12 minute read
DEFACE MY TRANSCRIPT, BUDDY
Deface My Transcript, Buddy
Content warning: depression, grief
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I submitted a version of this paper at the end of the summer to resolve an incomplete English class from earlier this year. My professor has not yet read it and my grade remains NC.
Ethan Miller
Professor XXXXX
Section leader XXXXX
ENGLXXXX
16 August 2022
Living With Ghosts in Franny and Zooey
Undergraduate analyses are wont to lean on simple, if not entirely coincidental, parallels drawn between texts and other texts, texts and worlds, and—most abhorrently—texts and selves. Argumentative chains of logic and reason are hoisted over shoulders and dragged along behind these elementary English class analogies, and I, dear professor, have found myself in the shipyard with this paper, heaving and ho-ing my heart out to make this chain fall in line behind the parallel I intend to draw. This flowery pastiche-prose is the spoonful of sugar meant to help the acrid antidote that is this three-month-late meta-paper slide smoothly into your inbox.
I came across a copy of Franny and Zooey a few days ago in a thrift store in northern New Hampshire (it was conveniently connected to a dispensary, “Live Free or Die”). I, like every angsty teenager with literary inclinations, read and re-read The Catcher in the Rye during my adolescence. Unfortunately, I abandoned J.D. Salinger once I became aware of the pervasive and priggish sentiment amongst English class aficionados that Holden Caulfield was a dick and if you identified with him you too might be a phallic phony. Thankfully those sentiments were not present in the White Mountains. I bought the weathered copy for only one dollar and read it immediately upon my return to Providence. To put it simply, I was floored. The coincidence between what I read and the circumstances under which I initially failed to write this very paper was too perfect for me to pass up.
I, like Franny, have a dead older brother. I, like Franny, had a breakdown at college and found myself licking my wounds on my parents’ couch. I, like Franny, have a hard time understanding the enigmatic ways in which grief has affected and will undoubtedly continue to affect my life. I, like Franny, have come to grips with the fact that the only answer to existential dread—the pain of existence in a world in which everyone and everything you know and love will ultimately disappear—is to do the difficult, little things every single day, no matter how meaningless they may seem compared to the search for your sibling’s soul. Franny, the actress, must act, as her brother Zooey insists. And I, the student of Comparative Literature, must compare literature. So here you go. This paper, Professor XXXXX, is my answer to the question I have asked myself over and over again since starting college the same year Luke died: What could this university (or the universe, for that matter) possibly want from me? I don’t know, but this is what it’s getting.
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Once, last semester, while standing in line at a vegan ice cream place in Fox Point, I found myself talking with an ex-university chaplain. Always distrustful of chatty strangers, I initially turned my eyes toward the sidewalk and tried to brush her off. She was undeterred by my indifference. Yielding to her eager zeal, I learned that this spiritual woman was in Providence to sort through the belongings of her sister who had died three months before. Although my newfound friend didn’t feel ready to undertake the task of sorting through the materiality of her sister’s life, necessity compelled her. In a moment of blind faith, I decided to share my own experience. This woman, whose name I reproach myself for forgetting, listened to me in a way that few people have: gently, thoughtfully, responsively, and without a single “I’m sorry.” I bawled on Ives Street in front of a horde of vegans.
What has stuck with me the most from my conversation with this chaplain, which couldn’t have lasted more than 10 or 15 minutes, was a question she asked me before walking away with her oat-milk swirl cone (this detail, for some reason, persists): “What was his name?” Upon being asked I froze. My brother died in January of 2019, the year I started at Brown. No one from this life, which is markedly separate from my life back home in Missouri, ever met him. For the few people whom I am able to share any of this mortifying experience with, Luke is referred to as “my brother.” Saying his name seemed to bring him to life again. Instead of an empty genetic relation, a void in my life that others might be able to understand, my friend the chaplain wanted to know who he was: the real, corporeal, spiritual person I spent the first 17 years of my life looking up to. There is power in a name.
[REDACTED SECTION: Here, I honestly made an attempt to write a normal academic paper about a book that I felt strongly about and wanted to do justice. This lasted all of two pages (including three rather sizable block quotes) before I gave up and resumed grumbling.]
So now allow me to begin the single page of writing that will hopefully help you understand how I managed the effort to cobble together this Hail Mary. The problem with Franny and Zooey, as Zooey asserts, is that “Those two bastards [their older brothers] got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards” (139). No, the problem, whether they admit it or not, is that their eldest brother and wisest sage is dead. Franny explains her breakdown to Zooey as simple disinterest:
This disinterest is familiar to most students. It is Franny’s grief that gives this disinterest its particular potency.
At the end of last semester I found myself asking the question that every depressed person has asked themselves at some time in their lives: What’s the point? I’d asked this question many times while Luke was alive and I have continued to ask it after his death. It’s not always about him. It’s a valid question for anyone to ask. That being said, something happens to that question when I add a little preamble. Its ability to render me immobile and utterly disinterested in my own life increases by an unimaginable degree. Luke is dead, so what’s the point?
