“Why I am writing from where you are not”: Absence and presence in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Abstract

In this article, I demonstrate how Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close creates counter‐narratives through the text’s representation of multiple voices within complex meta‐textual narrative structures. Foer exploits the narrative structures/styles of conventional novels by delving into Bildungsroman, confessional realism, and one‐sided epistolary arrangements in order to represent the chaos and lacunas of traumatic events. Both the meta‐textual and the twists on traditional narrative forms create aesthetic artifacts that disrupt reader expectation and amplify the sites of transference holding readers accountable for the retention of cultural memory, thus making it possible to engage in trauma literature in ethical‐empathetic ways.

Keywords:

• Jonathan Safran Foer
• contemporary American fiction
• trauma theory
• novel as discursive act
• cultural memory

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Gideon Kennedy, Sara Littlejohn and Nancy Myers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. Dori Laub’s term. See “Truth and Testimony: The Process of the Struggle” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth.

2. This idea of framing comes from Marianne Hirsch’s allusion to Roland Barthes’s labeling of photography as “flat death”. Hirsch’s reflection on documenting the events of 9/11 through photography builds upon the idea of “miniaturizing death [as] a coping strategy” (77). See “I Took Pictures: September 2001 and Beyond”.

3. Bakhtin writes of the utterance act: “An act of our activity, of our actual experiencing, is like a two‐faced Janus. It looks in two opposite directions: it looks at the objective unity of a domain of culture and at the never‐repeatable uniqueness of actually lived and experienced life” (Toward 2).

4. Bakhtin’s concept of “creative understanding” is an integral part of this approach. As he writes: “In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding – in time, in space, in culture” (Art 7). Bakhtin views the act of empathizing with another as the creation of an active relationship with another.