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Transcript of mourning and melancholia in elic
Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan SafranFoer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Sien Uytterschout, Ghent University, and Kristiaan Versluys,Ghent University
Whereas melancholy (or ‘acting out’) entails a complete repressionof all trauma-related memory, mourning (or ‘working through’) isan endeavour to remember the traumatic event and fit it into acoherent whole. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, these twoways of reacting to and dealing with trauma are embodiedrespectively by the protagonist’s paternal grandfather and by hispaternal grandmother, both survivors of the Allied firebombing ofDresden in 1945. Foer ties up this ‘old’ trauma with a fresh one –11 September 2001 – by having the Schells lose their only son, theprotagonist’s father, in the attacks on the World Trade Center.Aspects of both acting out and working through are in turnsynthesised in the protagonist himself – Oskar Schell. In hisbehaviour, the boy displays characteristics of both a melancholicand a mourner.
Keywords: trauma in literature; 9 ⁄ 11 in fiction; melancholy and mourning; JonathanSafran Foer.
I. Introduction
Since Dominick LaCapra’s reintegration of the Freudian terms ‘acting out’
or melancholia and ‘working through’ or mourning in the field of trauma
studies (LaCapra 1994, 2001), this dichotomy has become the default
theoretical groundwork for working with trauma in literature. Melancholy
and mourning both apply to memory. Typical reactions to trauma
comprise either a repression of all trauma-related memory or an endeavour
to remember the event and fit it into a coherent whole.
By means of a brief overview of trauma theory, this essay will uncover
the aspects of melancholy and mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest
novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. In Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close, these two ways of reacting to and dealing with trauma are
Orbis Litterarum 63:3 216–236, 2008Printed in Singapore. All rights reserved
embodied respectively by the protagonist’s paternal grandfather and by his
paternal grandmother, both survivors of the Allied firebombing of
Dresden in 1945. Foer ties up this ‘old’ trauma with a fresh one – 9 ⁄11 –
by having the Schells lose their only son, the protagonist’s father, in the
World Trade Center. Aspects of both acting out and working through are
in turn synthesised in the protagonist himself, Oskar Schell. In his
behaviour, the boy displays characteristics of both a melancholic and a
mourner.
II. Trauma theory
A traumatic event is often so violent and disruptive in nature that it cannot
be fitted into existing referential frameworks. As a result, survivors of
trauma cannot grasp the magnitude of what has happened to them
(Greenberg 2003b, 23; Radstone 2003, 117). A victim’s memory fails to
register the event at the moment of its occurrence, because the extent of ‘its
violence has not yet been fully known’ (Caruth 1996, 6). Through the
paradoxical workings of dissociation – a defence mechanism of the human
mind – a trauma survivor does not register or integrate into memory (the
impact of) the crisis, but neither can he or she completely banish the event
from memory. Trauma at the same time resists integration into and erasure
from the mind.
Dissociation entails a process whereby the event(s) experienced in a
state of trauma will not be open to memory in the usual way (Coates et al.
2003, 3). The traumatic past is only accessible to the victim by a deferred
act of understanding (Greenberg 2003b, 31),1 and experiences that resist
knowing will inevitably manifest themselves belatedly. This belated
expression of symptoms does not occur by way of a coherent narrative
or in a conscious effort of the trauma victim. Instead, the belatedly
experienced trauma makes itself known in an uncontrollable and a highly
fragmentary fashion, in the form of, for example, flashbacks or
nightmares. Since 1980, this set of symptoms has been officially recognised
by the American Psychiatric Association under the denominator of Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD (Leys 2000, 2).
While following up World War I veterans in the early 1920s, William
Brown established that his shell-shocked patients were often incapable of
finding an outlet in speech or in action for their powerful trauma-related
217Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer
emotions (quoted in Leys 2000, 84–85). Instead, the soldiers would
unconsciously externalise their emotions into physical or bodily symptoms.
The patients had absolutely no (conscious) access to the memories of the
incidents that formed the basis of their condition. This dissociated
remembrance or self-inflicted amnesia of the traumatic event is what Pierre
Janet (1980, 23) calls le souvenir traumatique (traumatic memory).2 Janet
emphasises that traumatic memory must not be equated with a complete
erasure of particularly painful memories. Instead, traumatic memory
concerns a modification of the victim’s consciousness that enables him to
disintegrate a part of his memory in which he can (temporarily) stow away
the traumatic event. The solution to overcome this dissociation consists of
guiding the trauma victim from his disjointed traumatic memory to a
coherent narrative memory. In other words, traumatised people have to
learn to express themselves and try to fit their experiences into a larger,
coherent whole (p. 24).
