extremely loud and incredibly close by jonathan safran foer

Art Spiegelman depicts himself as a cartoon character suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and conjures up traumatic memories. What is at stake here, is a visual questioning on the possibility of narrating the unspeakable.ĥThe graphic choices in the second plate of In The Shadow of No Towers point to a similar, if symmetric, questioning.

While the grandfather urges “It’s unspeakable, write it” ( Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close 124), the novel delivers but a series of blank pages (120-123), thus materializing the void bestowed upon us by the story’s “two thousand white pages” (124). It is apparent for instance in the visual answer Foer provides to one his characters’ assertions to write the unspeakable. 2ĤTrauma theory and the representation of trauma, provide the background on which both works are set. 2 According to Jonathan Safran Foer “ Both the Holocaust and 9/11 were events that demanded retelling (.)ģThe impetus behind 9/11 literature can thus be seen as an attempt to look beyond the “ theatrical spectacle” put on by the media, or as an effort to make sense of the “desert of the real.” I would like to examine Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers from this perspective, that is, I would like to consider the narrative momentum that drives the (re)telling.Was it not something of a similar order that took place in New York on September 11? Its citizens were introduced to the ‘desert of the real’-for us, corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots of the collapsing towers could not but be reminiscent of the most breathtaking scenes in big catastrophe productions. Žižek weaves the hollywoodian comparison further, and argues that those who experienced the event on television felt something akin to what is presented in the movie The Matrix (1999) when “the hero awakens into ‘real reality’ sees a desolate landscape littered with burnt-out ruins,” what the movie exposes as “the desert of the real” 1 (15): The plane becomes “the ultimate Hitchcockian blot, the anamorphic stain which denaturalized the idyllic well-know New York landscape” (14-15).

1 The reference to “the desert of the real” in The Matrix is to Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Sim (.)ĢAs Žižek explains “the endless repeated shot of the plane approaching and hitting the second WTC tower” can be viewed as “the real-life version of the famous scene from Hitchcock’s Birds” in which Melanie’s head is hit by a bird.

Extremely loud and incredibly close by jonathan safran foer