since i’m teaching this, i just reread it. my students are loving it, but i’m liking it as much as i did the first time, which is so-so. when i first read it i gobbled it up like it was junk fiction — i couldn’t stop reading. this time i thought i’d read more slowly and reflectively, and come up with something interesting to say, but it was the same as the first time: i found the book incredibly mesmerizing, charming, and moving, but i have little to say about it. maybe the most interesting feature of this book is its postmodern playfulness and intricacy — the chronological overlapping of the three narratives that constitute it, the slow unfolding of intersecting plots, the myriad coincidences that are not coincidences, the simultaneous meaningfulness and meaninglessness of everything, the protagonists’ deep isolation in the sprawling city, the human connections they are constantly making and dissolving with each other and other people, the ineffectiveness yet indispensable quality of language, the reworking of collective tragedy in terms of personal drama, the reworking of personal tragedies in terms of collective drama, et cetera et cetera.
yet i find all this, in this book, barely more than cute. this book is so compulsively readable because it’s so cute, but when it comes to analyzing it, to teaching it, i find i have nothing to say. this same nothingness seems to have affected my students, who went from being the most vocal class i’ve ever had to being virtually mute. they are bowled over by the novel in their journals, but have nothing to say about it in class.
what is there to say about ELIC? i don’t know. i have been trying to read it in terms of trauma theory but don’t want to go there because the book is too cute, too sentimental, and it’s not a testimony in any meaningful sense of the word (that i know of). does a book have to be a testimony in order to be analyzed in terms of trauma? i think so. i think it needs to be serious, you know. trauma is serious business, after all. it leaves people and communities devastated. it ruins the mind. it ravages the land. trauma is not playful territory and i am squeamish about treating a playful narrative as traumatic.
what was foer trying to do when he wrote ELIC? was he trying to come to terms with 9/11? one of the problems here is that 9/11 is a fairly banal tragedy in this book, as tragedies go. oskar’s father, thomas, who dies in the WTC during a breakfast meeting, could have died in a host of other ways and the book wouldn’t have been very different. the national and global significance of 9/11 is never even obliquely addressed. the terrorists are barely mentioned. the collapse of the towers is tragic for oskar only because his daddy was in one of them. this is not an oversight on foer’s part. he clearly juxtaposes the terrible tragedies of the firebombing of dresden and of the nuclear bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki to the 9/11 attacks, and gives the latter, it seems to me, short shrift by making it a very personal tragedy in the life of a very sweet little boy. whereas dresden and hiroshima are presented as collective events, 9/11 is described here only through oskar’s loss of his dad. this may have something to do with the fact that the audience of ELIC is aware of the political import of 9/11 in a way in which it may not be of the occurrence, let alone the significance, of dresden and hiroshima. foer does not need to remind us what 9/11 is about. still, one wonders.
the theme of ELIC, if this book can be boiled down to one theme, is the hopelessness and agony of love. we are all destined to lose each other, both when we physically have each other and when we don’t. at the end, [SPOILERS] everyone is alone, crying him or herself to sleep or sitting in an airport with nowhere to go. oskar’s lock-and-key search leads nowhere, his father’s coffin contains love letters neither he nor anyone else will ever read, love remains undeclared, and a lot of people who could have loved each other and supported each other are locked inside their personal hells, unable to tell each other anything except through letters the addressees never even get to see. this is not to say that this isn’t a tender book, because it most certainly is. these people love each other very much, and oskar is as luminous a literary creation as any. but they also make each other very sad, or, at least, they fail to alleviate each other’s pain and keep each other good, safe, lasting company. which may or may not have anything to do with 9/11.
Some great points, Gio. Some reactions, not entirely consistent or coherent or fully-developed:
a) You made a good point, in another thread where I brought up the wholly personal reactions of characters in Clare Messud’s novel _The Emperor’s Children_, that “tragedies do have a personal dimension”–and that such personal reactions may be mechanisms for positive personal growth. It struck me then as a good point; is there any reason why Oskar’s reactions (or Foer’s construction/deployment of his character’s problems) are different from other ‘personal’ reactions to the events of 9/11/01?
You also have noted elsewhere a utility for earnestness–something Michael and I had a harder time appreciating, in some of the discussion on poetry, for instance. I’m NOT calling you out–I’m just trying to tease out some definitions, where something turns from being earnest and passionate to cute, or from being personally productive to being narcissistic?
I ask it of you but I am also asking it of myself and others–(b)–as it seems a really interesting recurrent dilemma in various literary reactions to 9/11: the personal becomes the only way for people to tackle the political. There are some obvious answers: we experience 9/11, Afghanistan, the war on terror through our own personal lives. So it makes sense that we’d see narratives of people trying to make sense of “history” (the event, the trauma) in relation to their own personal worlds/understandings.