The Freudian distinction between melancholia and mourning, and
LaCapra’s elaborated version of that distinction into ‘acting out’ and
‘working through’ are conceptually very similar to Janet’s two ways of
remembering trauma (traumatic and narrative memory). Acting out or
melancholia is a state of mind in which the victim’s notion of tenses (past,
present, future) implodes. That is to say, the melancholic finds himself
trapped in an endless reliving of his traumatic past while acting that past
out in a post-traumatic present. By compulsively holding on to the past,
the victim smothers every possibility of moving towards a liveable future
(LaCapra 2001, 21). Acting out disables trauma survivors to express what
they feel and forces them to express what they cannot feel (p. 42). Thus
they are prevented from converting their traumatic memory into a
narrative one. Melancholics semi-consciously resist this conversion
because of their ‘fidelity to trauma’ (p. 22). They feel that their own
coming to terms with trauma would be an ultimate betrayal of those who
were lost in the event, especially lost loved ones (p. 22). Working through,
on the other hand, is what LaCapra terms an articulatory practice,
necessarily invoking an effort at testimony (p. 42). Slowly but certainly, the
process of mourning enables traumatised people to develop a narrative
memory of the traumatic event. It allows them to remember what
happened to them at a certain point in the past, while at the same time
realising that they are living now. Critical consideration of the traumatic
218 Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys
past itself and of coping with that past, lessens the danger of a lapse into
melancholia-related compulsive behaviour (p. 22).
If ‘acting out’ impedes the process of coming to terms with an extreme
event, so does ‘pure’ working through. Trauma theorists even postulate
that a process of pure working through does not exist. This notion
consequently forecloses viewing a process of healing as a straightforward
transition from one state of mind to another. Instead, trauma theorists
presuppose that the ‘ideal’ way of dealing with trauma consists of an
interlacing of acting out and working through. The former can even be a
necessary antecedent to the latter, in that brief instances of acting out often
offer a respite to the mourning human mind. Melancholic fantasies (for
example, indulging in the belief that the lost loved ones watch over those
who are left behind) are a necessary and welcome relief from the crushing
reality that those loved ones are gone (Harris 2003, 146; LaCapra 1994,
205).
III. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
In the following, two of the three sufferers of trauma in Extremely Loud
and Incredibly Close – Oskar Schell and his grandmother – will be shown
to more or less adhere to the ‘mixture’ of acting out and working through.
The novel’s third character (Thomas Schell, Oskar’s grandfather) defies
everything that is even remotely connected to coping with trauma. For the
most part, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close consists of the rambling
accounts of its nine-year-old protagonist, Oskar Schell, a boy who has lost
his father in the terrorist attacks on 11 September. A year after the events,
while hiding in his father’s wardrobe, Oskar stumbles across an envelope
labelled ‘Black’ in which he finds a mysterious key. Thinking (and hoping)
that this key is meant as one last Reconnaissance Expedition (a game in
which the father sends his son out on various quests), Oskar immediately
embarks on a treasure hunt across the five boroughs of New York City in
search for a matching lock to his key. His plan is to meet everyone named
Black living in New York. Oskar’s narrative, then, mostly recounts what
and ⁄or whom he encounters on his quest in a post-traumatic present.
At the same time, his soliloquy always contains ample reference to the
past, more precisely an ante-11 September past, when his father was still
alive.
219Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer
Oskar’s trauma narrative is interwoven with that of his paternal
grandparents, both survivors of the Dresden firebombing at the end of
World War II. That is to say, in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
two extreme events are brought to the fore and are linked to each other
through the experiences of three traumatised characters. The air raids on
Dresden make up the core of the grandparents’ (primary) trauma. They
emerged from the attacks physically unscathed but forever burdened with
guilt for being the only survivors of their respective families. On 11
September, they lose their only son (Oskar’s father). Hence, the
grandparents’ experiences might be seen as an instance of pre-traumat-
isation (by the Dresden bombings) and re-traumatisation by the events
on 11 September. All three traumatised characters have a unique way of
coming to terms with and recounting their experiences. Whereas
traumatised people mostly face both conflicting urges of witnessing and
denying (or working through and acting out) simultaneously, Thomas
Schell’s mind and actions are firmly embedded in acting out or
melancholy. His life has become a fixated reliving of the traumatic
events in Dresden in 1945.
IV. Grandfather
People who have been caught up in a traumatic event are utterly
overpowered by the magnitude of what they have experienced. They
cannot fit what has happened into an existing referential framework,
nor can they conventionalise it. Therefore, a trauma victim’s initial
reception of such unimaginable events is often one of complete
incomprehensibility (Greenberg 2003b, 23; Radstone 2003, 117; Roth-
berg 2003, 149). Thomas Schell is one of those people. On the night of
the Dresden firebombing, moments before the air raid alarm goes off,
Thomas’s girlfriend, Anna, tells him she is pregnant. He is overjoyed.
