Department of English and American Studies. English Language and Literature

Transcription

1 Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Agáta Buganská Trauma Narratives in Jonathan Safran Foer s Novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Bachelor s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph. D. 2016

2 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography... Author s signature

3 Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph.D., for her valuable advice and patience.

4 Table of Contents Introduction The Psychology of Trauma: Narrativization and Interpretation Analysis of Trauma Narratives in Selected Works Storytelling and Experimental Writing in the Work of Jonathan S. Foer Truthfulness and Humor in Everything Is Illuminated Trauma and History in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Conclusion Bibliography Summary Resumé... 50

5 Introduction Representing Holocaust and the 9/11 has been approached in the work of a number of writers of both fiction and non-fiction worldwide. The work of a contemporary Jewish American author Jonathan Safran Foer counts among those who approach the historical significance of these events through fictional trauma narratives and attempt to comprehend the effects of traumatic history on both individual and collective identity. Contextualizing Foer s two popular novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close with contemporary trauma theory the following chapters aim to analyze the depiction of trauma in the novels protagonists and the narrative strategies that encourage both empathic and reflective reading. Both Foer s novels are considered experimental in their visual form. Therefore, the following analysis pays attention to the typographical and other visual oddities and their interpretations as well. The first chapter offers an insight into the theory of trauma. It is based on the work of popular trauma theorists, such as Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, psychiatrists and literary critics. The section offers a summary of the typical features of trauma, the intrusive phenomena and the latent appearance of the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. It discusses the processes of integration of traumatic experience in narrative memory and the necessity of composing a coherent narrative as a means of recovery from trauma. The chapter then focuses on the historiographical and fictional approaches to the representation of trauma and their differences. Lastly, it specifies the features and principles of trauma writing that invite empathic and critical reading, providing the following analyses with a theoretical background. 5

6 The second part of the novel then consists of three subchapters the first one of which is an introduction to the work of Jonathan Safran Foer. It stresses the meaning of retelling memories in Jewish tradition, briefly introduces Foer s literary work, and shows his attention to design, visual form, and experimental writing techniques. Some of them are already in this introduction presented in specific instances taken from the two analyzed novels. The following chapter offers an analysis of Foer s first novel Everything Is Illuminated. The analysis derives from the fact that Holocaust narratives often privilege historically accurate narratives to fiction, when introducing the novel s two protagonists and narrators Jonathan and Alex. It discusses Jonathan s choice to write a humorous and fantastical narrative about his ancestors Brod and Safran, and contrasts it with Alex s writing that dedicates its space to truthful interpretation of Alex s and Jonathan s journey and the testimonies of Grandfather and Lista, the survivors of Nazi pogroms in Ukraine. The analysis aims to discover how Foer achieves to convey the trauma experience intensively, and whether his writing avoids numbing of the historical experience while still inspiring sympathy. The last chapter is then dedicated to Foer s second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It focuses on the traumatizing effect of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 as depicted in the child protagonist and narrator Oscar Schell, whose father died in the World Trade Center that day. Through two secondary plotlines narrated by Oscar s grandparents, the novel looks at the current trauma through the lens of previous historical tragedies, the bombings of Hiroshima and Dresden in World War II. The analysis then stresses the importance of providing a trauma with historical context besides thoroughly investigating the structure of Oscar s trauma, its symptoms and, of course, the novel s visual imagery, non-textual and other illustrative elements. 6

7 1 The Psychology of Trauma: Narrativization and Interpretation The aim of this thesis is to concentrate on individual and collective trauma depicted in Foer s work rather than explore directly and into detail the psychiatry of trauma. However, it is necessary that the basic terms, concepts, and questions of the trauma theory are mentioned and understood, mainly for the purpose of the further literary analysis of the two discussed novels. This chapter thus provides a definition of trauma and its symptoms, and summarizes some of the basic concepts and ideas by leading theorists in this field, such as Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub and Dominick LaCapra, concerning the origins and effects of trauma, its role in a victim s mind, trauma s relation to the past, and, in particular, the accessibility and possibilities of representation of traumatic experience in language and fictional, narratives. Since the main characters of both analyzed novels have all gone through an extreme traumatizing experience in the past and Foer s narratives, to put it simply, tell a story of their attempted journeys toward recuperation, the central concern here is to understand what trauma is, how a traumatic experience becomes embedded in the victim s mind, and to what extent and by what means a human mind is able to overcome its effects. A second objective is to examine whether a commonly accepted approach to interpreting a traumatic past exists, and whether a fictional story can complement historiographical representation of the past events or might even be more appropriate for this interpretation in some cases in regard also to the experimental writing techniques and unusual visual elements in Foer s writing, such as visual art, photography, and calligraphic effects, which are discussed more closely in the following chapters. According to Cathy Caruth s definition, trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other 7