But I just finished Mohsin Hamid’s _The Reluctant Fundamentalist_–a novel which in many ways works, but is so elaborately designed, so fussily attentive to its structural mechanics and its narrative purpose that it seems less effective as a novel, more a set of arguments revealed through character. (That’s a capsule review, and a digression from my point here.) In it, the Pakistani college-student-now-successful-business-shark experiences 9/11 differently from his colleagues, and it exposes (or heightens? or creates?) tensions between his own specific history and the American approach to the world. What I found interesting is that despite the more explicit political critique of the novel, its approach to that political critique is still determinedly, explicitly personal: it is protagonist Changez’ personal reactions and experiences of his identity which wholly inform his understanding of politics.
So my question is: does 9/11 and our reactions to 9/11 reveal a shift in the way the political is now understood primarily through the personal? (We might also add: do narratives of 9/11 reflect the way we cannot approach trauma except through a psychological framework? I.e., we perceive, not just interpret, the event as personal, psychological — with perhaps political dimensions?) As opposed, say, to our understandings of JFK’s or MLK’s assassination (both of which might also be somewhat banal, as traumas, but significant, as historical events) which generated at least initially and for some time significant political debate — or of Hiroshima, or Dresden, or any number of genocides?
That’s not entirely clear, but: in a nutshell, do our narratives of 9/11 reveal a fundamental shift in the ways we perceive history, geopolitics, and trauma? (And this seems to me to be Don DeLillo’s primary thesis in both _Libra_ and _Mao II_–and I very much look forward to what he gets up to in his 9/11 novel…)
c) Last bit: what I think Oskar lacks, and Foer seems a bit distant from as well, is a sense of irony. It is hard to find a critical distance from Oskar’s understanding of the events of 9/11, and without that critical detachment from the character’s perceptions (so crucial in Messud, LaBute, Kalfus, Walter, Hamid…) the novel fades into at best a bland sincerity and at worst kitsch?
(I don’t really totally buy the above. I think Foer’s book’s metafictional conceits are the ways it produces a critical distance. That said, I too find the book almost too sincere in its emotions to engender much reaction at all….)
Okay, enough provocation. Back to y’all…
My initial response is to say that I think we have become rather unable to talk about politics in a serious collective way any more–that, yes, we see the political through the personal, but the personal has become reified. Perceiving all trauma through a personal psychological framework (as you put it, Mike) has stunted our politics. It is also true, I think, that we have cultivated a rather limited approach to “the personal”–as the ability to perceive politics through the psychological frameworks of others would necessarily result in some kind of collective politics. I think we are at an impasse–unable to come to terms with shared qualities with others, while refusing to think in so-called discredited “large terms.” I don’t know enough about contemporary fiction to understand how novelists come to terms with the personal/political dilemma but I wonder, Mike, if you see anyone who is unsettling the stabilities of the personal while confronting the political.
A quick note before I retire, but:
–the Kalfus book actually turns my argument on its head. It’s about the best thing I’ve read so far.
–I think DeLillo has been both mapping and interrogating the way ’self’ overtakes subject and history and politics. Benjamin Kunkel’s book _Indecision_ starts with the apathetic slacker self struck dumb by 9/11, but the character grows into geopolitics and economics through the novel–not just becoming a “better person,” but reframing how to think about action and ethics. I think Jennifer Egan’s _Look at Me_ (published right at/after 9/11/01) got inside and challenged the self-absorption yet also set it up against/with a social, historical sensibility. I’ll try to think of others–but I am struck by how many critiques of the cultures of “self” (like Messud) still end up reifying, as Michael notes, that approach.
I’m puzzling over my own definitions and reactions, so I apologize for my confusion, and for causing any in you.
I just read–and really disliked–Neil Labute’s “The Mercy Seat,” and in his introduction as well as throughout the play he enacts exactly what I’m trying to name above. He refers to his writing of the play, how it ended up revealing something like “the ground zero” in our hearts and between us. And throughout the play, we watch people not very honest with themselves and their intimates grapple–as dust and ash from the Trade Centers covers everything–with moral decisions. The events of 9/11 serve as catalyst and context, but in such fictions the terrorist attacks are (merely?) useful metaphors for what ails us. In some instances, there’s a heartfelt earnest sense that 9/11’s tragedy reveals and then perhaps redeems the disconnect of our everyday moral lives. (A film like The Great New Wonderful does this, horribly; perhaps JSFoer is up to something similar, about the existential pain of love and loss.) Suche earnest attention to the self isn’t necessarily bad or wrong or an immoral use of the events … or at least I’m not arguing such. But I am struck by how it keeps the narrative centered in the realm of American narcissism.
Even when a fiction criticizes such self-absorbed reactions to 9/11–as in Labute and Messud and some others–nonetheless it strikes me that we are being invited to read the failures of these “selves,” the lapsed or absent morality of these characters–and, again, 9/11 becomes backdrop and background and banal symbol for these individuals in the fore. We still read the events through the prism of an individualized morality, an individualized sense of psychology, a personal reaction to trauma.