That there might be an actual threat to Dresden this time simply does
not occur to him:
Before I left, she said, ‘Please be over joyed [sic].’ I told her I was, of course, Iwas, I kissed her, I kissed her stomach, that was the last time I saw her. At 9.30that night, the airraid sirens sounded, everyone went to the shelters, but no onehurried, we were use [sic] to the alarms, we assumed they were false, why wouldanyone want to bomb Dresden? (Foer 2005, 210)
220 Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys
Thomas Schell survives the Dresden firebombing. His pregnant girlfriend,
Anna, does not. Having survived while his lover perished, is torture for
him. He cannot reconcile his own ongoing life with the death of his loved
ones, and especially the death of Anna. This paradox of survival and the
ensuing, emotional crisis a trauma victim goes through is an essential
component of the concept ‘trauma’. Having faced death, the question is
what constitutes trauma. Is trauma caused by the encounter with and the
narrow escape from death or is it rather the experience of living with the
knowledge of having encountered and escaped death while others have
not? Survival, then, becomes a balancing act between a crisis of death and
a crisis of living (Caruth 1996, 7). In the following excerpt, Thomas attests
to this wavering between two extremes:
I’m sorry. … I’m sorry for everything. For having said goodbye to Anna whenmaybe I could have saved her and our idea, or at least died with them. I’m sorryfor my inability to let the unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on tothe important things. … I thought, it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s atragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I’d had two lives, I wouldhave spent one of them with [his wife, Anna’s sister]. I would have stayed in theapartment with her … I would have spent that life among the living. (Foer 2005,132–133)
The paradox of survival is closely connected to another trauma-related
concept, namely that of survivor guilt. Survivor guilt can be seen as a direct
result of PTSD. Among other symptoms, PTSD entails a trauma victim’s
thoroughly distorted self-image (Wirth 2005, 38). Clearly, Thomas’s self-
esteem has received a terrible blow and he suffers from feelings of
unworthiness (Foer 2005, 33). At least a part of Thomas’s suffering is due
to his convictions that he is not worthy of having survived Dresden. These
feelings of unworthiness constitute the haunting experience of being unable
to live in the present and being equally unable to let go of the past. In the
case of Thomas Schell and his wife, this inability to live in the present is
represented by their creation of Nothing and Something Places in their
apartment once they are married. Nothing Places are rectangles of space
that do not exist. Whoever occupies a Nothing Place temporarily ceases to
exist as well (p. 110). As they go along, the Schells systematically carve out
more and more Nothing Places, so that in the end their apartment is more
Nothing than Something. They even mark the Nothing and Something
Places on the blueprint of their apartment, so that no (more) misunder-
221Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer
standings can arise as to which room is what. As an ultimate example of
Thomas’s inability to love and live with someone who is not Anna, he even
insists on making love in a Nothing Place. Finally, Thomas sees no other
option than to leave his wife (and their unborn child),3 ‘not out of
selfishness’ but because ‘[he] can’t live, [he has] tried and [he] can’t’ (p. 135).
However overpowering the experience of a traumatic event may be, it is
possible to survive. In the case of Thomas Schell, that survival must be
understood in its barest sense – a mere bodily survival stripped of all
emotional well-being. As his name suggests, Thomas is a shell of the man
he once was. The issue of (bodily) survival is logically tied up with the
question whether or not one can (emotionally) recover from trauma. If
recovery stands for regaining full ‘health’, then it is impossible. There is
absolutely no possibility of ever recovering one’s pre-traumatic self
(Kacandes 2003, 179–180). What is possible, however, is that over time a
trauma victim manages to incorporate and master what has happened.
Crucial in this process is acceptance. A trauma survivor must learn to
accept that what seemed utterly impossible before, did in fact happen.
Irene Kacandes (p. 180), Hans-Jurgen Wirth (2005, 43) and Dori Laub
(quoted in Kaplan 2005, 123), among others, suggest that this acceptance
can be facilitated by articulating what happened. Wirth goes so far as to
foreclose the phase of acceptance should the traumatic experience be
suppressed. Trauma must be admitted, not repressed or denied (Wirth
2005, 43). In a very literal sense, Thomas Schell is unable to share his
traumatic experiences with others because he suffers from aphasia – the
loss of speech. It is not unreasonable to assume that he has unconsciously
inflicted this condition on himself. His inability or refusal to speak testifies
to an unwillingness to cope with his traumatic past. Using language
suggests at least some form of coming to terms or comprehension, and that
is what Thomas wants to avoid at all cost. Thomas’s loss of speech goes
hand in hand with his losing Anna in Dresden (Foer 2005, 16).
Thomas’s radical refusal or profound inability to talk about the past
precludes every attempt at coming to terms with that past. His behaviour
can be characterised as the process of ‘acting out’ or melancholia. It
encompasses the victim’s urge to hide, to live bodily in the present but to
remain psychically in the past and constantly relive the events that torment
him. Acting out involves the inability to bear witness to what has
happened. That inability ensnares the trauma victim in an existence in
222 Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys
which he is unable to invest love and attachment in new relationships
(Harris 2003, 145). This certainly holds true for Thomas Schell. Thomas
married a woman who comes as close to the real Anna as possible: Anna’s
younger sister. He does not appreciate her for her own person, but only as
the last remaining link to Anna. Even when he asks his wife to stand model
for his sculptures, he does not sculpt her. His sculptures are a ceaseless
attempt to reconstruct (his image of) Anna.
Thomas’s unrelenting obsession with his pre-traumatic past is rooted in
his inability to forget. According to Cathy Caruth (1996, 33), ‘forgetting’ is
a vital phase in recovering from trauma. The process of forgetting is akin
to Janet’s narrative memory and involves the trauma victim regaining an
amount of reasonableness, which allows him or her to let go of the past.
Thomas Schell does not attain the amount of reasonableness needed for
Caruth’s ‘forgetting’. In fact, he does the exact opposite. He is
fundamentally unable to relinquish the memory of his beloved Anna.
