Mafuá

ABSTRACT: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), a postmodernist novel written by Jonathan Safran Foer, makes use of unorthodox elements to complete the narrative. The book presents several photographs in black and white, colors, blank pages, pages marked up with red pen, overlapping words, pages with only one word or sentence, among other elements. These elements make the reader get closer to the first person narrators existent in the narrative, as if they were in contact with these narrators, seeing through the narrator’s eyes. This closeness brings the idea of interaction between reader and narrator. This study aims to analyze and make considerations about the use of unorthodox elements in relation to the process of reaffirmation and destruction of memory, and also the issue of individual and collective trauma overcoming which was caused by the attacks of 9/11.

Keywords: 9/11; Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close; Images; Memory; Trauma.

RESUMO: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), de Jonathan Safran Foer, é um romance pós-moderno que usa elementos não-ortodoxos para completar sua narrativa. O livro apresenta diversas fotografias em preto-e-branco, bem como cores, páginas em branco, sobreposição de palavras, páginas com apenas uma palavra ou uma frase, entre outros elementos. Esses elementos fazem com que o leitor fique mais próximo dos narradores em primeira pessoa existentes na narrativa, como se estivesse em contato com esses narradores, vendo através dos olhos dos mesmos. Essa proximidade nos traz uma idéia de interação entre narrador-leitor. Este trabalho pretende analisar e tecer considerações acerca do uso desses elementos não-ortodoxos em relação aos processos de reafirmação e desconstrução da memória, bem como à questão da superação do trauma individual e coletivo causado pelos atentados do 11 de setembro.

Palavras-chave: 11 de setembro; Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close; Imagens; Memória; Trauma.

There are not many novels, in the tradition of postmodernism[i], which rely on elements other than the written word. Drawings and photographs, for instance, are more commonly seen as belonging to the realm of children’s fiction than in adult fiction; however, the adult novels which do use those elements do so not as a mere gimmick but as a form of expanding the meaning of the written word. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), a postmodernist novel written by Jonathan Safran Foer, makes use of unorthodox elements to complete the narrative. Among them the reader can find several photographs in black and white, colors, blank pages, pages marked up with red pen, overlapping words, pages with only one word or sentence, etc. These elements can be found over Oskar Schell’s narrative, his grandfather’s narrative and his grandmother’s narrative.

The readers’ relation with a first person narrator is already, by definition, a close one: all the facts are presented through the narrator’s point of view and all the assumptions the readers make are filtered through the narrative prism of what s/he wants readers to see. The unorthodox, imagetic elements have the power to make the relation between narrator and reader even closer: the narrator is able to present the readers with the exact images s/he is faced with the narrative, making readers his/her accomplices. This can be seen, for example, in the many episodes when Oskar, a nine-year-old boy and one of the narrators of the novel whose father died in the attacks in 9/11, sees something relevant for him or even when he quotes his scrapbook called “Stuff that happened to me”. When this happens, the reader is presented to images, so s/he has a greater understanding of Oskar’s narrative, far beyond comprehension only through the written text, but there is a limitation on the possibilities for the reader’s thoughts, as these elements direct them more and more through the narrator’s perspective. According to César Guimarães (1997, p. 64), in his book Imagens da Memória (1997), “the narrative image, constituted by linguistic signs, when approached to visual images, suffers a kind of ‘alteration’ in its strictly linguistic nature”[ii]. Thus, when the reader does not have enough elements, s/he creates his/her own images through and because of memory; but when these images are provided to the reader, a collective memory, created and then shown by the narrator, and accepted and consumed by the reader is formed. What the reader has in the images are additions to Oskar’s narrative, the images are used as a reaffirmation or a destruction of the image created by the reader, as an example of this, we have in the pictures 1 and 2 images from Oskar’s Stuff that happened to me, in the first picture the reader is presented to an image of Stephen Hawking and in the second to an image of Hamlet.

