integral part of the spiritual and moral aspects of humankind” (Wood 164). As in

Wilde’s work, Salinger’s child character’s openness to and absorption in sensual experience enables them to experience “life [and] themselves with the deliberation of artists” (Wood 164). Children have their own special insight into the meaning of experience as a source of sensual pleasure and beauty, and can revel in these experiences for their own sake.

However, Salinger’s work is again plagued by idealizations and an extreme individualism. Although Buddy admits that the Glass children were “affected” by their background (SI 147), children in Salinger’s work tend to be unbelievably developed individuals largely uninfluenced by their parents or upbringing, their ‘artlessness’ is far too ‘artful’. They repudiate the values of the adult world without instruction, by intuition, instead of being socialized by them. Both the Glass children and Buddy’s fictional children appear to have been born with fully formed, independent subjectivities, modeling the individualistic resistance to the culture that produced them in unrealistic ways. This is a symptom of the kind of individualism Lukes contends pictures

“individuals as like onions which, once their outer, culturally-relative skins are peeled off, are much the same in all times and places” (Lukes 151). Such an abstract concept of

96 the individual is problematic because “it represents a primitive, an a- or pre- sociological view of the nature of the individual” (152). Salinger wants to place children, like art, in an autonomous sphere that acknowledges none of the claims of the culture that produced it, and wants his artist characters to remain in this state, existing in but not of society, an idealistic impossibility.

The similar autonomy of the aesthete and the child is visible in the relationship between Seymour and Sibyl in A Perfect Day for Bananafish. Presented as the opposition to Muriel’s commodified subjectivity, Sibyl serves as a characterization device for

Seymour’s child-likeness, highlighting the way Salinger’s romanticized child subjectivity informs his aesthetic subjectivity. Sibyl is the definition of idealistic artlessness and she favors her own imaginative world over that of the material realm of phony adults. A prominent element in Salinger’s idealized conception of childhood is the tendency to engage in the imaginative projection of form over life naturally that his Glass characters use to integrate their art and their life. The playful exchanges between Sybil and Seymour that reject material reality in favor of what they create in their imaginations highlights the way Salinger conceives of this goal as a reversion to an original state rather than something newly obtained. Furthermore, the physicality of Salinger’s prose in these stories, with its attention to right gesture and correctness of movement, suggest the aesthetic importance of sensuous experience, and the natural receptivity to this pleasure that he endows children with.

Sibyl is characterized by gesture and body parts, and Salinger’s description is at its most sensuous here. Many of her gestures reflect the symbolism at work with the parable of the bananafish, subtly suggesting the problems of desire and consumption that

97 all the Glass fiction wrestles with. Much of Sibyl’s movement is tellingly focused around her stomach. She looks “down at her protruding stomach” (17) before correcting

Seymour in calling her yellow swimsuit blue; she walks “stomach foremost” (20) and lays “on her stomach on the float” (22). The stomach is suggestive of the image of consuming beauty in traditional aestheticism. She also eats, with great pleasure, both olives and wax. Sybil consumes and lives off her experiences of the world. She is consumed by the simple beauty and jouissance of those things which she loves. She consumes them and they sustain and become a part of her. When she picks up an ordinary beach shell, she looks at it “with elaborate interest” (20), and when she walks she

“suddenly [breaks] into an oblique run” (16). What Sybil possesses is the capacity to experience the sensations which the world offers with complete absorption unmediated by concerns about conforming to its phony expectations. Unlike the bananafish, she is not gorging herself on one thing that she desires, but in the spirit of the aesthete, pursuing new and varied experiences without feeling the loss at their passing that plagues

Salinger’s adult aesthetes. Free from desire, she is free from the impulse to capture, to possess, and thus perfectly detached in her appetites.

A second body part which characterizes Sybil is her ankles and feet. Seymour’s repeated grasping of Sybil’s ankle suggests a desire to halt her movement, for her to remain static within this moment of her beauty before she ages and loses her seer’s vision. Like many aesthetes, much of Seymour’s unhappiness comes from the transient nature of his experience. Sybil’s ability to throw her entire self into her experience purely and naturally is, in part, made possible by the fact that as a child she has yet to learn how quickly moments of beauty and pleasure fade. After his moment of epiphany in seeing

Sybil’s capacity for imaginative jouissance, Seymour, in the only gesture of farewell he makes before taking his own life, kisses the arch of Sybil’s foot before releasing her to run “without regret in the direction of the hotel” (25) and towards her inevitable adulthood. After years of gorging himself on art and spiritual experiences, friendship with

Sibyl has made Seymour realize that his childhood is irrevocably behind him and that his search for pleasure in these things is ultimately fruitless; as Adorno observes, the

“expectation of sensuous pleasure perverts the nature of art as well as the nature of real sensuous pleasure, for art is unable to provide it” (20). Art, even true art, cannot provide the innocent, sensuous pleasures of childhood for a grown man, and Seymour has destroys himself seeking after it.

This emphasis on Sybil’s body contributes to the physical nature of Salinger’s prose, which highlights the imaginative value of sensuous experience. Salinger’s idealized children are characterized by an ability to fully immerse themselves in pleasurable experience because they remain liberated from confining social norms and desires. Sybil’s actions are artless, yet with the deliberation and expression of an artist.

After telling Seymour where she lives, she “ran a few steps ahead of him, caught up her left foot in her left hand, and hopped two or three times” and then Seymour tells her,

“you have no idea how clear that makes everything” (20). That Salinger places

Seymour’s response not after Sybil’s answer to his question, but rather after her gesture, suggests that it is this performative, expressive movement that has made things clearer, not the fact she has given him, since fact, like the material world, holds little value for him. When a wave “soaked Sybil’s blonde hair,” Salinger asserts, “her scream was full of pleasure” (24). Instead of being captive within the cave that is materialism and phony

99 pride, trapped by endless consumption, she is free to take joyful pleasure in experience without ownership.

Sybil and Seymour’s conversation about the book “Little Black Sambo” highlights the little girl’s preternaturally aestheticist worldview, along with its problems.

The use of the story has distinctly aestheticist tones, especially with regards to the notion of aesthetics over morality. Given the complex racial history of Sibyl’s storybook and the close scrutiny and criticism the book faced during the 1940s (Yuill 73), Salinger’s reference to it in his 1948 story must be read as contributing to this dialogue, given that

Bananafish was published sixteen years after Langston Hughes’ famous criticism of the book. Salinger’s use of the book embodies Hughes’ comment that the story was

“undoubtedly amusing to the white child, but like an unkind word to one who has known too many hurts to enjoy the additional pain of being laughed at” (1). That the conversation centres around the illustrations is particularly meaningful since they are the most problematic element of Bannerman’s children’s story. Dashini Jeyathurai observes that the illustrations depict Sambo “as having very dark skin that is juxtaposed against the whites of his eyes and teeth, a broad nose, and a wide smile and notes that while the story was set in India and about an Indian protagonist,” the illustrations matched “what

African-Americans such as Langston Hughes recognized immediately to be the pickaninny” (Jeyathurai), a derogatory caricature of dark-skinned children of African descent. Especially within the context of Seymour’s conversation with the little girl,

Salinger here seems to be supporting the counter-argument that “Little Black Sambo” was a simple children’s story by asserting the priority of aesthetics over these justifiable

100 objections, attempting to place art in its own sphere separate from the important conversations surrounding race in America at the time.

This is evident in Sybil’s reading of the story, and Seymour’s reaction to the inaccuracy of her representation of it. Sybil’s assertion that there were six tigers instead of four suggests Salinger’s form-over-content aestheticist approach to the book that elides the racist content of the story in favor of the individual’s unique experience of it. Art’s autonomy from social values has been the most problematic element of aestheticism since its inception, and it is unsurprising that Salinger would insert such a commentary into his story given the ways he would himself go on to whitewash and appropriate a wide variety of Eastern religions and art. Sybil here displays precisely the kind of value system promoted in aestheticist fairy tales, which playfully spurns the factual in favor of the imaginative and the enjoyable. Her reading of “Little Black Sambo” models the aesthetic ideal of liberation from moral values and the detached pursuit of joyous and pleasurable experiences for their own sake as the highest calling in life. Langston Hughes’ and later scholars’ commentaries make clear the serious problem with this attitude and the way it overlooks marginalized groups. Sybil and Seymour’s decision to focus on the aesthetic rather than racist elements of “Sambo,” like the Glasses attempts to make art out of their lives, is a choice afforded to them by unacknowledged social and economic privilege, not simply a spiritual gift.

Sybil’s name and its connotation of sibyls, the ancient Greek women believed to be seers, is suggestive of the parallel Salinger creates between artist seers and child seers, highlighted by Seymour’s quotation of T. S. Eliot's “The Wasteland” - “How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire” (19). The quotation is excerpted from section I,

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“The Burial,” and Slawenski argues that there is a correlation between Eliot's depiction of the Sybil cursed with eternal life, but not eternal youth, and the thematic significance of the bananafish. Like the Sybil, Seymour longs to die, having glutted himself on life through aesthetic experience. Sybil herself is something of a seer; she notably calls

Seymour “see more glass” (16), evoking his seer status as well as, perhaps, the warped lens through which he views the world. The things that Sybil “sees,” like the six tigers and the bananafish, are products of her childish imagination, but in Salinger’s system imaginative experience has spiritual as well as aesthetic significance. As Cotter argues, her vision comes “from within” (Cotter 89) rather than from the earth; like Seymour and his aesthete siblings, she is an artist creating her own imaginative version of the world, repudiating material reality for her own divine vision.

Buddy’s claim of authorship in Seymour, and his statement that while his description of Teddy’s eyes did not physically resemble Seymour’s, two of his family members “remarked that I was trying to get at [Seymour’s] eyes… and even felt that I hadn't brought it off too badly” (176-7) refute some critics’ claims that “Teddy” isas a story about a little boy swami, suggesting that Teddy functions as Buddy’s reimaging of his child-savant brother and that the story’s use of Zen and mysticism adheres to the pattern of use in the later Glass novels. Furthermore, as David Galloway observes, although critics have read this story, and indeed much of Salinger’s fiction, as a promotion of Zen, what their interpretations fail to account for is the fact that the mysticism fails to save either Teddy or Seymour (Galloway 32). Anthony Kaufman has argued that Teddy creates a persona as a defense against the ugly, loveless world around him, but this overlooks Salinger’s clear emphasis on an idealized, essential subjectivity.