8 intrusive phenomena (Unclaimed Experience 11). LaCapra puts forth a similar definition of trauma as a disruptive experience that disarticulates the self and creates holes in existence; it has belated effects that are controlled only with difficulty and perhaps never fully mastered (41). The reaction to extreme traumatic experiences, which was in the 19 th and 20 th centuries called shell shock, combat neurosis, or traumatic neurosis (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 130), has been given a new name post-traumatic stress disorder. Its definition and characteristics were formulated by the American Psychiatric Association and introduced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for the first time in the 3 rd edition in 1980 (Lockhurst 1). Its most recent 5 th edition (2013) includes trauma in a new chapter on trauma and stress related disorders, as opposed to its previous inclusion among anxiety disorders, and proposes four diagnostic clusters described as re-experiencing, avoidance, negative conditions and mood, and arousal (American Psychiatric Association). These include various other symptoms, e.g. mistrust, feelings of helplessness, restlessness, continuous scanning of surroundings for danger, depression, and the already mentioned dreams, nightmares, hallucinations and flashbacks (Erikson 184). Besides these symptoms alone, many studies and clinicians have investigated [their] latent structure (Schnyder et al. 267). This latency, the delayed appearance of the symptoms of trauma, mentioned in both previous definitions and its causes and consequences constitute the center of many studies (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 4), including those reviewed here. Modern researchers observe that the intrusive phenomena from the previous definition are often accompanied by an amnesia for the past a certain numbness and bleakness, and forgetting of the past traumatic event, and also that they are absolutely true to the event, that is, the event is revived in a flashback or dreams but 8

9 in an unaltered form exactly as it happened (Greenberg & Van der Kolk qtd. in Caruth, Trauma 191; Erikson 184; Caruth, Trauma and Experience 5). In other words, the traumatized are unable to recall the past event at all and the reality of the witnessed horror remains hidden in their unconsciousness. Such failure in memory, as Caruth points out, is, in trauma, closely tied up with the inability to have access to it, and that is where the belatedness of trauma lies (Trauma 152). Analyzing the works of Sigmund Freud, she explains that [w]hat returns to haunt the victim is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known, that it is through the forgetting of the event and its subsequent reliving through a recurrent vision that it is first experienced at all (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 6, 17). This idea is developed by Dori Laub who claims that the latency of the effects of trauma is merely as important as the fact that the victim was never fully conscious during the [experience] itself and on this thought bases his theory of collapse of witnessing (65), and by Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart who explain the whole process of adapting events and pieces of information and the mind processes involving memory (160-1). Three terms are crucial in their analysis: habit, narrative, and trauma memory. Habit memory can be compared with instinctive behavior and it is a capacity humans have in common with animals (160). On the contrary, the narrative memory is uniquely human: Narrative memory consists of mental constructs, which people use to make sense out of experience [F]amiliar and expectable experiences are automatically assimilated without much conscious awareness of details of the particulars, while frightening or novel experiences may not easily fit into existing cognitive schemes and either may be remembered with particular vividness or may totally resist integration. Under extreme conditions, existing 9

10 meaning schemes may be entirely unable to accommodate frightening experiences, which causes the memory of these experiences to be stored differently and not be available for retrieval under voluntary control. (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 160) Trauma memory, then, is the one that includes memories and experiences which were never properly understood, analyzed and assimilated in the narrative memory, and are not remembered in the conventional sense. To explain this further, with help of Jodie Wigren, who examines similar causal chain inspired by the work of the French psychologist Pierre Janet, the understanding of trauma depends on assimilating new experience to previous understandings (Wigren 417). In general, the mind processes compiling and processing new incoming information remain mostly outside of conscious awareness, they are automatized and very rapid, which is possible exactly thanks to the existence of the cognitive schemes (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 160). If the experience is too discrepant for the preexisting patterns or if such schemes in which it could be assimilated do not exist, the experience is stored in traumatic memory, which keeps replaying the action in various intrusive forms, which can then be seen as the typical symptoms of trauma, until the victim of the event achieves to assimilate it to his/her narrative memory, to the patterns of his/her mind processes (Wigren 417). Only after the piece of information about the past experience has been analyzed and processed unconsciously can it become accessible to consciousness, and thus can be recalled by will (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 171). Finally, this interpretation of the psychological processes affected by trauma is not different from how Caruth approaches Freud s thoughts on indirectness in psychic trauma in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Unclaimed Experience 60). In her own words, what causes the traumatic response in one s psyche is the lack of preparedness to take in 10

