The Challenges That Lie Ahead (Extra Credit)

As a member of the Millennial Generation, I often tire of hearing my elders dramatically fretting about the issues we face these days, as if these will be the things to bring about the end of life as we know it. The pervasiveness of technology, the ubiquity of media, and the seeming deficiency of morality are all credible threats, but you would think that the world is without hope because it will someday be up to our incommunicable and out of touch generation to solve them. “Kids these days.” It frequently occurs to me that our grandparents probably shook their head similarly at our parents, and our great-grandparents at our grandparents, and so on and so forth. Every generation has issues they must face.

And so over the course of this class it has also occurred to me that these issues are the challenges posed to the writers of modern American novels. Racism, terrorism, and consumerism are all concerns of today, as well as subject dealt with in the novels we have read.  In Beloved, Toni Morrison forces the contemporary reader to consider the ways in which the history of slavery still haunts modern America.  White Noise debates the superficiality of capitalist ideals. And Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close considers the ways in which post-September 11 America loves, grieves, and communicates, effectively or not.

These are all matters at the forefront of public debate and, while the average citizen can afford to evade or circumvent forming an opinion on them, it is the responsibility of the modern American novelist to wrestle with these questions until they come to some sort of arguable conclusion. By using stories that can make us laugh and characters that make us cry, they can also make us think about the things we would rather avoid. Through literature, we can stand to stare our troubles square in the face.

So maybe our generation is a bit more out of touch than those that came before us. And maybe these problems we face are too cumbersome for us to deal with right this very minute. But it seems to me that if we get our peers to read more of the great modern American novels, we would all be better equipped for the challenges that lie ahead. 

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathone Safron Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close brought me to tears on many occasions. I think Oskar is such a precious character. Being almost the same age as Oskar at the time of the 9/11 events, I really appreciated him. I think I connected so closely with this book because he embodied what we went through on September 11, 2011.

            I think the end of the book leaves us very hopeful because it allows for Oskar to remember his father so positively. When he says, “He would have told me the story of the Sixth Borough, from the voice in the can at the end to the beginning, from ‘I love you’ to ‘Once upon a time…’ (326), I basically cried on the inside. I can imagine him saying it, and it’s just so touching. He will forever have this wonderful memory of his father.

            I was also very interested in the idea of the reversal of the man falling out of the building. It’s such a childlike thought to think that the events of 9/11 can be reversed. Only a child can dream that such a catastrophic national tragedy could “unhappen.” I flipped through the pictures at the end of the novel multiple times imagining the reversal of 9/11. I thought about what would happen if this event never occurred. Like Oskar said, “We would have been safe,” (326). It’s hard to imagine what would have happened if 9/11 never took place.

            In class, we discussed America’s reaction to 9/11. I immediately thought of the instant comraderie that was only on the surface. Americans pretended to band together, but deep down they were just as conflicted as the relationship as Oskar’s grandparents.

The importance of being Oskar

Jonathan Safran Foer chose Oskar's age with great care, as he falls somewhere between adulthood and childhood in the preadolescent limbo that is so often ignored in novels told from the points of view of children. Having been around Oskar's age when we underwent the tragedy that was 9-11, there are several aspects from personal experience that I can compare to Oskar's reaction, even though Oskar is such an elaborate and individual character.

In handling the whole of an American tragedy like 9-11, Oskar exhibits somewhat selfish reactions and expressions to the grief that has struck his family, as the protagonist seems to only be affected by things that directly impact the character. Where most of the narrative revolves around events taking place post-9-11, all the stories and disheartening affliction held by his mom or his grandma, he only thinks about his father, the key his father left behind and how that will make Oskar feel better, as well as the his mother's grief nonsatisfactory. Often, he seems like a brat and we have a difficult time gathering his insensitivity and inability to gauge human emotion with success, read facial expressions, etc.

