The courage to be an absolute nobody
American dreams, Eastern spiritualities, and the quarter life crisis
‘I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete- that’s what scares me. That’s why I quit the Theater Department. 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. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.’
Franny Glass of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (1961) is eating lunch with her college boyfriend, Lane, or rather, not eating lunch with her college boyfriend, Lane. Reunited for the weekend, Franny is discernibly flustered, disquieted by something she hesitates to name. Skirting around his encouragement to pick up the chicken sandwich she ordered, Lane issues several noncommittal responses as Franny begins to discuss the book she brought with her. Initially shying away from detail, Franny grows increasingly animated as she describes The Way of A Pilgrim - a nineteenth century work about a mendicant pilgrim who practises the art of ‘praying without ceasing’. The Jesus Prayer is short prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me’ is meant to be repeated to such internal entrenchment that it becomes an unconscious ‘self-active’ mantra.
‘Something happens after a while..the words get synchronised with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing. Which has a really tremendous, mystical effect on your whole outlook.’
Franny is showing the first signs of real enthusiasm. Lane is cutting into his frog’ legs - ‘I’m going to reek of garlic’. Having been raised by her elder brothers, Seymour and Buddy, to appreciate their ‘favourite classics’ first and foremost, Franny was familiar with ‘Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tsce and Shankaracharya and Huineng and Sri Ramakrishna’ before she ever knew ‘too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman’. Perhaps equally as formative to her psyche, Franny spent her childhood participating on a show with her siblings called ‘It’s A Wise Child’ which adds an extra dimension to her extreme and sudden aversion to ‘ego’ and performance. It is a singularly crushing expectation to tote a child as exceptional and gifted, built to do great things and step up to an already-lighted podium.
Just before she faints at lunch, causing an abrupt end to their carefully timetabled weekend schedule, Franny admits that she has quit the theatre department she had been heavily involved in. Her justification is the ‘poor taste’ involved in wanting to act in the first place.
‘I mean all the ego. And I used to hate myself so, when I was in a play, to be backstage after the play was over. All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm….I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting - it is, it is. I don’t care what anybody says.’
Lane interrupts to question whether it’s really a fear of competition that has led her to call it quits. It is here that we receive the quote that began this article. For Franny, the ebullient scene of theatre and its self-congratulatory (as she sees it) nature are detestable - the need for ‘applause’, to make a ‘splash’, for audiences to ‘rave’ about her performance. The act of performance on the stage is conflated with performing in life; accolades doled out to a leading lady become symptomatic of general societal malady: the desire to ‘do something distinguished’ and ‘be somebody interesting’, to be ‘somebody at all’.
What does it really mean, to ‘be somebody’? It’s a quality we often diagnose in other people with ease but find difficult to recognise in ourselves. Being somebody becomes an outward categorisation for those who are wealthier, more affluent, respected in their field, luminous in their achievements. Wanting to be somebody unites thousands upon thousands of people in a clawing rat race that starts with the dichotomy Franny puts before us: nobodies versus somebodies.
I was struck by Franny’s declaration that being a nobody without shame or resentment was a courageous decision. Indeed, it’s more than a decision, a conscious and deliberate way of life revolting against expectations that the bravest and most admirable thing to do is the exact opposite. The ladder of life beckons those with the promise that only the brave, ambitious, hard-working movers-and-shakers of the world are the ones achieving success; grit and graft become synonymous with happiness, meaning, fulfilment. Is it braver to turn your back on every measure of success that society lays before you? Is this line of questioning just another way of disrupting the American Dream?
In the land of freedom and opportunity anyone can be successful if they prove their worth - by this logic if you don’t bear the marks of success then your worth is immediately diminished. Symbols of status and affluence are inextricably linked to the sense of self. Of course, reams of literature exist riffing on the idea that the American Dream is in itself a deceitful mirage, at least for most of the population. As Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) attempts to emphasise, there are vast numbers of Americans who society refuses to see, namely black men and women. Langston Hughes expresses a similar sentiment in ‘Let America be America Again’, a poem originally published in Esquire in 1936:
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.(America never was America to me.)
