Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (29 page)

Here is the child’s revenge against the obscenely dirty tricks that life has played on him: violence at long last. Of course—of course—the postmodern Foer “virtualizes” this (Jacobean) explosion by informing us afterward, “It would have been great.”
It would have been great
. This is the very plaint of injury as it makes its dark way toward healing: to purge our violence via imaginative release. Aristotle defined catharsis pretty much this way some twenty-four centuries ago.

The death of a parent sits inside this child like a malignant tumor that must be removed so that he can live. Perhaps that is what grieving means: gradually extricating the materials of death from within us so that life can regain the field. But there’s the rub: we cannot bear to let go of our dead. With this insight, we are able to see how Foer’s larger story ultimately coheres. Each death we suffer is a double death: Dad dies initially on 9/11, but he is further dying, more slowly and insidiously and unforgivably, inside his son every day that son lives. And it can’t be stopped. What is true for 9/11 is true for Dresden. Grandma—as war-ravaged as any, a survivor of Dresden—loves Oskar with an almost maniacal intensity because
he is there
. But the others are not: “I can’t remember what the front door of the house I grew up in looked like. Or who stopped kissing first, me or Anna. Or the view from any window but my own. Some nights I lay awake for hours trying to remember my mother’s face.” Here is the routine theft, sacking, disappearing act that time performs on the living. We can be ravaged without bombs or falling towers. Survival cannibalizes us, eats away our past, maroons us in the present.

Hence one understands
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
to be a dirge against entropy, an effort to keep one’s most precious memories extremely loud and incredibly close. Foer has constructed the Schell family in such a way that this challenge is especially daunting and unmeetable: they have lost everything, not only via the devastation of Dresden and 9/11 but thanks to the corrosions of both time and the human heart. The firebombing of Dresden separated what they had: Anna (Grandmother’s sister) died, Great-grandfather survived but committed suicide, Thomas (Oskar’s grandfather) was permanently unhinged, even though he made his way to New York and found Grandma. They are the walking wounded: one cannot speak, the other cannot remember. Thomas retreats to Dresden and writes a series of letters to his unborn son (also Thomas, Oskar’s father), trying to explain his absence, letters to a man who died in the Twin Towers. Everywhere you look there are people orphaned and shipwrecked by disaster.

Coming at the very end of this corrosive serial chain is the child, Oskar, the inheritor of an entire history of separation and abandonment. The depredations of politics and time constitute the impossible hand he’s been dealt. But he bears the load nonetheless, and none of it, as Oskar-Yorick insisted at the
Hamlet
performance, makes any sense. Dad died the most horrible death imaginable; but the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Dresden fared badly too. Against this backdrop it makes perfect sense that the book closes with a magisterial effort to undo the damages wrought by time. This cannot be done in reality, but it can perhaps be done in fiction. Grandma can dream of collapsed ceilings reforming, fire going back into bombs, bombs rising into the bellies of planes whose propellers turn backward, away from Dresden. Her dream goes all the way back to Adam and Eve: the apple is put back on the branch, the tree goes into the ground, the sapling becomes a seed, light itself yields to the primal darkness. A new beginning.

But of course the light cannot be put out and the apple is always/forever eaten. Knowledge cannot be undone. Hurt is real and unerasable. Oskar Schell lost something irreplaceable, and Foer enables us, in the few sweet pages devoted to the tender relationship between father and son, to measure just what it was that was lost. Thomas Schell, at once lost son and lost father, comes to us, victim of 9/11 though he is, as the freest man of the story. His whimsy, his habit of shrugging his shoulders rather than giving specific answers, his gentle and wise intimacy with his gifted son, make up some of this novel’s warmest and finest pages. Nothing surpasses, in this respect, his story of New York’s Sixth Borough, the borough of imagination and freedom, place of magic and possibility. The Sixth Borough used to be accessible to every New Yorker, but it began to recede, and soon enough special long jumpers were needed to make the miraculous leap all the way to this promised land, and when the long jumper was airborne, “every New Yorker felt capable of flight.” Yet the Sixth Borough is destined, like so much else in this book, for disappearance, leaving as its only legacy Central Park, transplanted into Manhattan as the residual site of wonder, a place where “the children were pulled, one millimeter and one second at a time, into Manhattan and into adulthood.”