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Teddy’s mysticism, like Seymour’s, is aesthetic in nature, where the individual and their impressions remain central. Kaufman is right in sensing that Teddy’s use of spirituality should not be taken at face value, and that it is a form of defence but it is not a mask. As

Chai observes, “even the finest appreciation is defenseless against suffering. But if for this reason the moral consciousness finally emerges as supreme, that is only because it offers a medium for the richest, most complex impressions of all” (Chai x). Given the parallel Buddy makes between Seymour and Teddy, Teddy’s spirituality seems to be for the purpose of intense impressions, for the aesthetic value of its performance.

There are many elements of Teddy that suggest this aesthetic reading, the foremost being Salinger’s consistent emphasis on beauty and int0ense impressions.

Teddy’s face “carried the impact, however oblique and slow-travelling, of real beauty”

(256), his voice “was oddly beautifully and rough-cut” (258). Again, Salinger emphasizes the physical body of the child and its beauty, the “rough-cut” and “slow-traveling” nature of Teddy’s beauty drawing attention to its naturalness as well as suggesting the kind of refined aesthetic taste it requires to appreciate such beauty. Teddy, like Seymour, is a true

(that is, inherent) artist who experiences an aesthetic epiphany after “looking abstractly toward, or over, the twin smokestacks” (282) after which he spontaneously quotes two

Japanese poems. Using Bidney’s system, this moment can be read as a Salingerian aesthetic epiphany since it recalls “the work of poets” and the reader feels “a recurrent undertone of pain that increases in direct relation to aesthetic joy” (199). Japanese poetry is presented as a refined pleasure that does not rely on easy emotion, and the pleasure of the poems is underwritten by grief in that they both hint at Teddy’s suicide at the end of the story. Furthermore, he had his first mystical experience at six (288) and is interested

103 in books and in words, creating a list of words to look up when he returns to the library, as well as being committed to being more loving to the people who do not understand him (275). He thus can be read, like Seymour, as a “morally sensual child” (Wood 156) and aesthete.

Teddy also displays the refined sensibilities and sense of correct gesture that in

Salinger’s work “suggests that what gives meaning to life and even death is the imaginative value of heightened and refined sensation” (Bidney 119). He is fascinated by orange peels floating in the water outside of the ship. He is concerned with maintaining his impression of them, noting that “in a few minutes the only place they’ll still be floating is in my mind… if you look at it a certain way, that’s where they started floating in the first place” (262). He also displays the same appreciation for gesture that the

Glasses have, placing “the ashtray on the glass top, with a world of care, as if he believed an ashtray should be dead-centred on the surface of a night table or not placed at all”

(264). This moment with the ashtray is later recalled in Seymour’s “distracting habit….of investigating loaded ashtrays with his index finger… as if he expected to see Christ himself curled up cherubically in the middle” (108) which can be read as an early expression of Salinger’s notion of God-seeking through aesthetic correctness and immersion in experience.

The view of education represented by Teddy can be described as epistemological individualism, which Lukes defines as “a philosophical doctrine about the nature of knowledge, which asserts that the source of knowledge lies within the individual” (107).

This is reflected in Teddy’s assertion that the first step towards obtaining knowledge is ridding yourself of knowledge not obtained from the self. Teddy tells Nicholson that

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“logic’s the first thing you have to get rid of” (290), reflecting Aatos Ojala’s reading of

Wilde’s aestheticism, which he contends “held the opinion that the fatal errors of life are not due to man’s being unreasonable, but his being logical” (Ojala 38), as well as the transcendentalist maxim to unlearn reason and “behold the world with child-like passive admiration” (Tanner 55). Teddy states that the apple in the Garden of Eden story was full of “logic and intellectual stuff,” saying, “what you have to do is vomit it up if you want to see things as they really are” (291). Seeing things as they are is not the apprehension of an objective state, but rather to see how the self perceives things, independent of exterior influences. Teddy says that if he were to change the education system he would try to show children “how to find out who they are, not just what their names are and things like that… I’d get them to empty out everything their parents and everybody ever told them” (298). Such an idea is underwritten by a problematically abstract and idealized concept of the individual, and this optimistic view of the untutored reveals a foundational naivete in Salinger’s work.

Like the Glass siblings, Teddy uses Eastern spirituality primarily to achieve detachment. Given his apparent suicide at the end of the story, Teddy cannot be read as a detached mystic, but only as in pursuit of detachment. The observational position he continually adopts physically and mentally suggests aesthetic detachment. This is evident in the way Teddy uses detachment art to connote the true. Teddy notes in his diary that he must ask Professor Mandell, a poet, to stop sending him poetry because “I already have enough for 1 [sic] year anyway. I am quite sick of it anyway” (274) and later complains that poets “are always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions” (282).

This is not a condemnation of poetry since Teddy quotes two Japanese poems from

105 memory, noting that “they’re not full of a lot of emotional stuff” (283). The parallel to

Seymour and his religion of art is evident: Teddy is drawn to Japanese poetry because it is unsentimental and therefore un-phony and beautiful. It is not the “syntaxy droppings”

(F 19) that Franny complains leave nothing beautiful, because it is not drawn from the first-hand emotional experience of the poet but from a detached love of beauty that reveals an ultimate divine truth. In this case, both the poems that Teddy quotes foreshadow his death at the end of the story.

The detachment that produces the poetry Teddy enjoys also produces true love, just as it does in the Glass fiction. His critique of sentimentality in art also applies to life.

He complains that his parents “don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more” (285). He states that he loves God but not sentimentally, observing “if I were God, I certainly wouldn’t want people to love me sentimentally. It’s too unreliable” (285). Teddy’s version of unsentimental love is modeled in his diary, where he makes notes to do things like “find daddy’s army dog tags and wear them whenever possible. It won’t kill you and he will like it” (274). Salinger takes pains at the beginning of Teddy to establish how dreadful all the members of Teddy’s family are, so it is significant that he never makes any attempt to change them or expresses any wish that they were any different, beyond critiquing the love that they have as sentimental. Instead, he looks for ways to act out his “affinity”

(285) for them, without sentimental attachment. Teddy seems also able to avoid the error of the Glass siblings and does not project an imaginative vision over reality, although

Kaufman convincingly argues that his swami persona is characteristic of “the defensive

106 use of imagination by other children in the Nine Stories collection” (130). Thus he can be read as imaginatively creating a self that is an artistic expression of his true, essential self, one that is not harmed by the phony adult world or influenced by its exterior logic and knowledge.

Children as presented in Salinger’s fiction exist in a state of natural aesthetic distance because they remain uniquely connected to the sensuous world around them and experience its pleasures uninhibitedly and with detachment. Although they inevitably pass out of this transient stage, their subjective experiences of beauty can serve as an example of the attitude necessary to love people without desire. Because they have not yet reached an age where they will attempt to conform their impressions to the values of the phony world around them, they are also capable of loving and accepting others simply as they are, without expectation of any kind, as well as possessing an imaginative capacity to respond to the suffering of others. They know their own impressions, and are set apart from the self-doubt, sense of alienation, and unhappiness that plague Salinger’s adult aesthete characters. While almost all children possess these traits, there is a gradient; children like the Glass siblings and Teddy already possess the refined sensation and spirituality that Salinger associates with ‘true’ artists, while children like Sybil are seers simply because their inherent selves have yet to be separated from the divine that created them.

Salinger’s treatment of children highlights the distinctly aestheticist and transcendental worldview at the heart of his fiction. As, respectively, the inaugural Glass story and a story retroactively fitted into the saga through Buddy’s authorship, “A Perfect

Day for Bananafish” and “Teddy” display both Salinger’s continued emphasis on the

107 aesthetic and the way that his love of beauty was married to religion in order to develop his unique system. These stories also highlight the significant problems with Salinger’s worldview. At the forefront is his tendency to universalize individual, conditional experience, suggesting a kind of universal ‘natural’ state of childhood that consciously overlooks perspectives outside of his own white, male, privileged, American experience and which ultimately declares other peoples’ legitimate differences from this group to be immaterial. It also reveals the extent to which Salinger’s religion of art was based on a faulty, naive concept of an abstract, essential self. His belief in a timeless, essential truth that should inform the actualization of an inherent subjectivity leads him into the dangerous American Transcendentalist mistake (also found in aestheticism), that “a self which can claim that its truth is anything but personal, grounded as it is not in history… but in nature” which enforces “its truth as the truth for all selves” becomes an expression of latent fascism (Wolfe 196).

Chapter 4: The Use of Religion in the Glass Stories

To say the Glasses have a unifying religious philosophy is at once true and untrue.

The indecisiveness of the aesthete, their opposition to finalized reality, and the aesthetic purpose of religion is further reflected in the lack of consensus regarding the type of religion that constitutes the religious life. Buddy and Seymour are predominantly characterized by their interest in Zen and Eastern mysticism, Zooey and Franny’s discussion of the religious life primarily concerns Christian themes and Christ, Waker

Glass is a Roman Catholic monk of the Carthusian order, and Boo Boo (via the diary of

Francis Kilbert) is “convinced that Mr. Ashe made the world” (154). Despite this, there is

108 a unity in the way that religion is approached by the Glasses. They reference a variety of religions, and treat the differences as complementary rather than contradictory. There is no sense that any of the characters view themselves or their particular religious beliefs as having exclusive access to truth; the Glass siblings conceive of disparate religions and the cultural and historical truths that frame them as different names for (or avatars of) the same God (Z 114). In the novellas, religion is never discussed for its own sake, but only for the ways it might enrich art or help the artist to live in the world; the individual remains at the centre.

Both aestheticist and American Transcendentalist traditions are behind this approach to religion. The American Transcendentalists also drew from a variety of sometimes conflicting traditions of spirituality and philosophy and married them through what Tony Tanner terms “mystical generalizations” (Tanner, Barbour 57). What Perry

Miller calls the Transcendentalists’ “undiscriminating eclecticism” (Miller, Barbour 65) seems also to be an underlying tenet of Salinger’s work. This is as problematic in

Salinger’s writing as it is in the Transcendentalists. The carelessness with which Salinger draws from Eastern religion has led many critics to observe that he did not fully grasp the mysticism that he used, and his blending of Eastern traditions with American Christianity is appropriative rather than appreciative. Salinger’s equation of beauty and the divine, often used obliquely to define both terms, is derived from the Transcendentalist idea that

Christ and his message were intrinsically beautiful and their concept of God as having created the world with no ulterior motive whatsoever, purely for the joy of self- expression, “as an artist creates beauty for the love of beauty” (Miller, Barbour 72).

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Salinger’s use of the term Philokalia (“love of beauty”) as the name of a key religious text in the Glass novels further highlights this parallel.

