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.


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)


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-


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


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


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


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,


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


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,


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


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)


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


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


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


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


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).


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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Dasburg, H. 1992, ‘Foreword’ in D. Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of theHolocaust, Routledge, London, p. xxi.

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Leys, R. 2000, Trauma. A Genealogy, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill.Metzger, L. 1992, ‘Bombing of Dresden’, available at http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.

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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.


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