The Silent Dialogue between “Nothing” and “Something” in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Introduction
In its most raw and unspeakable form, trauma is an incomplete gestalt of experience that forces one to question what’s been lost. Bigger than the sum of its parts, trauma contains elements of unknowability and it’s this unknowability that creates disturbances in our psyche.[1] The three narratives running throughout Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close present a rich landscape for investigating subjective trauma. The cataclysm of the Dresden bombings and the terrorist attacks on 9/11 create an enigmatic vacuum that each character handles differently, but within all three narratives, there is a noticeable absence and a disruptive presence that hinders or prevents acceptance and healing.
Humanity’s struggle with understanding trauma may partly be based in the constitutive nature of our concept of “self,” or the theory that our identities are made up of an intricate network of relations. When presented with an experience that shocks and irrevocably alters our perception of reality, we often turn inward in order to not only identify what caused the distress, but also question the subsequent multidimensional and temporal effects. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer attempts to elucidate this elusive nature of trauma by narrativizing the silent dialogue between the “nothing” and “something” of unclaimed traumatic experience in order to examine the unknowable ontological submission that accompanies grief and mourning.
Trauma vs. Mourning
When discussing the origin of the Greek word trauma, in her book Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth follows in Freud’s footsteps by connecting its English translation to not only an injury inflicted on the body but also on the psyche. Directly translated to “wound,” trauma, Caruth argues, is not isolated to the event either. Trauma, she writes, is “an event that [. . .] is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (p. 4). In other words, one cannot completely uncover their trauma by retracing it to the event itself. Trauma does not exist consciously in the event, but in the survivor’s post-traumatic response which is a result of an inability to recognize and claim their own trauma. The wound, Caruth says, tries to find meaning in itself, but meaning “in its delayed appearance and its belated address” must account for both the truth of the events and the unknown conditions that dictate our response (p. 4).
Mourning is one response to trauma. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler suggests that “mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance” (p. 21). Mourning, in any form, involves a sense of loss, and the unknowability of trauma creates an unknown condition of loss: what exactly do we lose? As Butler poses, “something is hiding in the loss, something is lost within the recesses of loss” (pp. 21-2). Identity is balanced on the strength of our relations, and it’s unclear how the tragedy of disconnection affects our sense of “self.” Who do we become after this severing? In this way, when we mourn, we don’t only mourn for what can be qualified and quantified—we also mourn for the immeasurable loss within our own consciousness.
A Nothing Story
One of the most important motifs throughout Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the use of “something” and “nothing” as qualifiers for space. The most obvious division of space in this way exists in Oskar’s grandparents’ apartment, where they create areas where they don’t exist to the other. Both still in the grips of their post-traumatic event response to the Dresden bombings of 1945, the apartment’s peculiar organization is born out of the grandparent’s mutual desire to avoid moments of recognition: Thomas Sr. from recognizing Anna’s absence; and Grandma from recognizing Thomas Sr.’s recognition of her inadequacy compared to Anna. Their apartment begins with one Nothing space, but by the time the grandfather leaves, the apartment is more Nothing than Something. This clear division between two absolutes creates problematic relations: “But a friction began to arise between Nothing and Something, in the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow [. . .] at night the Nothing light from the guest room spilled under the Nothing door and stained the Something hallway” (p. 110). As Thomas Sr. says, these disturbances in distinction are like echoes of the once tangible or perceivable, and in Oskar’s grandparents’ awareness of that absence, they both become lost.
Misunderstandings between the imagined Nothing and Something spaces leads to unrest between the couple, because like their trauma, there is no escaping the Something space. This begs the question: Is there ever really Nothing space? Is the absence of presence Nothing? Grandma tells Oskar in her letter to him that her life story is full of “spaces” (p. 176), which is why she simply repeatedly presses the spacebar when Thomas Sr. tells her to write her life story. Her letters to Oskar are also full of extra spaces, but that likely delineates her age more than her need to create space between the thoughts of her own existence. Though she certainly embodies more absent space than present (she doesn’t even have a name, for example), Oskar’s grandmother’s life is not truly blank. Just like the Something shadow from the Nothing vase, Oskar’s grandmother creates echoes and artifacts—proof of a lived life. She clings to an imagined absence, to a constructed silence, in the hopes of never having to confront the Something that made her believe she was Nothing. D’Ambrosio (2018) argues, “[b]lank here is representational [. . .] but also symbolic: his wife’s ‘missing’ life, due to both the traumas she experienced and her husband’s impossibility to actually love her” (p. 95).
Grandma’s narrative ends with her describing what happened in the aftermath of the Dresden bombings, how she tried and failed to find and save family members. She also reveals that she regrets not telling her sister she loved her before she died, telling Oskar that it’s “always necessary” to tell someone who love them (p. 314). She writes this letter, however, from an airport, where she follows the newly returned Thomas Sr.. Her desire to stay at the airport, to exist as neither Something nor Nothing as the world goes on around her, signals an abandoned search for meaning. With this, Foer implies that the only way to avoid the traumatic dance between Something and Nothing is to stay still, or, more bleakly, to stop living. Butler asserts that mourning has the potential to “challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control” (p. 23). Though she may find some healing in sharing her story with Oskar, Grandma loses herself to her trauma and therefore must rely on watching other people make connections in order to live, hence the symbolic airport as her place of rest.