Salinger’s use of spirituality highlights what he perceives as the similar, if not identical, goals of aestheticism and religion to make life correspond to an overarching form that gives it meaning. Chai reflects on the interplay between religion and aestheticism, noting that,

If the objective of life is in some sense art (the achievement of form in our

existence) one can likewise speak of religion (in effect, a way of life) as aspiring

to form. The form religion seeks must be artistic, inasmuch as it attempts to bring

into meaningful relations all our various relations. (104)

Salinger’s aesthetic use of religion draws on the correlation observed by Chai, in that both religion and art confer individual significance on disparate moments in the lives of the individual Glass siblings and in their collective history. Just as art crystallizes the aesthetic moment, so stylized religious rituals, like Franny’s Jesus, prayer integrate and extend into the life of the subject the structure and meaning spiritual life confers on material existence. Religion becomes in Salinger’s use a way to facilitate the subject’s aspiration to make art the purpose of life, bolstering the individual’s capacity to give form to life through art by re-framing otherwise random experiences as meaningful, a creative exercise. By drawing on the parallels between religious and aesthetic life,

Salinger is able morally to justify the attitude of superiority his aesthete characters have towards ungifted characters and to suggest that beauty and art are what give meaning to life. Just as the aesthetic moment can be crystallized and preserved when given form in art, so intense encounters with divine beauty can be sustained through religion.

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Salinger’s use of religion also emulates Kate Hext’s description of Pater’s exploration of God solely in terms of the individual, and that “the absolute centrality of the individual and of kindness, compassion, and love between individuals is constant”

(Hext 78). The Glasses do not pursue the religious life in order to find truth or please a deity, but to better dedicate themselves to art and to compassionate relationships with others. Furthermore, as Wolfgang Iser notes in his study of Pater, in aestheticism religion loses its original significance and becomes elements of a technique that enables the subject to externalize itself, embodying “the aesthetically ideal state, making the forces which organise the world subservient to subjectivity” (Iser 54). This is performed through the artist’s vision, the “transforming sight of the mind’s eye” (Iser 48), and this element of subjective transformation is central to Salinger’s aesthetic religion as well. Salinger’s aesthetes do not respond to the misery of the world around them by attempting to change it; rather, the Glasses imaginatively transcend their philistine surroundings through experiences of beauty that they formalize into an artistic perspective on life that enables them to love those around them, even when they fail to meet the stringent criteria for a religious life.

The blending of religion with a nineteenth century-style religion of art is vital to

Salinger’s aestheticism in order for him to justify keeping art entirely separate from social concerns. By universalizing religion and making art a religious calling, Salinger claims that people become more loving and compassionate through experiencing art and beauty since these have the same spiritual function as religion, reconnecting the subject to their unique, God-given “true ego” and their place in the world. This is important for the twentieth century writer, since, as Adorno observes, “the autonomy that art gained after

111 having freed itself from its earlier cult function and its derivatives depended on the idea of humanity. As society grew less humane, art became less autonomous” (Adorno 1).

Since Salinger, living in the post-WWII era, cannot claim that people are inherently humane on their own, he relies on artists’ connection to the divine, asserting art’s spiritual function instead of its social one. To critique the commodification of art while maintaining that it ought to be autonomous and individualistic, that it should not be required to play a social role, Salinger must insist that through the divine, art reconnects the subject with their ‘true’, divinely-given self that commodification strips away, enabling them to be more humane through individual transformation rather than systematic, large-scale change (something he maintains a distrust of). In this way the material conditions of society need not be addressed since change is only possible on an individual level, and the greatest social good an artist can do is strictly to adhere to their individualistic vision without desiring any result, since this would strip their art of its sacred set-apartness.

The sanctity Salinger assigns to art and the artist also reinforces his continual insistence that the artist and art should be elevated above quotidian concerns and the marketplace by making art into something sacred. This mirrors nineteenth century aestheticism which, as Chai contends, “had been preoccupied with the question of sanctity,” noting that it transitioned from emphasising the sacredness of life to one on rites and sacraments, “concerning itself less with a ceremony’s intrinsic meaning than with the aesthetic impression it produces” (Chai 129). This is an element of the Glass novels often misunderstood by critics who believe that he uses religion for its own sake and not for art’s, but comments such as Buddy’s assertion that “what little I’ve been able

112 to apprehend … of the Zen experience has been a by-result of following my own rather natural path of extreme Zenlessness” (SI 208), reveals that the Glasses are guided by individual taste (“my own rather natural path”) in pursuit of new, intense experiences, not religious truth. Salinger’s aestheticizing of religion is as equally preoccupied with sanctity as its nineteenth century ancestor, although his aesthetes move in the opposite direction, from formal religious observances such as meditation, Zen, and the Jesus prayer that offer transcendent aesthetic experiences, to a broader affirmation of the sacredness of all human beings as at once both essentially unique and essentially the same.

The Glass siblings each adopt this belief in the sacredness of life through aesthetic epiphanies that lead them away from the judgemental attitude fostered by their aestheticism. The sanctity of life gradually becomes almost as important to their religion as beauty itself, and although the two are not one and the same, the capacity to recognize beauty and sanctity are both related to the refined sensibilities of the aesthete. Sanctity, like beauty in Salinger’s work, is as much a perspective, a way of seeing, as it is a quality; recognizing the beautiful in the world is in one sense recognizing its sacredness.

Buddy closes Seymour: An Introduction with his own aesthetic epiphany that his brother

Seymour was right when he said that “all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next” (213); but it is through his brother’s art, both his poetry and his life, and not through the manifold religious texts he makes reference to, that he comes to realise this. The sanctity of the world as creation and as material for art not only elevates the role of the artist since, as “the only seer we have on earth” (SI 104), they exclusively have access to this perspective, but it also creates space for Salinger’s

113 love doctrine to overcome its isolating aesthetic judgements against the world in order to re-enter it.

4.1 Art and the Artist in the Religion of the Glasses

In a letter to Buddy reviewing one of his stories, Seymour tells Buddy that art is not his profession but his religion and asks him,

since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But

let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were

working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be

asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished... I am so

sure you’ll only get asked two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you

busy writing your heart out? (160)

While nineteenth century aestheticism used the term “religion of art” to connote its desire to “redefine the relation of art to life, to impart to life itself the form of a work of art and thereby raise it to a higher level of existence” (Chai 4) ] what Seymour’s assertion makes clear is that his religion of art actually views the life of the artist as religious, with all the struggles, transformations, and obligations that come with a spiritual vocation.

Importantly, as Seymour’s quotation highlights, while Salinger’s aesthetes draw on religious tenets to conceptualize their obligations both to their art and to others, their intense individualism means that in order to fulfill their spiritual calling they must write their hearts out -- that is, the greatest obligation of the artist is to “shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s” (Z 199). Strict adherence to the terms of the “true ego” is to discover Zooey’s truth that “we’re carrying the Kingdom of

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Heaven around with us, inside” (Z 171), re-establishing the aesthete’s inherent connection with the divine.

The notion of art as a religious calling is reinforced by Salinger’s claim that artistic vision is the same as spiritual vision. The artist’s connection to the divine that constitutes art as their religion is attributed to their status as a seer (SI 104), a person of moral and spiritual insight obtained through transcendental experience. Salinger equates refined and heightened sensibility with the spiritual capacity to see God throughout the

Glass novels, suggesting that because God is the Ideal beauty, seeing the divine in the world means being able to recognize its beauty; thus, the “intense life of observation”

John Gaggin describes as a central element of aestheticism becomes “God-seeking,” the pursuit of divine beauty in the various ways it is expressed in the world. Zooey critiques

Franny’s use of the Jesus prayer for precisely this reason, noting that its purpose is “to endow the person with Christ-Consciousness” (Z 172); that is, a transcendent perspective that enables her to recognize the inherent sacredness of life, including the “cup of consecrated soup” (Z 196). Salinger’s use of the term “consciousness” further highlights the essentially aesthetic nature of this doctrine; God-seeking is not a decisive, active pursuit but a way of seeing that affirms a sacredness bestowed upon by the individual’s unique experience. Importantly, while the Glasses pursue the maintenance of this perspective, even a true seer cannot consistently maintain this transcendent perspective

(since it is largely brought on by intense temporary experiences) so the work of the seer is to crystallize and preserve through their work.

Reflective of the two religions from which they draw much of their inspiration

(Zen Buddhism and Christianity), the Glasses view life as characterized by suffering and

115 loss. Phonies are often characterized as (to some degree) immune to this pain because they are too shallow to experience anything intensely; this is why Buddy observes that after Seymour’s death his widow immediately acquires expensive clothing to suit the occasion, and why Zooey states that psychoanalysts cannot help Franny since they are only experienced in “adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine… and

God knows what else that’s gloriously normal…” (108). Both critiques highlight the threat of loss of the self through commodification (or other means) that is at the heart of suffering for Salinger; although phonies never experience the agony of religious life, the

Glass siblings consistently suggest that intense feelings, negative or positive, are what give meaning to life and affirm the subject, and that life without them is empty, meaningless, and devoid of fulfilling relationships; thus the Sick Man is “done in by the most stimulating companion, disease or no, he has ever known” (103).

There are two types of loss confronted in these texts. The first is the universal experience of the loss of a loved one. Walt Glass, a minor sibling only discussed with any detail in the short story “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” dies in an accident while serving in the Second World War and Seymour, also a veteran of the war, kills himself while on a second honeymoon with his wife Muriel. While Seymour’s dramatic suicide is given a great deal more attention than Walt’s death because his status as teacher and saint in his family make his ‘sickness’ an ever-present risk for his siblings, both losses leave their mark on the family. But loss through death is only one half of loss in Salinger: like the original aesthetes such as Pater, the Glasses display an anxiety surrounding the passage of time and the losses inherent to it. This is revealed in their attempts to preserve the intensity of impression of certain moments. For instance, Seymour states that “I have

116 scars on my hands from touching certain people” (RHRC 75). These include scars from touching Franny and Zooey when they were children, as well as grabbing the yellow dress of a little girl named Charlotte; that Seymour describes himself as marked by these transient moments of beauty that have passed away, like the period of childhood he idealizes, reveals the harm that their loss has caused him. Buddy makes a parallel comment when he imagines Seymour, noting that when he pictures him, he gets “a vivid- type picture all right, but in it he appears before me simultaneously at the ages of eight, eighteen, and twenty-eight…” (170-1). Buddy remembers Seymour not as a whole person, but rather in intense individual moments in his life that have been lost to time and to his brother’s death. Importantly, both Seymour and Buddy respond to the pain of loss by recreating these moments in their writing, suggesting that the crystallization of these moments in art is one means of (imperfectly) preserving them.

