Although Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is not an epistolary novel,
the “use of the letter’s formal properties to create meaning,” called
epistolarity by Janet Gurkin Altman in her book Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, (4) provides the structure
within the novel for Grandpa/Thomas Schell Sr. and Grandma to conduct self-reflective
analysis in a nonlinear timeline within the context of the plot. In Epistolary Responses: The Letter in 20th-Century
American Fiction and Criticism, Anne
Bower states that a character writes letters “to perceive and document her responses”
(12) and that “the pen can arm any writing self or character with special
offensive and defensive possibilities for moving unsatisfactory relationships
into more satisfying states” (5). This documentation and revision make the
letter writer “an active respondent to and shaper of his or her past, present,
and future” (Bower 9). Bower’s “view of the letter in fiction as a device that
opens up response space for the protagonist’s rewriting of self is affected by
four theoretical interests, each which is central to contemporary discourse
analysis: absence/presence, gendered writing, intertextuality, and the
semiotics of reading/writing” (16).
Absence/Presence
To define the absence/presence characteristic,
Bower describes “an agonizing pull between here and there, intimacy and
separation, bonds and barriers, time present and future (or past and present),
the tangible and the intangible” (16).
Letter writers are acutely aware of the gaps between the writer and the
addressee; the writer usually struggles to overcome the gaps but may use them to
protect himself or herself (Bower 6) or to document his or her existence (Boer 66).
Bower also mentions how the nonverbal aspects, such as time lags, frequency of
letters, length of letters, and verbosity, emphasize absence and presence
(17).
The core of Foer’s novel focuses on
absences and the characters’ needs to understand these absences; within this
core are the letters written by Oskar’s grandparents. The external reader is
privy to three of Grandpa’s letters—May 21, 1963 (which is divided into two
parts), April 12, 1978, and September 11, 2003—all of which are titled “Why I’m
Not Where You Are” and Grandma’s one letter—September 12, 2003 (which is
divided into four parts)—titled “My Feelings.” In the 1963 and 1978 letters,
Grandpa attempts to explain to his son, once before Thomas is born (Foer 16-34,
108-141) and once when Thomas is almost fifteen years old (Foer 208-216), why he
is absent from Thomas’s life. The final letter is written two years after
Thomas’s death (Foer 262-284) and is an attempt to explain why he returned.
Grandma’s single letter (Foer 75-85, 174-186, 224-233, 306-314) is written in
the airport terminal to Oskar to explain why she has left.
Thomas Schell, the grandfather/renter,
suffers from the absence/presence pull between here, his life in America after
World War II, and there, his life in Dresden before the bombing. To explain his
decision to leave his child, Thomas writes a letter to his unborn child with
the intention of mailing it just before boarding the airplane (Foer 135);
however, Thomas intends this analysis to benefit his child and not himself. This
attempt at comfort is quickly dispelled when he notes that this letter to his
child is part of his daily communication journal, a book that is not special,
“only necessary” (Foer 28), which adds emotional distance to the physical
distance between father and son. Thomas’s closing further separates him from
his unborn child: “I’ll never be your father, and you will always be my child”
(Foer 135); in a rare moment of insight, Thomas’s analysis allows him to
recognize that he is not responding like a father but that the child will
always feel bonded to him.
To better understand Grandpa, the
external reader needs to pair Thomas’s letters to his child with Grandma’s
letter to Oskar because Grandma analyzes Thomas’s actions. For example, Grandma
explains to Oskar that she knew when she reunited with Thomas seven years after
the war that “[h]e was trying to remake the girl he knew seven years before. He
looked at me as he sculpted, but he saw her” (Foer 83). Grandma recognizes that
Thomas is pulled between the past and present, the here and there. She is also
aware that by attempting a relationship together, Grandma and Thomas were
“looking for an acceptable compromise” (Foer 84). For years Grandma “needed a
child,” and awoke one morning to the understanding of “the hole in the middle
of me. I realized that I could compromise my life, but not the life after me. I
couldn’t explain it. The need came before explanations. It was not out of
weakness that I made it happen, but it was not out of strength either. It was
out of need” (Foer 177). Once Grandma’s pregnancy is revealed to Thomas after
“it was too late to do anything about it” (Foer 177), Thomas leaves for the
airport where he writes his May 1963 letter to his unborn child. The imminent
birth of child that would blur the carefully drawn lines between absence and
presence, nothing and something, is too much present for Thomas to handle. Rather
than understand why he feels a need to flee, to return to his interrupted but
non-existent life in Germany, and then to create a new life with a new family,
Thomas simply flees and leaves Grandma to create a something of a life out of
nothing.
