Oh My Word: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I, nearly 11 years late, have just finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The novel tells the story of generational trauma and the process of grieving as Oskar Schnell, the nine year old protagonist, mourns the loss of his father in the 9/11 terrorist attack. Similarly, his grandparents struggle with the legacy of the Dresden firebombing during World War II. The text mixes different narrative voices, photography and experimental visual storytelling techniques in order to convey the emotion of traumatic loss and grief.

When reading the reviews of the text, it became clear to me that one particular question kept recurring: why use the visual storytelling techniques at all? what to they contribute to the text and why would Foer use them?

9/11 in particular, but other traumatic cultural events too, come with a unique kind of visual iconography. Additionally, images survive where witness testimony doesn't - often these events are so tragic that few survivors live to tell their stories and images fill the gaps in our knowledge or experience. They also allow the text to tread the line of fact and fiction as the photography suggests a that the novel has a kind of veracity, whilst the text is evidently a fiction. By treading this boundary, the text offers escapism and catharsis in equal parts.

Most of all, in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer's occupation with the visual allows him to draw attention to the ways in which the characters, suffering from trauma and grief, fail to communicate with eachother. Instead they depend upon their images, their own private writing or letters, and the images and writing of others in order to communicate their feelings. Many of the photographs are taken or collected by Oskar that resonate with him in some way go in his scrapbook 'Things that Happened to Me', whilst hundreds of his grandfather's letters fill the cabinets of Oskar's father's childhood bedroom, some of which we as readers are privy too. Similarly, Oskar's grandfather's daybooks (where, because of his mutism, he communicates with writing) fill every surface of the apartment. 

The use of real photographic images from 9/11 in the final pages of the text are some of the most intensely emotional, if dubious morally speaking. The final pages of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are also the first to evoke movement and dynamism by utilising a flipbook effect. They remind me of the closing images from the film Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentary about the Lebanon war of 1982 which uses real images of the war in its final minutes, which shock viewers and evoke intensely emotional responses to the reality of the events depicted. The artistry of the final images of the text, however, lies in the reversal of the sequence of images so that the fall of the victim in the image becomes an ascent. This resolves Oskar's (and his grandmother's) desire to change the past and make history go backwards, offering them a resolution to their grief. 

Though Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is, to me at least, a fascinating and charming text about the legacies of trauma across generations, it certainly isn't a text for everyone. That said, the use of photography, experimental typographical techniques and visual arrangements are a refreshing take on what print literature can be and how it can operate as a genuine reflection of culture and experience.