Franny and Zooey...and Mahayana Buddhism

Franny and Zooey depicts a precocious young woman undergoing a spirituality-induced nervous breakdown. In the first part of the book, Franny is venting her frustrations about ego and ambition to her non-comprehending, average-Joe boyfriend. She states that she is “sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody,” which her boyfriend, Lane, interprets along with her recent retreat from theater performance as her wanting to drop out of the rat-race. Franny becomes somewhat obsessed with the Jesus Prayer, practicing this prayer as a japa mantra that supposedly may lead to “enlightenment” and entering the “so-called reality of things.”

At the height of her breakdown and misery, the Fat Lady in Franny and Zooey provides relief to Franny by representing the earthly, commonplace, even boring aspect of the real world. In being so filled with myriad philosophies as a child, and then embarking on this quest for enlightenment and peace via the Jesus Prayer, Franny was starting to lose touch with reality. This image of the Fat Lady, sitting in an “awful wicker chair,” “swatting flies,” and even having “cancer,” immediately brings Franny down to earth, so to speak. The Fat Lady is pathetic, normal, freakish to the point of being laughable, but in a way, she encapsulates the mundane level of existence away from high-falutin’ philosophy and esoteric concepts. Eventually it is stated that “there isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady,” including the pretentious professors that Franny was so antagonistic about.

“It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” Krishnamurti once wrote. Perhaps Franny’s misery is due to her – and her brother, Zooey – simply knowing too many philosophical concepts, most of which the common person on the street has no access to or even interest in. For example, Zooey even has the habit of reciting the Four Great Vows before he eats. He thinks his older brothers converted him and Franny into freaks by unleashing too much of this seemingly unconventional knowledge upon him and his sister.

Both of them seem to disregard their mother, Bessie, though she views Franny as merely a “run-down, overwrought little college girl that’s been reading too many religious books.” But Bessie, who can be seen as a symbol of the Fat Lady in their lives, has a point – “I don’t know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn’t make you happy,” she says. By being full of head knowledge, Franny and Zooey have become almost snobbish, or at least very critical, opinionated, and readily picking on others. During Franny’s breakdown, she yearns for true knowledge that leads to wisdom, and frets over her motives for reciting the Jesus Prayer, worrying whether she is just being greedy for spiritual treasure and Enlightenment. She is so caught up in the reeling of her mind, that she misses what is right in front of her – Bessie bringing her chicken soup, Bessie worrying about her, Bessie caring about her. In seeking desperately for otherworldly peace and chasing after an “experience” of enlightenment, Franny needed be grounded again with the here-and-now, the realm of the Fat Lady.