Loss is also a key element of the aesthetic epiphanies in these texts. In the depths of her depression, Franny’s only request is to speak to her brother Seymour who at this point has committed suicide. At a loss, Zooey looks out the window and experiences an aesthetic epiphany while watching a child with her dog. The first element of the scene emphasized by Salinger is the intensity of colour: the girl’s “navy blue reefer and a tam that was very nearly the same shade of red as the blanket on the bed in Van Gogh’s room at Arles” (151). But the painterly beauty of the scene is only part of Zooey’s attraction; it is the little girl’s lost dog, looking for her “in frantic circles” for whom “the anguish of loss was scarcely bearable” comparable only to the “joy” and “ecstasy” of their reunion.

This epiphany is terminated by loss as well as the pair walk out of Zooey’s sight, and his realization that “there are nice things in the world” is interrupted by the intrusion of

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Franny blowing her nose. The interplay of the loss of Seymour and the loss of the aesthetic moment, both to transience and to the lowness of material reality summarizes the dilemma of loss as it is conceived by Salinger, who seems to follow Adorno’s contention that art “absorbs pleasure as remembrance and longing” (21). This remembrance is shown in Buddy’s recreations of family moments, each story “with a beginning and an end, and a mortality, all its own” (5) and his longing to recapture his dead brother’s life and give it meaning.

The search for meaning amidst the loss and the transience of life are prominent themes in nineteenth century aestheticism as well, and Chai argues that its fascination with lending the form of art to life is inspired by “the intuition that all the moments of our existence might form an ideal sequence and in doing so convey some higher meaning which we ourselves, in living and suffering each individual moment … are prevented from grasping” (200). For the original aesthetes, this “higher meaning” replaced the meaning given to life by religion, but in the Glass stories the projection of form into life to form an “ideal sequence” is imaginatively to recreate events through the lens of Christ- consciousness. This is largely done through the meta-narrative of Buddy’s authorship of the Glass novels, and in the way that Eberhard Alsen observes that the Glass stories function as a composite novel. Alsen suggests that Salinger gives authorship of these stories to Buddy, in particular, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, in order to suggest “that we ought to treat Bananafish as a story told by an unreliable narrator” (Alsen 9). However, given that Salinger’s aestheticism treats fact and material reality as something “low and trivial” (Kedney V/23) it seems unlikely that Buddy’s unreliability would be an issue; like all the Glasses, Buddy is largely unconcerned with facts, and even opens Zooey by

118 observing that “the facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do” (47) and goes on to present his work as a

“counterbalance” to these vulgar facts.

Instead, Buddy re-creates key moments in his family's collective development of their religion of art in order to give these disparate crises and epiphanies (many of which he was not even present for) an artistic form that reflects his family’s artistic philosophy, integrating their lives with their art and lending their diverse experiences a unified, coherent meaning. This is why, despite praising Seymour for never “spilling a single really autobiographical bean” (SI 148), all the stories Buddy claims authorship of (with the exception of Teddy, which he still implies is modeled on Seymour) use his family as material. Buddy’s work is not in violation of this tenet of the Glass religion of art since his retellings are creative rather than biographical, with frequent allusions on Buddy’s part to the creative license taken by him. Through his art Buddy lends these events a deeper significance and a thematic unity (as in, when Franny, Zooey and Buddy’s separate moments of crisis all lead to the same epiphanic conclusion) that would not exist in real life; this may in part account for critics valid comments that the Glass siblings are unrealistically gifted, since Buddy is not trying to represent real people but his artistic ideals. Thus, the twofold purpose of Buddy’s writing these stories is not to preserve the events as they occurred, but the beautiful moments of epiphany that provide the transcendent Christ-consciousness necessary to philokalia, and as his own means of transforming their disparate experiences into a unified and meaningful whole; this is the composite novel structure Alsen observes, but its ultimate purpose is aesthetic, and not, as he claims, religious.

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Salinger thus explores the relationship between aesthetic pleasure and loss on multiple levels, asserting that beauty is what makes the pain of transience bearable, despite being ephemeral in nature, and that through form the artist can represent these moments of intense feeling. The apprehension, preservation, and affirmation of these idiosyncratic aesthetic epiphanies is the pursuit of saintliness by Salinger’s aesthete characters, but the key to actually capturing these moments is the development of an individual style of art that can accurately reflect their vision as seers. Salinger’s approach to style again reflects an aestheticist view of art. It is reflective of Iser’s definition of aesthetic style, which states that

What style makes tangible is the artist’s individuality, not a reality made

classifiable through a norm… style reduces things to their human dimension, not

copying reality but filtering. What style represents must always be the

individual’s perspective, and for the individual it is only this perspective world

that is real. (47)

That this “filtered” reality is for the Glasses superior to the base material reality is, as previously discussed, reflected continually through the purposeful disconnect between the

Glass siblings’ art and their lives; but their justification for this opinion differs from nineteenth century aestheticism again because of the religious dimension they add. Since, reflective of American Transcendentalism, self-actualization is spiritual in nature, the development of a personal artistic style is an element of God-seeking whereby “the only seer we have on earth, the artist” (SI 104), can share their vision. This is why Buddy declares it treacherous for Boo Boo to suggest that

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3320 Seymour’s poem may have been drawn from first-hand experience (SI 164) because he sees the poem as the sacred writing of a seer.

In Seymour: An Introduction, Buddy holds up Seymour’s development of an individual style as a complete artistic achievement, stating that “Seymour does with a poem, I think, exactly what he was meant to do with one” (128). He describes Seymour’s process of style development as being inspired by Chinese and Japanese poetry, which he is drawn to for its capacity to “enlighten the invited eavesdropper within an inch of his life” (117). The style he eventually produced was a thirty-four-syllable haiku style verse

“that met his most long-standing demands of poetry in general” (126). Style is emphasized over content, not only in Buddy’s low opinion of writers who draw from first-hand experience, but also in his contention that “the true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it” (121), and that “one pure poet’s voice is absolutely the same as another’s and at once absolutely distinctive and different”

(122). While these claims might seem at odds with Salinger’s individualism, Hegel’s view of the function of the imagination is helpful:

It is not sufficient that the spirit, such as we find it immediately in ourselves,

should reveal itself in a visible reality. It is the universal spirit, the absolute truth,

the rational principle of things which ought to appear in the representation… the

function of imagination is to reveal to our mind the essence of things, not as a

principal or general conception, but in a concrete form, and in an individual

reality. (2.11)

Because art is a religious calling in Salinger’s system, the material the artist uses is divine in origin, but ideally it should represent both their individual reality and “universal”

121 humanity, which is for Salinger the claim that everyone is divine. This problematically emulates American Transcendentalism’s egalitarian impulse which viewed “all religions the same religion, all poets singers of the same music of the same spheres, chanting eternally the recurrent theme” (650 Miller,Barbour). Thus, for Salinger, style, not content, is the medium through which all-important individuality is expressed in art in

Salinger’s aesthetic system.

The search for an inclusive style becomes another obligation in the Glass religion of art. It arises from Seymour’s concern that his poems “read as though they’d been written by an ingrate… someone who was turning his back… on his own environment and the people in it who were close to him” (SI 124). This is reflective of Hegel’s insight that “art is not destined for a little privileged circle of savants, but for the entire people, the common heart, or at least for ordinary culture” (vi 3/6). Specifically, Seymour was concerned with the opinion of his childhood librarian Miss Overman, asserting that he owed her a “painstaking, sustained search for a form of poetry that was in accord with his own peculiar standards and not wholly incompatible… with Miss Overman’s tastes”

(125). Buddy is initially resistant to this idea, arguing that Miss Overman is not qualified to pass judgement on poetry, presumably because she is not an aesthete. Alsen argues that over the course of the Buddy-authored Glass novels, the Glass writer “comes to accept

Seymour’s notion of the intimate relationship between art and religion (7), and certainly in Seymour this is the case. As Buddy asserts,

the poet’s function is… to write what he would write if his life depended on his

taking responsibility for writing what he must write in a style designed to shut out

as few of his old librarians as possible. (126)

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Style thus functions for Salinger and Adorno in similar terms as “the inclusive moment whereby art becomes language” (293). That Buddy highlights his own change of heart in this matter draws attention to the progression of the Glasses, from the misanthropy of the earlier texts towards a less judgemental and more loving attitude towards non-aesthetes.

Buddy is actually able to conclude by saying that Seymour wrote poems that Miss

Overman “herself would have very likely have thought striking, perhaps even comely…”

(126) but the absence of the word “beauty” is telling, as is the slightly patronizing tone; non-aesthetes remain non-aesthetes.

The exploration of the reader’s experience of art helps to bolster an otherwise rather undeveloped element of Philokalia. After imagining what Miss Overman’s response to Seymour’s poetry would be, Buddy describes his own, drawing again on the musical imagery he uses when he earlier accuses non-aesthetes of being “a peerage of tin ears” (SI 104), saying that Seymour’s poems have the effect “of someone - surely no one completely sober - opening my door, blowing three or four or five unquestionably sweet and expert notes on a cornet into the room, then disappearing (128), thus highlighting the brevity and intensity of aesthetic experience. Buddy then responds to two of Seymour’s poems that are not reproduced in the text. Buddy’s responses to Seymour’s art are characterized by his exploration of his own imaginative response. Given the minimalist structure of the double haiku Seymour develops, many details are left out, particularly physical descriptions, but Buddy authoritatively fills these in for himself. In one instance,

Buddy states that while his brother does not describe a particular character, he sees her

“as a terribly pretty, moderately intelligent, immoderately unhappy, and not unlikely living a block or two away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (129). Buddy’s

123 description of the experience of art reflects Adorno’s claim that “the viewer enters into a contract with the art work [sic] so as to make it speak” (375); the experience of his brother’s poetry is not a passive reception but a creative act in itself.

Salinger’s concept of accessible style problematically universalizes his concept of beauty. The assumption underlying Salinger’s theory regarding the reception of art is that all subjectivities should experience pleasure in the face of art or the beautiful, and that those who do not are inferior. Salinger’s excessive individuality again blinds him to the ways that a person’s definition of beauty is culturally, socially, and economically determined and the absence of a concrete definition of beauty beyond its equation with the divine complicates this further. Even after Buddy’s epiphany that Seymour was right to develop a style that average subjectivities might find “comely” overlooks Adorno’s insight that the “universality of pleasure unknowingly presupposes an affirmative response to social norms” (Adorno 237).The attempt of the Glasses to moralize receptivity to beauty by claiming those who love the beautiful are God-seekers whose quest will make them better people only affirms their limited, American definitions of these concepts rather than undermining their dominant culture.