Thomas’s problem becomes even more complicated when it turns out that
he is painfully aware of his obsession with the past. He realises that if only
he could let go, his life would be much simpler. But despite his insight into
his own state of mind, Thomas cannot help himself. His entrapment in the
past becomes his torture in the present:
I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about thingsat all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and myhappiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it wasme, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know,but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, towhat great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’vethought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. (Foer2005, 17)
Remembering the past is a compulsion for Thomas. In his reasoning, the
fact that he lost the possibility of spending his life with Anna can only be
compensated by never forgetting about it. Sadly enough, Thomas is not
holding on to real memories. Instead, he cherishes projections of what a
life with Anna could have been like. On several occasions, Thomas
expresses the wish not to think about what could have been ever again. But
he cannot help himself. The profound paradox between forgetting and
remembering or thinking and not thinking comes to the fore in Thomas’s
own account of the destruction of Dresden. Amidst the chaos of the
223Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer
burning city, Thomas remembers that one single thought kept him on his
feet: Keep thinking.4 When he is lying at the foot of the Loschwitz Bridge
thinking he will surely die, that one thought keeps him alive. Reconsidering
this in retrospect, Thomas concludes that at that time to keep thinking
might very well have saved his life. Now that he is alive, however, thinking
is killing him (pp. 214–215).
Inextricably tied up with Thomas’s struggle between wanting to forget
and not being able to is his aphasia. His refusal or inability to speak
prevents him from sharing his experiences with others. Thomas again
acknowledges his problem in one of his numerous letters to his son
(Oskar’s father), ‘Sometimes I think if I could tell you what happened to
me that night, I could leave that night behind me’ (Foer 2005, 208). On the
other hand, upon marrying Anna’s sister, it is he who invents the rule that
prohibits talking about the past. Thus, he forecloses every prospect of
coming to terms with the traumatic events of his past. Thomas Schell’s
aphasia can also be seen as a bodily manifestation of his psychic turmoil.
From the moment Thomas is in America, the involuntary reliving of the
past translates itself in aphasia. He then has this loss of speech literally
inscribed in the flesh of his hands by having the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’
tattooed on his palms. When he is not communicating by writing, Thomas
relies on his hands and his self-made sign language to express himself. The
meaning of Thomas’s life, it seems, can be broken down to a mere ‘yes’ or
‘no’ and a few gestures. Speech, for him, is an inadequate means of
expression and must therefore be omitted. With the help of this crude ‘sign
language’, Thomas takes part in daily conversation without running the
risk of expressing the inexpressible.
V. Grandmother
At first sight, Mrs Schell seems to do much better as a survivor of the
Dresden air raids than her husband. W. R. Greer (2005, n.p.) even asserts
that Grandma is the most accepting survivor in the novel. She does not
lose her speech, she is not trapped in endless reliving of the past (or so it
seems) and she is able to make a new life for herself and her son after
Thomas abandons them. Contrary to her husband, Mrs Schell has a drive
to communicate in general and to tell the story of her life in particular.
Although Thomas will not budge from his choice to remain silent about his
224 Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys
traumatic past, he does encourage his wife to do exactly the opposite. The
suggestion that she write down her life story and that it will be better for
her to ‘express herself rather than suffer herself’ (Foer 2005, 119) comes
from him. He believes that writing will be therapeutic, a way to lighten her
burden. Paradoxically enough, he sets up her desk and typewriter in
the Nothing guest room. Since a Nothing Place is a place in which the
occupant temporarily ceases to exist, it stands to reason that the
temporarily non-existent occupant’s writing efforts do not exist either.
As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that Mrs Schell is only
keeping up appearances and that, in fact, she is not coping well at all. After
her first encounter with Thomas in New York, for instance, she is clearly
suicidal (Foer 2005, 82). Grandma’s process of coming to terms with her
traumatic past, for example by writing her life story, is not, in other words,
one of ‘pure’ working through. Indeed, as it turns out, Mrs Schell does not
really write at all. She only pretends that she does by constantly hitting the
space bar.
Mrs Schell clearly reflects the same struggle displayed by Thomas,
namely that of wavering between a crisis of life and a crisis of death.
Taking her leave from Thomas after their first meeting, she plans to drown
herself in the Hudson River. His motioning her to come back might be her
lifeline but it takes a moment before she accepts. She is torn between the
prospect of death and the possibility of starting a new life with Thomas.
Eventually, she goes to him and keeps returning to him because ‘his
attention filled the hole in the middle of [her]’ (Foer 2005, 83) and for the
time being this is reason enough for her to live. Nor is this inclination
towards self-destruction a one-time occurrence. At one point, a couple of
days after ‘the worst day’ (11 September), Oskar sees his grandmother
carrying a huge rock across Broadway. Although she is in the habit of
picking up pretty rocks for her grandson to add to his collection, he senses
that there is something unusual about this one. He remarks that his
grandmother should not be carrying heavy things and that this rock looks
like it must weigh a ton. Moreover, ‘she never gave that one to [him] and
she never mentioned it’ (p. 104).