That passage into adulthood is what Foer wanted to chronicle. For Oskar, such a journey forward is forever linked to a memory backward, of a man who embodied freedom most perfectly in the stories he told to his son. For that is what Central Park means: a place where you must feel that you are “experiencing some tense in addition to the present.” Literature itself is made of just this: a script that brings to us time-bound people the opportunity to live elsewhere and “elsewhen.” That is the father’s legacy: imagination as balm, as a resource, as a tool for getting through horror, a way of remaking the world.

Oskar Schell’s story may include Dresden and Hiroshima, but it is first and foremost a story about what happened to
us
on September 11, 2001: how to imagine those deaths, how to get past those deaths. All mourners know that the beast they are wrestling with is not merely loss but also time. Hence Foer’s novel closes by reversing time: not merely Grandma’s dream of a return to Eden but a suite of photographs displaying a body positioned next to a tall building in which each page portrays the impossible: the body is rising. There is no religious message here, only a desperate and beautiful hope of undoing the damage, repairing the injury, honoring life. This too is promised by Dad’s fable of the Sixth Borough: “experiencing some tense in addition to the present.” Despite all the maneuvering room made available to us in grammar—present, past, future, conditional, subjunctive—we have no known tense for such a reversal of time, of fate. As Oskar imagines this luminous fable of freedom, he narrates his dad back from the roof of the burning building to the street to the subway to the apartment (always walking backward) to the coffee going from his mouth to his mug and then to his bed to the night before and finally to Oskar’s bed, leading to the story of the Sixth Borough, the final umbilical cord between father and son. The last words—logical, heartbreaking—are “We would have been safe.”

A child’s dream? Or the yearning that lives in every American since 9/11?

Up to now we have seen a great number of children for whom growing up means learning to cope with adversity. Some are victims of their environment, some adapt to coercive and deforming circumstances, some persevere and achieve a measure of selfhood, some opt out entirely, some go under, some flourish and flower. Each seems locked in a dance with culture and society. This, we tell ourselves, is the education that life inevitably metes out to the young. How could it be otherwise?

But deep inside many of us, lurking in our dreams perhaps as the residue of Romanticism, is the notion of childhood as autonomous, childhood as a time prior to socialization. We might want to term such a state innocence, but we have seen, with the help of William Blake, the extent to which innocence is always a dialectical notion, in some covert form of collusion with experience, indeed with social and ideological norms. Yet anyone who has watched children closely, seen them at play (individually and in groups), questioned them about their experiences and wants, listened to their sometimes strange responses, knows that children often seem a different species altogether, anthropologically different. There is the eighteenth-century story of the “wild child of Aveyron,” who was found in the woods and became the subject/object of Enlightenment pedagogy, yielding the meagerest of results: the child’s feral natural instincts were curbed, but the acquisition of language and all the baggage that goes with it could not be fully brought off, despite the best intentions. Or the nineteenth-century German example of Kaspar Hauser, who simply appeared out of nowhere at the age of thirteen, unable to write, afflicted with catalepsy and epilepsy, known to have been locked up since infancy, destined for a short, tragic, and unsuccessful stint as an adult. Yet I’d prefer not to medicalize these matters but to focus on what seems most alien about the “wild child”: namely, our own intuition that such creatures might have their own strange integrity and that they thereby willy-nilly expose the artifice and constructedness of our adult schemes. They do not play by our rules.

My first example is the enigmatic child Mignon, who appears in Goethe’s magisterial Bildungsroman of the late eighteenth century,
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship;
Mignon mesmerizes Wilhelm, and she has mesmerized countless readers ever since. Everything about her is a riddle, including her sex (she appears in boy’s clothes and has a more androgynous than female identity), her name (Mignon is merely a sobriquet: “They call me Mignon”), and her speech (she cannot master the language spoken by the adults; it is as if she had her own code). Music and dance are her modes of expression. We know that she worships Wilhelm, but this is no ordinary infatuation, nor does it have any possible future. Above all, she is the novel’s apostle of desire, and her beautiful tribute to longing itself is what educated nineteenth-century readers throughout Europe retained from this book, as a kind of haunting refrain, as unanswerable question:
“Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühen?”
“Do you know the land where the lemon trees blossom?” The land where the blood oranges glow in dark groves?
“Dahin!”
is the untranslatable imperative that governs the song:
There!
To there! To that place! That place is more than some tropical grove of lemon trees and blood oranges; it is akin to the place of desire celebrated by Baudelaire in his lovely poem “Invitation au Voyage”:
“Mon enfant, ma
soeur / Songe à la douceur d’aller là-bas / Vivre ensemble!”
“My child, my sister, think of the bliss of going there and living together.” A place of ease and beauty: here is the other world: Mignon is its (doomed) emissary. The wild child, even when orphaned and languishing, has an Edenic quality, a reminiscence of Paradise, that shimmers in contrast with the workaday world of grown-up pursuits. Mind you: this is neither ignorance nor innocence:
“Kennst du das Land?”
she asks, “Do you know the land,” the place? She knows it; do you?

