As I’ve said in class, I’m not a fan of the experimental things being done with text in this book. For me, they’re a distraction: the blank pages, page after page with only a single line on them, pages whose whitespace is being slowly invaded by words written over and over each other until they’re just an amorphous blob of black, the run-on sentences (like this one), the red-ink circles — they pull me out of the story, or I find myself skimming over them. I do like the illustrations though. I wish that more books were illustrated these days, with photographs or drawings, because I think that pictures can add a lot to a story without it being distracting.
However, having now finished the book, I will say that the form of the text, even though I don’t like it, does serve to illustrate the wounded pysches of all the characters. Everyone, from Grandma to Oskar to Oskar’s grandfather, is an unhealed survivor of trauma. Each character has not only their own voice and their own trauma, but their own unique textual style.
Grandma doesn’t indent, use quotation marks, or put any space between her paragraphs. She is fully-justified, quadruple spaces after her periods, and she puts dialogue on different lines. To me, her text looks confined and constrained — she and her words must line up on at least one side in an orderly, and whatever pain happens in the middle is hidden. She controls her text because it’s all she can control.
Oskar is stream-of-consciousness. Speech tags happen anywhere in his paragraphs and those paragraphs don’t stop just because someone has spoken. Paragraph breaks happen with a logic entirely of Oskar’s making, and I don’t really understand the whys of when he does break. Oskar’s text is fearful. When you’re afraid, really terrified, people’s voices blend together, and you perceive the world around you in chunks. Oskar’s need to find meaning saturates his text, and even when meaningful things happen he overlooks them because of his fear. Even his fantasies are about fear, inflicting fear on others through violence. Oskar doesn’t quite know how to be happy any more.
Grandfather’s text is all one huge block of words. Like Oskar, his own fear comes out through his lack of dialogue markers. People’s words and voices blend together — sometimes one has to read and re-read a section of dialogue in order to puzzle out who has said what. Grandfather’s text is often the most experimental. He’s responsible for the one-line pages, the black swallowing the page, the red circles that start out sensical but degenerate into nonsense (as far as I can tell). He has no other outlet for his words because he does not speak, and his text reflects that. His frustrated creativity infects his text with experimentalism because his trauma has denied him a voice with which to express himself.
I like your candid assessment of your own reaction toward the typographical experimentation in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. What is interesting is that while you find the atypical typesetting distracting, the inclusion of photographic images is not — even though they presumably interrupt the narrative flow as much as the textual stylizations.
I imagine you’re not alone feeling this, and it makes me wonder what it is exactly that is so bothersome to so many readers. My theory is this: the novel offers up text that aspires to be an image. That is, images can be images, and text can be text, but neither should aspire to be what the other is. Text that forms imagistic contours is poorly behaved text. I’m not trying to single you out — I imagine that novel is hitting against a cultural nerve shared by many readers. So the next question is: is Foer doing this on purpose, and is there a thematic reason to present such ill-mannered text?
I think part of it is that we’re conditioned to accept illustrations, be they drawings or photographs, in books from an early age. Our first books are picture books, and then they are lavishly illustrated children’s books. Pictures in books feel as though they are supposed to be there, while the first time I was ever introduced to textual experimentation like Foer’s was in high school with e.e. cummings (who I emulated obsessively for a year or two with my own atrocious teenage poetry and then discarded as ‘pretentious’ — my current reaction lies somewhere between those two extremes).
Like I said in my post, I think that the rude text does a lot to make the reader feel the anxieties and constraints of each narrator. Foer is layering in subtext by providing more standard subtext in the observations of body language and such, and also providing the _form_ of traumatized language and perception in how the various narrators’ texts read on the page.