Hello readers,

Last week in ASTU 100A, my class had the opportunity to visit the “c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city” exhibit at the Museum of Vancouver. This exhibition was centered around the ancient Musqueam burial ground and village cite c̓əsnaʔəm, which few people know – including myself prior to this visit – is located just before the Arthur Laing Bridge, in Vancouver’s current Marpole neighborhood. Ćəsnaʔəm continues to be a cite of great cultural significance to the Musqueam people, and was historically “first occupied almost 5000 years ago and became one of the largest of the Musqueam people’s ancient village sites approximately two thousand years ago”.

At this exhibit I was informed that in 2012 a condo company retained a permit to build on the c̓əsnaʔəm Musqueam burial ground. This act was met with fierce resistance from the Musqueam community and other activists when the bodies of several Musqueam ancestors (including those of two children) were overturned during the project’s excavations. After a 100 day vigil in honour of the disturbed ancestors and in protest against the project, the construction was eventually halted.

The contention over construction on the c̓əsnaʔəm burial ground can be critically considered using the philosopher Judith Butler’s theoretical lens from her work “Frames of War: When is Life Grievable”, of which we just read the chapter “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect” for ASTU 100A. Although written in the context of society’s attitudes in times of war, it seems fitting to use Butler’s central theoretical question of “when is life grievable?” to reflect on the 2012 c̓əsnaʔəm incident, and by extension more generally on the colonial divisions between “us” and “them” that still plague mainstream Canadian society. At its essence, Butler’s approach inquires into why it is that “we mourn for some lives but respond with coldness to the loss of others”, especially on a public scale (36). One of the conclusions that Butler reaches is that it is the extent to which we recognize ourselves in other people that leads us to mourn for them. Butler continues by stating that those who we cannot recognize ourselves in (largely due to the ways in which we are socially conditioned to view “us” and “them” by factors such as the media and the culture we are raised in) are then considered “ungrievable” or a life “that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all” (38). Considering the treatment of the c̓əsnaʔəm burial ground, it could be argued that even today in our celebrated multicultural Canadian society, the mainstream public’s apathy towards Indigenous ancestors alludes to a greater issue of a mainstream Canadian view of Indigenous lives as “ungreivable”. As many of the protestors to the c̓əsnaʔəm construction project pointed out, such a gross disrespect to the ancestors laid to rest there would have never occurred at a “white person’s” or settler’s cemetery. Furthering this idea, perhaps Mount Pleasant cemetery – with its spatial location in the heart of Vancouver, balanced neatly on the edge of the city’s East, West, South and North neighborhoods – is a cite of public mourning that, using Butler’s theory, is a clue as to who it is that we as a nation consider to be a part of “us”.

On this note, I would like to end this blog post by pointing to another group who has been unjustly excluded from the Canadian “us”. The 26th Annual February 14th Women’s Memorial March – a political act of public grieving – is coming up to commemorate the lives of and the injustice faced by the missing and murdered women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. This event also draws public light to the issue of violence against Indigenous women and girls in this country, which is an issue of human rights (as Amnesty International reported in 2004) that has largely been enabled by a sense of indifference from Canadian public. The historic lack of media attention and serious political action regarding these women and girls is further proof as to how we have drawn the distinction between greivable and ungrievable lives here in Canada. However, after reading Butler’s article, I think it is exactly events like this march that can work towards the dissolution of the boundaries of “us” and “them”, “mournable” and “not” in our society. As Butler writes, “The very fact of being bound up with others establishes the possibility of being subjected and exploited… But it also establishes the possibility of being relieved of suffering, of knowing justice and even love” (61). I wholeheartedly believe that we can achieve the latter in this country if we can publicly recognize that there was a long, long time before Canada was a settler nation, before the Marpole area was a box-store-cum-auto-sales belt, and before Indigenous peoples were denigrated to an “ungreivable” status.

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Butler, Judith. “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect”. Frames of war: when is life grievable?. Verso, 2009. 33-62. Print.

Hello readers,

My class has just entered our second semester of ASTU 100A, which will be focused around critically exploring 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror through the lens of a literature class. Right now, we have just finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the main plot of which tells the story of Oskar, a nine year old Manhattanite buzzing with curiosity and intelligence, but also with anxiety and grief after loosing his father during the September 11th attacks. After discovering a seemingly random key in his deceased father’s closet, Oskar begins a search for its corresponding lock over New York’s five Burroughs, which can be interpreted symbolically as his search for connection to his father and as a search for some sort of answers or meaning behind his death.

While many parts of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close are striking and deeply touching, ultimately upon completing this novel I found myself unsatisfied with Foer’s depiction of trauma and loss associated with 9/11, largely because I find that the experimental form of the novel is awkwardly incongruent with what I would argue are the traditional themes espoused by it.

In terms of the form and style, I would posit Foer’s novel in the postmodern* domain. To begin with, in a very postmodern way the novel has an unapologetic blending of sub-genres, in that the story is one of mystery and suspense (as when Oskar plays detective with the key and in terms of the reader’s work piecing together its multiple narratives), while at the same time has elements of romance (particularly evident in Foer’s side narratives of Oskar’s grandma and grandpa, as well as the grandma’s sister Anna), historical fiction (with significant attention given to depicting the bombing of Dresden and also, a solitary account of Hiroshima placed in the novel), the classic coming of age story (in terms of Oskar’s character development), and perhaps even contains elements of the genre that is often connected to postmodernism of magic realism (in terms of Oskar’s inventions and fantasies, and with reference to the irrelevance of the actual likelihood of Oskar’s and grandma and grandpa’s whimsical, almost fable-like tales). Furthermore, in congruency with the postmodern tradition of recycling existing artistic work into the new, Foer uses direct allusions to past work, most notably in how he gives significant attention to Hamlet and Oskar’s portrayal of the skull Yorick, to carry forward the novel’s own themes – in the case of Hamlet, one of mortality.