Like her husband, Grandma is burdened with survivor guilt. As a girl,
she collected letters. Long after the Dresden bombing, when she has been
living in New York for quite some time, she cannot help but wonder ‘about
those letters laid across [her] bedroom floor. If [she] hadn’t collected them,
225Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer
would [their] house have burned less brightly?’ (p. 83). Aside from feeling
guilty about having fuelled the fires that destroyed her house, Grandma
also struggles with deep feelings of unworthiness. Grandma’s low self-
esteem surfaces whenever she ventures an opinion on something. These
instances are so recurrent, that Oskar cannot help but notice them. When
he asks his grandmother for advice, she always insults herself before
answering: ‘I’m not very smart, but I think’ (p. 70). The most significant
moment of her self-loathing occurs just after she finds out that her son was
in the restaurant Windows on the World when the planes struck:
When I no longer had to be strong in front of [Oskar], I became very weak. Ibrought myself to the ground, which was where I belonged. I hit the floor withmy fists. I wanted to break my hands, but when it hurt too much, I stopped. Iwas too selfish to break my hands for my only child. … I had to go to thebathroom. I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to lie down in my own waste, whichwas what I deserved. I wanted to be a pig in my own filth. (p. 231)
In stark contrast to Thomas, Grandma is a talker. She wants to share her
experiences with others. Proof of her readiness and willingness to talk is
her compulsive desire to attain a native-like competence in English. She
wants to tell her specific story as a survivor of the Dresden firebombing.
That urge to get her story out is expressed by her feverishly writing the
letter to her grandson justifying her actions at the end of the novel. By
contrast, it is rather peculiar that the reader never gets her own account
of the Dresden bombardments. One does not find out where she was and
what she was doing when the first bombs struck the city, or what she did
to survive. The only thing the reader does find out is that she tried to
help her father free himself from a pile of rubble after the attacks (p.
308). The reader learns through Thomas, not through Grandma, that her
father survived the attacks on Dresden, but that he committed suicide
soon after. In her narrative, Grandma familiarises the reader with the
story of her childhood in Dresden before that fatal night in February
1945 and with that of her adulthood in New York City. The breach
between the two narratives is the omission of her traumatic experience in
Dresden.
On the whole, though, it seems that Grandma is better at coping with
her past than her husband. At a certain point, she suspects that Thomas is
on the verge of leaving her and their unborn child. When she confronts him
about his imminent departure, he tells her that he does not know how to
226 Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys
live. She admits that she does not know either but that at least she is trying.
He in turn retorts that he does not even know how to try (Foer 2005, 181).
However, Grandma confesses to Oskar that what has enabled her to go on
is that she has spent her life learning to feel less: ‘Every day I felt less. Is
that growing old? Or is it something worse?’ (p. 180). Grandma’s erosion
of feeling climaxes when she hears of the attacks on the World Trade
Center. She admits that she ‘didn’t feel anything when they showed the
burning building’ (p. 224) and that she did not feel empty upon realising
that her son was dead (p. 231). Grandma’s detachment and emotional
numbness have been described by Judith Herman as essential elements of
constriction, a post-traumatic state of mind in which the victim surrenders
to passivity and outward calm (Herman 1997, 42–43). Hence the initial
impression that Grandma might have succeeded better than Thomas in
making a new life for herself. In truth, though, she is just as much subject
to the tyranny of her traumatic past as is her husband.
If Grandma has gone through a (conscious) erosion of feelings and
repression of memories in the waking world, she is avalanched with them
while asleep. Whereas Grandma is able to dam up memories of her
traumatic past while she is awake, that past returns to haunt her in her
dreams. And even then, it is not from Grandma herself that the reader
learns this, but through Oskar’s observations. Oskar and his grandmother
are constantly in touch through a set of two-way radios. He bids her good
morning when he gets up and they usually talk when either of them cannot
sleep:
‘How did you sleep, darling? Over.’ … ‘Fine,’ … ‘no bad dreams. Over.’ … Somenights I took the two-way radio into bed with me and rested it on the side of thepillow that [the cat] Buckminster wasn’t on so I could hear what was going on inher bedroom. Sometimes she would wake me up in the middle of the night. Itgave me heavy boots that she had nightmares, because I didn’t know what shewas dreaming about and there was nothing I could do to help her. She hollered,which woke me up, obviously, so my sleep depended on her sleep, and when Itold her, ‘No bad dreams,’ I was talking about her. (Foer 2005, 104)
Grandma’s internal suffering clearly manifests itself in her suicidal nature
and it leaves marks on her body, more specifically on her eyes. One of the
first things the reader learns about Grandma is that she has bad eyesight.
Later on, Thomas realises that his wife cannot see at all when she hands
him the blank pages of her life story. Near the end of the book, however,
227Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer
Grandma confesses that her eyes are ‘crummy’ but that she can still see.
Pretending she was going blind was her way of drawing Thomas’s
attention. Another physical sign of Grandma’s suffering is her inclination
to hurt herself. This becomes especially apparent after she has lost her son
in the attacks of 11 September, when arguably her previous trauma (of
Dresden and of being abandoned by her husband) is awakened and
strengthened by this new one.5
VI. Oskar
Oskar is a very complex character. He is nine and too smart for his age. He
combines mature thoughts and ideas with an overall behaviour typical of a
child. So most of the time, Oskar is a nine-year-old boy with corresponding
wishes and desires such as making mischief with his friends Toothpaste
and The Minch. On the other hand, though, his favourite book is Stephen
Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, he speaks French and is all in all very
knowledgeable. Ever since he lost his father in the attacks on the World
Trade Center on 11 September, his life has been a daily struggle to
(emotionally) survive. He continually ‘wears heavy boots’, which is his
expression for being very sad and depressed. Conversely, when he is happy,
Oskar is feeling ‘like one hundred dollars’. Throughout the book, he comes
across several people who make his boots even heavier, not least his own
grandmother. At one point, Oskar feels so depressed that he explicitly
expresses a death wish: ‘What’s so horrible about being dead forever, and
not feeling anything and not even dreaming? What’s so great about feeling
and dreaming?’ (Foer 145).
