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INTERTEXTUAL SONGS OF INNOCENCE IN FOER’S EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE

E. Vlad

Abstract

Although this paper acknowledges within its theoretical framework seminal ideas put forward by Dominick LaCapra and Cathy Caruth, refashioning Freud’s descriptions of ways of experiencing and coping with trauma, it moves in a different direction. It explores the intertextual pattern used to create unexpected, ‘artificial’ responses to trauma. The most common labels used to refer to such texts as Foer’s 2005 novel are ‘9/11 Literature’ and ‘The Literature of Terror,’ with strong reliance on trauma theory. If in a traumatic story about 9/11 horror and terror are the necessary features, then Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close might not qualify. The current paper chooses to examine the novel within one out of two different intertextual reading paradigms. One of these two different approaches can be traced back to Blake’s Songs of Innocence. 9/11 trauma is there all right in Foer, but ‘intimations of immortality’ are aimed at through the use of ‘return-to-innocence’ literary devices, a pattern creating special effects by dramatizing innocence, experience, trauma. Foer’s formula relies on memorable, unexpected ways of dealing with trauma through the mediations of a polyphony of perspectives, among which the one of a child features prominently, with illustrious literary precursors looming large in the text. The multiple ways of dealing with, and being affected by, trauma are woven into a fictional fabric engaging in a creative conversation with apparently different texts such as Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the latter work providing the ‘ground zero’ for the erection of the ‘return-to-innocence’ narrative construction.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2019V/6.1/S11.020

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