Another element of religious practice essential to this spiritual aestheticism is detachment or disinterest, a principal found at the heart of both aestheticism and Zen, although for different purposes. While detachment in Zen Buddhism is a path that renounces the world and its desires, disinterest in aestheticism is a means of appreciating aesthetic experience for its own sake, a way of looking at the world as material for art.

This emulates the Kantian disinterested gaze, as read by Eagleton, who asserts,

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For Kant… the disinterested gaze which reads the world purely as form is a way

of eliciting the object’s enigmatic purposiveness, lifting it out of the web of

practical functions in which it is enmeshed so as to endow it with something of

the self-determining autonomy of the subject. (169)

For the Glasses, detachment serves both roles; as Zooey tells Franny, “... the only thing that counts in religious life is detachment” (198). Zooey’s comment is later revealed in

Seymour to be founded upon his older brother’s adaptation to his artistic religion of the

Zen “aim without aiming” pinciple. Drawn from Zen archery, and originally used in childhood by Seymour to shoot marbles, Buddy compares the principle to “the fine art of snapping a cigarette end into a small wastebasket” (209), eschewing the comparison to

Zen archery because he is neither “a Zen archer nor a Zen Buddhist” (208). It is a principle of acting without regards for the outcome, that is, without desire. While it is religious, the joy that Seymour experienced “when he heard a responsive click of glass striking glass” without caring “whose winning click it was” (209) reveals this to be an artistic principle as well.

Detachment, or aiming-without-aiming, is for Salinger the foundation for art produced for its own sake, free of American consumer culture that would commodify it.

Alsen suggests that the Glass novels trace Buddy’s development as a writer as much as they reveal his family history, and that this culminates in his development of the experimental style found in Seymour: An Introduction, one that is independent of his desire to be published. The novella does adhere to Salinger’s rules for art in a more faithful and developed way than the earlier works, but this is in part because Salinger was developing the ‘religion’ as he wrote, and retroactively had Buddy take ownership of the

125 stories. Buddy’s idiosyncratic style, with its frequent intrusions and exclamations that both interrupt the reader and express interest in their experience of the work are Buddy’s nod to Seymour’s conclusion regarding Miss Overman: Buddy has learned to communicate with others by developing a unique yet inclusive form, to “tell the reader where you are. Be friendly -- you never know” (164), but is also single-mindedly committed to crafting “a perfect image” (170) of Seymour. He states that he wants the story to have such a life of its own that he does not have to send it to be published; rather, the story should be able to “get down there without my using either stamps or Manila envelope” but is able “to just give it train fare, and maybe pack a sandwich for it” (164).

In their totality, these elements of the Glass religious life serve aestheticism’s goal of making life itself into art. Although they fail to provide a convincing programme to ease the pain of loss or a way to love other people in the real world, these practices are beneficial in cultivating a sustained artistic perspective.

4.2 The Integration of Art and Life

The pattern of aesthetic epiphanies that Martin Bidney observes in Salinger’s fiction is the catalyst for the development of the Glass religion of art, both its ideals and the pain of the Sick Man that characterizes it. The beauty that the Glass siblings seek, like all of life, is transient and must inevitably give way to the loss that characterizes existence. As Bidney argues in his work on Salinger’s aestheticism, “aesthetic pleasure here is inseparable from the pain of the absent individual” (125). Just as Salinger’s religious view of art was conceived amidst the trauma and death of World War II, so the

Glass family Philokalia is developed in the wake of Seymour’s suicide, as his siblings struggle to understand how the religion of art, passed down to them by their saintly

126 brother, failed to save him from self-destruction. The intense beauty of Seymour’s art, his poetry and the beautiful way he lived, contrasted with the ugly tragedy of his violent suicide, is the prototype for the pattern of aesthetic pleasure and loss that characterizes the Glass fiction. The heightened and refined sensibilities of aesthetes make both the pleasure of beauty and the pain of its inevitable loss so intense; but, in Salinger’s work, this aesthetic pattern is also endowed with the religious motif of death and rebirth. This is why Buddy cannot, in speaking of his brother’s poetry (considered in the novels to be the height of artistic achievement), “unreservedly recommend the last thirty or thirty-five poems to any living soul who hasn't died at least twice in his lifetime, preferably slowly”

(SI 128). The intense pleasure of Seymour’s poetry can only be experienced by those with aesthetic taste and those people, by definition, must experience profound loss or

‘death’.

While the development of form is central to the artist’s development in Seymour, the other novellas, and even Seymour itself are predominantly concerned with the vision of the artist as “the only seer we have on earth” (SI 104). Thus, the focus of both the

Glass siblings’ religious life and their artistic efforts is the cultivation of a specific, refined perspective, and this is done, in part, through intense observation; like the nineteenth century aesthetes, Salinger contends that “the highest human activity is the maintenance of an artistic view of life” (Gaggin 2). This perspective is reflected in the way the Glass siblings critique the aesthetic elements of the world around them rather than the moral problems. Leon Chai states that “if art is equated with vision rather than form, the distinction between art and the aesthetic of experience also ceases” (133), and that this “aesthetic of experience” is central to understanding the novellas, especially the

127 notable infrequency of artistic activity on the part of any of the Glass siblings (with the exception of Buddy). Despite extensively discussing art, Salinger rarely shows the

Glasses producing it because their discussions are the production of art in their lives.

John Gaggin observes a similar kind of aestheticism in his work on Salinger’s mentor Hemingway, a type he calls “the aesthetic observer,” “critics who analyse the artistic components of daily activity” (Gaggin 9). This type of character is predominantly concerned with the intense life of observation, and cultivating the refined perspective necessary for this formal analysis of life. Keen aesthetic observation is the material that produces the art of the aesthete’s vision, and as such is built into the Glass religion. God- seeking, and the detachment that must accompany it, is designed to cultivate this perspective by promoting disinterested recognition of the beautiful and the consecrated.

This is why Seymour is reported by Buddy to have said that the thing he loved best in the

Bible was the word WATCH! (152); for Seymour, the life of observation is the religious life.

A second element of this injection of form into life is the treatment of life as performance. The Glass siblings come from vaudeville performers and, as children, perform on a radio talk show.This characterization is significant given Chai’s argument that “theatre brings to the forefront the whole problem of the relationship between art and life” (22) that aestheticism addresses. Buddy declares that Seymour did not “live or die a whit less affected by his ‘background’ than any of the rest of us” (S147); Zooey states that the siblings “never really got off the goddam air” (Z 140) and even Boo Boo, “a fully landed suburbanite… will, all but literally, dance for her life” (146). The performance element of Glass aestheticism is highlighted in the physicality of Salinger’s prose, and the

128 precise, purposeful, and elegant way the Glass siblings interact with the world around them. John Gaggin describes the aesthete practice of injecting formal correctness into daily life as part of the aesthetic observer, “the aesthetic discipline of gesture” (65), and argues that they display “a devotion to craft and an emphasis on the artistic value of an action” (9). Franny displays this even in moments of despair. Salinger describes her breakdown in a restaurant bathroom, while clasping “The Way of the Pilgrim” with particular attention to the elegance of her gestures:

She brought her knees together very firmly… then she placed her hands,

vertically, over her eyes and pressed the heels hard… her extended fingers,

though trembling, or because they were trembling, looked oddly graceful and

pretty… she put [the book] on her lap -- on her knees, rather -- and looked down

at it, gazed down at it, as if that were the best of all places for a small pea-green

clothbound book to be. (F 22-3)

Again, Alsen’s insight into the composite nature of the Glass novels is helpful in highlighting the significance of Buddy’s authorship of Franny. Both Franny’s own discipline of gesture, the precision and grace of her movements even in, (or perhaps because of), a moment of intense feeling, are matched by Buddy’s rigorous attempt to capture them and highlight the artistic value gesture has for Salinger, and suggest for an aesthete, all of life should be a performance for its own sake, even when one is alone.

Buddy’s attention to detail here in this passage also reinforces the importance of the life of observation: the aesthete not only gains intense impressions but also a sense of meaning.

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Both the life of observation and the discipline of gesture require religious dedication in the Glass novels, and this offers benefits but at a high price. Buddy tells

Zooey that if a man with his throat cut and bleeding to death were to see a “pretty girl or old woman… pass by with a beautiful jug balanced on the top of her head, he should still be able to raise himself up on one arm and see the jug safely over the hill” (Z 154).

Salinger claims that this level of dedication to obtaining intense impressions, and the detachment it requires, can be translated into real love and compassion towards others, even if it prohibits any movement towards active change. But just as the aesthete in

Buddy’s story will move to see a beautiful object but not to save himself, so the love that enables a Salinger character’s return to the world is, in reality, a love of beauty and self, and its only gestures towards other people are still only in service of this goal. Gaggin observes of nineteenth century aesthetes that dedicating one’s life to intense impressions

“provided a sense of meaning in an otherwise fragmented culture; but the life of observation made the artist to some degree unfit for engagement” (Gaggin 101). This unfitness culminates in the suffering of the Sick Man and the death of the bananafish, so glutted with aesthetic experience that it can no longer escape back into the real world, thus dying from its gluttony.

The error of Salinger’s religion of art is the moral value not only of aesthetic experience but of taste, creating a moral hierarchy which views anyone who does not share his definition of beautiful as spiritually deficient. This mistakes art’s meaning for the individual as real, objective meaning. Eagleton describes this error in his critique of the Kantian subject of taste, arguing that what a subject encounters in an object of beauty is “a unity and harmony which are the effect of the free play of its own faculties” and this

130 activity “resembles the infantile narcissist of the Lacanian mirror stage…” (87). Despite all their aesthetic-religious epiphanies about loving others, the Glasses never move beyond the infantile narcissism that causes them to relate everything they encounter back to themselves, because what they are in fact encountering in these moments is their own, subjective taste, not a universal law. Despite frequently claiming to recognize the value of other people, their sense of spiritual superiority renders their own aesthetic pleasure more important (because they believe it to be a religious calling) and they choose to remain inactive in face of the dehumanizing culture they so passionately critique.