Evident in Oskar’s musings about life and death is the struggle for a
balance between self-destruction and self-preservation, also present in
Thomas Schell and Grandma. Although Oskar voices an express wish to
die, at the same time he is afraid of death. When visiting the elder Mr
Black, Oskar asks for coffee instead of tea because ‘[i]t stunts [his] growth,
and [he is] afraid of death’ (Foer 2005, 154). The boy seems to think that
drinking coffee will not only prevent him from growing in length but also
from growing older and by extension from dying. Oskar’s fear of death is
symbolically embedded in the story of the Sixth Borough, a bedtime story
told by his father on the night of 10 September. The story’s starting point is
that ‘once upon a time’ New York City had a sixth borough. One day, the
228 Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys
borough started drifting away and nothing could be done to hold it back.
The entire borough simply floated away and finally ended up in Antarctica
where its life became static and fixated. However, the New Yorkers of that
time were able to hold on to a small piece of the Sixth Borough: Central
Park.
Central Park didn’t used to be where it is now. … It used to rest squarely in thecenter of the Sixth Borough. … Enormous hooks were driven through theeasternmost grounds, and the park was pulled by the people of New York, like arug across the floor, from the Sixth Borough into Manhattan. Children wereallowed to lie down on the park as it was being moved. The children of NewYork lay on their backs, body to body, filling every inch of the park … and thechildren were pulled, one millimetre and one second at a time, into Manhattanand adulthood. (p. 221)
The theme of the Sixth Borough combined with Oskar’s earlier express
wish to stunt his growth is reminiscent of the story of Peter Pan. Oskar and
Peter prefer the status quo of their childhood albeit for entirely different
reasons. Peter does not wish to grow up because to him, adulthood means
to stop having fun. Oskar wants to stunt his growth because he is afraid of
getting old and dying. The life of stasis in the Sixth Borough as it has
become part of Antarctica resembles the Neverland, the island where Peter
Pan and the Lost Boys live. The people of the Sixth Borough are frozen in
mid-life, just as the children in the Neverland never grow up. The children
of New York, however, asleep in Central Park as it is being pulled into
Manhattan, grow up overnight. The story of Central Park, in other words,
can be seen as a metaphor for the inescapability of adulthood. The stasis of
life in the rest of the borough that ended up in Antarctica can in turn be
seen as a reflection of Grandfather’s fixation with his traumatic past and
his static melancholic frame of mind.
In keeping with Oskar’s complexity of character, the boy embodies most
of the symptoms of trauma, those normally attributed to adults as well as
those specific to children. As such, Oskar grapples with Kacandes’s notion
of the breach between a pre-traumatic and post-traumatic worldview
(Kacandes 2003, 180) and experiences this disruption with feelings of
profound sadness:
The next morning I told Mom I couldn’t go to school again. She asked what waswrong. I told her, ‘The same thing that’s always wrong.’ ‘You’re sick?’ ‘I’m sad.’‘About Dad?’ ‘About everything.’ (Foer 42)
229Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer
Oskar then goes on to tick off on his fingers everything he is sad about and
runs out of fingers before having finished his enumeration. Obviously,
Oskar was not always an unhappy child. This state of mind is a recent
development, one that started on ‘the worst day’. According to Kacandes
(2003, 171), there are a number of outlets for this sadness, all of which can
be detected in the character of Oskar Schell. The boy faces the
psychological need to do detective work to unravel what happened to
him and to attribute meaning to it. On a symbolic level, Oskar’s quest for
the lock to which he has the fitting key is a tentative step towards
‘unlocking’ his trauma. The sadness about his disrupted worldview goes
hand in hand with bouts of hypervigilance and overactivity. On his
wanderings through New York City, Oskar is obsessively on the lookout
to avert lurking dangers. He goes out of his way to avoid being in places
(the Empire State Building and skyscrapers in general) or using certain
facilities (public transportation and elevators) that to his mind are obvious
targets for future terrorist attacks or are prone to causing accidents, like
the one involving the Staten Island Ferry. Oskar’s panic attacks logically
follow from his hypervigilance, in that he avoids all these things because
they make him extremely panicky (Foer 2005, 36).
The roots of Oskar’s hypervigilance and panic attacks lie in his
overactivity. The child is both overactive in thought and in actions. His
daytime hustle and bustle is meant to soothe a brain in overdrive. Oskar
himself admits that going on his treasure hunt keeps him from going
insane, or in his own words, ‘Even if [the search for the lock] was relatively
insignificant, it was something, and I needed to do something, like sharks,
who die if they don’t swim, which I know about’ (Foer 2005, 87). From the
moment Oskar is alone for a while and has nothing to divert him, he starts
dreaming up the weirdest inventions. His imagination is especially vivid at
night, when he cannot sleep. Not only does he invent the most helpful
things to escape from sticky situations or to make people feel better, but
neither can he refrain from imagining the most horrible deaths for the
people he loves. When he does finally manage to fall asleep, he is plagued
by nightmares.
