A New and Ancient Form for a New and Ancient Tragedy

Jonathan Safran Foer's Post-Postmodernism

BY CLAIRE HARLAN-ORSI

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Foer

FIFTEEN DAYS AFTER the September 11 attacks, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote the following in The Nation: "Planes stuffed with innocent victims, including children, ripped through more than skyscrapers. They ripped through the greatest books: the Bible, the Koran, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Whitman. Many of the world's museums, dedicated to World War II, warn us of the potential catastrophe of culture by exhibiting books pierced by bullets. But where could we show skyscrapers pierced by planes? These planes were exploded inside us, and their fragments forever will wander under our skin."

What could Yevtushenko have meant when he wrote that the planes "ripped through the greatest books?" After all, the books of these masters remain unchanged today. Yet in some essential way, they have changed. No matter what anyone might rightly say about the tenacious survival of humanity's cynical nature, a tragedy necessarily changes some things, and one of these is the way we read. All of us who are alive today hold in ourselves certain indelible historical sadnesses that pile up on top of one another to affect our consciousnesses, both national and individual, in varying ways. So after this new sadness, those of us who are reading Dante or Dostoevsky are in some subtle way reading them differently. And we might find in these texts infinite relevance to our modern world, or we might find that this relevance is in fact finite, that the space opened by the bullet must necessarily be closed by something new.

The Search For Something Else

Recently, a few writers have made their own valiant attempts to fill this space. The most prominent of them may be the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, a 28-year-old whiz kid who was writing his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), as an undergraduate at Princeton. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer's second novel, details the adventures of 9-year-old Oskar Schell, who loses his father in the World Trade Center attacks and wanders around New York City in an attempt to resolve some of the tangible elements related to his existential despair.

The book incorporates all the contrivances of postmodern literature, all the (somewhere after postmodern) innovations of the Dave Eggers school, and some added textual spice that may be unique to Foer: double narratives, letters, photographs, handwriting, blank pages, black pages, color, self-conscious inter-textuality, deliberate homage, red cross-outs, and even a flip-book.

These textual fireworks, and not much else, appear to be the reason why everyone dislikes this book. By everyone I mean most critics, since the novel is on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list this week-not bad for a quintessentially literary book full of gimmicks that supposedly alienate readers. Among the critics, however, there is nary an unqualified good review to be found. "An admirably purposeful but ultimately mannered and irritating novel," Michiko Kakutani wrote in a March 22 Times review. Walter Kirn's acerbic Sunday Times review contained the devastating assessment that the book represented "a triumph of human cuteness over human suffering."

There is an interesting paradox at work here. On the one hand, reviewers are reacting with a seemingly reflexive-used as they are to deriding non-traditional compositions-negativity to the myriad of playful inter-textual touches within the novel. This reflexivity may be borne out of a fear of Foer's youth and his Princeton-bred intellectual precociousness that might seem annoying in the same way as Oskar Schell's manic spurts of quiz-show prodigy-type narration. These reviewers must have been thinking that someone, most likely everyone else besides themselves, was going to write the inevitable "this heralds the beginning of a new narrative form, the voice of a new generation" review. Some part of Foer's persona and his wildly ambitious work seem to be asking for it.

On the other hand, reviewers tended to focus the remaining half of their attention on a facet of the novel that seems the opposite of its postmodern flair: Foer's overarching sensibility, which is one of almost heartbreaking vulnerability. This vulnerability seems anathema to what his critics have denounced as the cold, alienating, intellectual spirit of the photographic and narrative techniques. No one acknowledges this contradiction, preferring to shift their focus to denouncing the heady emotional charge of the novel, which seems just as vulnerable to critique. Yet this pairing of surface narrative ingenuity with genuine literary pathos is both the novel's sustaining force and its ultimate innovation.

[Meta-]

This innovation is nothing new; in fact nothing in this book is truly new. All of Foer's characters are amalgams or homages to his literary past. The critics all point out Oskar's similarity to the great Holden Caulfield, a comparison from which no disaffected male character between the ages of 7 and 27 seems to be exempt, but no one acknowledges that Salinger's juvenile creation was as much a dusting off of his literary predecessors as Foer's. The blatant presence of these influences in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close suggests a level of predetermination on Foer's part that speaks not to a blind hope that reviewers won't "catch" him in an act of surface plagiarizing, but rather to a need to express a particular position on the malleability of literary influence.