11 a stimulus that comes too quickly, that is the lack of any prior scheme and knowledge about incoming, often violent, shocking, or frightening, information that reveals one s inability to convey such experience automatically to a conscious level of one s mind where it would be available for consciousness and thus causes the victim to be practically unconscious during the occurrence of the event (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 62). As has been said, trauma is typical for its impossibility of being processed and incorporated in the usual schemes of human knowledge and thought, which makes it virtually unspeakable, and explainable and translatable to language only with great difficulty. Due to the unexpectedness of the horror, trauma is not incorporated in the victim s consciousness and remains inaccessible in a form of shattered memories lacking integration in a complete story or the past. Any attempt of representing trauma, then, must be challenged by this inaccessibility (Caruth, Recapturing the Past 153). For the sake of successful recovery from a trauma, completing a story and creating a narrative, according to Wigren, as well as Caruth, Laub and Felman, is absolutely crucial, for [c]ompleted narratives make sense of felt experience (Wigren 416; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 117; Felman and Laub 69). Any disruption in the cognitive process of creating the narrative, such as the inability of mind to assimilate a traumatic memory, is a cause of psychopathology, a source of posttraumatic distress (Wigren ). Only a memory which is provided with a complete narrative form can be placed in a specific time, place, character, and meaning the affect and hurtful emotions the memory causes then belong to the past and present life is saved from its dissociative and disturbing quality (Wigren 417). Wigren, as well as Laub, who are both therapists, approach the narrativization of trauma experiences from the point of listeners to a testimony. But a reader can fulfill the role of an empathic audience as much as 11

12 a listener can, and be a guide and an explorer, a companion in a journey the survivor cannot traverse or return from alone (Vickroy 59). With the same objective to put their experience into context of time, Foer s characters attempt to create or represent stories that contain their traumas. Oscar, in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, trying to come to terms with the loss of his father, is determined to reveal the true story of the mysterious lock. All the people called Black he meets during his journey in fact represent the collective tragedy and trauma of all New Yorkers after September 11, and each of their individual stories is told. The mingling accounts of grandparents Schell present their own working through the survival of war and the loss of their son. Alex, in Everything Is Illuminated, deals in his own way with the violence of his father and the betrayal of his grandfather through the novel he writes, and, on the contrary, Jonathan fails to unfold and retell a history of his ancestors and filters his frustration through a rather nonsensical story of Trachimbrod. The arising question here is what strategies and forms in general the writers of trauma use and what rules they should follow to retell the events empathically, convincingly, with respect to the memories of survivors and the historical truth. Trauma narratives can have various purposes and functions which have been approached not only by writers but by trauma theorists and historians as well. The rise of interest in trauma theory and testimony during the 1980s and 1990s has given trauma literature an important role in the 20 th century culture and has been by many seen as an alternative to historiographical accounts (Vickroy 4-5). Many historians would certainly decline such assertion and would not accept the connection between a metaphorical, allegorical or symbolical representation and the historical truth. On the other hand, there are some who, with regard to the values of their profession, admit the possibility of opening history to new kinds of representations. Ann Curthoys and John Docker point 12

13 out that usually historians see history as fiction s antithesis (2). They themselves, however, would choose the middle path between extreme relativism and absolute objectivity in writing history (5). Similarly, Peter Novick distinguishes between the work of a historian and a novelist and sharply criticizes those who break and blur the most sacred boundary between history and fiction and question the objectivity of history (Novick ). At the same time, Novick also accepts that Holocaust, which is a core of his study, in particular is likely to be open to a range of interpretations, historical representations, metaphoric and figurative understandings (Curthoys and Docker 8). Finally, LaCapra clearly states that affect and empathy also have their place in historiography (LaCapra xiv), and thus he supports Laurie Vickroy s claim that trauma narratives indeed offer alternatives to often depersonalized and institutionalized historiographies and that trauma, in trauma narratives, can be present as more than a subject matter or character study (Vickroy 2-4). The question of history and historical truth in its enactment is, for Caruth, the deep ethical dilemma of how not to betray the past (Unclaimed Experience 27). The crucial task of a trauma writer would then be to avoid reducing traumatic experience to clichés and eliminating the force and truth of the traumatic reality (vii). At the same time, she encourages creating comprehensible stories suitable for integration into narrative memory and believes that even unconventional frameworks used for that purpose do not necessarily mean denial of the historical truth (Caruth, Recapturing the Past 154). A direct testimony can thus be replaced with a literary interpretation and supplemented with chronology, characterization, and dialogue, which are otherwise unavailable in survivors experience. The purpose of the original testimony, though, should still be prominent in the trauma writing. That is its competence to relieve suffering and its potential in collective and individual healing of trauma symptoms 13

