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).