PICTURE 1 – Stephen Hawking (Source: FOER, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 2006, 54)

PICTURE 2 – Hamlet (Source: FOER, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 2006, 55)

The images, one of the main elements used by Oskar, are presented to the reader with a meaning already constructed by the narrator. Even those images that the reader is unaware of or ignorant about are then discovered with the help of the text or by exterior aid, and that makes the reader’s imagination limited with the presentation of what the narrator sees or/and wants to be seen by the one who is reading the novel. Mitchum Huehls, in the article Foer, Spiegelman, and 9/11’s Timely Traumas, sees some of the images inside Oskar’s narrative and the image of the falling man – one of the most unforgettable images of the attacks in 9/11 – as something temporal, something that tries to represent reality, and even without a chronology these images construct a real existence to the readers. In his narrative, Oskar shows to the reader what he sees and these images give meaning to some things that once were in constantly movement. Mitchum Huehls says

After all, images, particularly the still photographs included in Foer’s text, represent stable and self-contained slivers of time. Functioning by analogy and simile, they tend to reduce, hypostatize, and impose meaning on a constantly moving reality better captured through cinema’s diachronic form. (HUEHLS, 2008, p. 45)

This image of the falling man is found in Oskar’s narrative (FOER, 2006, p. 59), as we can see in picture 3, and then in the end of the book, when the reader can flip the pages to see the falling man returning to top of the World Trade Center. In this end, Oskar has decided to move on with his life, even though he still makes assumptions to relieve his trauma and, from these images, Oskar’s decision and doubts can be seen, according to Mitchum Huehls (2008, p.43)  in “its temporal form – the flip-book’s cinematic, real-time performance of motion – [which] proves crucial to Oskar’s healing process”. This postmodern element interacts with the reader, giving the possibility to see and feel what the narrator sees and feels.

PICTURE 3 – Falling Man (Source: FOER, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 2006, 59)

Another element present and relevant in Oskar’s narrative is the use of colors in some of the pages of the novel, as it can be seen in pictures 4 and 5, where the reader is presented to a representation of papers used to test pens. In those, the reader can see an example of the intrinsic and arbitrary connection between signifier and signified. In those pages a harmony between the image and its meaning is found, serving as reinforcement for the expected, the predictable. When the reader is presented to the first colored images, s/he sees something that makes him/her think about how predictable humans are, even if this predictable element is something that humans unconsciously do, and these images are there because they are necessary to help the reader reinforce this awareness.

PICTURE 4 – Reproduction of the paper used to test pens. (Source: FOER, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 2006, 45)

PICTURE 5 – Reproduction of the paper used to test pens. (Source: FOER, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 2006, 48)

However, not all uses of color in the novel construct that idea. When, in the narrative, the narrator present the word Purple written in green ink, as we can see in picture 6, there is a break of the predictable and from this break is possible to do an analysis of this semantic and syntactic breaks, because of linking this image with the images presented in pictures 4 and 5,  the reader can see a color that does not mean what it is, it simply loses its meaning when it is written with a different color ink, therefore the reader sees this as a challenge to what people usually do and/or how things should be. If those images were not colored, its purposes and meanings would not be seen and understood in the required manner.

PICTURE 6 – Reproduction of the word Purple written in green ink. (Source: FOER, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 2006, 63)

In the narrative of Thomas Schell, who is Oskar’s grandfather and one of the narrator of the novel, the colors can also be found but in a different position. Throughout the narrative, the reader is presented to a letter marked up with red pen, as it can be seen in picture 7, giving a feeling of reading something not only already read but also corrected and edited. Oskar’s father used to do those markings in the New York Times, so the reader has a clue that Thomas Jr. must have read at least one of the letters from his father – something that is confirmed along the novel. Through semiotic theory, the reader can see those marks in red ink as an index – sign that is indicator of a fact or condition – because they are marks lived on the text to show the reader something, and this something is, as it was said before, a clue to the reader.