14 (Caruth, Trauma and Experience vii; Vickroy 8). Exploring further the values of fictional trauma narratives, Vickroy formulates three more specific tasks of trauma writers: firstly, to help readers discover their own sympathetic imaginings of humanity in extremis, secondly, to expand their audiences awareness of trauma and confront them with difficult cultural issues, and lastly, to reveal obstacles to communicating [traumatic] experience (2-3). As to the first one, Vickroy believes that the writer s role is that of the reader s guide through the retelling of a traumatic experience in order that this experience be understood more widely (8). Further she adds: no reader can apprehend trauma completely through narrative... audience needs assistance in translating unfamiliar experience in order to empathize with it (11). In other words, a traumatized person might need help in making sense of the experience, a professional therapist who can lead his/her way toward completing and finally pronouncing the story of a traumatic event. Similarly, the nontraumatized cannot comprehend the full effect and meaning of trauma, and possibly never will, but a guide in the form of a fictional story and characters, with whom the reader can identify, can bring the much needed sympathetic and respectful response. However, the narrative cannot become overly mediated (Vickroy 26) because it would lose the authenticity of the traumatic reality which the writer should maintain by creating in readers what LaCapra calls empathic unsettlement (LaCapra 78). That means being an attentive witness/reader, whose empathy is desirable for understanding traumatic events, and disposes of narratives that deny the trauma they are depicting by prematurely (re)turning to the pleasure principle, harmonizing events, and often recuperating the past in terms of uplifting messages or optimistic, self-serving scenarios, and at the same time raises doubts about positivistic and formalistic accounts, warns against a complete identification and victimization in writing, and thus favors an empathic but still critical reading (LaCapra 78). This brings 14

15 up again Vickroy s second proposition to the trauma writers to spread knowledge about the painful ambivalence that characterizes traumatic memory and warn against the danger of ignoring the presence of trauma (3). Felman and Laub, who turn more to the audience, also encourage them to be critical to the process of witnessing a testimony through art, but do not reject artistic interpretation either. They claim that the truth is not incompatible with art on the contrary, art needs the truth for its existence, for the audience to realize the role of their witnessing of the testimony that is being projected (Felman and Laub 206). In general, a trauma narrative has a potential to convey experiences that have been overlooked by traditional historical scholarship, that demand more than compassion, and provoke social action (Vickroy 11, 21). The writer can always choose to offer a comforting narrative but his/her approach can also become more disturbing like Foer s, who in his writing addresses social and political issues besides the testimonial and historical aspects of the narrative. What remains to be the inherent objective of trauma writing is depicting the patterns of trauma memory, which is often unorganized, dissociated from usual memory, and fragmented in the sense of construction of self a personality and an identity. A common strategy of narrators/protagonists of trauma fiction is, according to Vickroy, to work against such fragmentation by giving order to their experiences (24). Judith Herman mentions more features of the trauma memory important for its interpretation. She says it is often wordless and static (qtd. in Vickroy 29), which is a response to the speechless terror (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 172) the failure of memory to organize the traumatic experience on a linguistic level, in words and symbols. The memory s repetitious, stereotyped and emotionless characteristic adds to the narrative strategies, language and artistic elements in trauma fiction through which the writers attempt to reveal the tension of conflicted or incomplete relation of 15

16 traumatic experience to memory (Vickroy 29-30). Among these are textual gaps and various typographical oddities (Saal 458) in Foer s Extremely Loud, for instance, the grandfather Schell s daybooks showing only one phrase per page but relating to a complex narrative of his past life in both Dresden and New York, or the testimony of Alex s grandfather in the second novel, where the agony and shame in facing the truth makes his words merge into paragraphs without spaces between words including no alteration or reflection to the experience. Further, it is repetition, e.g. Oscar s overuse of adverbs extremely and incredibly and other phrases, a nonlinear plot structure, multiple narrative voices present in both Foer s novels studied here, and, most importantly, a focus on fiction, symbolism, imagination and visual images, photographs and other objects, that can be seen as the bits and pieces (Vickroy 29) of the fragmented memory being organized into a meaningful story, and that allow the writer to reduce the textuality of their work, which attempts to give a true picture of trauma which is, by definition, hardly possible to achieve by linguistic means only. These specific stylistic and visual features of trauma narrative are available where a textual interpretation might fail in conveying a truthful and empathic image to the reader. To summarize the theoretical underpinnings, in its most basic definition, trauma is described as a response to an unexpected and overwhelming experience that causes uncontrolled disruptive processes affecting the victim s mind and behavior. From the medical point of view, it is considered a disorder and among its most prominent symptoms are included various recurrent phenomena like flashbacks, dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, syncopal attacks etc. but also depression, helplessness, grief, mistrust, and other psychical abnormalities. Many theorists and studies on trauma explore the latency of trauma, the belated appearance of its symptoms. Mostly, they conclude that the reasons for it are unpreparedness of mind for the sudden fright of the 16