Furthermore, because Salinger asserts that epiphanies, not effort, are what make a person moral, the aesthetic epiphanies of the Glass siblings never inspire them actively to change the world they hate or even improve themselves. Adorno captures this element of aestheticism when he asserts that “the phantasmagoria of an aesthetic world unperturbed by purpose provided an excuse for the real world to stay as it was” (Adorno 634-5). Thus,

Franny is never kinder to Lane or her professors, Buddy never really reconciles with

Muriel, and Seymour kills himself because he cannot learn to love his phony wife anymore than he can “learn or drive himself to like bad poetry” (RHRC 74). Zooey cannot listen to Buddy even when he implores him, through a letter early in Zooey, to be kinder to his mother Bessie, whom he repeatedly calls “fatty” and mocks. Salinger seems to have some sense of the troublingly imaginary nature of his philosophy, since he gives to Bessie the wisest line in all of the Glass novels: she tells her misanthropic youngest son that he “can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes” (99), and this truth is precisely why the Glasses choose to live in their minds instead.

4.3 Philokalia: A Love of Beauty

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Salinger’s religion of art culminates in Philokalia, a love of beauty. While the term Philokalia itself serves only as the title for the book the Pilgrim finds in the novel

Franny reads before her breakdown, the Glass characters continually assert their love of beauty above all else, and like the pilgrim of Franny’s story, they view their love of beauty as a pursuit of sacred, transcendental experience. Like religious adherents, they conceive of their aesthetic taste as a calling, a path fraught with difficulty. Walt Glass’ claim that “the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sicks on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world” (154), suggests that the ultimate goal of their religion is to achieve a transcendent perspective that can imaginatively see everything as beautiful. In Franny, the Philokalia teaches the pilgrim what it means to pray ceaselessly, and in the Glass novels this transcendent perspective, by whatever name each gives it, concerns the integration of art and life, that is, to make art ceaselessly. In order to do this, the aesthete must cultivate a heightened consciousness and attempt to perpetually maintain it.

The Glass siblings try to achieve this through God-seeking. God-seeking is ultimately a form of self-realization, since as Zooey tells Franny, “we’re carrying the

Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we’re all too goddam stupid and unimaginative to look” (Z 171). Thus, to seek God is to turn inward towards the self. This reflects the American Transcendentalist belief that

to escape this destructive desire and achieve happiness was a process of self-

realization that depended on reconciling the self’s natural desire to self-transcend

in order to become one with the world through a single moment’s experience and

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the self-asserting impulse of the individual to remain unique and responsible only

to herself. (Bowers/Barbour 17-19)

For Salinger, the aesthetic moment fuses these two impulses, enabling the self to become one with the world through Christ-consciousness, the transcendent recognition that everyone is Christ, and at the same time reinforces the self’s unique vision. Zooey’s claim that “to me, everything [sic] is beautiful” (82), and his later admonishment to

Franny that she is unable to recognize a legitimate holy man because she fails to see the soup her mother offers her is “consecrated” (196), as well as Seymour’s claim that “all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next” (213), again highlighting the interrelatedness of the divine and the beautiful; the religious life is to see everything as beautiful because everyone is God and everything is sacred.

Moments of intense consciousness are where this transcendent perspective is supposed to be achieved, requiring a sensitivity or “morbid attrait” to beauty. Salinger appears to draw on the aestheticist idea, that “through love the artistic intelligence identifies with different modes of human existence in order to bestow upon them a higher significance,” (Chai 105) by having his “Christ-consciousness” endow his misanthropic aesthetes with the ability to imagine that everyone is beautiful and an expression of God’s creativity. The products of creation are imaginatively recast in the idiosyncratic style of the aesthete who can from this transcendent vantage point appreciate them for their own sake rather than as means to other material ends. This transcendence is not a denial of the distinction between good and bad art, between the ugly and the beautiful (since Seymour says this would be impossible), but a choice to relate to all things through the subject’s temporary experiences of the beautiful- that is, through love. However, as Adorno

133 observes, “the beautiful in art is the illusion of peace in empirical reality” (Adorno 366); this exercise is ultimately imaginary, and its purpose is not active love towards other people, but the erasure of ugliness, both internal and external, from the life-art of the

Glasses. For this reason, the Glass siblings may imaginatively make art that claims to exist (or seeks to exist) in loving relationship with the world, but which in empirical reality is illusory.

These moments of intense consciousness are conceived of as resistance to dehumanizing consumer culture, reconnecting the subject to what Salinger believes is truly valuable. The disinterest that is key in Salinger’s religion of art is intended to render the subject more receptive to these moments. In this way, the aesthetic functions for

Salinger in much the way it does for Eagleton, who contends that

the aesthetic is important because it speaks of more than itself. The detachment or

ataraxia we attain for a precious moment in contemplating the artefact is an

implicit alternative to appetitive egoism; art is no mere antithesis to society, but

the most graphic instance of an ethical existence beyond the understanding of the

state. (164)

In this manner, aesthetic experience not only insulates the aesthete against the dehumanizing effects of consumer culture but also, through its disinterest, makes the aesthete subject more capable of ethical and compassionate relationships with others.

Detachment from the appetitive demands of consumer culture returns the subject to the openness and desirelessness of childhood, enabling them to be open and unguarded with others rather than using them or competing with them.

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What detachment offers Salinger is a means by which the transformation of life into art can be enacted by aesthetes without completely retreating from humanity, something his fiction condemns through both Franny and Seymour’s struggles.

Seymour’s description of the duties of his ideal marriage are to “elevate, help, teach, and strengthen one another, but above all serve… honorably, lovingly, and with detachment”

(RHRC). Buddy also criticizes Western people who confound Zen’s “near-doctrine of

Detachment [sic] with an invitation to spiritual callousness” (208), emphasizing the notion of service to others that Seymour sees at the heart of detachment, as well as echoing Adorno’s notion of “aesthetic disinterest [that] involves a radical decentring of the subject, subduing its-self regard to a community of sensibility with others“ (Adorno

39). Detachment thus helps to control the desire that the Glass characters struggle with in regards to their art, such as Buddy’s confession that “I always want to publish” (164) and

Franny’s lack of “courage to be an absolute nobody” (Z 30), as well as highlighting what they come to conceive as their religious duty to love other people as Christ.

Their moralizing of a love of beauty has several problems. Adorno notes that

“aesthetic value is not immanent in the work of art but ‘realized’ in the imagination”

(Adorno 59), whereas Salinger unequivocally claims in Franny that “if you’re a poet, you do something beautiful” (19) without any recognition of how this activity might be culturally or socially conditioned. In Salinger’s system, a subject either recognized the same things as beautiful that he does, or they are spiritually inferior to ‘real’ aesthetes.

Furthermore,

to aestheticize moral value is in one sense to display an enviable confidence:

virtue consists fundamentally in being oneself. Yet it also betrays a considerable

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anxiety: virtue had better be its own reward, since in this sort of society it is

unlikely to receive any other. (Eagleton 41)

Eagleton’s insight clarifies to the Glasses disillusionment: virtue as its own reward is not enough for them, because they want to be vindicated in their feelings of superiority towards others and to be freed from the suffering that this idealism subjects them to.

When the ‘morality’ of loving beauty fails to provide rewards beyond temporary aesthetic experience, to offer, in Seymour’s words, “health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness” (RHRC 74), they collapse.

The reliance on the imaginary is why Salinger’s art religion cannot actually produce a more loving person. This is borne out in the relationships the Glass siblings have with everyone else. For instance, just before he admonishes Franny to be less judgemental towards non-aesthetes, Zooey directs a cruel tirade against his mother, concluding, “I don’t care what you say about my race, creed, or religion, Fatty, but don’t tell me I’m not sensitive to beauty. That’s my Achilles’ heel, and don’t you forget it”

(82). Zooey’s claim that he is sensitive to beauty is borne out by his aesthetic epiphanies, but Salinger’s suggestion that moments of aesthetic epiphany help one to recognize the value of other people is not. This is made clear by the fact that the epiphany that closes the novel, that everyone is Seymour’s Fat Lady and the Fat Lady is Christ himself is new to Franny but not to Zooey, who asks, “don’t you know that goddam secret yet?” (201).

Salinger believes too much in the power of the artist’s ‘sacred’ imagination; in claiming that everyone is the same, Zooey has not become more loving because rather than actually learning to accept people who do not live up to his standards, he pretends that

136 they do, an illusion that will be broken anytime anyone, even his mother, does something to irritate him.

Seymour’s struggle to see everything as beautiful has even greater consequences with his relationship with Muriel; he does this is by imaginatively projecting what he considers beautiful onto her and by convincing himself he has come to view her phoniness as beautiful. His own descriptions of Muriel and her mother make it clear that they are categorically consumeristic and phony, and yet he states that they are “a terrible and beautiful phenomenon to watch” (69). He calls Muriel’s marital goals, “absurd and touching,” stating, “she wants to shop for curtains. She wants to shop for maternity clothes” and acknowledging that his brother Buddy would “despise her for her marriage motives as I’ve put them here” (71-2), later describing his own desires for marriage, drawn from a miscellany of Vedanta, as partnership in which both “elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other” (91). The phrase “as I’ve put them here” is important because it highlights the imaginative gymnastics Salinger’s religion of art requires of its Christ- figure; Seymour has described a woman whose personality and whose goals for life are entirely incompatible with his own, but he believes that his euphoric claims to love her simplicity, the intense moments he experiences with her as he imaginatively represents her in a way she would probably find insulting, are love. He believes this because he has developed a religion of art that demands that he love, and in striving to live up to his ideal, he fails to see he is only doing so in his imagination. The effort of sustaining this illusion of aestheticized love proves too much for Seymour, and glutted on beautiful experience, he takes his life in front of the woman who failed to live up to his imaginary portrait of her.

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The failure of the imaginary love of the Glass religion of art is again an uncritical collusion with the values of commodity culture. Their religion demands that art be a spiritual experience that saves them and makes them better people, but as Eagleton observes, this is to “falsely transfer the notion of property on to [sic] a field where it is completely out of place” (375). He argues that this attitude is one of self-preservation that violates Kant’s claim “that the beautiful transcends material interest” (375). Furthermore, their resistance to the portrayal of material reality in art could be considered what Lukács describes as a “campaign against realism” that results in the “impoverishment and isolation of literature and art.” He describes this as “one of the crucial manifestations of decadence in the realm of art” (Jameson, Lukács,Fredric 58) and certainly the fate of the bananafish, after having indulged in its favourite pleasure too much, recalls the similar over-indulgence of the decadent aesthetes of the nineteenth century.

