Hello readers!

This week in my ASTU class, we are continuing to analyze the remembrance of 9/11 through Johnathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which I mentioned in my last blog post. However, we also have read “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect” from literary theorist Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable. As the title suggests, Butler focuses on the vulnerability of the body, as well as the impact of interpretation and perspective regarding the lens through which we see and remember trauma.

Something that really struck me about “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect” is the idea of valuing peoples’ deaths. Butler claims that “by a cultural reflex, we mourn for some lives but respond with coldness to the loss of others” (36). In other words, some deaths affect us more deeply than others. Therefore, we value different peoples’ deaths at varying degrees. This idea is exemplified by the character of Oskar Schell in Foer’s novel. He lost the person most important to him during the bombing of the Twin Towers: his father. Oskar is completely shocked by his father’s death and his reaction is scattered throughout the novel. Sometimes he gets “heavy boots”, which is his way of expressing sadness. Other times he is cruel, such as when he tells his mother that he wishes she would have been the one to die in the bombings instead of his dad. Yet, he also feels frustrated. “It makes me incredibly angry that people all over the world can know things that I can’t, because it happened here, and happened to me, so shouldn’t it be mine?” (256). In this case, Oskar is referring to the censorship of images by the USA government regarding the events of 9/11. Oskar wanted to find out how his father died, so he tried to Google search for images to see if he could locate his dad. The death of his father affected him so deeply, that Oskar felt compelled to connect with him once more — in this case, by discovering how he died. If he did not value his father, Oskar would not have made the effort, despite how difficult it was for him to do so.

On the contrary, Oskar has no trouble giving a presentation in class about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan towards the end of WWII. He shows his fourth grade class an interview of a women describing in vivid detail the horror that she experienced while looking for her daughter after the bombs decimated the cities. He then went on to tell his class facts about the bombing, including the diameter of the bomb. Oskar felt no connection to the people who died in these bombings; he learned about facts that had do with the bombs themselves, but displayed no sense of empathy towards the lives lost.

Ultimately, the value of death appears to be a prominent topic in both Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Butler’s “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect”. Oskar displays this idea throughout the novel. He highly values the death of his father, as he was an extremely important figure in Oskar’s life. However, Oskar displays a sense of apathy with regards to those who suffered during the bombings of Japan. After analyzing both pieces of literature, I find that I am left with some questions: why do some deaths affect us more than others? Shouldn’t the fact that someone lost their life be enough to warrant grieving? How do you put a value on someone’s death? Is this desirable? These are questions that will require further debate and analysis in order to be answered.

Until next time, readers!

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect.” Frames of War: When is a Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. 33-62. Print.

Happy New Year, readers!

Over our winter break, my ASTU class read Johnathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This novel focuses on the traumatic events regarding September 11th, 2001, specifically by following the story of Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy who loses his father (Thomas Schell Jr.) in these bombings. After finding a key hidden in his father’s room, Oskar sets off on a journey around New York City to find the lock it opens in an attempt to remain close to the father he can no longer look to physically. Although the storyline itself is intriguing, I found the structure of this novel to be the most compelling aspect; this is what sets it apart from the other technologies of memory that I have analyzed throughout my educational career.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close proceeds at a brisk pace, quickly moving from one event to another. Aside from Oskar, there are two other main narrators: Grandma and Grandpa (Thomas Schell Sr.). The grandparents’ chapters in the novel take the form of unsent letters — Grandma writes to Oskar and Grandpa writes to his “unborn child”. These chapters also take the form of flashbacks to earlier times in the grandparents’ lives, including the events they witnessed during the bombings at the end of World War II in Dresden, Germany. In other words, the novel jumps from Oskar in the present day to Grandma or Grandpa’s accounts of the past.

Within each of the narrators’ sections, there is a variety of visuals. These include photos of doorknobs, buildings, keys, and locks taken by Oskar’s camera, newspaper clippings with red pen used to circle grammatical mistakes, letters, and pages where pens were tested in an art store. The pen markings throughout the novel appear in colour, while the photos are black and white. These visuals do not appear in any particular pattern; they are placed in a somewhat random order. I find this last point particularly unusual, as I have not read any other novels with a similar format.

In general, the novel’s structure can be described in one word: sporadic. This choice in layout emphasizes the fact that each of the characters is traumatized. When one is traumatized, nothing makes sense or appears normal. Therefore, the random order of the visuals and jumping around from one character’s thoughts and actions to another makes sense. It gives Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close a sense of honesty and authenticity with regards to both the events being described, as well as the characters’ emotional turmoil.

In contrast, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, which I mentioned in my last two blog posts, has no visuals; it relies solely on detailed description. Although this detail is effective in describing the traumatic events experienced by Naomi Nakane’s family, especially the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it does not show the sporadic mindset that the Japanese-Canadians most likely experienced as explicitly as Foer’s novel does with regards to 9/11.

Ultimately, I found both of these novels’ approaches to trauma effective in their own ways. Even though the structure of Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close shows the lack of normal functioning after experiencing an event like 9/11, the visuals were somewhat distracting at times and made the novel feel disjointed. Although this was the point, I personally prefer the approach that Kogawa took in Obasan, as it was somewhat easier to follow and felt more cohesive overall.

Until next time readers!