17 event, the lack of suitable preexisting patterns of memory that would be able to integrate the novel experience into present knowledge. This failure in processing the traumatic experience makes the victim virtually unconscious to it already during its occurrence and thus it cannot be accessed and recalled consciously. That is possible only once the experience is successfully assimilated in one s psyche. Researchers agree that for such recovery a complete narrative of the past event must be created and given an emotion, a chronology, and a conclusion. The representation of trauma, especially in its literary narrative form, has been a subject of discussion among historians in regard to its historical accuracy. Some theorists agree that a narrative capable of invoking empathy and critical reading, which maintains the authenticity of the studied event, can have a great impact on readers understanding of trauma and therefore can contribute to collective healing and awareness. Trauma writers attempt to achieve such influence through depicting the process of creating a narrative and possibly recuperation of the narrator and protagonists of the literary work in such ways and writing strategies that mirror the pathological characteristics of trauma, including typographical, linguistic, and stylistic effects. 17

18 2 Analysis of Trauma Narratives in Selected Works 2.1 Storytelling and Experimental Writing in the Work of Jonathan S. Foer Jonathan Safran Foer was born in 1977 in Washington DC as the middle of three brothers in a conservative Jewish family. He earned a degree in philosophy at Princeton in 1999 but before that, in his sophomore year, he made a journey to Ukraine to work on his thesis which later expanded into his first and best-selling novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002). It is a story of a young Jewish American writer Jonathan who goes to Ukraine in search for a woman who he believes saved his Grandfather from the Nazis. The story clearly carries a considerable amount of autobiographical features. For example, Foer claims he never considered his Jewish origin a definitive part of his personality and identity, but it turns out in the first, as well as in his second novel, that Judaism, history, family, and traumatic experience are the themes that interest him and which he most often depicts in his fiction. He describes briefly his motivation to write about the traumatic historical events in an interview with The New York Times Magazine columnist Deborah Solomon: "Both the Holocaust and 9/11 were events that demanded retellings The accepted versions didn't make sense for me. I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something. With 9/11, in particular, I needed to read something that wasn't politicized or commercialized, something with no message, something human (Solomon n. pag.), and adds that his writing process is not based on any precise preparation. He finds ideas and inspiration through the act of writing itself. That is possibly why Foer s style is very easily recognizable. What The Guardian reviewer Michel Faber calls a characteristic blend of whimsy and hubris the artifice-dazzled unawareness of being out of one s depth is in fact an experimental and confrontational strategy of narrating fiction. Similarly to many postmodern contemporary works, Foer s novels strongly rely on each reader s 18

19 individual reading and understanding. Foer is interested in opening questions concerning, for instance, governmental foreign policies and various sociocultural topics like racism or xenophobia, and giving the readers perspectives to analyze rather than drawing final conclusions or giving a message. His writing encourages empathic reading and aims for readers sympathy with their own community and the ones depicted in the novels, motivating them to listen to other voices with humility, and consequently to participate in the retelling of the history. The strong sense for community and family is a significant part of Jewish American literary tradition, where family gatherings take part, and telling old stories and long lasting memories is ritualized and carries strong symbolism of the faith in God and his guardianship (Novick, The Holocaust 4). One of the major Jewish festivals Pesach is based on engaging all members of the family, and in fact all Jews in the world, as they celebrate it at the same time, in a dialogue, retelling of history with the help from Haggadah, a book of living memory, telling the story of the Jewish liberation from Egypt supplemented with guidelines for the rituals during the Pesach seder (Foer, What Is Different ). Jonathan Safran Foer is the editor of the New American Haggadah and it is no surprise that, in cooperation with the translator Nathan Englander and the designer Oded Ezer, he gives this ancient, sacred text a completely new shape and design. The use of interactive writing techniques, like multiple narrators, breaking paragraphs, condensed text, blank pages, and full-page pictures, though, are not given as much space here as in Foer s own fiction, since Haggadah is not a traditional narrative with a coherent story and heroes. The original Hebrew text itself is in Foer s Haggadah complemented by four voices of four Jewish authors (namely Jeffrey Golden, Nathaniel Deutch, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, and Lemone Snicket) who comment on and interfere with the story, targeting one of four different areas 19

20 labeled Nation, House of Study, Library, and Playground, and thus participate in the retelling of the story of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt. Through each Haggadah, the Pesach stories are supposed to demonstrate the continuity of Jewish experience. The modern concept and modern translation allow the New American Haggadah to embrace this continuity by transcribing the historicity of the original story to the contemporaneity of design and language ( New Haggadah ). Introducing Foer s work, it is also worth mentioning his nonfiction writing. Unlike the two novels to be analyzed in this thesis, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and several short stories he published, the book called Eating Animals is not based on the writer s imagination. It reveals quite daringly what America s meat industry is really about and takes advantage of information collected during almost four years of research, and embedded in the author s subjective perception. Foer includes a great deal of his own life and family history in this creative nonfiction narrative. The research was motivated by the birth of Foer s first son and he describes it in the first chapter of the book called, familiarly, Storytelling : As my son began life and I began this book, it seemed that almost everything he did revolved around eating. As I finish this book, he is able to carry on quite sophisticated conversation, and increasingly the food he eats is digested together with stories we tell. Feeding my child is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters because food matters (his physical health matters, the pleasure of eating matters), and because the stories that are served with food matter. These stories bind our family together, and bind our family to others. Stories about food are stories about us our history and our values. (Eating Animals 12) 20