Kalfus does something really damn interesting: he foregrounds this vicious divorce, these two characters behaving horribly, and 9/11–then the bombing of the Taliban, the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, suicide bombings in Israel, the search for WMD and the invasion of Iraq–are the background events in each chapter. As the world turns, the characters engage with one another in ways that riff on, resemble, resonate off the geopolitical. Seems like the same thing I’m questioning… yet I think Kalfus’ book enacts a reversal, so that the central characters–these selves–are the metaphors, the figurative devices which allow us in this narrative to grapple with the ethics and social contexts of global political history. Rather than keeping us stuck in selves, we see these selves as metaphors of an American subjectivity, and the book’s corrosive energies become far more incisively political. For me, and my focus is less on testimony or witness than on historiography–how we represent and understand historical events, as means for shaping our actions and understandings in/of history–Kalfus does something really amazing.
But I realize in that last sentence that I’m coming at these narratives quite differently than Gio does, for instance–or at least I don’t pay as much attention to the nature of testimony and witness. (So, as a result, I may end up engaging a lot more with meta-narrative, meta-representational play; I may privilege irony over any notion of Truth; etc.)
sorry for not contributing to this great debate — yet. i need time to think, and i don’t have it. spring break coming up, though! in the meantime, michael, what does reification mean, in the context in which you use it?
Has anyone else read Craig Wright’s play “Recent Tragic Events”? It’s funny and very effective, and was produced for the first time at the one-year-after mark, almost exactly contemporaneous with Labute’s play.
It takes place on 9/12/01, in Minneapolis, as a couple start a blind date made confused by the events of the day before, and by the disappearance of one character’s twin sister. The play includes an appearance by that character’s great aunt, Joyce Carol Oates, who is played by a sock puppet on another character’s hand; the Stage Manager pops in at the beginning of each Act, telling us some details about the nature of the play; all this representational play dovetails precisely and without whimsy around issues of determinism and choice. I really dug it. And that issue (or issues: is history determined, are the forces of history buffeting us individuals about like pawns, do we have any agency?) emerges constantly through JFK narratives, and strikes me as another kind of counterpoint to the narcissistic iteration batted about above….
Gio,
I just mean that the “personal” has beccome naturalized, taken as a “thing” which exists outside of the forces that actually construct it. People too often take the circumstances of their lives–and the social conditions that create those circumstances–as something not open to change or even questioning. They’re just given. Perhaps many novelists, who have such as stake in the personal, give the private too much autonomy and thereby contribute to the naturalized quality of certain personal lives (particulary the middle class, professional classes they often make central?).
mike and michael,
a few days ago i wrote the longest, most thoughtful comment in reply to your observations. then i lost it. you can imagine the frustration. i said some pretty amazing things, but i can remember none of them and, furthermore, seem to have lost the capacity for recreating them.
i find the 9/11 has less and less meaning for me the more i think about it. what seems to have more and more meaning is all the mess that’s come out of it. i keep thinking: what would we feel had the towers crumbled because of an earthquake or a tsunami? 9/11 “means” nothing. death, even the death of many at the same time in the same place, means nothing. interpretation applies to what we do with that event. what *we* did with that event is to wreak a whole lot of national and international misery. with toni morrison, i wish we had given the dead a bit more time to die.
i wish i could say something that is more relevant to the debate that’s taken place above, but all those thoughts have dissolved in cyberspace, never to return.
I just finished ELIC, and I must say that I do agree with you about your interpretation of love. But I was, as a teacher of this book, did you find any similarities between how Oskar heals from pain and how the Blacks or his Grandparents heal?
chelsea,
i honestly don’t think there’s a lot of healing going on here. it seems like people try to heal, even make a little bit of progress towards that goal (oskar and his mom finally talk), but this accomplishes nothing at the end of the day. they are still as desperate and alone. is foer trying to tell us that you can’t heal? maybe that there is nothing to heal from while you are alive (life itself is the pain)? i don’t know, but i kind of suspect that might be the case.
what do you think?
p. 165
“Then, out of nowhere, a flock of birds flew by the window, extremely loud and incredibly close.”
As Abe Black regains his hearing, he regains his freedom. The birds (the first things to be noticed when he regains his hearing) symbolize this freedom. But why did Abe keep himself from this freedom in the first place? I think he had spent so much time hearing things that we’re not pleasing to his ears (wars and such), and he just wanted some peace and quiet for once (after his wife died). I don’t think that it ever occurred to him to turn the hearing aids back on because of the fact that he had no visitors. All of his friends and family had died, or not known of his whereabouts. He had no one to listen to or to talk to. I think his deafness symbolizes ignorance to one’s surroundings, and it can be compared to 9/11. Before the attack, the U.S. was not so cautious about the Middle East, and was not expecting the attack on that oh so lovely morning. Before Oskar, Abe was not aware of the beauty of hearing things. In a sense, after both occurrences, people woke up to reality. Abe discovered freedom. The U.S. discovered the need for awareness and protection. Both Abe and our country were missing something and found that something because of people coming along and changing perspectives. Abe and Oskar I found out relate in a way also: Abe’s wife dies and his hearing ends/Oskar’s dad dies and he no longer rides subways. People die and something is given up. A positive thing is given up after the death of a loved one. It’s like losing part of your heart. Like they are a part of your and take that part with them when they die.
alright, i have one more question to ask…what about the the story of the grandparents? why does the grandfather come back? what is the connection between oskar and his grandfather??
when did oskar meet Abe?
what did they do? and what did oskar learn from abe.