Letters: Pynchon and Foer

 Letters and the act of physical written communication that they represent have been a concern of several of the texts we have read this semester. In the contemporary world, letters have become relics, antiquated remnants in an age of communication that is largely electronic, immaterial. Letters are physical, and the letter exists in a liminal space between author and recipient; in fact, it seems to contain a piece of the person who has written it, and we might all acknowledge the humanity inherent to the form. Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close each present different treatments of the letter, Pynchon’s postal service identified with esoteric conspiracy, Foer’s with the unspoken words at the core of the individual.

Stamps become a mark of the absurd, arbitrary conundrum that is the postmodern condition in The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon’s novel was, however, published in 1965, a time when the letter was still a major mode of communication between individuals. Conspiracy, or allegations of conspiracy, surround postal systems, paranoia attached to the most benign, the everyday—which may have something to do with historical context: the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Reds, an unknown enemy hiding behind every corner, in the most simple form of the everyday: the letter, the mail, the post. Are papers carried around by a man who appears to be homeless really a subversive act of postal sedition, a manifestation of the W.A.S.T.E. system or the nefarious Trystero? The novel is particularly concerned with control of communication, eavesdropping in said communication, and the dissemination and exchange of information between individuals. What does it all mean—something? Nothing? A third of the way through the novel, this quote appears, in the context of a farcical play: “It is about this point…that things really get peculiar, and…ambiguity begins to creep in among the words” (Pynchon, 55). Ultimately, no answers will be provided.

Foer provides a divergent characterization of letters; Pynchon is unrecognizable. In Foer’s novel, letters fill coffins—letters constitute the individual, and allow him or her to express things impossible in speech. Within a letter, Oskar’s grandmother recalls a letter her own grandmother wrote, at a time when Oskar’s grandmother was accumulating such letters: “The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life” (Foer, 79). The memory of this letter is embedded in the letter Oskar’s grandmother has written to Oskar, which is the story of her own life. Oskar’s grandfather writes letters he is unable to send, and, in one letter, confesses (it is a confession) the trauma which has destroyed his life: he is a survivor of the Allied Forces’ Bombing of Dresden, one of the great atrocities of World War II. This experience has cost him his voice. Letters, somehow, seem to bridge the gap between something and nothing. These letters are far more than an object for literary delight, and the form of the letter is embedded into the narrative itself. Letters, for Pynchon, are absurd, arbitrary instances of communication in a world the substance of which is disappearing; for Foer, letters are far different: an instance of something amidst a sea of nothingness.