Gendered Writing
According to Bower, gendered writing
includes looking at the gender of the author, the characters, and the external
reader and, for epistolarity, examining how personality and personal issues are
expressed within the letter format. A novel’s author may utilize purported
typical characteristics of female and male writing. Female writing is characterized by a woman’s
attempt to “redefine herself and define others” as well as to “increase [her]
power or sense of self through the opportunity to write [her] own truths” (Bower
12). Whereas female writing can be
recognized by its “physicality and emotionalism” (Bower 52), male writing is
characterized by a “maintenance of power rather than its acquisition” (Bowe 13). Men usually reject “the writing of women and
[. . .] the writing qualities associated with women, such as discursiveness,
multiplicity, and emphasis on personal relationships and community” (Bower 81).
Thomas’s letters are examples of
typical male writing by their lack of self-reflection. While the title of the
each letter suggests an explanation of his affects—“Why I’m Not Where You Are”—Thomas
never understands what has caused him to react this way. He lists the events
resulted in his absence, but he does not explore the emotions and motivations
that caused and resulted in those events because the exploration of the affect
system is a typical female style of writing. Thomas maintains his power from a
distance by mailing an empty envelope to his son, with the exception of the
delivered April 12, 1978, letter. He controls the relationship, or lack of
relationship, by writing letters but only sending the empty envelopes (Foer 233),
almost a taunt to his son. The one letter that is sent describes the bombing of
Dresden and the death of Thomas’s immediate and future families. This letter
does contain a rare admission from Thomas, one that has probably taken the
ensuing fifteen years to realize: “[I]f I’d said, ‘I’m so afraid of losing
something I love that I refuse to love anything,’ maybe that would have made
the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn’t do it. [. . .] And here I am,
instead of there” (Foer 216). For a moment, it appears that Thomas may be
reaching out to reunite with his son, but then he retracts that attempt and
controls the situation by stating, “here I am, instead of there.” The analysis
is unsuccessful again because Thomas does not proceed through the entire
process, which results in the restriction of his wants and his ability to
achieve his wants.
Interestingly, Thomas’s son writes
on one of his father’s letters in a display of typical male writing. Granpda,
in his September 2003 letter, recounts a conversation between himself and
Grandma; Grandma states that she never read the April 1978 letter, the only one
that was physically mailed, but that her son “was obsessed with it, always
reading it” (Foer 277). The external reader has already read this letter on
pages 208-216 and has seen the son’s writing. In an attempt to maintain power
over a father that he has never met and has had no interaction with, the almost
fifteen-year-old son edits his father’s letter. Thomas-the-son circles all the
grammar, mechanics, and spelling errors in Thomas-the-father’s letter. In the
father’s final letter, the external reader learns along with Grandma that the
son eventually located his father in Dresden and visited him there but is unable to process his emotions, lies about
why he is there, and does not reveal himself as the son.
Grandma’s letter, as well as her
autobiography, is an example of typical female writing by its attempt to define/redefine
herself and Thomas and the increase in her sense of self. As pointed out in the
absence/presence discussion, Grandma analyzes Thomas and explains the reasons
behind his actions over the past forty years to Oskar; Thomas’s letters list
events, while Grandma provides the insight. Through her self-refelction that
has spanned approximately eighty years and that she examines in one letter
typed on a single day, Grandma grapples with the issues of love, intimacy, and
need, which are typical female issues. Grandma’s realizations include facts
that came to define her as a person: she needed a child (Foer 177); she used to
feel shame in her relationship with Thomas because she did not want him, but
she later felt shy in making a request because she did want him (Foer 179); she
wanted him to miss her (Foer 307); she tried to notice everything about Thomas
the second time he left because she had “forgotten everything important in my
life” (Foer 308); and she loves “not being alone” (Foer 309).
