Incredibly Close Research Articles

Trauma, Ethics and Myth-Oriented Literary Tradition in Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

This essay proposes a reading of Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel as a literary artifact that the author has consciously elaborated following the strategies of a myth-oriented tradition that had its first literary outbreak in times of High Modernism, being subsequently pursued by magical-realist and postmodern writers. The novelist associates strategies and motifs belonging to such tradition to a context that fulfills the premises of contemporary trauma fiction but that also aims at establishing comparisons between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and WW2 events that North American readers are here forced to remember from the perspective and opinions of a nine-year-old traumatized narrator. Modernist and magical-realist elements combine in a novel that openly demands the ethical positioning of its readers.

Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Whereas melancholy (or ‘acting out’) entails a complete repression of all trauma‐related memory, mourning (or ‘working through’) is an endeavour to remember the traumatic event and fit it into a coherent whole. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, these two ways of reacting to and dealing with trauma are embodied respectively by the protagonist’s paternal grandfather and by his paternal grandmother, both survivors of the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945. Foer ties up this ‘old’ trauma with a fresh one – 11 September 2001 – by having the Schells lose their only son, the protagonist’s father, in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Aspects of both acting out and working through are in turn synthesised in the protagonist himself – Oskar Schell. In his behaviour, the boy displays characteristics of both a melancholic and a mourner.

Visualised Incomprehensibility of Trauma in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

In the wake of massive trauma, the purpose of literature is to constantly work against a smoothing-over of the painfully disruptive character of the event. With his latest novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer has ventured to represent the traumatic events of September 11 and to interlace them with those of the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945. Combining linguistic virtuosity with typo-graphical and other visual elements, Foer attempts to come as close to the disruptive nature of trauma (representation) as possible, and achieves what Ulrich Baer has described as “mock[ing] the black and white simplicity of printing paper” (Baer 2002, 2). In this contribution I argue that, contrary to what certain critics have maintained, Foer’s use of visual interludes betrays no inability on his part to adequately convey his story by means of language. Instead of treating these elements as a meagre and unconvincing surrogate for language, they should be seen as complementary to the narrative. Some-times the visualisation of trauma in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close even goes beyond what language can convey

Philomela Revisited: Traumatic Iconicity in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Art makes up, what fortune has deny'd --Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VI When the Jewish American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer published his sensational debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002), at the age of 25, it met with rave reviews, instantly casting its author as one of the great hopes for the future of American letters; the New York Times waxed ecstatic and celebrated this work of brilliance and such brio with two reviews in two weeks' time. The novel dealt with the Holocaust in a daringly funny and technically innovative way. (1) While the critics cheered unanimously, many also wondered, somewhat fearfully, where Foer could possibly go with a second novel. When Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close appeared in 2005, it became clear that Foer had upped the ante, not only on the thematic level, but even more conspicuously in the novel's remarkable form, which Salman Rushdie appropriately dubbed pyrotechnic in his blurb. (2) Thematically, Foer's second novel tackles some of the remaining historical traumas of the twentieth century that were left untouched in Everything Is Illuminated: primarily 9/11, but the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima also feature as important subtexts. On a formal level, Extremely Loud is even more extreme in its deviation from customary novels: it garishly plays with typography and the text is lavishly interspersed with pictures. Because of this seemingly playful approach to a subject matter requiring great gravitas, reviews of Foer's second novel have been rather mixed; many consider its form completely inappropriate for representing 9/11. Yet many of these responses seem prompted, understandably, by emotions about the recentness (say, the incredible closeness) of the historical crisis of 9/11, rather than by balanced considerations of artistic representation. What so far has been left out of the debate is the question of the accuracy and suitability of Foer's novels as traumatic histories that attempt to access and to represent a painful past that is by definition inaccessible. Psychotherapists and other students of testimony such as Dori Laub, Soshana Felman, Judith Herman, and Lawrence Langer have discussed the difficulties involved in testifying about historical or personal moments of crisis--words simply fail to capture these shattering experiences, and verbal testimonies therefore tend to be extremely circuitous and oblique. (3) On a personal level, Jonathan Foer has had his own brush with a traumatizing event in childhood, and perhaps this explains part of his continuing interest in this intriguing phenomenon. This is by no means an attempt to argue that his novels are in any way occasioned or triggered by the author's childhood trauma; rather want to suggest an explanation for Foer's intimate knowledge and understanding of traumatic events as instanced by his novels. Writing for the New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon explains that [Foer's] development as a writer was shaped less by his parents and by his genetic endowments, less even by the novelists and poets he loves, than by a single event: the Explosion, as he calls (4) In 1985, when Foer was eight, he was involved in an explosion in the chemistry lab at school, which critically injured two children, one of whom was Foer's best friend, and which left Foer with second degree burns on his hands and face. Although the experience shattered Foer's idyllic youth--or perhaps rather because it was such a shattering experience--he had never written a single word about it. His childhood fear that the skin of his face was peeling off after the explosion (Foer told Solomon, I asked him [his friend] if the skin was pealing from my face. He said no. asked him again. He said no. remember making him promise) probably did influence his impressive description of the Dresden bombing in his second novel, where Thomas Sr. recounts how he grabbed the doorknob and it took the skin off my hand, saw the muscles of my palm, red and pulsing, why did grab it with my other hand? …