21 Food and vegetarianism are other partly autobiographical themes that both Foer s novels share, along with the themes of the Jewish tradition, history of the Jewish nation, and most important, the family history, which is in Eating Animals represented by an episodic plot line about the writer s grandmother, a survivor of the Holocaust. Foer s novels are written with the use of post-modern techniques which add to their playfulness in both narration and design. His writing almost always includes multiple narrators, more than one narrative technique, and experimental features in language and typography, which always refer to the plot of the narration and inspire ethical and critical reading crucial for understanding the structure of trauma narrative and its themes. These are often helplessness and fear, but also continuation, joy, and hope. Foer s most recent novel is Tree of Codes (2010), which is a peculiar example of visual writing and is seen by many as a piece of art rather than fiction. It was created by the so-called die-cutting technique; Foer chose a collection of short stories The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and by cutting most of the words out of its pages created an interesting interactive book with a new story inside, and an anagram of the original name as its title. It seems that this technique had already caught Foer s attention before. Oskar, the protagonist of his second novel, discovers die-cutting when he learns about the bombing of Hiroshima. The radiation absorbed more by dark surfaces burns out the Japanese writing out of white paper. That inspires Oscar to find a specialized printer able to recreate a sheet like that (Extremely Loud 190). However, Tree of Codes is an experiment interesting for its almost Dadaist method of writing and the physical form of the book with punctured pages. The design and visual elements, such as illustrations, photography, typography and organization of the text seem to have a more profound meaning in the two analyzed novels as will be examined in the following chapters. 21

22 Both Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud display multiple layers of narration. They both depict a collective traumatic event but from a personal perspective of the narrators, and each consists of three story lines. The main plot of Everything Is Illuminated is narrated by Alex, Jonathan s Ukrainian guide, who recounts a story of their very rigid search for Augustine (Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 105). Alex remains the narrator also in the second plot line which consists of his letters to Jonathan. The last thread, interlacing with Alex s writing, is Jonathan s historical novel about the shtetl Trachimbrod and its people, narrated by himself. At the first sight, the texts are clearly distinguishable from each other. Alex s letters always start with a salutation and a date and are written fully in italics; his retelling of his and Jonathan s journey is a plain text which changes its form and pace slightly only in the last two chapters An Overture to Illumination and Illumination which are a transcription of Alex s Grandfather s testimony. As the Grandfather is reliving and re-experiencing the traumatic events through his testimony (Laub, Truth and Testimony 61), the text turns into a flow of his long suppressed words without paragraph breaks, sentences with no full stops and eventually words with no spaces between them indicating Grandfather s great anxiety and feelings of shame and guilt. Jonathan s chapters are then marked off from Alex s by their title written in a wavy line. This playful feature resonates with the mystical elements, which appear in Jonathan s narrative. The need to visualize the trauma depicted in his writing is more elaborate in Foer s second novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. It is narrated by Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy from New York who is dealing with a loss of his father who died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in As Aimee Pozorski says, where language fails, there may be only the visual (133) and in the case of the child narrator in particular, it might be easier to let him express his thoughts and feelings 22

23 through nonlinguistic narrative strategies to satisfy Foer s intention to make the reading of his second novel powerful. The novel again consists of three story lines: Oskar s search fills the main dynamic plot. His narration takes form of his diary entitled simply Stuff That Happened to Me where he inserts photographs, received letters (from Ringo Star or Stephen Hawking for instance), all kinds of random notes and objects that remind him of his father or are in any way connected to his quest for the correct lock which would match with the key that he found in his father s closet, and newspaper articles corrected in red ink by his father. The other two narratives consist of rather non-linear and partly retrospective personal testimonies of the bombing of Dresden, loss of families and loved ones, and the life of immigrants in the USA after the World War II, in form of letters from Grandfather Schell to his son Thomas, Oskar s father, and from Grandmother Schell to Oskar. The title of chapters with Grandfather s letters is always the same Why I m not Where You Are, followed by a date, the oldest being from 1963 and the most recent from Grandfather lost his voice shortly after arriving in America which can be seen as one of the most prominent displays of trauma examined again in the following chapters. What this loss of speech means for the visual form of the novel is the fact that, for his everyday communication, the grandfather uses daybooks which are filled with the never sent letters to Thomas Schell and with pages including only one sentence or question. These appear in the novel often completely out of the context and relate to a completely different part of the plot e.g. a simple phrase like Excuse me, do you know what time it is? (Extremely Loud 112). Grandfather s chapters then resemble a personal journal. The disarranged daybook pages and letters create a mosaic, depicting the history of the family, which is completed by the records of the two other narrators, 23

