I agree with Jennifer’s summary of Foer’s story. He attempts to create a symbol-driven handbook for categorizing the depth of emotions arising from, among other things, love and illness. But the complexity of human experience cannot be limited to the characters on a standard keyboard. The approach reminds me of Hassan’s point that “we no longer know what response is adequate to our reality” (23). Hassan also describes dehumanization as a process of turning emotions into an equation, calling it a “revulsion against the human” (20). Foer’s story plays with this, but I wouldn’t call it dehumanized. Actually, I think its form allows it to have an opposite effect. Obviously no generic handbook would ever have such intimate examples, and by disguising itself within generic instructions, the underlying sensitivity is exposed.
I just mentioned Hassan, but I mostly didn’t know what he was talking about. I’m curious about what others thought of the “POSTmodernISM” essay. I had a hard time with it, partly because I’m unfamiliar with many of the names and works he referenced, partly because the form threw me off.
As for Link, I think I liked her story better than Jennifer did, but the ending also confused me. The zombies were what initially attracted me to this story, too, and it’s nice that Soap fears them but at the same time appreciates their simplicity. I don’t consider them much of a metaphor; I think they’re just zombies, but by the end I still felt like I’d missed something.
One part I found especially engaging and hoped would be expanded more was when she described Soap’s painting on 158-159 like a depiction of the story itself, the story of being lost in the woods. No one really knows what the painting is supposed to be or where it came from. Maybe it’s a forest inside of which is a prison, inside of which are these strange characters. But that’s about as far as I got with that interpretation. I like how the narrator calls Soap so many names, the preferred name being an object. Does this count as dehumanization? Sometimes he’s Arthur, or Sweetheart, or…Wolverine? At the end he’s not there at all. So whose story is it?
I’m also curious to know what everyone took from the Cage piece. I was initially skeptical because of the multiple fonts–they seem a little gimmicky and annoying, especially since they don’t really make a pattern and I really want them to. But I enjoyed the story/poem and how self-aware and contradictory it is right from the beginning, with its hopeful title and hopeless parenthetical title. It’s sometimes like a piece about good intentions gone wrong. Tunnel workers go on strike to make more money or have better conditions, but the government ends up not just not needing them, but actually doing better without them. That’s so sad.
But back to the fonts: What do you think about them? Are they just there for attention? I don’t get why the form is the way it is, unevenly centered and mashed together, unless maybe the point is to look jagged (which is possible) or maybe there’s no point at all (also possible). What is it that holds everything together here?
I think this idea of “dehumanization” is a good one to consider — not just for this week’s stories, but throughout the course of the semester.
The word reminds me of a related concept (at least etymologically related) that is also important: humanism. I wonder if anybody else sees DeLillo’s “The Uniforms” and Jonathan Safran Foer’s “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease” on opposite ends of the humanist spectrum. That is, the two stories seem to imagine two completely visions of humanity’s possibilities. DeLillo is cynical (on the surface, at least), while Foer is nostalgic and hopeful. Yet there is a clear geneology stretching from one generation of writer to the next.