*Project Realism: This post is indebted to Sara who introduced the idea that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a work of psychological realism. I was inspired by her re-naming.
Is the peculiarity of the novel a matter of language? I propose that it can be understood as a work of poetic realism. In addition to using musical elements (which don’t appear in EL&IC) to heighten and clarify emotional experience, poets have been traditionally inclined to compare and to exaggerate. To take control (momentarily) of their personal losses and traumatized cities, and to describe the indescribable, Oskar and family expand their senses. Familiar forms of expression are often paired with a poetic truth built of comparisons and exaggerations. While I am interested in Grandma’s poetics (dredged-up memories secret even to herself) and Thomas Schell senior’s (enacted in an unbelievable flesh inking of identity) since their accounts are presented as written text, Oskar’s connection to poetry is more complicated.
Foer makes an effort at training us to read layered language. When Oskar tells Gerald the limousine driver a joke, writes letters or plays the tambourine, his boots are lighter. Foer does not say that Oskar’s grief lessens “as if” or “like” boots made lighter. The comparison is assumed. And like poetry, we are not confused by the two, overlapping languages. We know when something sounds incredible, when Oskar is speaking to us from the edge of reality. If the truth of what “heavy boots” means is felt by us, then does this descriptive “lie” become the truth? Naming Oskar’s feeling as the general word “grief” or the trite phrase “heavy heart” would be grossly inaccurate, not to mention make it easy for us to doubt its truth and pass it over.
Oskar is unusually empowered by knowledge for a boy his age and constantly in the heat of inspiration (or rather, invention). Foer gives his protagonist a poetic temperament. However, I do not think that Oskar’s search for the right Black and the right lock is because of some inherent, wacky switch in his brain that separates him from everyone else. Like a surrealist poet, Oskar invents a game in order to unhinge his unconscious and to order his chaos of feeling. I do not think that it is a coincidence that the Black search’s origins are in an art store following Oskar’s excitement over the multi-sensory. I read the early interaction between Oskar and an art supply store manager as a message from Foer about how his protagonist, despite his gifts, is altogether normal. Oskar is taught about color synesthesia and afterwards “tries to catch up with [his] brain.” Oskar is not some kind of synesthete, able to compare and exaggerate naturally without purpose or exertion.
Because of the art store scene, every time Oskar makes an incredible leap of imagination, I share in his exaltation but also his exhaustion. He sees his father’s name everywhere “in marker and oil sticks and colored pencils and chalk and pens and watercolors.” Like a poet, Oskar’s thoughts reach great heights. He has the ability to bring what is known and what is unknown closer together. But unlike a poet and unlike Grandma or Thomas Schell senior whose traumatic afterthoughts exist primarily on paper, Oskar projects his poetic truth onto a world of present objects and present people, his day-to-day. For me, this is the novel’s greatest tension.
This is a very intriguing explanation of a number of the novel’s difficult elements, ranging from why Oskar “invents” (instead of “make things up”) to the metaphors he uses to describe his emotions (“heavy boots” and “zipping up the sleeping bag of myself”). This is a poetically-charged reading of the flipping of the literal/evocative planes I mentioned in class. I’m not sure I’d call Oskar a surrealist poet though; there’s something Romantic about him (Wordsworth comes to mind).