Welcome back everyone! With the new year we have started discussing new themes in our ASTU class. We have started off by reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, while looking at how we communicate trauma.
Throughout reading this novel I felt myself being flipped back and forth: I like it, I hate it, it’s brilliant, it’s pretentious, and so on. Despite my indecisiveness, I am glad that I read it. However, the question that lurked the back of my mind was, “What is the author trying to achieve?” Is he trying to create a realistic portrayal of trauma through a multitude of characters’ stories, with a focus on the events of 9/11? Perhaps it’s just meant to be a story filled with interesting characters, and happens to be situated during a time of trauma. Perhaps, more to Foer’s style, the whole novel is a metaphor, or a “linguistically sophisticated fable,” as Michel Faber, a critic from The Guardian stated.
“In EL&IC, he serves up a smorgasbord of symbolic oddities. Oskar’s grandfather mysteriously loses the power of speech and communicates only on notepads; his wife goes blind and types hundreds of pages of her life story onto a ribbonless typewriter. The 101-year-old journalist upstairs is deaf, and reduces all 20th-century history to single-word filing cards. And so on and so on. This book is a linguistically sophisticated fable, and 9/11 is a smokescreen obscuring its true nature.” -Faber, Reviewer for The Guardian
I searched the internet to find clues as to what Foer’s goals were while writing this piece. In one interview done by The White Review, he somewhat answers my question. It seems to me that Foer sees himself as an artist, and his work as art, and that the reader may take from it what they may.
THE WHITE REVIEW
— Do you see yourself as a political writer?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
— No. I don’t see myself as anything. I mean, I’m not really one of those people who see themselves at all when they’re not looking in the mirror or being asked a question. I write what I’m thinking about or what I care about, you know. I write what I want to read.
Putting aside what Foer was trying to achieve, now leads me to the question, “What has he achieved?” Many readers and reviewers have critiqued his writing, calling it precocious and gimmicky, while many other readers have found it to be comforting and incredibly moving, but it seems that no one who has read this novel, is indifferent towards it. I wondered how, by including traumatic events such as the those on 9/11, the Dresden bombings and Hiroshima captured and created an audience, and how it made the book stand out from other popular novels.
I wondered how others felt about Foer’s novel, and what kind of reactions he evoked. Some critics, such as Faber, argued that Foer was not right to take these traumatic events into his literature, as he was appropriating vulnerable subjects, and that the characters and story are not realistic enough to respectfully tell the story of people’s trauma. Other readers exclaim that this book is thoroughly moving and in many reader reviews, people tend to not only acclaim the novel, but share their own trauma and experiences of 9/11.
Now, if the story had been about a 10 year old boy who lost his father in, say, a car crash, and the grandparents’ story had been about love and loss, and had nothing to do with 9/11 or Dresden, would readers have had as strong a reaction? Because Foer used the trauma which a large collective of people had personally encountered, readers reacted with a sense of personal entitlement, because similarly to how Oskar feels in the book, this trauma belonged to them. If Oskar’s story was about the death of his father by a random and singular event such as a car accident, then people would not view his story as their own and therefore not react with such strong and personal feelings towards the book and the characters portrayal of trauma.
Some interesting reviews:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jun/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview22
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/22/books/a-boys-epic-quest-borough-by-borough.html
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4588.Extremely_Loud_and_Incredibly_Close