However, when thinking about my own reaction to 9-11 at that age, I know that the comprehension of the whole event, of terrorism, or grief, or of any aspect of the tragedy was near-impossible. I'm pretty sure that the two things I felt most unsettled by on the day of 9-11 was the fact that I got to miss school and the fact that my sister's birthday party was canceled. It's a matter of perspective and a critique in how we view tragedies selfishly, whether we want to admit it or not.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Blog

            My initial reaction to seeing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer in bookstores was that it was too soon.  I am aware as to how unoriginal this notion is, but I was guilty of it.  Overall, I am against exploiting people, events, or anything else with some social value, and it made me sick when gold coins, quarters, special edition twin tower novelty bills; FDNY shirts, hats, toy fire trucks; and documentaries galore were created to honor the memory of the World Trade Center, and the freedom of commerce that it stood for as an attempt to make a profit off of a national tragedy that reverberated around the world.   Although many individuals found purchasing these items a coping mechanism, the sale of them began to demonstrate a sense of greed that I did not realize was possible—profits were made off of peoples’ grief. 

            However, after reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I came to realize that the novel might not be as deplorable as my cynicism made it out to be.  Today in class, we discussed what the novel is about.  As a relatively recent addition to the works of twenty first century American literature, the novel serves as an excellent commentary and reminder of what is and should be important to us.  The novel takes a subject that society has told us not to talk about, a topic that will forever be too soon to talk about, and it molds a beautiful message out of that.  No, we do not step back often enough and tell each other how much we love each other and how much we mean to one another, and we think exactly as Oskar thinks as he expresses his efforts to his mother, “‘I promise I’m going to be better soon… I’ll be happy and normal… I tried incredibly hard.  I don’t know how I could have tried harder.” (Foer, 323).  What Foer attempts to express to his reader is that we should stop trying so hard to be happy and to portray whatever “normal” is, maybe it is time that we let life happen.  After all, there is no way to predict who will enter and leave our lives, but we can choose to embrace them for who they are, just as Oskar did.

Extra Credit Blog Post

Narrative Strategies in Beloved and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close 

One aspect of the twentieth century American novel that we have studied in this class is the use of many authors of multiple narrators. Particularly in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close use multiple narrators; these narrations all focus on the effects of tragedy on a variety of people. Using these multiple narrators also adds an element in which the readers know more or less than the various narrators. This model mirrors that of the actual tragedies themselves; multiple people know varying amounts of information before, during, and after tragedies occur. Beloved, modeling that of middle passage and slavery in America, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly close mirroring that of the bombing of Dresden and 9/11.

            In the second half of Beloved, the novel plays on the information known between characters and the reader. Particularly what happened to Sethe’s “crawling already?” daughter. The struggle between who knows what comes out particularly when Stamp Paid makes the choice to tell Paul D about the events even though Sethe has not told him, “He had made up his mind to show him.” (Morrison 183). Stamp tells Paul D by showing him the newspaper clipping, however there is still initial confusion and denial as Paul D repeats the phrase “that ain’t her mouth” (181). This  confusion mirrors the confusion of the middle passage. Some members, the transporters know what is going on, however, the passengers often did not speak the langue, have any idea where they were going, or know what was happening. The novel uses these multiple narrators to show the confusion and trauma of middle passage and slavery.

            In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close the narration shows the initial confusion and confusion after 9/11 and subsequent struggle to make sense of that confusion. Oskar coming home, not really understanding what is happening. When he explains to the man what has happened with the keys, he says, “They let us out of school, we didn’t understand what was happening yet” (Foer). He is initially confused and then shocked when he listens to the voicemails from his father, and then his father asking if he is there. This mirrors the initial confusion and shock that occurs in any tragedy, as well as specifically 9/11 and the bombing referenced in the novel. How initially, people are confused about what is happening and then the initial confusion wears off, but there is still emotional damage left over.

            Both novels use their narrative strategies to mirror the trauma of actual tragedy. By doing this the novels can use their narratives to provide their strategies of how to deal with these events after they have occurred. 

Not-so-empty Spaces

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is filled with spaces; those spaces are filled with meaning.  It permeates the very fiber of the book.  Space as a conceptual framework of the novel functions similarly to a particular definition of “space:” as the expanse in which all things are located and all events occur.[1]  Foer fills his spaces with parts of the narrative not communicated through the words on the page.  There are literal spaces between the words and even spaces in many of the photographs.  Then there are figurative spaces in between the characters and even within the characters, as they distance themselves with emotions and intimacy. 

To illustrate just how much Foer has infused this framework of space into the novel and how it functions as a theme as well as a mode of narrative, let’s look at two pertinent examples. 