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At one point in Zooey’s endless expounding, Franny fills an unresponsive lull with a simple statement, “I want to talk to Seymour” (151). Me too, Franny. I want to ask, now that you’re gone, Luke, after spending 17 years making me the person I am, being my guide through life, what the fuck do you suggest I do? I have asked this question many times. Every time it’s the same answer. Whether or not I want to hear it
varies. Keep going. Do it for Mom and Dad. And that, I think, is what Seymour’s advice, passed from Zooey to Franny, is really all about. In a finale that feels at once heartfelt and snide, Zooey insists that one must keep acting or doing whatever one does with all one’s heart for some imaginary “Fat Lady” who is somehow God. Fine, I get it. Salinger won me over. But I feel that there is really another “fattie,” as Zooey nastily refers to her throughout the text, in whom the siblings might find solace: their mother, Bessie.
Losing a child is unimaginably painful. I have been in close proximity to two people who have experienced that loss for the last three and a half years. The texture of their grief is deep and rich and excruciating, and they feel it every single day. It doesn’t necessarily get better. Kübler-Ross’ five stages of platitudes are a lot less informative than you might think. It certainly can’t be easy watching another child wreck their life because of what happened either. As Zooey affirms to Franny, “this is not fair to Bessie and Les [their parents]. It’s terrible for them … if you’re going to go on with this nervous breakdown business, I wish to hell you’d go back to college to have it” (160). My parents—kind, gentle, hard-working people—have ensured that I always have a soft place to land. In fact, I’d quite like to have another breakdown so I could go home and be babied right now. That being said, they both worked so hard and sacrificed so much to help me get into this university and I’m the only hope they have left. I’m writing this for them.
So now we have come to the unavoidable topic of my utter disregard for the assignment. Most importantly, I don’t want you to think that this lackluster half-paper comes from a place of disrespect for either of you or for your class. Professor XXXXX, your lectures were energized and thought-provoking and I looked forward to them every week. TA XXXXX, our section helped me delve more deeply into the texts and I felt challenged every time we met. I appreciate both of you, but this is all I have right now. I woke up one morning at the end of the semester, felt the lowest I have since the immediate aftermath of Luke’s death, and got on a plane the same day in order to save myself. I’ve come a long way in the last three months. No, I’m not exactly doing better. I wouldn’t call going from numbness to puke-crying for two hours nearly every day improvement, but at least I’m feeling it now. At least I’m dealing with it.
Writing these six pages was a milestone of vulnerability for me, but I also understand that this is a graded assignment for a class at an elite university. I want whatever grade you think I deserve. Before this final, I turned in a string of uninspired papers about which I felt and thought very little. This, at least, made something happen in my heart and mind. I feel better after writing all of this down. If the goal of education is to help a person think more deeply about their life and the world, then writing this paper certainly accomplished that. But don’t think for a second that I’m not emailing this to you with a smirk on my face and a middle finger to god, daring him to make things worse for me. Send this to a dean. Deface my transcript. Kick me out. My dear professor and dearest section leader, there is nowhere further for me to fall.
Works Cited
Salinger, J., 1955. Franny and Zooey. 1st ed. Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, and Co.
Idon’t think that there is any normal college experience, certainly not considering the grueling and fractured circumstances many of the readers of this paper have endured since being so unceremoniously plucked from our just-getting-good first year. I know I’m not alone in making it through college under particularly difficult circumstances either, although sometimes it does feel like it’s sunshine and rainbows and keggers for everyone else. I want to affirm, however, that the social and academic demands of being at this university are more burdensome for some than others.
I would have loved to be more social throughout college. I wish I could leave my house with a smile on my face and an open mind towards all of the thoughtful people and incredible opportunities at this school. I wish that I could go a day without having visceral flashbacks. I wish my brother was still alive. But I can’t, I don’t, and he’s not. And here I am, starting another semester woefully unprepared. You might ask, why not just take time off? Brown is oh-so-accommodating right? Well, there’s no guarantee that things will get better after a year of WWOOFing or crying at home on the couch and there’s certainly no guarantee that they won’t get worse either. I’m here and I’ve decided to finish.
The essay printed above came from a place of necessity and I think that is exactly what makes it the only piece of writing I’ve been proud of since my freshman year. At no point during college have I felt capable of participating in the toil of the academic machine, although I faked it for as long as I could. Writing this essay was the first time I admitted that to myself or anyone else. And, god, did it feel good. I wish there was some sort of lesson I could offer to anyone who might feel similarly, but lessons don’t really work unless you learn them for yourself. I’ve had to figure out, in perhaps the most arduous way possible, how to keep going. I hope you can too. Call your parents, hug your friends, and if you’re really down, you could even try emailing me.
ETHAN MILLER B’23 should really stop listening to Elliott Smith.