PICTURE 7 – Reproduction of a letter of Thomas Schell with red ink marks. (Source: FOER, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 2006, 208-209)

On the other hand, most of the images are in black and white, which gives the idea that after the 9/11 attacks there is no more room for colors, that there is a lack of happiness, a sense of overarching trauma and that the world is in black and white. Moreover, the reader can find a metaphorical image of New York after the attacks of 9/11 (FOER, 2006, p. 60-61), presented in picture 8, reinforcing the idea that the world was no longer the same and showing the reader how the narrator, Oskar, sees the city after that. Everything that Oskar relates to him is not able to be related to the idea of happiness because of his trauma.

PICTURE 8 – Metaphorical image of New York. (Source: FOER, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 2006, 60-61)

New York is a city constructed through common knowledge and it makes the reader’s image construction – through memory – easier, which, once again, gives the readers an affirmation or deconstruction of the image created by him/her, besides constructing a new perspective of the city of New York when the reader is presented to its images through the eyes of the narrators, as it can be seen in pictures 9, 10 and 11.

PICTURE 9 – New York and the light representing the World Trade Center. (Source: FOER, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 2006, 253)

PICTURE 10 – Brooklyn Bridge. (Source: FOER, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 2006, 89)

PICTURE 11 – Empire State Building. (Source: FOER, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 2006, 246)

Therefore, the unorthodox elements that can be found along the narrative of the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are artifices which aim is to reach a certain degree of intimacy with the reader. Thus, when the reader is taken inside the meaning of such elements it makes the reader’s imagination gets used to the limits given by the narrator in the flow of the events, his/her imagination becomes secondary and the images presented serve as a guidance to the reader’s memory, for Guimarães (1997, p. 70) “for memory, just an image”[iii]. It happens mainly through the images, for example, where the narrator works with images in black and white it is created to the reader a feeling that express the vision of the narrator about facts and events. When the narrator uses only texts as a source to bring his point of view, the reader has freedom to imagine anything he wants to. The use of this unorthodox elements can be a simply and effective mean when the narrator’s objective is to pass on his thoughts and his point of view about the things, and this way of transmitting can be certainly effective to the understanding of the narrative, but it can also make more difficult to see things, but the merit is in having the reader analyse and understand an image or the whole text through an image from the narrator’s optical and this, in most of the times, is achieved with success.

References

BARTHES, R. A câmara clara: nota sobre a fotografia. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1984.

________. Elementos de semiologia. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1977.

CONNOR, Steven. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 1-19.

FOER, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. England: Penguin Books, 2006.

GUIMARÃES, C. Imagens da Memória. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 1997.

GREIMAS, A. J. COURTÉS, J. Dicionário de Semiótica. São Paulo: Contexto, 2008.

HUEHLS, Mitchum. Foer, Spiegelman, and 9/11’s Timely Traumas. In: Keniston, Ann; Quinn, Jeanne Follansbee. Literature after 9/11. New York: Routledge, 2008. p. 42-59.

KOSSOY, Boris. Fotografia & História. São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 2001.

PLAZA, Julio. Tradução Intersemiótica. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2008.

* Este trabalho é integrante do Grupo de Pesquisa “O Onze de Setembro nas Literaturas de Língua Inglesa”, coordenado pelo Prof. Dr. Eduardo Marks de Marques.

[i] According to Steven Connor in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism it was “always a phenomenon of cultural interference, the crossing or conjugation of ideas and values.” (2004, p. 17) bringing the notion that postmodernism aim is to expose the world, people, experiences and ideas, and besides being connected to cultural studies it intends to perpetuate its present.

[ii] Free translation of “a imagem narrativa, constituída de signos lingüísticos, ao aproximar-se das imagens visuais, sofre uma espécie de ‘alteração’ em sua natureza estritamente lingüística”

[iii] Free translation of “para a memória, justo uma imagem”.