A condition presumably ensuing from his hypervigilance and panic
attacks, is Oskar’s need of ‘zipping up the sleeping bag of [him]self’ (Foer
2005, 6). In his desire to hide from the physical and psychical threats in the
present, the child resembles the melancholic and goes through the process
230 Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys
of ‘acting out’. Apart from his desire to hide, Oskar’s ‘acting out’ also
reveals itself in his ambiguous attitude towards articulating what happened
to him. Oskar is at the same time able and unable to share what he is going
through. That is to say, he is unable (unwilling?) to talk about his
experiences with his mother and grandmother but he does explain
everything to complete strangers such as the elder Mr Black and the
renter (who turns out to be his grandfather).
Oskar’s selective inability to testify to his (traumatic) experiences goes
hand in hand with his fits of rage. His suppressed feelings and experiences
well up in the form of sudden outbursts of anger towards people in general,
but mostly towards those who are closest to him, like his mother and
grandmother. In one of these paroxysms, Oskar tells his mother that if he
had had a choice, he would have chosen her to die instead of his father
(Foer 2005, 171). Another vicious outburst is directed at Grandma for
having torn off and thrown away the plate block of a sheet of valuable
stamps (p. 105). Apart from having real fits of anger, Oskar also envisions
a number of situations in which he reacts aggressively and even violently.
One of those imagined scenes takes place between Oskar and a bully from
his class, Jimmy Snyder, during the school performance of Hamlet (pp.
146–147). Another particularly violent explosion of anger is directed at his
psychologist, the incompetent Dr Fein, when he asks Oskar whether any
good can come from his father’s death. In his imagination, Oskar ransacks
Dr Fein’s office but in reality he just shrugs his shoulders and goes out.
Deeply frustrated, Oskar also turns his violence and aggression towards
himself, in that he bruises himself whenever he wears particularly heavy
boots or is disappointed. Upon discovering the mystery of his key, for
example, he muses: ‘If I’d been alone, I would have given myself the
biggest bruise of my life. I would have turned myself into one big bruise’
(p. 295). This (mild) form of self-chastisement can explain the fact that
Oskar changes his mind about the issue of feeling and not feeling (and
living and not living), which at the same time again establishes the boy’s
state of mind as a ‘mixture’ of melancholia and mourning. In one of his
particularly horrible imaginings about what he would do if trapped in a
burning skyscraper, Oskar concludes that ‘feeling pain is better than not
feeling, isn’t it?’ (p. 245). The physical pain of the bruises echoes Oskar’s
inner pain of missing his father. Since the death of his father, Oskar has
weekly appointments with Dr Fein. Oskar does not understand why he
231Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer
should see a psychologist, because to him, it is only natural to wear heavy
boots when one has lost one’s father. Oskar reasons that not wearing heavy
boots in such a case would be unnatural and food for psychologists’
sessions.
Just as Thomas constantly attempts to recreate Anna,6 so Oskar
desperately clings to the memory of his father and does his best to
remember every tiny detail about him. Finding the matching lock to his
key is of secondary importance to Oskar. What the boy wants above all
is to piece together an image of his father. Upon visiting every Black in
New York City, Oskar hopes to hear that they knew his father. In the
end, he is not disappointed. The Mr Black to whom Oskar’s mysterious
key belongs did indeed meet the man, however briefly. When Oskar
entreats Mr Black to tell him exactly what his father looked like (Foer
2005, 298), the tormented son can temporarily bask in the melancholic
fantasy of minutely recreating his father’s image. Apart from just visually
reconstructing his father’s appearance, going on the treasure hunt is for
Oskar yet another means of keeping his father’s memory alive. Oskar
thinks that the key in the envelope hidden in his father’s closet is a clue
in the last Reconnaissance Expedition his father set up for him. This
Reconnaissance Expedition was never properly concluded since Oskar’s
father abruptly died and literally and figuratively left Oskar clueless.
When the quest falls short of his expectations, Oskar is deeply
disappointed:
The renter wrote, ‘You’re late.’ I shrugged my shoulders, just like Dad used to.… ‘Where were you? I was worried.’ I told him, ‘I found the lock.’ ‘You foundit?’ I nodded. ‘And?’ I didn’t know what to say. I found it and now I can stoplooking? I found it and it had nothing to do with Dad? I found it and now I’llwear heavy boots for the rest of my life? ‘I wish I hadn’t found it.’ ‘It wasn’twhat you were looking for?’ ‘That’s not it.’ ‘Then what?’ ‘I found it and now Ican’t look for it. … Looking for it let me stay close to him for a little longer.’(pp. 302–304)
What deserves particular attention in this quote is the phrase where Oskar
says that he shrugged his shoulders like his father used to. Together with
several other references to Oskar’s resemblance to his father and
grandfather, this phrase establishes Oskar as a ‘memorial candle’. The
notion of ‘memorial candles’ is especially applied to children of Holocaust
survivors. In every survivor family, Dina Wardi asserts, one of the children
232 Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys
is chosen to become a ‘memorial candle’ for all the relatives who perished
(Wardi 1992, 6). The metaphor of ‘memorial candles’ entails that children
become a replacement for the deceased. Thus, they are themselves and
become the ones that are missing at the same time. Throughout the book,
Oskar is repeatedly being told by his mother and grandmother that he
resembles his father and grandfather. That he reminds other people of his
father and grandfather makes him feel unspecial (Foer 43) because ‘why
couldn’t I remind people of me?’ (p. 252).