In John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (937) George and Lennie never do find their ranch where they might ‘live off the fatta the lan’. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby of The Great Gatsby (1925) lives a life as ephemeral and insubstantial as a firework, characterised by fantastic wealth and outrageous parties that make him the ‘somebody’ of New York to everyone other than the one person he so desperately wants to reach. Taking a character like Gatsby we begin to reckon with the truth in Franny’s disgust; there is often hardly anything real in a ‘somebody’ at all beyond the fuss and feathers of their outward appearance. When you’re a nobody you’re a nobody for noone’s admiration, respect, envy, notice, disdain or pity - maybe that’s more real than anything.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a man that evokes this conviction more intensely than Willy Loman whose pathetic slide into despair is rendered in excruciating vividness in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). Willy has fallen hook and sinker for the idea that his life-long efforts for the Wagner company have made him indispensable, even endeared, to both his colleagues and the corporation (‘They don’t need me in New York. I’m the New England man. I’m vital in New England’). Willy comes into conflict with his eldest son, Biff, over his lack of direction in life. Biff lets the audience in on his realisation that his father’s earnest efforts to encourage him along the same dogged path of white-picket-fence respectability have been made in vain:
‘I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and the time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and I thought, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be . . . when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am. ‘
The generational father and son clash has been rendered many times both before and after; think of Matt Damon and Colin Ford in We Bought A Zoo (2011): ‘I thought this was a dream come true for all of us. / It’s your dream! You can’t force a dream on someone else, Dad!’. Truer words have never been spoken. Biff has spent his whole life attempting to live up to the ideals his father has set but he sees himself as an ordinary man, with ordinary wishes. Willy, entrenched in the individualism of American aspiration rebukes his honest expressions: ‘I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!’ like those names mean something. He clings to this for fear of the terrifying alternative: that they mean nothing at all, a fate unimaginable and unbearable. It would take insurmountable courage for Willy to face this reality unflinching.
The American Dream wants you to believe that life moves forward on set tracks, upward trajectories to greatness that move in a linear fashion like hops on stepping stones or pawns on a chessboard, each one leading to a higher rung. Esther Greenwood of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) is paralysed by the numerous possibilities to be somebody in the iconic and oft-quoted ‘fig-tree speech’:
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
What does my wonderful future look like? How do I get there? Questions that I’m sure thousands of readers including myself have posed to themselves. Esther, like Franny, like me, is a woman in her early twenties. Salinger is to some degree participating in a wider cultural and literary questioning of the American Dream, but is this not also bound up entirely with a depiction of the quarter-life crisis in action? Salinger is preoccupied with adolescent malaise as well as the attractive principles of Eastern spiritualities that similarly piqued the curiosity of his contemporaries - more on this to come.
If you search up adolescent malaise in the dictionary, you would probably find some mention of Holden Caulfield. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) preceded Franny and Zooey by several years and is Salinger’s most famous piece of writing. Holden, sixteen, rather insufferable, is obsessed with ‘phonies’, he mentions ‘phony’ about thirty-five times in the novel. Phoniness is a mostly adult disease and by his definition, anyone who appears fake or puts on a show for another’s benefit, a quality that he betrays himself to his own dismay. The act of ingratiating oneself by putting on an act is seen as revolting rather than what most people regard it as - the smooth lubricant for social interaction. “I’d have this rule that nobody could do anything phony when they visited me. If anybody tried to do anything phony, they couldn't stay.”
If Holden so desired, he could have gone to university and found out all about how some academics have spent their lives looking at the ways in which we construct our identities in society through performance. For now, we can take his earnest indignation towards people who feel the need to be somebody they’re not as an outward jab during a period of youthful uncertainty where authenticity seems harder to find than ever before. The obvious rebuttal to Holden’s protest is who, exactly, decides what we are and aren’t? Willy Loman aspires to Become Somebody at the same time as he frantically clutches at straws to reassure himself that that Somebody is already him. His failure is foreseen from the beginning but not every form of aspiration falls under the white-picket-fence fantasy. Is Willy Loman’s attempt to Be Somebody not another form of Franny’s Jesus prayer? Is her aspiration any less fanciful? It’s tempting sometimes to believe that being nobody might be a simpler attainment, a more easeful life.
Like Salinger, W. Somerset Maugham was interested in writing about Eastern religious philosophy and spirituality - a broad category that amongst other doctrines includes ideas of rejecting materialism and status in search of a higher meaning. Salinger was particularly interested in Zen Buddhism. Several prominent American writers were increasingly turning to the East for inspiration, Ezra Pound released his own anthology of classical Chinese poetry translated into English (ranslated is a very loose term considering his lack of knowledge of the language, they’re largely considered new pieces in their own right). Other writers in the Imagist movement turned to writing poetry characterised by its brevity and succinctness. Dutifully following Pound’s order to ‘make it new’, a new wave of poetry emerged, an example being William Carlos Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’.