Most importantly, Grandma’s final
realization of herself as a person, and the advice that she deems most
important to pass along to Oskar, is stated in the closing to her letter. After
debating whether she ever loved Thomas or just loved being needed and not being
alone and after recounting how she did not say, “I love you” to her sister the
night before the bombing of Dresden because, at that moment, it was “unnecessary,”
Grandma states, “Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell
you, Oskar. It’s always necessary. I love you, Grandma” (Foer 314). Grandma redefines
herself, after eighty years, as someone who knows that love is necessary and
that it is necessary to share that information.
Intertextuality
In intertextuality Bower examines
“the ways written texts of any kind resonate against each other” to encourage
“a heightened awareness” in the external reader (120). Within intertextuality,
Bower examines relettering, her term for the repeated or extensive imitation
and/or incorporation of an earlier text that “force[s] both the heroine and the
novel’s reader into constant comparisons of texts and contexts” (19). The
letter-writing protagonist in a relettered novel is able to use the preceding
text to illuminate his or her own condition; working with a previously existing
text—quoting it, analyzing its content and form, and discussing its relevance
to other texts or to her own life—the epistolary protagonist comes to new
understanding of the past (her own and that of the persons in the intertext) (Bower
113-114). In that regards, I have previously discussed the intertextuality
between the two letter sets—how Grandma’s letter explains events or the effects
of those events described in Thomas’s letters. I have also discussed the intertextuality within the Thomas’s
third letter when the son edits the letter in red ink but also rereads the
letter obsessively, which spurs him to search out his father in Germany years
later. The example that has not been discussed yet is the intertextuality
between Thomas’s letters and his journals. All three of Thomas’s read letters
are pages from his journals or daybooks that are used for daily communication.
Thomas admits early in his first letter that “at the end of each day, I would
take the book to bed with me and read through the pages of my life” (Foer 18),
but that these same books were never special, “only necessary” (Foer 28) and
were left lying around the apartment to be used as doorstops, trivets, insect
swatters, or sources of paper to line the bird cages (Foer 28). But as a means
of communication, the daybooks were limiting because if Thomas ran out of
space, he would have to point to a page with a phrase already written on it,
even if the phrase did not specifically address the question or need. For
example, when asked, “‘How are you feeling?’ it might be that my best response
was to point at, ‘The regular, please’” (Foer 28). Not only does Thomas
describe these pages, but these pages are included in the text awkwardly in the
middle of the letter so that his daily life continues on interrupting his
letter, which shows that Thomas’s full attention is not on the letter and his
child. The interrupting quality of the intertextuality mirrors the events that
interrupt Thomas’s self-reflection that, in turn, contributes to the
unsuccessful attempt at analysis.
Semiotics
Semiotics, according to Bower, encourages
the external reader “to think about whether we read for mastery and knowledge
or for intimacy and the sharing of experience” (143-144). Regardless of the
plot, examining the semiotics of “its
letter quality makes [the novel] about giving and withholding information,
about language’s ability to transmit thoughts and feelings or to mask them, and
about how we construct or misconstruct meaning from language and how we are
constructed or misconstructed by language” (Bower 135). As has been noted
previously, Thomas writes prolifically and even seems compelled to write. When
he fills up a journal, as he does in his final letter, he writes over and over
the final few pages obscuring the words and even the page itself (Foer 281-284).
This act shows that the writing, while he claims it to be an act of explanation
or analysis, is more important as a physical act of expression and claiming
presence than it is as a tool of self-relfection. Other times, Thomas reports
writing while in the shower, writing on napkins, and writing on Grandma’s arm.