1. The “Falling Man” photograph.

The functionality of the flip-book effect at the end of the novel depends on the space between the pages.  Presented any other way,—even with words—the ending couldn’t achieve the same effect.  The picture is also divided almost in half, with one of the towers of the WTC taking up the left half and the right half being filled with mostly negative space, at least in the first photograph.  As the reader flips the pages, that space is gradually filled with its subject, the falling man, except in this iteration he isn’t falling, but flying upwards.  The final photo in the series shows the lefthand side completely empty—but is it?  In the context of the other photos, we learn that the space is actually full to bursting with meaning in a reversal of the normal conception of how space works.  You may be able to reverse the action of the photograph, but you can never reverse the action of history.  Notice also that the reader has the power to flip the pages in the opposite way, the action of which actually reflects reality.  This would require a reversal of the conception of how books themselves take up space: we think of them as progressing from left to right.  I think Foer places most of what he has created as the theme of space in this one photograph and what he does with it. 

2.  The tower of black text (284).

In what might be the most formally innovative chapter in the novel, Oskar’s grandfather uses multiple techniques of communication that move away from the use of words.  The chapter culminates with a tower of jumbled text that forms as the words themselves move closer and closer together.  This is a significant image in the novel, indicating that spaces are required between words for there to be any meaning at all, not just on a typographical level but also a psychological and linguistic level.  Still, meaning is dependent on the order of words set in the space of the page.  They follow from left to right with a set amount of space in between.  This tower (perhaps a significant image in its own right, without considering its deeper-level implications) eschews that normative conception of space to show that we, as readers, need space in order to read at all.  So if readers need space to understand, so too do the characters need space to “read” each other.  Even with its distancing quality, if the characters come too close together, such as Oskar and Abby Black in a significant passage, then physical features along with emotional features are obscured. 

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[1] Source: dictionary.com

I Want an Infinitely Long Blank Book and the Rest of Time

   

In many ways, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a book of parallels, with comparisons between fathers and sons, the bombing of Dresden and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the methods of communication employed by numerous characters. Letter writing as a form in particular is privileged throughout the novel, though the use of images where words fail is also very prevalent. A visual parallel which caught my eye was of the two images above, the first of Oskar’s grandfather’s overlapped writing in his last letter to his son and the second of the night sky on the night he and Oskar unburied Thomas Schell’s empty coffin and filled it with all the letters his father had written him but never sent.

The first image is representative of how Oskar’s grandfather has too much to say to “his unborn child”. As he says in an earlier letter, he has “so much to tell…the problem isn’t that [he’s] running out of time, [he’s] running out of room…there couldn’t be enough pages” (132). Because he becomes mute, there is a special limitation on how much he can say, and so in general Oskar’s grandfather resorts to recycling what he’s already said or simplifying his answers to “yes” or “no”. In the case of his last letter however, he simply cannot be concise and so he “[needs] more room, [he has] things [he needs] to say, [his] words are pushing at the walls of the paper’s edge” (277) and become more and more cramped together until they overlap and become incomprehensible.

The second image is signifies how there are no words sufficient enough to express what Oskar is feeling as he and his grandfather unbury his father’s empty coffin. “Because it was so dark, [they] had to follow the beam of [Oskar’s] flashlight” (317) in order to be able to find Thomas Schell’s grave. When “the batteries in the flashlight ran out, and [they] couldn’t see [their] hands in front of [them]” (319) then only the night sky remains, just as unintelligible as the overlapped writing.

With both images though nothing precise can be discerned from them, the emotion of them, the overwhelming blackness as well as the miniscule white space, is clear. There is pain but there is also hope, bleeding through despite the pitch darkness. In my opinion, that is the point of everything Foer is trying to say in his brilliant novel.