Secondly, the novel defies the bounds of classic, traditional literature and moves into the range of the postmodern in that it mixes prose with images from Oskar’s scrapbook, as well as collages together other media including business cards, formatted excerpts from newspapers, letters, selections of writing that have been marked up as if by hand, pages formatted in experimental and conceptually pointed ways, and even entire blank pages.

Further distancing itself from the traditional novel, Foer alternates between narrators of Oskar, his grandma and his grandpa, each of whom have a very distinct way of storytelling and a very different audience to whom their stories are meant to be addressed to. This fragmentation of narration also works to obscure the chronology of the novel, with its characters flip-flopping from past to present, from the voice of the elderly, to the elderly’s memory of being young, to the voice of the young itself. Additionally, the curation of these three narratives next to each other (as in which story or chapter goes where) as well as the placement of the aforementioned collage style texts and images, seem to suggest a sense of postmodern self-reflexivity on the part of Foer. What I mean by this is that Foer as an author has to understand himself as present in the novel – and perhaps the reader is supposed to understand this as well – as he is the hand putting the story together. This is in contrast to if Foer let the story play out in a more traditional sense where the protagonist’s voice would be the only orchestrater in driving the story forward.

Lastly, in true stride with the postmodern tradition, the novel seems to end with a lack of conclusions – indeed it seems that Oskar’s efforts, no matter how strenuous or taxing, have not led to the meaning or answers that he was searching for. As a reader this is disappointing. Conceptually however, this lack of a neat and tidy ending seems to fit with an analysis of the novel as a postmodern work.

What I am suggesting by all of these observations is that the postmodern form of the novel – with all of Foer’s seemingly postmodern stylistic choices – seems to suggest a self-aware attempt of Foer to be experimental and critical in his representation of trauma. What I mean by this is that through the chaotic, non-chronological, collage style of Foer, he seems to be making a case that the trauma represented in his novel cannot be represented by a novel, in the classic sense of the word. Trauma cannot be tied up easily – something like 9/11 or the Dresden bombings cannot be told through a conventional story with a neat and tidy ending. To do so would imply some rationality to what was experienced by his characters. As the lack of conclusion in the novel suggests however, meaning or rationality is what Oskar was searching for but could not find. Thus, the postmodern style of the novel would lead one to infer that Foer was trying to highlight this postmodern rejection of an objective sense of “meaning” or “truth” or “rationality” in the world. Indeed, in line with how postmodernism arose following the horrific absurdity and trauma of the Second World War, to represent 9/11 Foer seems to be suggesting that a whole other stylistic approach is needed – one that does away with neat and tidy master narratives and instead explores a human story through a non-rational, more eclectic and perhaps more human way.

Or at least that is how I would like to read Foer’s novel.

Instead, however, I found Foer’s use of postmodern techniques to be incongruent with what the novel is ultimately centred around, that being an exceedingly American, traditional story of loss following a day that changed everything for Oskar, and a day that is often remembered and represented as having changed everything for the rest of humankind as well. Perhaps the most central aspect to postmodernism is a questioning of the master narrative, particularly those related to events like 9/11 that tend to be treated with an air of objectivity, as if these events, their histories and repercussions exist outside of the rhetoric and narratives that continually reinforce their importance. What I expected from Foer’s novel then, given its postmodern stylistic techniques, was a more nuanced, critical telling of 9/11 and its repercussions – if not a counter narrative entirely. It seemed that all of Foer’s cards were leading him towards this, but the hand he played was aimed back at tradition and back at the master narrative.

In fact, in class we have been discussing how there are many elements to Foer’s novel that seem to have it contribute to the idea of 9/11 exceptionalism and American exceptionalism more generally. Oskar refers to that day as “the worst day” and exhibits a drive towards action, which, as one of my classmates mentioned, can be interpreted as his character representing America’s immediate action oriented response to 9/11 and the ensuing exceptionalist, neoconservative and flattened rhetoric of the master narrative of “good” vs. “evil”, “us” vs. “them”.

As this is a blog, and a log of my most immediate thoughts, my opinions may change as we continue on in class with exploring the arguments for and against whether or not Foer’s work contributes master narrative of 9/11. For now however, I remain disappointed that Foer’s experimental and what I have argued postmodern style did not lead to more of a critical telling of Oskar’s experience of 9/11. Perhaps what this leads me to conclude is that Foer’s style was not very postmodern at all but instead was a stylistic choice of the author that had little to do with the critical postmodern tradition of questioning the foundation of knowledge, the power of language and the master narrative. On this note, I would like to leave you with a quote by Walter Kirin who reviewed Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close for the The New York Times. Kirin says “(Foer and his peers) can’t really be called experimental, since their signature high jinks, distortions and addenda first came to market many decades back and now represent a popular mode that’s no more controversial than pre-ripped bluejeans”. So perhaps, building on this interpretation, Foer’s style was not a postmodern move at all, but a mere stylistic trend of this current age used to tell what appears to be a very traditional story of a boy and loss. 

* Here I am referring to postmodernism as I have learnt about it in several of my classes (including sociology, geography and political science) as well as what I know of it from outside of school and not from a position of a formal analysis of postmodern literature specifically.