So it seems the author is ahead of his critics once again, engaged in the same old meta-criticism. You might think Foer knows everything, and you'd have to wonder how much longer this kind of literary self-consciousness can sustain itself. But that would be before you read a sex scene like this:

I was in her for only a second before I burst into flames, she whimpered, Mr. Goldberg stomped his foot and let out a cry like a wounded animal, I asked her if she was upset, she shook her head no, I fell onto her, resting my cheek against her chest, and I saw your mother's face in the second-floor window, 'Then why are you crying?' I asked, exhausted and experienced, 'War!' Mr. Goldberg said, angry and defeated, his voice trembling: 'We go on killing each other to no purpose! It is war waged by humanity against humanity, and it will only end when there's no one left to fight!' She said, 'It hurt.'

The narrative here is complex and hyper-literary in its simultaneous juxtaposition of two different voices and world views. This is itself no more innovative then when Virginia Woolf used a similar technique 80 years before. It is clever, yet crucially, it is not just clever for the sake of cleverness.

These voices are not the snide and self-satisfied voices of characters created by an author who wants to know more than his readers. These are the voices of infinitely yearning, heartbreakingly earnest characters who always seem to have more to lose. Foer has little of most contemporary authors' reflexive paranoia about clichés (take "burst into flames") or qualms about delving into the simple roots of the language his characters inhabit. He creates post-post-modern characters who would be emotionally at home in any century.

Oskar, whose personality inspires the kind of expressions vocalized in reviews like Kakutani's as "exasperating precocity," is actually extremely annoying. Yet in denouncing Foer for his unlikable narrator, Kakutani misses a simple truth that has been obvious to people for centuries: 9-year-old boys are always annoying. Kakutani's assertion that Oskar "should be a highly sensitive character" is laughable; in both a psychological and literary sense, it implies a normative mode of suffering that must necessarily restrict anyone who wants to represent tragedy.

Oskar's grandparents, whose experience of the bombing of Dresden forms the second narrative layer of this novel, are likewise drawn with extraordinary complexity. Their humanity, as seen though their own eyes and the eyes of others, forms a psychologically complicated and paradoxically compelling whole. Foer has done more in this book to humanize the elderly than any sappy grandmotherly Hollywood film could

ever do. In fact, Foer's relationships might just embody the very essence of the anti-Hollywood. His marriages (both in this novel and in Everything Is Illuminated) rarely work out, yet people keep living with each other, keep loving each other, move out, move back in, fall in love again and hate their partners, continuing this weird cycle of endless compromising.

There Are Certain Truths After All

Just as Foer captures something of the essentially crazy nature of human relationships, he manages to structure his narrative in a way that reflects the reality of tragedy itself. When considered in the context of how people experienced September 11, Foer's textual innovations hardly seem superfluous. Just as photographs interrupt this novel, our lives during that tragedy and now are continually interrupted by pictures, not all of them necessarily meaningful or connected with some traditional, conscious narrative. These photographs-as well as everything else that is inserted into and then becomes an indelible part of this novel-disrupt our sense of time as linear, much like we had to keep reliving the falling of the towers. Foer's time is both flighty and burdened with a sense of the historical. As much as September 11 was a new tragedy in many ways, it was also as old as time itself; there have always been orphaned children and grieving wives, lost people and alienated communities. This essential continuity of grief over the ages is reflected in the narratives of Oskar's grandparents, who experience Dresden in ways that are profoundly different but fundamentally related to the experience of their grandson.

Foer's narrative techniques, then, work to his advantage, exposing real and important continuities of human experience. To chalk this up to pretentious technical fireworks and then fail to engage the novel reflects a distressing lack of intellectual generosity. There are so many simple truths here: that people are complex, that time is enigmatic and history leaves its mark, that images change our lives, that 9-year-old boys are annoying. It may seem strange to talk about the existence of truths in such a technically post-modern novel. Yet this duality is exactly where the real value of the book lies. We should be so lucky to have writers who search ceaselessly for narrative innovation while always striving to acknowledge the humanity of the worlds they create.

Claire Harlan-Orsi B'07 is a highly sensible character

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