24 Oskar and Grandmother. Grandmother s story complements and intertwines with the renter s. It is interesting to observe how each of them perceives his/her self, compared to how the other one sees them, as it is not only being a witness of a traumatic experience that matters in a testimony. Dori Laub claims that the position of this witness has another level and that is the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience ( Truth and Testimony 61). This is crucial in the process of testimony of Oscar s grandparents who tend to blame themselves for the suffering of the other, and due to a lack of communication are not able to evaluate these situations objectively. What makes Grandmother s story authentic is the organization of the text. She rarely puts more than one or two sentences on one line and most of the text is a reproduced dialog between her and her husband which usually ends with a short sentence expressing her feelings. My Feelings, after all, is the title she gives to her memories: He wrote, Everything will be OK. I told him OK wasn t enough. Everything will be OK perfect. I told him there was nothing left for a lie to protect. Everything will be OK perfect. I started to cry. It was the first time I had ever cried in front of him. It felt like making love. (Extremely Loud 178) The last pages of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close are filled with a fifteen-page flipbook of a man falling backwards up into a window of a skyscraper. It is a part of Oscar s Stuff That Happened to Me, and it signals how strongly is this image embedded in the child s mind, and how the visual expression of a disturbing experience can be more powerful for the reader as well. 24

25 2.2 Truthfulness and Humor in Everything Is Illuminated In the debate over the appropriateness of approaching the Holocaust through fiction, Foer clearly chooses the affirmative side, offering a compelling example of fiction which yet again opens the questions of relation between literature and testimony, witnessing, testifying, and reading, that has interested most of the contemporary trauma theorists such as Shoshana Felman, Dominick LaCapra and Cathy Caruth. Everything Is Illuminated overcomes the aesthetic boundaries in the representation of Holocaust set by, for example Theodor Adorno and Berel Lang. Lang expresses these boundaries in the following four adjectives, narrow, prosaic, nonironic, nonfigurative (34). Paul Eisenstein argues that Lang s ethical criteria determine the Holocaust writing to take only a non-fictional and historically accurate form (84). Adorno argues that in fictional trauma narrative some of the horror of the event is removed and similarly Elie Wiesel is strongly opposed to using the atrocities of Holocaust for literary purposes only and let them [end] in fantasy, in words, in beauty (both qtd. in Eisenstein 84). This chapter aims to examine the ways in which the main characters and narrators of Everything Is Illuminated approach a traumatic event and the trauma it causes. It argues that the narrative strategies employed in the novel deliver a credible and moving, but dignified fictional representation of the Holocaust experience, despite the previously stated limitations. As was mentioned before, there are three story lines and two narrators in the novel; a young Jewish American writer Jonathan Safran Foer and Alexander Perchov, a Ukrainian of the same age, who is Jonathan s guide on his travels in Ukraine. Their narratives, which are in fact two novels the protagonists write, mingle and are periodically interrupted by letters from Alex to Jonathan, which form the third narrative thread. Jonathan s responses to these letters are never included and their actual 25

26 existence is disclosed only by Alex s comments on them. In fact, the novel is not that much about Jonathan. Even though Alex admires him and addresses him as the main hero of his story, Jonathan is hardly more than a listener, partly because of the fact that he comes to a country where nobody speaks his language and all the communication, including the testimonies of Lista and Grandfather at the end of the story, is retold by Alex who thus becomes the protagonist of his own narrative and is in the end the one whose life is most affected by what he learns about his family history (Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 1). This element of mediation of a story is important for conveying historical experience in Foer s work. Firstly, both Alex and Jonathan are the second generation of Holocaust survivors, and the experience of their grandfathers is mediated through their narratives. The fact that the readers are not forced to face the testimony directly gives them some space to absorb the experience and be less involved in its re-experiencing which, as Laub argues, is what generally happens to interviewers/listeners of Holocaust survivors ( Truth and Testimony 62). A more distant perception of the traumatic event is desirable since it prevents the reader from getting lost in or numbed by a firsthand experience. At the same time, Foer makes the testimony still very authentic thanks to Alex s interpretation. For example, when Grandfather speaks for the first time about the death of his friend Herschel in the town of Kolki and Alex interprets every sentence for Jonathan, as happens here: Herschel is wearing a skullcap in the photograph because he was a Jew. Herschel was a Jew. And he was my best friend. He was his best friend. And I murdered him. (234) 26