Finally, to suggest that the pleasure experienced in the face of the beautiful can make people more moral and compassionate is a naive conception of pleasure derived from Salinger’s idealization of the childhood state. Not only is the claim that pleasure in the face of the beautiful contradicted even in the characterizations of the Glass siblings themselves, it is the root of their desire to be child-like sliding into real childishness, with all of the temper tantrums normal to an overindulged youngster. Adorno calls the attempt to use pleasure as the social role of art “bourgeois” and a “bad compromise,” noting that

“pleasure remains infantile without mediation” (Adorno 20-1). He states that the expectation of sensuous pleasure “perverts the nature of art as well as the nature of real sensuous pleasure, for art is unable to provide it” (Adorno 20) and this is precisely the

138 charge that could be fairly leveled at Salinger, whose work seems crystallized (in a bad sense) in a moment of childishness from which he cannot (or will not) move beyond.

4.4 Desire and Bananafever

In A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Seymour tells Sybil that “very ordinary looking” fish swim into a hole, “behave like pigs” and die of bananafever (22). While the story serves as a parable for the Glass religion’s teachings about the desire and greed that destroy individuality, the question that the story must raise is why Seymour tells her “this is a perfect day for bananafish” (22), given that the conclusion of the story concerns not the phonies generally associated with desire in Salinger’s work, but the character

(Seymour) whom all his aesthetes hold up as an artistic saint. The answer reveals a nuanced portrait of Salinger’s notion of desire and the threat it poses for his aesthete characters as well as phonies; Seymour says it is a perfect day for bananafish because his own days of gluttony are coming to an end. This can be described as a kind of mystic decadence, an overindulgence of refined taste and spirituality producing isolation and misanthropy. The Glass siblings, glutted with spiritual and aesthetic experiences, are trapped in banana holes from which they cannot escape; their continued pursuit of perfection according to their ideals, conceived of as their respite, is the very thing that harms them. While Salinger construes this as the inevitable failure that arises in the pursuit of a perfect religious life by imperfect people, it is not merely his characters but his system that seals the fate of his bananafish. This failure lies in its blindness both to its idealistic concept of aesthetic experience and individuality, resulting in a low opinion of material reality that treats even positive involvement with the world as desire.

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As has been previously discussed, the concept of the aesthetic as a means of escaping desire is not unique to Salinger, but is a part of aestheticism and American transcendentalism. Adorno, speaking of Schopenhauer whose work both the aesthetes and the American Transcendentalists drew on for their own philosophies (and who is mentioned by Salinger in Seymour: An Introduction), notes that aesthetic experience

“transcends the spell of mindless self-preservation, becoming the paradigm of a new stage of consciousness where the ego no longer fends for its particular interests in a framework of material production” (Adorno 475). However, in positing art and spirituality as a solution to their own unhappiness, the Glass siblings use it as a means of self-preservation, consuming more and more aesthetic and spiritual experience. Zooey observes this, stating that

As a matter of simple logic, there’s no difference at all, that I can see, between the

man who’s greedy for material treasure -- or even intellectual treasure -- and the

man who’s greedy for spiritual treasure...ninety per cent of all the world-hating

saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of

us are. (148)

Henry Grunwald, in his introduction to Salinger, notes that “there is little the critics have said about [the Glasses] that they have not said about themselves” (xx) and Salinger is certainly adept at anticipating the faults that readers will find in his aesthetes. However, this self-criticism has no impact on on their lives because of their aesthetic attitude, which Iser contends is defined by its feeling of superiority to reality, “a feeling based on illusion and since the ideal can never be realized, the aesthetic attitude must eventually meet its own disillusionment” (149), hence Franny’s continual complaints that she is

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“awful” and “destructive” and “horrible” (F15). Despite her rigorous aesthetic education and natural taste, she feels too superior to others to be able to love them in reality, and is continually disillusioned by her failure.

Part of this problem stems from Salinger’s blindness to his characters’ collusion in the systems they critique. While the Glass siblings may criticize themselves, they overlook how their own professions, artistic or not, participate in capitalism. Zooey and

Franny act, Buddy publishes in magazines, and Boo Boo is a suburban housewife and yet they continue to claim they are resisting and set apart from consumer culture. The unrealistically convenient supply of money from the siblings’ performances on a radio show highlights, rather than conceals, the issue. This is a problem with the idea of the aesthetic as a perfect answer to desire; Eagleton actually argues that while the aesthetic does function as the “very sign and model of disinterest…the enemy of bourgeois egotism” (39), he also notes that “its release from all determination is also a dream of absolute freedom which belongs with the bourgeois order itself” (109). This dream of absolute freedom, manifested in Salinger’s belief that subjectivity is immanent and that art is pure-in-itself, becomes parallel with the bourgeois goal of economic independence, something the Glass siblings supposedly achieve without any compromise to themselves.

This is, in Adorno’s words, to mistake “illusion for a second order reality” (Adorno 378) that persuades them that they are resisting consumer culture when, in fact, their miraculous economic independence is the definition of consumer culture’s goals.

This magical way of thinking about art and the aesthetic is American transcendentalist in its suggestion that

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the answer to capitalist structures of oppression and alienation lay not in

collective economic transformation but rather within the individual who could

somehow escape his/her economic determinations by holding fast to the vital

realm of culture, the realm of freedom. (Wolfe 9)

Zooey takes issue with Franny’s use of her professors to indicate problems in the educational system, stating, “you don’t just despise what they represent - you despise them” because their behavior “is none of your business” (162). He concludes that, “if you’re going to go to war against the System, just do your shooting like a nice, intelligent girl -- because the enemy’s there…” (163), confessing that he has the same problem because he lets his feelings about “television and everything else get personal” (163).

While this might initially sound like an argument for fighting systems of oppression rather than individuals, it is the opposite: everyone’s problem, Franny and her professors are “not using their true egos” (168). Thus, according to Zooey, the enemy is not in the system because the system is just individuals who have made something unfortunate by failing to self-actualize; the enemy is the false ego, and the only meaningful resistance to systems for artists “is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms” (199).

Salinger’s answer to objectifying consumerism is for each person to cling to their individual calling as liberation, ignoring the way these conditions are socially and economically determined.

While the Glass siblings acknowledge their own desire, they fall short of recognizing the full extent of the problem because they still see themselves as on the path to a desireless life. Eagleton’s definition of desire as the “inability to see anything straight, the compulsive referring of all objects to our own sectarian interests” (162), is

142 appropriate to Salinger because of his emphasis on vision and perspective as both the origin and solution to greed and because, like Eagleton, he posits aesthetic experience as antithetical to desire. However, it also functions as an accurate description of the way his own narcissistic characters continually refer all objects back to themselves; as Bidney argues, “devotion to one’s own aesthetic gratification is narcissistic at heart” (119) and this narcissism is the foundation for the Glasses own problems with desire, something that they are unable to recognize because they have imaginatively recast this narcissistic devotion as equivalent to spiritual devotion, which it ultimately is not.

Salinger’s aesthete characters do offer token recognition of this problem, generally concerning their desire for professional artistic success or spiritual achievement, which compromises their dedication to art for its own sake. Ordinarily, they police each other in this regard, as when Zooey accuses Franny of using the Jesus prayer to gain spiritual treasure, or when Seymour criticizes Buddy for writing “something that you think is universally considered funny” (SI 154), although Buddy admits that he wants to get published in magazines (SI 164). Franny is the most upfront regarding her desire both for professional and social success, stating

I'm afraid I will compete-that's what scares me… Just because I'm so horribly

conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause

and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it… .(F 30)

This desire for artistic recognition, even in a world with inferior aesthetic sensibilities, is the temptation experienced by all the Glass siblings in their quest to produce art after their own hearts (SI 161). But Franny’s admission that she is conditioned by her culture is unique amidst the Glass’ naive and cultish worship of their own individuality, and their

143 aestheticist tendency to define themselves negatively against others, believing that they remain largely autonomous from the American culture that produced them. This is an obvious error that cannot be corrected by their continual recourse to art as spiritual and self-improving.

Franny’s admission reveals a sexist side of Salinger’s concept of desire. Only female characters are heavily influenced by consumer culture, and even amongst phony characters vapid consumerism is largely the realm of women while men tend to be phony in the interest of professional success. Bessie Glass provides an interesting example of the relationship between desire, femaleness, and loss in Salinger. In Zooey, the narrator

(Buddy) asserts that where his mother’s eyes could once report her grief “with an eloquence and a seeming passion for detail” she now uses this same sensitivity “to break the news… that some remote Hollywood starlet’s marriage was on the rocks” (90). The suggestion that Bessy Glass has relinquished her capacity for heightened and refined sensation and immersed herself in phony consumer culture, in order to feel the loss of her sons less deeply presents a fascinating counter to Seymour’s suicide: to escape the pain that is inseparable from refined consciousness Seymour kills himself physically while

Bessie kills herself spiritually, embracing phoniness and sentimentality. Implicit is the suggestion that this option is easier for Bessie since, while she was once herself an artist

(dancer and vaudeville performer) her natural gifts do not compare to those of her children. Consumerism for Salinger gives its participants its own perspective. It is a way of seeing the world, as means to ends, that is for Salinger a way of not seeing, since it misses everything that for him makes life bearable.

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Desire in artist characters leads to major spiritual problems that are connected with the problem of loss and transience. One is the self-indulgent misanthropy that develops out of their view of average humanity as a barrier to God-seeking and aesthetic experience. This is due to an error in the Glass impetus to love, the notion that everyone is Christ, which demands that the Glass siblings somehow both continue to assert their difference from non-aesthetes and yet maintain that they are essentially the same. This impulse is a product of the American transcendentalist view that “peace comes through communication… that does not level differences but recognizes them” (Wolfe 35) while still asserting an essential sameness in God. Salinger fails to effectively integrate this into aestheticism because the Glass recognition of difference is an assertion of their superiority, and the communication is only one-sided since artists are the only seers on earth and non-aesthetes in this system are “a peerage of tin ears” (SI 104), without spiritual or moral insight. Instead, the allegedly inferior sensibilities of phonies serve as a justification for the Glass siblings to vent their frustration and pain in the face of loss on these people, because, for these individualists, it is more important to use others to affirm their own uniqueness than it is to operate with love in the world, despite their claims to the contrary; the imaginary love of the Glass religion is relegated to the epiphany alone, and interactions with non-aesthetes are never shown as improved by these moments of insight.

