Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

As I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I was moved by Jonathan Safran Foer's weaving of past and present memories of people affected by 9-11 and his decision to include accounts of the bombings of Hiroshima and Dresden. Although he shows parallels in these stories of loss and trauma, we are aware throughout the text of the singularity and exceptionality of each one. Safran Foer describes the very personal suffering of individuals who must coexist with memories and physical artifacts of these events as they go about activities in everyday life- traveling, writing letters, lying to one another, sleeping and dreaming, looking at photos or letters. The characters of Oskar, his grandmother and grandfather attempt to make sense of their lives in a world that moves forward while they remain in a liminal state of doubt and uncertainty. The author captures the frustration they experience when they realize that fundamental, life-changing questions associated with these events will never be answered; thankfully, the author does not present a completely pessimistic picture of human relationships at the end of the book. Each character is presented with an opportunity to re-evaluate the most important things in their lives, and each chooses to engage with their memories in ways that are not self-destructive and directed exclusively inwards. They share their feelings with one another, and are less lonely for it.

I was also reminded when I read this book of my friend who traveled to Hiroshima and saw people’s shadows burned into walls as a result of the blast's impact. What are the artifacts of loss when everything is blown apart and people simply disappear, leaving shadows, and not bodies, behind? I believe our artifacts are memories, texts, photographs, ephemera that may mean nothing to some but everything to others- and as some of my peers have pointed out, Safran Foer offers us many ways of documenting or representing life as doodles or even blank pages.

Given the fact that I don't read much fiction anymore (no time, sadly), I found myself missing the psychological space of novels and the powerful combination of abstraction and intimacy that I experience when reading a good one. Until now, I have not experienced the novel as a way of reflecting upon the events of September 11, and I found that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (through the author's careful writing) existed within a medium that could offer a more thoughtful, nuanced, and honest way of representing the anger, confusion, and sadness of people coping with the aftermath than other representations (fiction films, mostly) or forms of documentation that I have encountered. Even though it may be difficult for many us to verbalize their thoughts in a completely transparent manner, due to physical and social limitations, it is possible to express ourselves more freely through writing, especially in memoir form.

Finally, I want to add that I enjoyed the experience of bringing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close everywhere throughout my travels in New York City. I picked it up at the Strand, and brought it to Bushwick, Washington Heights, into the tunnels of the subway, upstairs, downstairs, and finally to Teachers College. Like the space of memory, good works of fiction allow us to engage in one activity or be present in one space while absorbing ourselves in another. In some ways, the act of reading or writing a novel is to create a safe space for embracing affect that would, in other contexts, be prohibited or ignored.

Veblen & the Leisure Class - Working Hard or Hardly Working?

"Conversely, the greater the proficiency and the more patent the evidence of a high degree of habituation to observances which serve no lucrative or other directly useful purpose, the greater the consumption of time and substance impliedly involved in their acquisition, and the greater the resultant good repute." (32)

Below are some assorted thoughts on Veblen:

What characterizes the leisure classes is not simply the accumulation of material wealth, but the belief that they are entitled to such an accumulation (we discussed this in class w.r.t Mills.)

When I read about the wealthy, "leisure class" described in Veblen, I was immediately reminded of auction houses that deal in fine art or luxury property sales. I have never been to an art auction but I have seen them portrayed on television, in the movies, and heard stories about them from friends who work in the business of selling art. The truly wealthy send their assistants or whomever to bid for them- *perhaps this is where the phrase "to do so-and-so's bidding" came from, though I don't know. The leisure class with money aren't even present in these instances! They are doing what Veblen describes, namely, enacting the business of being wealthy and overseeing things from on high, without having to do any physical "labor". I wonder where the idea of large-scale anonymous donations or philanthropy fits in Veblen's idea of leisure class. Is an anonymous donation of a huge sum interpretable as a symbolic gesture of the leisure class' need to conceal their wealth? Is it part of the act of doing something they're "supposed" to do? (though I'm not entirely cynical; I believe that some people make generous anonymous donations for reasons of modesty, and also because they believe in various causes and social improvement.)

Another interesting point that Veblen brings up is the relationship of technology and tools to a societal transformation in ownership. Tools allow for greater productivity. More productivity means more things to accumulate and increased time for those in power to collect and buy stuff. Humans, and animals such as the bower bird, like stuff.

Of course what rich people buy is not necessarily "high-class"; however I'm sure they like the myth that we imagine for them, the greater myth we participate in where we collectively imagine that they buy rich things and have fun activities in the presence of other rich people. Meanwhile, the hardworking, long-suffering staff plot their revenge. Cf. the great movie by Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg, The Celebration (Festen) and countless other narratives in a similar vein.

Barthes and Mythologies

"To keep a spatial metaphor...I shall say that the signification of the myth is constituted by a sort of constantly moving turnstile which presents alternately the meaning of the signifier and its form, a language object and a metalanguage...Myth is a value, truth is no guarantee for it; nothing prevents it from being a perpetual alibi: it is enough that its signifier has two sides for it always to have an elsewhere at its disposal. Meaning is always there to present the form; the form is always there to outdistance the meaning." (Barthes, 123)

To Barthes, myth is a "sign" (combination of signified and signifier) with a unique relationship to its corresponding words, images, or other representations of objects (signifier); the objects that they refer to (signifier); and a larger body of meaning, which he calls "signification". Unlike other signs, myths can have many physical and visual representations; these "forms" point to higher-order, abstract concepts like "imperialism" or "colonialism" or "justice" that attain the status of myth because their meanings are ambiguous, powerful, "motivated" (as Barthes describes them), and connected to our historical and physical contexts. A myth is a representation with deep, often disputed meaning(s) embedded in social norms, activities, objects and ideas, and as I understand it, deeply related to our beliefs and assumptions. A myth is "speech stolen and restored" (125)

My reading of Mythologies leads me to understand Barthes as a kind of detective of meaning. He uncovers the power behind cultural practices and habits that we often perceive to be superficial and popular distractions. The activities of wrestling and striptease are embodiments of spectacles of justice and fear, respectively. Barthes also looks at why these activities have attained such predictability in their execution/performance, and reliability in how they amuse or titillate audiences. As myths, these activities are both capable of fulfilling certain expectations of how we think we should act and behave, and also capable of instilling a sense of fulfilllment (for example, in the witnessing of naked "sex" in striptease, or the thrill and catharsis of seeing someone "deserve" physical defeat in wrestling). What can be considered mythic in our contemporary world according to his analysis? What cultural symbols, activities or representations have meanings that might possess this contradiction of "obviousness" and ambiguity? Barthes seems to consider myths as representations of meaning that can communicate at an individual, personal level, and also at a level that functions in the realm of a "collective experience" or memory. Are myths culturally similar or dissimilar? Can certain types of myths be generalizable across cultures? In other words, do cultures have the same myths? Or same types of myths? How do myths enter and exit in historical relevance? What does it mean to be living in a world where we can continually inscribe meaning onto objects- physical, digital, biological- through recontextualization?

Here are a few quick myth mashups for you. I really couldn't think of anything else, right now, except for Che (sorry Che for more representational abuse- but I use these as illustrative examples). Are myths more or less powerful now because of the sheer number of mythic representations out there, or because now so many more people can repurpose mythic representations, thereby evoking (I speak for myself) mixtures of disgust, reverence, confusion?? As I look at the images below I wonder, how, and why?!?!