The Something Connection
Unlike Grandma, Thomas Sr. does not use his letters to strengthen his connection to his kin. His letters, other than the one he sends to Oskar’s father, are never sent. Having lost his ability to speak after the bombings, Thomas Sr. writes his entire life down. In notebooks, letters, napkins and skin—Oskar’s grandfather creates a living archive. When they are at the airport together, Thomas Sr. tells Grandma that he doesn’t “know how to live” and he doesn’t even “know how to try” (p. 181), but that statement reads false. In the one letter he sends to his son, Thomas Sr. writes, “‘I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything’” (p. 216). This suggests that he does know how to live, and it isn’t that he doesn’t know how to try; it’s that he refuses to. Life is about connections, our relationship with ourselves and others, and this is something Thomas Sr. must recognize, because when he cuts himself off from love, he says he’s no longer living.
It’s also obvious that Thomas Sr. understands that connection is what makes life meaningful, because even though he writes everything down, he doesn’t go out of his way to make sure he’s understood. When Grandma proposes to him, the phrases he uses to respond are “I’m sorry, this is the smallest I’ve got” and “I’m not sure, but it’s late” and “help” (p. 33). He could write something more direct, but he chooses to be vague. When he calls Grandma and just presses numbers as a form of communication, the only thing he’s communicating is that he has something to say (p. 269-271). If he truly wants to connect with Grandma after abandoning her forty years earlier, he has better options. He repeatedly chooses not to make a meaningful connection, because he believes that loving after losing love may affect the nature of the love lost. He says, “[t]he end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering” (p. 33).
When Thomas Sr. is writing his last unsent letter, he has so much to say he eventually runs out of room and the letter becomes nothing but a black page of layered letters. Thomas Sr.’s dark mass of unintelligible presence can be compared to Grandma’s purposefully blank page through a shared meaning: Sometimes trauma can’t be adequately be narrativized. Atchinson (2010) argues, “Grandfather’s and Grandmother’s distortion of language’s representational potential symbolically defines the recursive struggle to express (and to comprehend) the chaos of personal trauma” (p. 366). Thomas Sr.’s unwillingness to connect to someone extends to the reader as well, as we are left literally in the dark as to what happens after Oskar tells him he wants to dig up his father’s grave (p. 281). Thomas Sr. can’t lose what he never had, which includes closure to his own story.
Literally sending his son the Nothing he was willing to offer him speaks to a pathological commitment to absent presence. Thomas Sr. didn’t want to love his son, but he clearly already cared for him or he wouldn’t bother sending the empty envelopes. Joining Oskar to dig up his grave and placing the empty envelopes inside the coffin is also a sign of some sort of emotional attachment, which poses the question: Can we truly disconnect from people? This, similar to the end of Grandma’s narrative, suggests that there’s no way to keep ourselves from making connections—to keep ourselves from loving people—if we want to go on living. Butler argues that grief and mourning are not solitary conditions because they remind us of the network of relations we depend on in order to ensure humanity’s continued synchronicity, and that arguing against this “would be denying something fundamental about the social conditions of our very formation” (p. 23).
The Silent Dialogue
Rounding out the three narrators of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is Oskar Schell, an extremely precocious, inquisitive, and creative child who finds comfort in solving problems of his own invention. After “the worst day,” Oskar seeks to fill the absent space his father left behind by not only inventing his father’s salvation, but by also searching for signs of his father’s presence in the city.[2] When he finds the key in his father’s closet, Oskar embarks on a mission not unlike the “reconnaissance missions” his father used to send him on. The last one before he died has Oskar searching Central Park without any clues to direct his focus. When he asks why there are no clues, this exchange takes place: “‘Who said there had to be clues?’ ‘There are always clues.’ ‘That doesn’t in itself, suggest anything.’ ‘Not a single clue?’ He said, ‘Unless no clue is a clue.’ ‘Is no clue a clue?’ He shrugged his shoulders like he had no idea what I was talking about. I loved that” (p. 8).
This search for meaning throughout the heart of New York City is at the root of Oskar’s narrative. As he searches for the mysterious Black, Oskar is really submitting himself to the transitive unknown. He has no way of knowing who or what awaits him, as the nature of what we’ve lost is just as unknowable as the trauma that caused us to lose it. Oskar tells his grandfather that he needs to know how his father died so he can stop inventing: “If I could know how he died, exactly how he died, I wouldn’t have to invent him dying inside of an elevator [. . ] There were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his” (p. 257). This is undoubtedly true, but his search to fill the absence of not knowing how his father died isn’t the only reason Oskar embarks on his journey. After he finds the right Black, Oskar reveals he’s searched so hard because he’s seeking absolution for not answering his father’s last phone call before the tower fell. His relationship with his father was based in their bond over a shared love for knowledge, and by not answering his call, Oskar denies himself knowledge and denies his father connection. In this way, Oskar, too afraid of the unknown, sentences himself to never knowing.