Such places, such ambassadors, sometimes disturb. One of the most striking examples of a wild child so emancipated that she unsettles her environment is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Pearl, the illegitimate daughter of Hester Prynne in
The Scarlet Letter
. As the title suggests, this novel is something of a semiotic treasure trove, and Hawthorne lavishly wraps his plot and characters in diverse symbolic discourses, of which the most notable, from our perspective, is that Pearl herself is often depicted as the living embodiment of her mother’s sexual transgression. In a number of well-known scenes Pearl also acts as her mother’s figurative jailer, most particularly in the powerful and haunting sequence in the forest where Hester meets her former lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, the sun comes out, and for just a brief moment there is the possibility of real freedom beyond the confines (physical and conceptual) of the Puritan community: the man, the woman, and the child could flee their prison. Alas, this is not to be: not only is Dimmesdale demonstrably not up to the challenge, but Pearl herself explodes, insisting that Hester reclaim the embroidered
A
that she has momentarily cast away and that she reenter its symbolic domain, rebecome its prisoner.

Now, this is passing odd, because Pearl most stands out in our minds—and in the mind of her troubled mother—as a creature entirely resistant to such symbol systems, a creature whose character has “a hard metallic luster,” as of one sprung clear of the whole moral trap, along with its moral trappings. Hester often wonders if Pearl is entirely human, and Pearl delights in torturing her mother at such moments, telling her at one such juncture that she (Pearl) has no Heavenly Father at all. In the heavily laden religious scheme of this novel, having no Heavenly Father means that your father then must be the Devil instead, and more than once Hester looks into her daughter’s eyes and espies some strange dark figure lurking there. One of the book’s feistiest moments comes when Pearl, interrogated by the worthies of the community as to who made her, “finally announced that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses, that grew by the prison-door.” It is a splendid answer, firmly on nature’s side of the divide, and Hawthorne’s tales of Puritan life make it unmistakably clear that nature is home to the Devil, sometimes also known as the Black Man. Yet we, who today may find Hawthorne awfully ponderous in his investment in such symbolic arrangements and obsessive typologies, admire such childlike verve. It is the same verve that leads Huck Finn to realize that Tom Sawyer’s magic tricks smack of Sunday school. It is the same verve that leads Harriet Beecher Stowe’s elfish character Topsy (in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
) to proclaim, in answer to the same question of who made her, “Nobody … I spect I grow’d.” In short, the wild child exposes, as little else can, the papier-mâché artifice of adult constructs, regarding both God and man.

I want also to mention some of the obvious children’s-literature figures who opt out altogether, who remain eternally young: one thinks of Peter Pan (whose spirit presides over high school and college reunions, I have to believe) or the even more beguiling Pippi Longstocking of Astrid Lindgren’s wonderful stories. Pippi operates a bit like an alien come to a new world (ours): she has the two chief attributes that no child actually possesses: physical strength and endless money. Yet even though Lindgren writes her as someone who always carries the day in each of her little adventures—she routinely bests the faintly bad guys Lindgren provides her with, and she is the recipient of Tommy’s and Annika’s undying admiration—we cannot escape the feeling that she does not know how to live within culture. How to behave in school, what to say or do when adults are having a social event, what kinds of manners one is supposed to have and display: these are all (charmingly) outside her ken, beyond her capacities. It’s no surprise that the Swedish public of the 1940s responded with indignation when she first came into print. She is what the French call
sauvage
, and one cannot imagine her as an eventual adult.