This attitude of self-indulgence is compounded by Salinger’s “Sick Man” doctrine, that highlights the self-sacrificing and martyr-like resolution of the artist who, despite their suffering, is more “determined than ever to see his sickness run its course,” to be “done in by the most stimulating companion, disease or no, he has ever known” (SI

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103). While this suffering has already been explored in terms of the individual, the effect of the Sick Man’s suffering on others is dealt with obliquely in the novels, possibly because of Alsen’s insight that Buddy is an unreliable and biased narrator and Salinger’s view of artists as saints. That the disease is described as “the most stimulating companion” the artist has ever known is revealing in the way it values this suffering as more interesting than most people. Despite their claims of detachment and love, the violence of certain elements of the Glass saga, both in terms of sentiment and, in two strange cases with Seymour, actual physical harm, reveal a correlation between the disease of the artist -- the Sick Man -- and bananafever, which through Seymour are proved more similar than dissimilar.

The Sick Man’s connection to bananafever is, as Galloway observes, clearest in

Seymour’s story line since his “life has been filled with erratic spiritual experiences”

(35). Galloway argues that like the bananafish, Seymour “has become so glutted with this experience that he can no longer participate in the real world” (35). The Glass siblings’ uncritical use of multiple religions, their pursuit of beauty at the expense of everything else in their lives, and their gradual isolation from the real world all suggest that the entire family is afflicted with this spiritual gluttony, consuming more and more transcendental experience until they are trapped in an imaginary world, a cave from which they cannot escape. Galloway argues that love eventually leads Salinger’s characters away from “transitory, unearned mystical experience” because it fails to give their lives meaning, but his claim that they do reenter the world through love is suspect given the absence of meaningful relationships with non-aesthetes in the texts.

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The first expression of the “Sick Man” in Seymour is related by Mrs. Silsburn, a bridesmaid in the wedding Seymour fails to show up for, who states that a famous actress

(later revealed to be Charlotte) was permanently scarred after being hit by Seymour as a child. Buddy admits that this is true, and that she was a friend of the family who performed with them on “It’s a Wise Child” after Seymour secured her a position. Buddy later recounts the whole story, explaining that Seymour threw a rock at her because “she looked so beautiful” (RHRC 89). If read in light of Seymour’s statement earlier in the novella that he has scars “from touching certain people,” including one from grabbing

Charlotte’s dress to keep her near him (RHRC 75), this behavior can be understood as a violent manifestation of the aesthete’s pain in the face of transient beauty; Charlotte’s beauty and her childhood will pass away, and this violence is Seymour’s cry of pain. This is further affirmed by the fact that Buddy claims that everyone in the family knew that he threw the rock because she looked beautiful. When recounting the story, Buddy lies to his audience and includes Charlotte amongst those who understood what Seymour did, admitting only to his readers that “I am a liar, of course. Charlotte never did understand…” (89). His lie betrays his bias; Seymour’s pain as an aesthete seer is more important than the damage he does to others.

The second key act of violence in the Glass novels is Seymour’s suicide. While suicide is an act of violence against the self, Seymour’s decision to shoot himself in the same room where Muriel was sleeping reveals feelings of anger and a desire to wound.

This explanation is borne out in the moments leading up to Seymour’s death, when he irrationally loses his temper at a woman in an elevator whom he accuses of looking at his bare feet. To simply state that Seymour is angry at Muriel for her phoniness is

147 insufficient; he states that he speaks admiringly of her “identification with Metro-

Goldwyn-Mayer tragedy” and says he loves and needs “her undiscriminating heart”

(RHRC 67). Rather, Mrs. Silsburn’s observation that Charlotte and Muriel look alike

(RHRC 83), especially in childhood, reveal this to be Seymour’s failed attempt to recapture the experience of Charlotte’s beauty in his own life. The story of Charlotte, and the family’s acceptance of it, reveal the self-indulgence of greed for aesthetic experience and the inevitable pain of its loss. Because the suffering of artists is holy, it has more value to Salinger than the suffering of the permanently scarred Charlotte or the trauma of

Muriel, and because of the superiority of imaginative recreation over reality, Buddy comfortably ignores these problematic elements of his brother’s character when he canonizes him as an artistic saint, using his novella to introduce the reader to his own version of Seymour.

Thus, the disinterest promised by the aesthetic does not bear fruit in Salinger’s novel because his system cannot acknowledge its aesthetes own complicity in what

Adorno calls the system of practical activities and practical human beings, who in turn are mere facades for the barbaric appetite of the human species (343) and thus their artwork cannot, as Adorno states that it should, serve as an indictment of this system. A clearer understanding of bananafever reveals that they are themselves ruled by a barbaric appetite, one which is reflected, rather than challenged, in their artwork.

Conclusion

The philosophy of art and religion that J. D. Salinger develops in his Glass family stories can be said to be aesthetic both in the primacy of art and the artistic perspective and the privileging of intense moments of consciousness that gradually take on greater

148 moral and spiritual significance over the course of the saga. The Glasses’ aestheticist devotion both to their art and to beauty becomes a religion unique to Salinger’s work, one in which the artist is not simply distinctive from others on the basis of their gifts of perception and creative talent, but also because of their singular closeness with God as a result of their artistic-religious calling. Form, for Adorno, posits meaning even in the absence of meaning (382) and this is perhaps the best explanation of Salinger’s use of form-as-religion in his work. By making art a religion rather than a profession, the Glass characters seek to gain control and find meaning in an empty, commodified existence that seems to lack both beauty and God. This enables them to read the world as made both in

God’s image and in their own and to momentarily imaginatively transcend the mindless consumption of modern life.

Salinger’s system is drawn from elements of aestheticism which already existed in American culture, preserved by the American transcendentalists who shared common philosophical sources with the aesthetes and whose spiritual views heavily influenced

Salinger. These include an extremely individualistic view of spirituality, which emphasized self-knowledge and actualization over adherence to a specific creed, and a view of all religions as ultimately the same. Spirituality in Salinger is per individual taste and is used to intensify the individual’s experience of the beautiful by giving it moral and divine dimensions; in his work, as Chai observes of nineteenth-century aestheticism, if

“the moral consciousness finally emerges as supreme, that is only because it offers a medium for the richest, most complex impressions of all” (x). Religion in Salinger’s

Glass fiction offers deeper, more significant aesthetic epiphanies that strive to move the subject out of the solipsism inherent in the aesthetic lifestyle towards love. Even if this

149 move towards love is ultimately unsuccessful, Salinger’s use of American transcendentalism in aestheticism produces a uniquely American interpretation of the art for art's sake movement and reveals the way aestheticism influenced both religion and subjectivity in American thought.

Religion in Salinger’s aestheticism is used to justify an autonomous, detached form of art that exists in a separate sphere and is answerable only to the individual.

Individualism is central to Salinger’s worldview, and both religion and art serve to express the individual’s unique perspective. Salinger places no faith in large-scale political or social change, despite his deep suspicion of institutions and the market.

Rather, Salinger locates resistance to commodity culture in the individual’s actualization of an inherent, essential self through sensuous experience of the beautiful for its own sake. Aesthetic experience which transcends the instrumental logic of capitalism momentarily re-connects the subject with their inherent identity, the kingdom of God they carry inside of them, rejecting conforming influences in favor of an intense individualism that moralizes use of the “true ego” as a spiritual calling.

By falsely universalizing the concepts of beauty and religion, Salinger uses spiritualized aestheticism to imaginatively re-humanize humanity, enabling him to claim that art could be autonomous from social issues even after the horrors of the Second

World War. His work presents a notion of transcendent beauty that through divine power could re-connect the subject with a fictitious essential self; thus, art can stand aloof from social concerns and focus solely on the individual since people are made better and more humane through aesthetic experience. That each of the Glass stories works up to an aesthetic epiphany, but that none of these revelations bearing fruit in the lives of the

150 characters suggests that perhaps even Salinger himself doubted the capacity of beauty to affect such change, and that he could not find morality and spirituality in autonomous, individualistic art.

The centrality of the individual for Salinger, combined with his romantic belief in an essential self or “true ego,” means that the child represents the ideal state in his work since children are temporally nearer to this unadulterated state. Children are in his texts natural artists who privilege their own impression of the world over the ‘reality’ described to them by adults in a manner reflective of the projection of form over material existence that his aesthete characters continually engage in. This inherent self is gradually corrupted by the conforming and alienating influences of commodity culture. The association of the notion of an inherent self with the divine via American

Transcendentalism renders the maintenance of a child-like perspective a spiritual duty, a concept that mirrors Transcendentalist thought. The Glass siblings, as his aesthete characters, strive to maintain a child-like perspective on the world, and Buddy Glass continually refers to their childhoods throughout the stories he actively narrates.

This mixture of aestheticism and religion is a site of contradiction in the Glass saga due, in part, to a lack of development of the contradictory requirements Salinger has for artists. The Glass identity rests in their refined aesthetic taste that enables them to negatively define themselves against a world without the capacity to appreciate them, and yet a major element of their religious life of art calls them to cease discriminating between themselves and non-artist subjects, to find everyone and everything beautiful.

There is a sense that, like nineteenth century decadents, the Glasses do not feel responsible for helping a culture they view as dying, choosing instead to focus on

151 improving their own heightened consciousnesses (Gaggin 25) and yet, they are each plagued with guilt concerning the misanthropy their narcissistic devotion to their own artistic gratification has produced in them.

Salinger stopped publishing his work before resolving these problematic elements of his philosophy, leaving the Glass characters in a perpetual cycle of aesthetic euphoria and inevitable loss from which their individualistic spirituality cannot adequately rescue them. Seymour’s suicide looms over the published Glass texts, and it is not without significance that the final novella returns full-circle to this pivotal moment without ever offering a satisfactory answer, closing with the line “quickly. Quickly and slowly” (213); two contradictory impulses that mirror the artistic autonomy and love that inspired

Salinger’s religion of art but were never successfully integrated with one another. The

Introduction, which seems poised finally to explain how Salinger/Seymour’s religion of art failed his saintly character, is never concluded and the author’s own descent into solitude and silence suggest that perfect artistic autonomy ultimately demands the perfect isolation his spirituality and love sought to avoid.

Nevertheless, Salinger’s aestheticism is a testament to the way that the nineteenth- century art for art’s sake movement continued to influence art and culture. His religion of art, while troubled, is a unique attempt to come to terms with and correct both the more mundane ravages of commodity culture on what was once sacred, and to create, if only imaginatively, a space for beauty and love in the wake of one of the greatest crimes in human history, the Holocaust. While it can be argued that Salinger’s system ultimately failed not only his characters but the author himself, it remains a fascinating representation of the meaning and power of art in the modern world.

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