Grandma reports that after Thomas leaves in 1963, she “erased all of his
writing. I washed the words from the mirrors and the floors. I painted over the
walls. I cleaned the shower curtains. I even refinished the floors. It took me
as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words” (Foer 233). By
erasing Thomas’s words, Grandma hopes to define herself or find the Something
in the apartment, which she fails to accomplish through this act of erasure.
Thomas literally uses his words to
create his son when he decides to bury his forty years of letters in the son’s
empty coffin. Since the son died in the World Trade Center collapse on 9/11, no
physical remains were available for burial, but Oskar’s mom/Thomas Jr.’s wife insisted
on a normal funeral. By the end of the novel, after exhausting his quest for
the lock to fit a key, Oskar decides that to create a presence of his father
that the empty coffin needs to filled “with things from Dad’s life, like his
red pens or his jeweler’s magnifying glass, [. . .], or even his tuxedo” (Foer 321).
Grandpa/Thomas joins him with two suitcases filled with papers. Thomas explains
to Oskar that on the papers are all the “[t]hings that I wasn’t able to tell
[my son]” because “I lost him before he died”; he continues to explain that he
was “[a]fraid of losing” his son and “afraid of him living” because “[l]ife is
scarier than death” (Foer 322). Although Thomas’s words do not describe his son
and were never handled by his son, these words that represent the life of a
father without his son become the body of the son in death; since Thomas cannot
grieve for a son he never knew, he must bury the only part of that son that
belonged to him, his unsent letters. The external reader is left to ponder this
significance.
Grandma’s pretend autobiography is
another example of language’s ability to transmit or to mask thoughts and
feelings. Thomas suggests to Grandma that she write her life story so that “she
could express herself rather than suffer herself” (Foer 119). Once Grandma begins
typing, it occupies all of her waking time so that they would rarely see one
another. Thomas states that “I was so happy for her, I remembered the feeling
she was feeling, the exhilaration of building the world anew” (Foer 119-120).
“After years of working in solitude,” Grandma presents Thomas with her
autobiography, updated to that very minute, but all Thomas receives is two
stacks of blank papers. It is this moment, this lack of language production by
Grandma, that convinces Thomas that Grandma has not been lying about her
eyesight all these years and it is his fault that she has typed blank pages
because years ago he pulled the ribbon from the typewriter (Foer 120-124).
Thomas pretends to read, makes suggestions for changes, and laughs at funny
stories that do not exist. Not wanting to discourage her from an activity that
she obviously enjoys, Thomas suggests Grandma now write her feelings; Grandma
replies, “Aren’t my life and my feelings the same thing?” (Foer 130). However,
in part three of Grandma’s letter, the external reader learns that Grandma’s
eyesight is fine; she went into the guest room every day “and pretended to
write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces”
(Foer 176). Grandma tried to make Thomas hear her frustration with the living
arrangements through her lack of language; her life and her feelings in 1963
were blank spaces. Thomas does not see the lack of language as an attempt at
communication. After Grandma stops writing and reengages with life in the
apartment, then Thomas creates the Something and Nothing places. Once again,
the lack of efficient self-reflection led to a lack of freedom and unhappiness.
Anne Bower states that “the writing
does not stand for but is the action
of making value judgments, exercising power, making commitments, taking a
social posture, establishing relationships” (24). The epistolary properties of
letters make them useful tools for self-reflection, but Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is an example of how the lack
of self-reflection can negatively impact the letter writer’s life, as seen in
Thomas’s decisions, but also the lives of those around the letter writer, as
seen in the effects on Grandma and the son. The hope provided by the novel is
that Grandma’s final realization is not lost on Oskar and that he will learn
from her lesson without having to suffer anymore losses in his own life.
(This
post is a condensed version of my midterm essay for ENG 5010 that I took in
fall 2012.)
Altman,
Janet Gurkin. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State UP,
1982.
Print.
Bower,
Anne. Epistolary Responses: The Letter in 20th-Century American Fiction and
Criticism.
Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1997.
Print.