Gertrude Stein in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

    At two separate times over the length of the novel, Safran Foer appears to directly allude to Gertrude Stein's famous proclamation, "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." It comes first in "My Feelings" on page 76 where the grandmother says "The words were very simple. Bread means only bread. Mail is mail. Great hopes are great hopes are great hopes. I was left with the handwriting" (76). It comes again later when Oskar is talking with Mr. Black from 6A, Mr. Black says "A rose is not a rose is not a rose" (156) among other things.
   As I understand it, the goal of Stein's famous utterance was to separate the word "rose" from all of its various associations, heaped on by writers like Shakespeare for instance, to things such as love and beauty. She was getting at the idea that all the ideas we convey through language and that we think language actually is capable of containing are in reality is ascribed. Language is fundamentally arbitrary; there's no reason why the word "rose" is required to refer to a certain type of flower.
    So, then, I'm sort of curious as to why Safran Foer seems to be so consciously both courting this idea, and potentially disagreeing with it (I say disagree because of Mr. Black's very blatant inversion of it later int the novel). This novel is obviously very concerned with form, but I think it's also concerned with language itself (it seems like a lot/most post-modern novels are at some level concerned with the idea of language itself).
    What I think Foer might be getting at grows out of something I was thinking today during class when we were discussing Extremely Loud in the context of many other post-modern novels. I would say that Safran Foer's novel is significantly less cynical than something like The Crying of Lot 49, in part because instead of making light of the basic problems of communication in the way a lot of post-modern writing does, it tries to outline the ways we get around those problems. I think this is illustrated most clearly in a contrast between Foer and Pynchon treat the space between dialectics. At several times over the length of The Crying of Lot 49 we are presented with binaries, the "yes" and "no" hands for instance. However, at the end of the novel, when Oskar is talking to William Black, Black says that "highs and lows" are "easy" and that finding a balance between the two of them, being "reliable" and "good" is what is both hardest and what is actually to be desired. The place in between binaries is where he, and I would say Foer as well, thinks we should try to exist. On the other hand, at the end of his novel, Pynchon refers to this very same space (or at least a very similar space) as "bad shit," something to be generally avoided.
    So, this all comes back to the "rose is (not) a rose" discussion in this way: Safran Foer possibly wants to reject that words are in fact totally arbitrary (or at least that they can be separated out from their context) and that, as a result, that communication is impossible. He wants to find a sort of middle path through which we might actually find connection with other human beings, and he proposes to do this by simultaneously acknowledging the difficulties of communication (by courting the arbitrary nature of signs, playing around with form in the ways that he does) and constantly trying to circumvent them (by denying the arbitrary nature of signs, by asking us to focus on the "handwriting" and the larger emotional thrust behind acts of communication).

Something from Nothing

Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, both format-wise and plot-wise, explores the meanings of empty spaces and nothingness extensively.  Whether it is the loss of certain physical senses following a tragedy, such as Thomas’ loss of speech; the creation of Nothing Spaces by the grandparents to gain a sense of privacy; or the literal spaces in much of the novel's dialogue; it seems as if the spaces within the novel hold just as much, if not more meaning than the content on either side of the space.  This nothingness is used most often as a sort of coping mechanism; characters use it as an escape, something that allows them to either hide from their grief or hide from fully processing it.  In Thomas’ case, instead of dealing with the loss of Anna, he loses the ability to talk about his feelings or the tragedy at all.  His life with Oskar’s grandmother is heavily structured and built out of rules, what is something and what is nothing.  Eventually, what was something and what was nothing became muddled and confused, “The longer your mother and I lived together, the more we took each other’s assumptions for granted, the less was said, the more misunderstood, I’d often remember having designated a space as Nothing when she was sure we had agreed that it was Something” (111).  After enough time, it is impossible for Nothing Spaces to be truly neutral; they hold immense meaning merely because they are different from Something Spaces. 

Through Oskar’s narrative the reader sees the alienation that can be felt after a loss or tragedy; many times Oskar expresses anger when someone else is upset, or when someone else is not upset enough.  Perhaps it is his immaturity coming into play, but he is extremely egocentric in his feelings of grief, contrasting with the feelings of overwhelming patriotism and unity that was felt in much of the United States following September 11^th.  Through Oskar’s isolation, he creates one huge Nothing Space for himself.  This Nothing Space is made up of the quest on which his father sends him.  By feeling alone in his quest and in his grief, Oskar is unable to process his grief and to truly cope.  By the end of the novel, Oskar has realized that he was not alone in his quest; everyone he met with had anticipated his arrival, and his mother was aware of the quest the whole time.  Once he discovered that his isolation was self-imposed, he was able to develop a more empathetic outlook on the grief of others and begin processing his own feelings.  Though the loss of senses and use of Nothing Spaces seemingly draws the characters away from coming to terms with loss and tragedy, it is through these coping mechanisms that grief can be processed.  Foer sets up these nothing spaces as an alternative to the deindividuation of unification and patriotism after a tragedy.