It’s at this juxtaposition between searching for truth and making meaningful connections where the “silent dialogue” of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is found. The unspeakability of trauma is represented visually in the picture of the night sky Oskar takes on his way to dig up his father’s coffin. However, unlike the visual representation’s of Grandma and Grandpa’s unspeakable trauma (blank and black pages), Oskar’s starry night sky seeks connection. Oskar says as much himself: “I took pictures of the stars with Grandpa’s camera, and in my head I connected them to make words, whatever words I wanted” (p. 317-8). This image could be considered an unbalanced mixture of his grandfather’s black page and his grandmother’s blank page, with Oskar’s starry night combining what his grandparents lacked to create something beautiful. D’Amrosio (2018) writes that the picture of the starry night “suggests the possibility of finding some sort of communion between the above and the below, joining in a silent dialogue with the very earthly episode developing on its right” (emphasis added, p. 97).
In his search for meaning in his father’s death, Oskar dances between the Something and the Nothing of his grandparent’s narratives. He too is neither Something nor Nothing, but it’s only because of his submission to the transitive unknown. It’s like his father’s “reconnaissance missions;” searching for meaning was about the search, not what was meant to be found. When his father refuses him a clue before searching Central Park, he refuses Oskar Something. He refuses him Nothing by placing the map in his hands. With this, Foer suggests there are no answers to life’s biggest questions, but it’s in searching for them anyway that we forge the connections that make life worth living.
Conclusion
Oskar’s journey throughout New York City as he seeks his father’s presence connects him with dozens of people, and when that adventure is over, Oskar reconnects with his mother too. When Butler says, “[l]et’s face it. We are undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something,” she speaks to both the trauma humanity inflicts on itself, as well as the importance of the bonds that help us navigate it (p. 23). We cannot know where to find our trauma, just as we cannot know where to look for our loss. Uncertainty about such fundamental aspects of the human condition can only be soothed by a collective search for meaning. In the end, Oskar’s grandparents exist between the Something and Nothing of their own making, anchoring and subjecting themselves to an isolated, fixed unknown. Oskar, on the other hand, exists on a symbolic bridge (one he’s no longer afraid of), which allows him to continuously search for meaning between Something and Nothing—a search that he learns shouldn’t be conducted alone.
[1] Gestalt Therapy, a method of therapy developed by Fritz Perls, Laura Perls and Paul Goodman and based somewhat in Gestalt Psychology, is used to help those who suffer from PTSD. It concentrates on present mindfulness with the hope of “filling in” the unfinished business that has thus kept them from becoming whole again. See Perls et al. 1951.
[2] In many ways, Oskar is also searching for his father’s voice in the city, as it is the story of the 6th Borough that connects Oskar’s searches in Central Park to the search that takes place within Oskar’s metaphorical heart throughout the narrative.
Annotated Bibliography
Atchison, Todd. “‘Why I Am Writing from Where You Are Not’: Absence and Presence in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 46, no. 3-4, Routledge, July 2010, pp. 359–68.
Atchison’s article illuminates the disruptive and chaotic nature of trauma by examining Foer’s use of counter and meta-textual narratives. By telling the story of 9/11 through three narrators, but with the voices of an entire city, Atchison argues that Foer creates an archive of traumatic memory after the attacks. These collections of voices demonstrate the various ways a story can be disrupted or distorted. This interruption of narrative sense is described as an absence, and Atchison argues that Foer calls on the reader to fill it in.
Butler, Judith. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning Violence. Verso, 2004, pp. 19-49.
Butler tackles the concept of grief and mourning within the confines of violent loss after the attacks on 9/11. She makes an ontological argument for mourning by claiming that one doesn’t know what they’ve lost when they are in mourning. This creates a crisis of identity, but this crisis is also elusive to identification. Butler bridges mourning to politics via the interconnectedness of humanity, and argues that it is within our nature as human beings to come together after collective mourning to form a united front against the trauma that caused it.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. John Hopkins University Press, 1996.
In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth discusses the inherent unknowability of trauma due to the lingering after affects of a traumatic experience. She applies this theory to our understanding of how history is recorded, arguing that trauma can’t be accounted for by experience alone. For this reason, she argues history can be misrepresented. She analyzes Freud’s trauma theory, and points out how trauma and literature are connected via the “knowing” and “not knowing” elements found within each.
D’Ambrosio, Mariano. “Black Pages and Blank Pages: Shandean Visual Devices in Contemporary Fiction.”The Shandean, vol. 29, Paris, 2010, pp. 79-99.
D’Ambrosio analyzes several contemporary fiction novels in their article, but I focused only on the section that discussed the text. The article argues that Foer’s extensive use of visual devices throughout the novel made the effects of trauma on the characters and the voices throughout the narrative that much more poignant. The use of black and blank pages is investigated for their effect on the narrative, with interruptions and disruptions common as representational devices for character states of mind and trauma progression. Specifically, the article argues it’s the unspeakability of trauma that creates these illegible pages.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Mariner Books, 2005.