27 This exchange continues throughout the two final chapters, still conveying the traumatic experience strongly to the reader, especially when some sentences remain untranslated, that is not interpreted, to Jonathan, as if lingering between the victim and the listener, and once Grandfather s testimony turns into an experimental stream of consciousness narrative which then merges with Alex s voice who says, the truth is that I also pointedatherschel and I also said heisajew and I will tell you that you also pointedatherschel and you also said heisajew and more than that Grandfather also pointedatme and said heisajew and you also pointedathim and said heisajew and your grandmother and Little Igor and we all pointedateachother so what is it he should have done hewouldhavebeenafooltodoanythingelse but is it forgivable what he did canheeverbeforgiven (Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 252) The novel s experimental techniques, as Callado-Rodriguez claims, suggest and symbolize the victim s posttraumatic condition, especially when she or he becomes a narrator (63). Thus Alex s story and narration through Grandfather are made realistic, believable, and moving enough to convey historical truth which, after all, is embraced in the novel. Alex is aware of the freedom of imagination in writing fiction but chooses to remain truthful. Menachem Feuer claims that Alex s original intention is to write a comedy (32). The fact that the whole story is narrated retrospectively disqualifies this presumption. The amusing element is produced only by the narrator s imperfect English. In one of his letters, Alex mentions Jonathan s suggestion not to alter the mistakes because they sound humorous, and humorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story but, bearing in mind what he has come to know about his Grandfather s history and his guilt, Alex takes his narration seriously from the beginning (Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 53). The comic features and episodes, such 27

28 as the seeing-eye bitch named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. owned by the Grandfather who pretends to be blind while driving a taxi, are Foer s tools to bring the main characters together, since they have little in common and come from completely different backgrounds. Through such episodes, Foer provides readers with more than a plain chronological list of events, which Alex s narration otherwise is. Similar comicality Foer includes in his writing is, as was mentioned before, not usual in Holocaust literature and might be considered daring and risky, is even more prominent and elaborated in Jonathan s part of the story. Jonathan s novel is characteristic for its cyclical treatment of time and the elements of magic realism. It is set in a shtetl called Trachimbrod between the years 1791, when Johnathan s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Brod is miraculously saved from the river of the same name, and 1941, the year in which his grandfather Safran marries Zosha, whom he never loved, the shtetl is bombed and the Jewish residents pogromed by the German army. The story often takes form of excerpts from other texts or stories not directly connected to the plot, e.g. some of the dreams in an anthology The Book of Recurrent Dreams are presented, or passages, including Brod s vision of her rape, from the phrasebook The Book of Antecedents which is a great example of how important the retelling of history is to the Jewish mentality and tradition. Each child in Trachimbrod would read it without skipping a word for they knew that one day it will be them filling the pages of future editions, and if there was nothing to report about, the villagers would simply report [the] reporting, just to keep the book moving, expanding, becoming more like life: We are writing We are writing We are writing (196). The phrase We are writing then fills almost two following pages stressing the importance of what Foer, through one of the characters, expresses as the act of remembering, the process of remembrance, the recognition of 28

29 the past (36). Paul Eisenstein ascribes this repetitive technique to Foer s calling attention to the story s excessive textuality (87). The novel focuses on the communication of trauma which is in general considered to be pronounceable only with difficulty. For that reason, Foer brings the typographically experimental writing to help him convey the tragedy of Trachimbrod and thus suggests that through writing one is able to secure his/her existence just as Jonathan and Alex attempt to as they try to grasp their histories. Jonathan s narrative is not so often targeted in the analyses of the Foer s first novel. That is possibly due to its magical realist characteristic, the individual characters and episodes, which are sometimes simply too ridiculous and too unimaginable. Trachimbrod, when seen in detail, is a village of caricatures and absurdities (Eisenstein 87) of characters arguing about little things just for the sake of arguing, a chaotic blend of conservativeness and traditions, and unearthly magical occurrences that nobody questions. However, it offers a different interpretation when seen from the distance. Callado-Rodriguez interestingly points out that Trachimbrod symbolizes the magnitude of the Jewish Holocaust, that it symbolizes the memory of every Jew killed in the genocide (60). It is convenient to ask, then, why does Jonathan choose to write in a humorous manner if the content of his narration carries such a serious symbolism. He says it himself that [h]umor is a way of shrinking from [the] wonderful and terrible world (Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 162). And yet, compared to the seriousness of the events and of Alex s story, Jonathan s novel seems ridiculous. It might be a consequence of the lack of evidence, which he hoped to find with Augustine but did not. To Jonathan, Augustine is a chance for an all-illuminative narrative (Eisenstein 83). She is supposed to be the reliable witness, the only one that is able to 29