Hello readers!
I just wanted to start off with a hello, a super-late happy new year’s, and a welcome back to ASTU. Anyways, let’s get this show on the road…
Almost everyone this week touched on the book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer. A couple popular blog themes included unique POV/perspectives, absence, Obasan, and personalizing vs. contextualizing within the context of 9/11 exceptionalism.
In case you’ve been slacking off and haven’t actually read the book or have magically forgotten what the book is about: it’s an intertwined telling of multiple lives in the Schell family (grandma, grandpa/Thomas Sr. /the renter, and Oskar). Throughout the novel we are shown the repercussions of not only 9/11, but the effects of other tragedies. (A bit of the Hiroshima bombings and the Dresden bombings)
A topic I will be focusing on is how individuals and societies react to and deal with immense trauma. Raphael compares Oskar’s reaction to Naomi’s (Obasan) reaction. He writes how Naomi, Obasan, and Aunt Emily all react and cope differently to similar experiences of Japanese internment. Aunt Emily decided to cope through finding justice for wrongdoings, whilst Naomi and Obasan suffered in silence.
So how do we cope? Nicola and Sam have the same answer: art. They both wrote about art as a way to break down the unspeakableness that attaches itself to trauma. Sam focused on the memorial aspect of art, saying that the memorials “portray trauma and spur healing, as well as also connecting to… [the] theme of memory.” Nicola takes a slightly different approach, with several excellent examples: “… The grandfather sculpts grandmother, he is trying to mold her into Anna,” creating a mixture of escapism, and a form of coping mechanism. She also brings up the significance of Oskars’ “Things That Happened to Me” scrapbook, and the grandmother writing out her life story, producing nothing but blank pages.
Nicola also suggests two interpretations of the role that art plays in the novel a) “a comment on the point and usefulness of art” or b) the implication of “a greater unfixability to certain traumas, and that escapism has only so much function.”
Before I finished the book, I wholeheartedly thought that art could help heal 100% of the time. But the more I think about it, the more that percentage shrinks. I do still think that art can heal, but I also am becoming more aware that it can create an “us” vs “them” mentality.
Take post-9/11 music. Most of it was normal, but some got really patriotic, obsessive even. Take this song and music video, for example… “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.” And “Man, we lit up your world like the 4th of July.” This sort of art cannot possibly promote healthy healing of a nation.
Look at this poem “Somebody Blew up America” as another piece of “art”:
“Who found Bin Laden, maybe they Satan
Who pay the CIA,
Who knew the bomb was gonna blow
Who know why the terrorists
Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego”
And
“Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day”
Perhaps these are just bad examples, the worst of the worst. Maybe certain types of art heal better than others? Does art even heal at all? Or is it just another thing that creates an “us” and a “them”? And if it does encourage a “them” and an “us”, is it justified to continue making this art?
Please don’t pin me down as an art hater; I’m anything but. I just don’t know what to say anymore. The more I try to think about the book and 9/11, the less I seem to know.
– Carolina