The precarious geopolitics of urban encounters in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

ABSTRACT

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks on America, grief has been co-opted to legitimize the fortification and fragmentation of cities. Whilst geographical works have emerged to critique the emotive infrastructures that underpin such urban-centric, militaristic initiatives, they fall short of providing positive interventions against this so-called ‘new military urbanism’. This paper addresses the aforementioned lacuna by taking up calls to explore possibilities for counter-geographies that spatialize the world in less violent ways. Drawing on geographers’ reworkings of Judith Butler’s philosophical musings on precariousness/precarity and non-violence and fusing them with literatures pertaining to urban encounters, we propose that Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ELIC) (2005), reimagines the post-traumatic city as a place in which embodied encounters with grief occur. Although these encounters are not pre-given to non-violence, they entail the possibility of revealing a shared, generalized condition of precariousness from which non-violent imperatives might arise. As such, ELIC can serve to ignite further reflections of the processes, relationships and avenues that nourish the emotive premises of non-violence for the defence of precarious lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarious
• geopolitics
• non-violence
• urban encounters
• literary geographies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The vulnerability of cities and urban life in the post-9/11 era has been emphasised by many writers. A sizable corpus of such works focuses on how mega-sporting events held in cities after 9/11 (e.g. the Olympic Games) are at high risk of being targeted by terror attacks and have thus been subjected to intense surveillance and securitzation practices (see Boyle and Haggerty 2009, 2012).

2 We acknowledge that there have been many different conceptualizations/usages of the related terms of precariousness and precarity (see Puar 2012). Connolly (2013) for example talks about precarity in terms of the fragilities of our contemporary condition as they are created by conjunctions between unfettered capitalism and non-human (ecological) systems. This paper however builds on critical readings of Butler by mobilising precariousness/precarity as an existential concept – expounding on the vulnerabilities of human lives and bodies and their relationships (state) violence.

3 The field of literary geography has expanded rapidly in recent years. One key trend has been for geographers to express their research (process) in non-traditional forms such as poems, drama and photography. As Lorimer (2008, 182) points out, greater attention is being ‘placed on the creative performance, presentation and writing of geographical studies of place’. However, we situate this paper in more ‘traditional’ literary geographies to ‘read’ and interpret literary fiction and underscore their relevance for the material world.

4 That is, Oskar knows that his father died during the attacks on the World Trade Centre, but he feels compelled to understand how exactly he died: did he die trapped in an elevator, did he jump, or was it something different altogether? As Oskar puts it, ‘there were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his’ (Foer 2005, 257).

5 Some examples of post-9/11 fiction that employ several intertwined first-person narratives include David Levithan’s Love is the Higher Law (2009), Sarah Winman’s When God Was a Rabbit (2011) and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009).

6 Complex links between urban terrorism and Europe’s so-called ‘refugee crisis’ – itself playing out in cities across the continent – appear to be surfacing, but these are beyond the scope of our paper. The refugee crisis, too, is underscored by a complex politics of grief (see for e.g. Stierl 2016).