Disaster Zone

HEVIEW Miller continuedfrom previous page titles; the majority of the poems in Ornithologies are just as interested in tracking the poet's arriving thoughts as they are in telling a story or constructing a landscape. In this way, there's nearly as much Ashbery in Poteat's work as there is James Dickey. And though Charles Wright might immediately come to mind (since Poteat's meditations are often triggered by landscape), the way Poteat uses narrative in his poems is different enough from Wright as to avoid being derivative. Unfortunately, it's this mix of influences that occasionally causes Poteat to falter. At times, the poems' meanderings become distractingly digressive . And sometimes Poteat's earnest Romanticism requires a certain confidence that his attempts to capture the mind "in motion" belie. For example, when Poteat claims, "Representation is all we are in the end, I guess, and then some," his hedging undercuts the potential lyrical force of the assertion—though such hedging is well in line with the poem's meditative nature. Additionally, when Poteat ventures from the physical world into ekphrasis, primarily in the book's third section, the results are somewhat less convincing, since the poems feel a bit less personally urgent. Despite such occasional shortcomings, Poteat is clearly a talented, insightful, and moving poet who is involved in extending and diversifying the aesthetics of contemporary Southern poetry. What's more, Ornithologies consistently works to engage large philosophical and historical issues—something, I sometimes worry, not enough of Poteat's (and my) contemporaries do. Given the accomplishments of Ornithologies and the ambition of his work, I look forward to seeing where Poteat goes from here. Wayne Miller is the author ofOnly the Senses Sleep (New Issues), cotranslator oftheforthcoming I Don't Believe in Ghosts (BOA), by Albanian poet Moikom Zeqo, and editor, with Kevin Prüfer, ofThe New European Poetry (Graywolf). Miller teaches at Central Missouri State University and coedits Pleiades. Disaster Zone Stacey Gottlieb A Disorder Peculiar to the Country Ken Kalfus Ecco http://www. harpercollins.com 256 pages; cloth, $24.95 Two cartoonish sticks of dynamite, slim black cylinders capped by a single, wiry, red-tipped thread, stand center stage on the cover ofKen Kalfus's latest book—twin images meant to evoke entities already under siege at the novel's start. That's right: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country is part ofthe swiftly expanding first wave ofliterature borne ofthe events of 9/11, joining recent works like Jay Mclnerney's The GoodLife (2006), Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), and John Barth's The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004), along with those from shores abroad, including notables like Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005) and Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World (2003). Kalfus enters this arena with two story collections and a prior novel to his name, books that have earned him a reputation for fine, inventive prose that delights in skewering the absurd, particularly the politically bent. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country largely underscores these traits, as well as the notion that Kalfus is a writer to be reckoned with: a talented wordsmith and critical prankster, yes, but one that bears distinction; a voice that feels somehow vital; a barker's call of the now, arch and elegant by turns. Admirable attributes aside, though, the novel's tale of one New York couple's marital and moral implosion in the year following 9/1 1 falls prey to the very flaws one imagines Kalfus would have taken the most pains to avoid—frustrating interludes that pander to The Things This Book Wants to Say and the Parallels It Would Like to Draw between the cultural moment in question and the central narrative at hand, rough patches that distract from the quality and momentum of the highly entertaining, often engrossing passages in between. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country is, at base, a study in dissolution: it is the story of Joyce and Marshall Harriman's marital union's demise; of each Harriman's descent from embittered spouse to vengeful victim; and of the frayed states of our nation—condemning portraits of soul and psyche...

The Book Review as Closet Drama

The Book Review as Closet Drama

Stuff That Happened To Me: Visuelle Verfahren in Jonathan Safran Foers Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005)

The essay is based on the manuscript for the presentation I gave at the symposium. It describes visual strategies in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), connecting them with their tradition in literature, showing the selfreflexivity of the text and providing a, if not the only, useful approach to analyzing them: as visualizations of trauma and at the same time as attempts to overcome the trauma by binding it in a narrative.