Hey readers! The latest piece discussed by my university english class is Jonathan Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, a novel about a boy whose father has died in the attacks on 9/11. The novel is experimental fiction, making it a complex read; I have been finding that it is difficult to see all the threads of the web of this account of trauma, until a second is taken away from the novel to gain perspective. After considering the work, I find myself interested in the relationship between the book and art. Not only in style, but in the expressions of the characters. First of all, the book is spotted with pictures, some immediately relevant, some more obscure. The very first that appears isa close up picture of a keyhole in an ornate doorknob. It invites us into what I consider to be the ‘locked’ secrets and accounts of the story following. The motif continues throughout the book, and is connected to Oskar’s (the name of the main boy who has lost his father) city-wide search for the lock that matches th e key that he found in his deceased father’s possessions.
In the novel, Oskar keeps a scrapbook called “Things That Happened to Me”. Some of the pictures he adds to it are found in the novel; most of the “things” are things that didn’t happen to him. One way of looking at this is as Oskar’s way of creating something other than the biggest thing that seems to be defining him, the thing that he cannot talk about, the “worst day”. He creates any other scenario. Another of Oskar’s art attributes come in his inventions and jewelry. He makes up fantastical inventions which could probably never be but which he sees as an escape from what actually is happening he invents thing when he cant sleep. It is as if it is his coping method, creating solutions for all the problems he thinks he can fix. The way I see it, both the inventions and scrapbook are Oskar’s escapism. The jewelery is seen slightly differently. His father was a jeweler, and Oskar used to design many more pieces; after his fathers death, he doesn’t design as much, his workbench is buried in his closet. One piece that he does make is a bracelet for his mother, which is designed after the morse code translation of his father’ last voice message. While the other forms are escapism, I see the jewelry as to intrinsically tied to his father and thus his expression of jewelry design, when it does reemerge, is tied to the memory of his father (as in the morse code bracelet).
Art comes up as an attribute in another chacacter, in Oskar’s absent grandfather. Part of the story is narrated from the point of view of the grandfather as a younger man, after having gone through the bombings of Dresden. He is a sculptor. In the novel, he meets the grandmother accidentally, many years after knowing her as his lover’s little sister. They end up getting married, but the memory of Anna (the dead sister to grandmother, previous lover to the grandfather) is incredibly strong. Even as the grandfather sculpts grandmother, he is trying to mold her into Anna. In this I see again elements of escapism, and of a coping mechanism.
In the portion of the story narrated by grandmother and grandfather, grandmother writes out her life’s story on a typewriter with no ink ribbon, thus not actually typing anything. This act of art helps her to cope with her life, and I think she thinks it will help her to connect with her husband, to mitigate some silence, lack of connection in their marriage. One way to interpret this might be to see it as a comment on the point and usefulness of art after all. Foer could be implying a greater unfixability to certain traumas, and that escapism has only so much function.
While not a major theme, I found it interesting to look at the various mentions of art creation throughout the novel. Maybe you all found it interesting too. Thanks for reading, see you next time!
Nicola Cox
