At this point I have only read up through page 217 of EL&IC, so I don’t have a full view of Tuesday’s reading to apply to this post. Instead, I want to look closely at one section, the one headed “Why I’m Not Where You Are” (208-216). Ignoring for now the red ink corrections, I want to look at the section describing the killing of the zoo animals (213). Frankly, I found this part ridiculous. It came across to me as so incredibly over-sensationalized in its attempt to produce an emotional response that it was flatly absurd. Obviously, the narrative has countless examples of subtle emotional appeals that do make you sympathize with the characters and grasp the immensity of loss / chaos. But this was not one of them: “I passed the zoo… one of the keepers was calling out for help… his eyes had been burnt closed, he grabbed my armed and asked me if I knew how to fire a gun… he handed me his rifle and said, ‘You’ve got to find the carnivores’” (213). Now, the Dresden zoo was actually bombed, and for all I know there were uncaged lions wandering the streets of Dresden that day (hmm). But the image of this man wandering around terminating rhinos and monkeys amidst the flames of Allied bombs just left me boggled. I understand that this tries to illustrate the extent of the chaos and the senselessness and absurdity of that day. But really all I get is the absurdity of the passage. To say the least, my disbelief came unsuspended. Regardless, there are other possible authorial intentions or subtexts which can be read into the scene. In some ways, the indiscriminatory nature of the animal executions mirrors the arbitrary or indiscriminatory nature of the firebombing itself. The narrator expresses a desire to kill everything, even things he suspects aren’t carnivores. I can’t tell if this is supposed to be him venting some kind of rage and confusion or if he’s just trying to cover all the bases and guarantee there will be no carnivorous zoo animals left in Dresden.
I realize immense violence and death is something that is incredibly hard to portray in a nuanced way that even remotely communicates the experience of those who have gone through it. Nonetheless, the zoo debacle just doesn’t do it for me. Having read Slaughterhouse-Five, I know it’s possible for an author to address the tragedy of Dresden in a way that is nuanced and sympathetic, while still communicating the extreme level of destruction and loss. Maybe this is because Vonnegut chose to view the atrocity through the lens of satire. Extreme violence like that seen in Dresden is almost incomprehensible to the human mind, and this incomprehensibility naturally lends itself to absurd portrayals. Vonnegut was aware of this and utilizes satire to communicate an authentic sense of what it was like to be there in the aftermath of Dresden. Foer, on the other hand, tries to play a scene of violent absurdity with a straight face, and frankly this why I feel that his description of the firebombing comes across (to me, anyways) as misdirected and emotionally exploitative. Then again, maybe I’m just voicing the typical intolerance for retellings like these voiced by people who did not experience them directly. There are a number of other aspects of the book which I find well written and compelling. Just not elephant hunting in the melted streets of Dresden.
In a word: Amen. However, as I’m sure four words will not suffice for the week’s blog, let me elaborate:
I agree wholeheartedly with your reaction to this “over-sensationalized” excerpt in that my sympathies were in no way moved by such an abundance of the word “killed.” To be completely honest, I was more moved to skim the page and search for a sentence that excluded that notorious verb and some animal or another. The repetitive nature of the passage, as you said, obviously holds significance in expressing the compounding nature of gore during such a horrific event, but I think Foer might have done more good by me if he’d been a tad more creative in his approach. That said, let me extent a little praise to Foer for the parts of the section that didn’t make me want to rip my eyes out.
While the ‘killed this, killed that, killed everything I fuckin’ saw’ nonsense was trying, the one thing that saves the passage from being completely without merit are the questions that accompany some of the killings. “I killed two lions…were they friends, mates…?” (213). This is one of those times that while reading such absurdity one beings to see the meaning (to steal from you: “illustrate the extent of the chaos and senselessness”) in such a ridiculous presentation. I feel like this question is when the grandfather’s narrative here begins to explicate the two-fold, those folds being incomprehensively compatible, nature of war for soldiers. Let’s imagine that in war, the point is to, “kill the carnivores,” so as to protect oneself from imminent harm or prevent the possibility of harm from occurring. Now, if we cannot decipher the carnivores from the herbivores (not to mention the omnivores who are just plain sneaky), but we’re still so afraid of the carnivores, then maybe, possibly, the solution is to just “shoot everything.” Oskar’s grandfather, in a way, illustrates the conscientious soldier, killing everything for the good of the living people of Dresden, but at the same time wondering whether or not these creatures might indeed operate just as they do. To begin to think of the enemy, or the carnivores, as anything like ourselves is to begin to falter in goal (that is, in the ability to fight and win wars). Another one of these humanizing the enemy quotations that I see is, “I killed a cub…was it climbing atop its parent?” (213). Actually, this also harkens back to the page before when Oskar’s grandfather speaks of walking over an old man and children in his search from Anna amongst the living and the dead. So, seeing something of the same action on both sides of the line (enemy/friend, killer/killed) should add to this idea of the possibility of seeing yourself in the enemy as a worse way to run wars than, say, dropping bombs. This commentary on the bombing of cities, or the crashing of planes into buildings, is to show the aid in a division between the soldiers who are killing at the victims of that destruction. This way, such soldiers do not have to worry about seeing the, “vultures fattening themselves on the human carnage,” (213) and blaming themselves for everything.
Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch in the reading, but hey, I’m trying to save Foer here from just being a dude who likes to write short, repetitive sentences about killing of all the zoo animals. (Maybe I am giving him too much credit…I mean, the least he could do was vary the word choice, right?)
The Dresden “safari” is another one of those passages that struck me at first as fantastic, in the “magical realism without magic” vein.
I thinking now, though, that it’s almost the opposite of magical realism, or at least a perversion of it. In magical realism, animals are often fantastic participants in the narrative, heavily symbolic yet delivering practical consequences (Pierce, think of the tortoises in The People of Paper). The death of all these animals in a fantastic way (surely by the end of WWII the Dresden Zoo had already been shuttered, as human populations could barely feed themselves, let alone charismatic megafauna) — anyway, the brutal death of all these animals in a fantastic way seems to be a kind of bludgeoning of magical realism itself. As if the narrative’s saying, You want animals freighted with symbolic meaning? Well take that!! (as Thomas fires a bullet into an ape’s heart.)
Or, quite possibly, maybe we’re simply all reading this passage too literally. If we read it as a traumatized text (made even more so by the red ink “wounding” the page), maybe Thomas isn’t that reliable of a narrator. Going back to Sara Nigh’s argument, maybe this is more a scene of psychological realism, in which he tells us what the world felt and seemed like, but that external world is actually a projection of a traumatized mind.
Regarding the Dresden Zoo on the night of the Firestorm: The zoo was open, and fully populated with charismatic megafauna. I was actually struck by the research that Foer had done in terms of the zoo scene, because he practically quotes one of the zookeepers there on that night —
“I had known for one hour now that the most difficult task I could ever bring was facing me. “Lehmann, we must get to the carnivores,” I called. We did what we had to do, but it broke my heart” (Otto Sailer-Jackson).
It took the police hours to find and destroy the panicked, injured, and burned animals that were trying to flee the area along with the human residents of Dresden, and the zookeepers had to shoot all of the carnivores that were still contained in their cages in case they somehow got out.
To clarify I’m more concerned with the question of whether or not this passage is emotionally effective than I am by the veracity of the situation itself. I’ll admit, I did little research on the facts of the situation… this post was more of an off-the-cuff “what the f***” than a well ordered examination. This is one of those scenes that seems so absurd that you feel somehow that it had to be grounded in truth. Obviously, it was, and my zealous condemnation of it forces me to eat some crow. I still feel like the passage as a whole is over the top in a way that takes me out of the narrative. It almost feels as if Foer asked himself, “How much carnage can I jam into nine pages? Maybe the grandfather’s unborn child and one true love can be melted to slag! WHILE he’s blowing away sympathetic animals!” I know that the Dresden firebombing was an absolute nightmare, and one of the greatest outrages of the war (an estimated 20,000+ civilians were killed). But I feel as if Foer tried too hard to show ALL of that carnage through the eyes and experiences of one individual. Even if someone did personally go through all this (who knows?), I still think presenting it in this way stretches the believability of the passage and compromises the narrative. Of course, if we’re not supposed to take the passage at face value (the text certainly doesn’t shy away from the question of narrator reliability/unreliability), then that’s an entirely different story. Metaphorical / allegorical interpretations, or the concept of “traumatized text,” etc. have all been mentioned in the comments / responses and I hope this is something that we can hash out in class. (Also, thanks for clarifying the facts of the situation. That was something that had been bothering me since I read the passage and wrote the post.)