Larry Darrell of Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge (1944) is set to marry the beautiful young Isabel when he decides to ‘loaf’ in Whitman-esque fashion around Europe and live off of his inheritance. The novel’s title comes from a paraphrased translation of a verse in the Katha Upanishad: ‘the sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over, thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard’. Traumatised by his time spent as a pilot during World War I, Larry eventually renounces his former life and his engagement to search for transcendent meaning, to the baffled consternation of his friends who perhaps consider this decision to be Larry’s quarter-life crisis. Larry attempts to traverse this razor’s edge as he flits between worlds, straddling the line between the promising American future he might have had and the puzzling journey he has chosen instead.
After a stint in a Benedictine monastery in Germany, Larry sets sail for India, unable to reconcile his own beliefs with the dogma of the brothers. One tells him: ‘you are a deeply religious man who doesn’t believe in God’. Larry professes that he ‘couldn’t believe in a God who wasn’t better than the ordinary decent man. The monks told me that God had created the world for his glorification. That didn’t seem to me a very worthy object’. He also states that he has ‘always felt that there was something pathetic in the founders of religion who made it a condition of salvation that you should believe in them. It’s as though they needed your faith to have faith in themselves’. He goes on to relate more details on his experiences in India, as he does throughout the novel, which must be read to be fully appreciated.
In following the path he does, Larry rejects every hand offered to him: the love and devotion of Isabel, the avuncular advice of Elliot Templeton and the fictional/narrative figure of Maugham, the helping hand of Henry Maturin who guarantees him a lucrative job, it all gets gently rejected. I sometimes think Larry Darrell is exactly the courageous nobody that Franny so desperately wished she had the strength and willpower to become. Of course, he is not a nobody at all, he is the only reason the narrator has decided to write the book. As the narrator states:
The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realised that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.
Whatever self-effacement Larry accepts as a consequence of his life-choices, his memory and significance is redeemed by the love of his friends who do anything but let him slip away into oblivion without witnesses. He is a Somebody in many of the ways that matter. Larry himself acknowledged that Christianity believes: ‘if you will act as if you believed belief will be given to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled; if you will surrender yourself to the beauty of that liturgy the power of which over the human spirit has been proved by the experience of the ages, peace will descend upon you’, echoing Franny’s own assertions that the Jesus Prayer works even when you don’t believe in it.
‘The marvellous thing, when you first start doing it, you don’t even have to have faith in what you’re doing. I mean even if you’re terribly embarrassed about the whole thing, it’s perfectly all right. I mean you’re not insulting anybody or anything. In other words, nobody asks you to believe a single thing when you first start out. You don’t even have to think about what you’re saying, the starets said. All you have to have in the beginning is quantity. Then, later on, it becomes quality by itself. On its own power or something. He says that any name of God - any name at all - has this peculiar, self-active power of its own, and it starts working after you’ve sort of started it up.’
At the end of Franny we are told that Franny is lying down and her lips are mouthing silent words in repetition. It’s an attractive sentiment - that you can be cripplingly embarrassed by something, have almost no faith in it whatsoever, and that somehow out of that mass of shame and furtive effort something real and good can emerge. The process invites falsity as a half-step towards finding authenticity even when our own doubts obscure the process. Fanny, Holden, Larry on the cusp of something more are defined by their lack of faith rather than its strength. Who, having read about Larry’s life, could say that through his great, expansive odyssey he yet failed to gain some understanding of what faith really meant? And that this knowledge was surely achieved through his continual dissatisfaction with the certainty of his own knowledge and faith?
As I have questioned earlier, maybe this growing preoccupation with Buddhism, spirituality, the rejection of ego and material status is all wrapped up in reactionary waves to the failure of the American Dream, or the pangs of adolescence and the quarter-life crisis. Perhaps decades of writers had come to a crisis point in which the entire state of the self and the journey of building up an identity for yourself felt more flawed than ever. Perhaps it is simply that a burgeoning thought was taking hold that saw the truth in one thing: reaching your hand towards something makes it real. Going in blind and looking for belief takes belief of its own kind, and the effort itself of journeying to Do or Be something (even nothing) is anything but phony, it’s a self-active fulfilment of faith.
Written by Alex J (alexisreading)
Books/ Plays/ Poetry referenced:
Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman
Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Langston Hughes - ‘Let America be America Again’
J. D. Salinger - Franny and Zooey
J. D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
W. Somerset Maugham - The Razor’s Edge
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
William Carlos Williams - ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’
Cover Art - Marc Chagall, Le prophète Isaïe