As a memorial candle, the child in question involuntarily shoulders a
heavy emotional burden. At the same time, though, memorial candles are
also seen as a source of light and hope (Dasburg 1992, x). This ambiguity
translates itself in Oskar’s own mixed feelings. However much Oskar
dislikes the fact that he reminds people of another person than himself, he
does exactly the same upon meeting the renter. Whether he does it
consciously or not, he attributes to the renter several aspects that remind
him of his father. He describes the renter as having a gap between his teeth
just like his father had and as shrugging his shoulders just like his father
used to. The man even shares his first name with Oskar’s father. These
coincidences of course come as no surprise to the reader, who knows that
the renter is in fact Oskar’s grandfather. Oskar, however, only knows this
in hindsight. Moreover, when the novel draws to an end Oskar even adopts
his father’s way of shrugging his shoulders. Oskar’s conscious imitation of
his father results from the new-found insight that there is nothing wrong
with looking like his father. It is at this point that Oskar’s behaviour
becomes a mixture of acting out and working through. This insight of
Oskar’s, in turn, can be interpreted as a first tentative step towards
mourning and recovery.
At the end of his quest, when Oskar experiences his final disappointment
as he comes across a conclusion to his search that is not at all what he had
hoped for, he does turn to his mother. He spills out every secret to her and
finds out that she knew all along. She even knows about her son’s deepest
secret – his father’s messages on the answering machine. While unbur-
dening himself to his mother, Oskar admits that he is conscious of his
problems and that he will do his best to learn how to deal with them.
Whereas in the beginning Oskar had more in him of a melancholic, he now
becomes more of a mourner. The quest for the matching lock to the
mysterious key he found did not bring him closer to his father, directly, but
233Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer
it does bring him closer to his mother, from whom he was becoming
estranged (Foer 2005, 322–323).
VII. Conclusion
With his fidelity to trauma, his crushing survivor guilt and his
fundamental inability to let go of the past, Thomas Schell is clearly a
melancholic. Considering that they both experienced the same trauma,
grandmother Schell seems to do much better as a survivor of a traumatic
event than does her husband. However, in the course of the novel it
becomes apparent that Grandma is only keeping up appearances and
that, in fact, she is not coping well at all. She is evidently suicidal at one
(if not two) points in the novel. Like her husband, she also suffers from
survivor guilt and she is plagued by recurring nightmares about her
traumatic past.
Oskar’s process of coping with his trauma has been equivocal from the
start. His behaviour wavers between aspects of the mourner and the
melancholic, with an initial inclination toward the latter. And yet, the boy
cannot be said to completely fit into one or the other type. Most of the
time, he feels the urge to hide away under the bed or in wardrobes and to
close himself off from the world. In this desire to hide, he resembles the
melancholic and goes through the process of ‘acting out’ his trauma.
Typical of melancholic trauma victims is their inability or even refusal to
talk about their past (cf. Thomas Schell). Oskar shares his troubles with
other people (as opposed to his loved ones), and in so doing he clearly
‘works through’ his trauma.
NOTES
1. This passage of time between the traumatic event and the first manifestationsof trauma symptoms is also known as the Freudian concept of Nac-htraglichkeit.
2. ‘le souvenir traumatique se presentait d’une maniere particuliere; il ne pouvait pasetre exprime pendant la veille et il ne reapparaissait que dans des conditions par-ticulieres, dans un autre etat psychologique’ (Janet 1980, 23).
3. Thomas’s abandonment of wife and child is part of LaCapra’s definition of ‘actingout’. Trauma victims suffering from melancholia may be profoundly unable to actresponsibly and ⁄or ethically, for example by giving consideration to other people(LaCapra 2001, 28).
234 Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys
4. In the description of the Dresden bombings, Foer has lifted scenes and phrases(including the phrase ‘Keep thinking’) from at least two sources: the witnessaccount of Lothar Metzger and an article by Edda West that appeared in 2003 inthe journal Current Concern, no. 2.
5. Cf. Foer 2005, 231 (cited above).6. Thomas Schell continually tries to (re)discover Anna in her sister, his wife, in the
form of sculptures, sketches, and ultimately, in his marriage to her.
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Sien Uytterschout ([email protected]) studied Germanic Languages at theVrije Universiteit Brussel and graduated in 2005. In 2006, she successfully concludedthe MA programme in American Studies (Universiteit Antwerpen) with a dissertationon trauma in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Currently,she is working for GUST (Ghent Urban Studies Team).
Kristiaan Versluys ([email protected]) is Professor of American Literatureand Culture at Ghent University (Belgium). He has published The Poet in the City.Chapters in the Development of Urban Poetry in Europe and the United States (1987) andsome eighty scholarly (book) articles in international journals and collections. Hisspecialities are urban literature (especially the literature of New York) and Jewish-American fiction. He is preparing a study on the discursive responses to 9 ⁄ 11.
236 Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys