Professor Amy
Hungerford: All right.
So, today we're going to talk
about Everything is
Illuminated, and Eli has
actually agreed to stand next to
me for the whole lecture and
translate my lecture into
Ukrainian dialect.
Thank you, Eli.
I'll call you up in a minute.
For anyone visiting the class
today, what we are doing is
talking about Jonathan Safran
Foer's Everything is
Illuminated.
This book was chosen by the
class as the last book on the
syllabus, and Eli here gave a
wonderful presentation,
reading from it in a very funny
Ukrainian accent,
and I think that's why
everybody chose it.
God knows if there would be
another reason.
No. Just kidding.
Now, when you meet a new
novel, there are various things
you need to do after you've
decided whether you like it or
not,
that is, if you're either a
professor in an English class
having to teach it,
or you are a student having to
talk about it or write about in
your papers.
Beyond that,
even beyond vocational
necessity, there is the desire,
I hope, that many people have,
to understand how new work fits
into the body of existing
literature.
And, especially,
I think that's the case when an
author is as openly ambitious as
Jonathan Safran Foer is.
It is very clear,
the minute you open this up and
you start reading,
that Foer is aiming at a
conversation with literature
that has preceded him.
It's also clear from his
interviews, and I was
particularly struck by something
he said in an interview about
his second novel,
Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close,
which is about 9/11.
And, I'll say a little bit more
about that novel,
which I haven't read but I've
read enough reviews of it to
know a few facts about it which
I think are relevant to this
novel.
He said about itâ€¦he was
asked by an interviewer,
"Well, doesn't it seem risky to
take on 9/11 as a subject?"
And he said,
"Well, what seems risky to me
is not taking on the important
subjects of your time.
That seems like the risk for a
writer."
And he says in another place,
"You have to justify the fact
that you're sitting alone in a
room writing all day.
What you do has to be somehow
world changing."
So, for a
twenty-something-year-old
writer, this is a heavy task.
And I think you can feel the
heaviness of it in the novel,
partly in its formal ambition,
and partly in the subjects that
it takes on.
It doesn't take on 9/11,
but it does take on the
Holocaust.
So, I will have a whole
argument about that aspect of
the novel and how it fits in to
literature of the post-45
period,
because--lucky you--I happen to
have written a book on this that
came out in 2003,
about genocide in literature.
So, this is actually a perfect
novel for me to lecture on in
that respect.
When you first meet a novel
of this kind,
with these ambitions,
there are certain things that
you do,
and for me those things include
noticing just about everything I
possibly can about the novel and
then thinking about what other
things that I've read seem to be
speaking to it,
or it seems to be speaking to
those things.
Now, I promised that I would
not conduct this entire lecture
in Q&A, but I did not
promise that I wouldn't ask any
questions, so here goes.
What novel seemed related to
this novel, from our syllabus,
to you?
Well, you can go outside our
syllabus.
That's okay.
Did you have another idea?
Yes.Student:
Marquez"s One Hundred
Years of
SolitudeProfessor Amy
Hungerford: Yes.
That's certainly in dialog with
this novel, yes,
and Foer talks about that as a
novel that really was important
to him.
Okay.
What else?
What from our syllabus seems to
be related to this novel?
You've never seen anything like
this before?
Yes.Student:
Lolita?
Professor Amy Hungerford:
Lolita.
Why?
What in
Lolita?Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Amy Hungerford:
Okay.
Yes, some of that humor.
Yes. What else?
What else from our syllabus?
Yes.Student:
--Oh, I was going to
extrapolate on
Lolita.Professoer
Amy Hungerford:
Yes.
Sure.Student:
â€¦experimenting with
speaking through the voice of a
character.
Professor Amy
Hungerford: Yeah.
Absolutely yeah,
inhabiting a voice that seems
very foreign.
Yeah.
To the writer.
Yes. What else?
Yes.Student:
Barth?Professor Amy
Hungerford:
Yes.Professor Amy
Hungerford: And what was it
about Barth that you think Foer
learned from?Student:
I think kind of writing
about writing.
Professor Amy
Hungerford: Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yep, definitely.
What else?
Roth?
Did anyone not see Roth in this
novel?
Okay.
Roth is certainly here.
Pynchon is very strongly here,
if you think about the episodes
in Crying of Lot 49 with
the Paranoids,
all those funny jokes and their
songs.
Foer learned a lot from
Pynchon, and certainly even more
from Pynchon's other novel,
Gravity's Rainbow,
I think, particularly,
than from Crying of Lot 49,
which doesn't--because of
its length-- doesn't quite go to
the operatic,
playful lengths that a longer
Pynchon novel can go to.
Pynchon is also very interested
in the eighteenth century,
and so that interest is
something that Foer shares,
in this novel.
Foer is someone who learned a
lot from the group of writers
that we would call
"postmodernist" and that I would
call "late modernist."
He learned to be very
self-conscious about his
language and to make that
evident on the surface of the
novel.
He also learned,
though, from Toni Morrison.
(Come on in.) He learned from
Toni Morrison.
In particular,
I think, he learned the value
of time travel in a novel.
This was something that I
brought up with respect to
Edward P.
Jones, as well,
but it's certainly here,
and there is one very,
very clear reference to
Morrison.
This is on page 51,
when he's talking about the
name of the shtetl and how it
was called.
Now, my Ukrainian is not very
"premium," so I will butcher
this name.
"Of course no one in Sofiowka
called it Sofiowka.
Until it had such a
disagreeable official name,
no one felt the need to call it
anything,
but now that there was an
offense that the shtetl should
be called that shithead's
namesake,
the citizens had a name not to
go by.
Some even called the shtetl Not
Sofiowka and would continue to
even after the new name was
chosen."In Song of
Solomon,
written in 1979,
I think, Toni Morrison has a
street that's called Not Doctor
Street,
because it was given an
official name at odds with what
the black community called it.
And so, they had called it
Doctor Street.
The town christened it
something else,
I think Main Street or
something, and so then they
called it Not Doctor Street.
So this little,
teeny piece is lifted directly
from Morrison.
You can see her footprints on
here in that sense.
Toni Morrison was,
of course, a teacher at
Princeton when Foer was there.
I don't know if he took courses
with her.
He certainly studied with Joyce
Carol Oates, but Morrison was
around and I'm sure he has read
that novel.
It would be surprising to me if
he has not.
So, the other thing that he
takes from Morrison is that
sense of collective history,
that history is something
passed down in oral tradition in
an intensely verbal culture.
So, the Jewish shtetl culture
that Foer imagines,
and the black community that
Morrison imagines,
are both intensely verbal
cultures.
Now, the Jewish community of
Foer's novel is also intensely
literary, in the sense of
literate.
They write everything down,
also, so that's a slight
difference between Morrison's
vision and Foer's.
I want to go in to some
detail about what I think Foer
has learned from Roth,
because Roth is the person I
see most strongly behind his
writing.
We didn't see the playful,
metafictional side of Roth very
much in The Human Stain.
Roth's work is straddling
both sides of that line,
between realism and very
hyper-metafictionality.
So, some of his novels have
alternate endings.
He has several novels that
feature Philip Roth.
So, Foer takes the conceit of
naming a character after himself
directly from Roth.
So, there are ways that he is,
on the surface,
citing Roth,
but there is a more profound
way that he is working in Roth's
terrain,
and that is in the terrain of
desire.
So, thinking back to Roth's
first novel, Portnoy's
Complaint, which is all
about masturbation,
Alex Portnoy's masturbation,
we see that he's taken the name
Alex, Alexander Portnoy.
Alex appears in this novel as
well, and then we have Safran,
who is this sort of love
machine.
So, he is a double of Alex
Portnoy, with a difference,
though;
so, instead of masturbation,
it's sex with the needy,
essentially,
sex with the love starved,
virgins, older women,
widows, etc.
So, the immediate
difference that Foer is pointing
to, is the difference between
something like solipsism or
narcissism,
desire as the fuel for that
narcissism, versus desire as the
fuel for community and
connection.
This is not without trouble,
though.
And it's the trouble that
interests me,
and that I think he takes from
Roth: and that's the
impossibility of ever actually
making that connection,
of it ever finally coming home.
And you see that in the story
of Safran, just in the fact
that--by the time he finally
gets married,
and finally has a proper
orgasm--what he falls in love
with, at that moment,
is not his wife,
but the baby that he is
engendering in that moment (and
of course it's a baby that
doesn't even exist yet).
So, the very absence at the
heart of desire,
the blankness or the
impossibility,
is demonstrated even in those
moments of overwhelming
connection.
And, I think it's telling
that Foer imagines sexual energy
as light, rather than some other
kind of phenomenon.
So, "Everything is
Illuminated";
remember,
there is that image of the
world being lit up by people
making love, that it actually
generates light that you can see
from space.
It's not a concrete engendering
act, even when it is.
It creates something else,
and that something else seems
to be related to knowledge;
how can you know your past?
This is a problem in the novel,
and it's a feature of the quest
element.
And I'll say more about that in
my second lecture on the novel,
but I think it has to do with a
vague understanding that is
imagined to illuminate the world
as a result of desire's
fulfillment,
or almost fulfillment.
But that theme of sex and
desire is abstracted into lots
of other forms.
And the couple that I want to
look at--one is sort of
religious.
This is on 140.
Here, we're learning about the
veneration of Brod's husband,
the Kolker, who is then bronzed
and made into a statue in the
town after he dies,
still with the saw blade
embedded in his head.
This is at the bottom of 140.
Those who prayed came to
believe less and less in the god
of their creation,
and more and more in their
belief.
The unmarried women kissed the
Dial's battered lips although
they were not faithful to their
god, but to the kiss.
They were kissing themselves.
And when the bridegrooms knelt,
it was not the god they
believed in.
It was the kneel,
not the god's bronzed knees,
but their own bruised
ones.
This little moment of
reflection on religious ritual,
or quasi-religious ritual,
is related to some things that
I want to say about the role of
Judaism in my next lecture.
But, as a practice,
it is a practice of negativity,
of acknowledging the
impossibility of connection to
that god and the impossibility
of fulfillment from that god.
But, nevertheless,
it is committed to the
fulfillment of the effort to
make that connection.
So, it's belief in belief.
And, in fact,
the book that I'm writing right
now is all about belief in
belief,
and so this confirms my sense
that this is an important way of
imagining how belief works in
the current moment.
You believe in the act of
belief.
So, that's one kind of
negativity.
Then there is a visual image
that we get over and over again,
and that's of the hole,
the empty hole.
There are a couple of examples
here, on 135.
This is after Brod and the
Kolker have separated themselves
with a wall because the Kolker
keeps beating her up.
He's deranged in part--part
sane, part deranged--by his
saw-blade embedded in his head.
And so they have this hole
between them through which they
can communicate,
but the wall protects Brod from
his rages so he won't beat her
up.
They lived [This is on
135.]
They lived with the hole.
The absence that defined it
became a presence that defined
them.
Life was a small negative space
cut out of the eternal solidity,
and for the first time it felt
precious,
not like all of the words that
had come to mean nothing but
like the last breath of a
drowning victim.
So, here we're offered two
versions of negativity.
One is all of the words that
had come to mean nothing,
and the other is this physical
emptiness, the hole.
So, the words that mean nothing
are an emptiness that is
frustrating, a blockage,
but the emptiness that is the
space, the visual space,
comes to be a space of
imagination,
that gets filled with
imagination.
So, they see each other from a
distance for the first time,
and are overwhelmed by the
connection that can then be
formed between them.
So, it's the very absence of
the physical presence,
one's distance from it,
that becomes the fulfillment
for this couple.
So, I hope you can see the
structural similarity,
or the logical similarity,
between believing and belief.
And we're told of Brod,
remember, also,
on page 83, that she was
constitutionally unable to love
anyone.
This is at the top of 83.
When she said,
"Father, I love you," she was
neither naïve nor
dishonest, but the opposite.
She was wise and truthful
enough to lie.
They reciprocated the great and
saving lie that our love for
things is greater than our love
for our love for things,
willfully playing the parts
they wrote for themselves,
willfully creating and
believing fictions necessary for
life.
So, if this is the lie,
that our love for things is
greater than our love for our
love for things,
the truth is that our love for
our love is greater than our
love for actual things or actual
persons.
It's the same structure as the
belief in belief.
Of course, that story of Brod
and her father telling each
other stories--both about their
love for each other,
and, in her father's case,
Yankel's case,
about her mother,
her fictional mother,
who he says died before she was
old enough to remember her--all
of the stories that Yankel makes
up become the fullness of his
life with Brod.
So, they replace the loss of
his first wife who abandoned
him.
And so, this gives fiction
a very powerful brief in the
world.
This is not unlike the
structure that I was pointing
out in The Human Stain,
 where the blankness of
Coleman and Faunia allows Nathan
to re-inhabit life by imagining
onto them all the dynamics of
their desire,
all of the facts of their life,
all of the details of their
biography.
So, likewise,
Foer uses blankness as a way of
pumping up the power of fiction.
It plays this role despite the
threat it will always pose to
fiction that you get here,
or on that little passage I
just quoted before,
about the nothingness of words.
So, the nothingness that gives
fiction its blank space to
inhabit, also can seep into and
infect words as in the
repetition of a word like
"Malkovich."
It is an infection that
bothered critics about this
novel.
They felt that the postmodern
play of the novel was
essentially trivial,
because these kinds of play had
been conducted in novels thirty
years,
forty years before (and many
more than that if you count
Tristram Shandy in the
eighteenth century,
but took powerful hold in
American fiction in the '60s).
They felt that Foer was simply
taking out those tools and
deploying them again,
but not for any new sort of
payoff.
So, some critics were
frustrated with this.
Now, this brings me to a
second kind of context that I
would bring to this novel,
or I do bring to this novel as
I think about it.
In 2001, Jonathan Franzen's
novel The Corrections won
the National Book Award.
The Corrections
attempted to make a marriage
between the postmodern novel,
as he understood it,
the novel filled with those
kinds of verbal play.
And Franzen modeled his novel
on William Gaddis' novel The
Recognitions,
which is about an art
forgery.
It's about 900 pages of
incredibly experimental prose.
It's extremely hard to read.
But for Franzen that novel had
enough in it of character
development and human investment
to go along with its verbal
playfulness that it made him
want to keep reading it.
So, in homage to that novel,
he called his novel The
Corrections and tried to
give us a story where the verbal
play would not drain the
sentiment from the novel.
So, he described it as the
social novel coming to meet the
postmodern novel.
He announced this to great
fanfare in an essay,
and of course the novel then
became famous.
And he became
infamous when he was
invited by Oprah to go on
Oprah's Book Club with The
Corrections, and he
refused.
It was quite a scandal in the
literary world.
And then he tried to go back on
it and say, "Oh,
okay, Oprah.
I really wasn't being a snob.
I'll come on your show," but
then she said "No.
Sorry.
We're scheduled for that week
now."
It was really a mistake on
Franzen's part,
but it also demonstrated his
own ambivalence about the very
project he had set out to
accomplish,
which is to make a novel that
people really want to read,
that has some sentimental
purchase on you,
that has characters you could
care about, as well as being
extremely ambitious in this way,
in this formal way.
Now that novel,
the way it tried to get
sentiment and verbal play to
line up,
was in part by making one of
the central characters an
Alzheimer's patient.
So, it's about a family,
a midwestern family,
and the two parents get
extended treatment in the novel,
as do the three children,
grown children,
in the family.
And the father has Alzheimer's,
and so there's a very
Pynchon-esque scene,
when his,
actually, his shit starts
talking to him,
and this is taken right out of
Gravity's Rainbow.
There's a scene very
similar to this in Gravity's
Rainbow.
So, Franzen tried to
make that poignant by making it
something that the modernists
tried to do,
which is the representation of
the actual workings of the human
mind in a daily situation.
And the terror of it,
for that character,
I thought, when I read the
novel, came across quite
powerfully.
So, for me, in part, it worked.
Foer is doing something that is
related.
He is trying to have both
sentiment and formal play.
How many of you felt for these
characters?
How many of you felt that they
were really inaccessible to you,
flat, unemotionally interesting
to you?
Okay. Just one.
So, I think he succeeded,
probably, to a greater degree,
if you read the critics (and
you can read that in this
incredibly bulked-up blurb
section in the packaging of this
novel).
A lot of critics did really
like this novel,
and I think that's why,
that for most readers,
he did succeed.
Now, I have things to say about
that, but in a minute.
I want to say that there is
another kind of context that I
think you could attend to
productively,
and that is the quality of this
novel as a campus novel.
Now, that's probably not
exactly what you were thinking
of when you read this novel.
It's a campus novel because it
was written on a campus,
and it's also a campus novel
because it is in part a coming
of age novel about someone who
goes from needing a lot of help
with his writing to kind of
writing on his own.
So, what you see is the
displacement of a narrative that
looks very much like Foer's
development,
or you would imagine the
development of a writer in a
writing program at Princeton
over time,
at first needing suggestions
from a mentor.
And, a lot of the way that we
come to know the character
Jonathan Safran Foer in the
beginning,
through Alex's letters,
has to do with things that he
has said to Alex about how to
write,
suggestions he's made.
So, Jonathan Safran Foer
remains as a sort of shadowy
presence for much of this novel,
but we see his wise sayings to
Alex about writing.
It's an interesting
inversion of the situation that
the author was in fact in.
He was in the class,
taking the class,
not teaching the class,
when he was an undergraduate,
and this was written when he
wasâ€¦I think it was
published when he was twenty
one.
The bar is not high.
Don't worry.
No. I'm just kidding.
The bar is very high.
Let me say that.
The bar is very high,
but don't worry.
Life is long.
You have plenty of time.
This is not just about Jonathan
Safran Foer, the man,
and his particular biography of
being a student in the writing
program at Princeton.
It is also about an
institutional history of writing
in the second half of the
twentieth century.
If you remember,
way back when,
when I lectured on Flannery
O'Connor, I mentioned to you a
critic named Mark McGurl at UCLA
who is writing a book called
The Program Era (or has
written it,
and I think it should be out
very soon, called The Program
Era). And it's an
analysis of how writing programs
leave their mark on the fiction
of the last fifty years,
because what's particularly
striking and new about writing
in this period is that a lot of
it happens on campuses,
and a lot of authors are
writing for campus
audiences.So,
Foer's novel is a version of
that kind of fiction,
and we can read it that way,
I think, quite easily.
It fits in that story that Mark
McGurl tells about the
development of this period.
So, just as when I read it,
I see that notation about
belief in belief and the love of
love,
and it fits in to a story that
I'm telling about the evolution
of religion in literature in
this period,
so you can ally it to other
arguments that are made about
the period, too,
and that help you to see why
certain things might be in the
novel and what kind of work they
do there.
And finally,
there is a last context that I
saw pointed out.
I think it was in the review in
The Nation, and
that's of trips of Americans to
post-communist Europe and
post-communist Russia.
Apparently, there is a whole
spate of novels that came out
right about the same time,
where Americans,
almost invariably young men,
went to the former Soviet
republics and had coming-of-age
experiences.
So, this certainly fits that
genre.
I don't personally have a lot
to say about that.
I think it's interesting to see
it as being aligned with a group
of novels that do that.
It doesn't, for me,
provide any particular insight,
but that's not because it's-
because it wouldn't.
It just happens that that
didn't strike a chord with me,
or lead me to other points of
analysis.
This is another point that I
want you to take away from my
engagement with this novel.
That is, that no matter what
context can be brought to it,
you as a reader bring your own
particular one,
your own particular set of
knowledge, your own particular
training, your own life
experience.
So, we're getting to the
end of the course,
and, in a way,
you have now the opportunity to
approach these novels,
any new novel that's written,
with several kinds of stories
about the period in your mind,
because now you have read--I
hope you have read--many novels
in this period,
and you can see where the
connections are.
So, you're starting to draw
those.
You'll need to do that on the
exam, but far more importantly,
I hope that you will continue
to do it when you read on your
own outside of class.
A lot of you are seniors.
You may not have a lot of time
after you leave school to read
novels.
When you do,
I hope it will be part of your
pleasure to approach them with a
sense of empowerment,
that you can know where they
fit in the history of the art
form they're engaging,
apart from your own pleasure in
reading them,
which will I'm sure be the
primary reason you'd pick up a
novel to read it,
but there is that other
intellectual pleasure that you
now can have.
I want to encourage you to feel
that you can do that.
It doesn't mean that it will
always produce insight for you.
So, I have been thinking about
this novel for approximately two
weeks.
Most novels that I lecture to
you about, I have been thinking
about for at least two years.
Your insights over time change,
and you notice different
things.
And it's nice to allow time for
that, and that's the value of
rereading in a few years what
you read before as a student.
So, I hope you'll maybe return
to some of these novels,
as well.
Now, that was my little
digression about after-college
reading, or outside-of-the-class
reading, but let me return to
this question of sentiment.
Foer wants it both ways,
and one of the ways he has it
both ways is by internalizing in
the novel a reader figure who is
our double.
There are actually three
doubles for us,
at least.
One is Alex,
who is reading Jonathan's story
as he sends it to him.
Embedding a critical reader
within the novel,
as we have seen with Barth and
in Pynchon (where Oedipa was
that double),
allows a certain set of
metafictional tricks.
One of the most reliable
functions for that internalized
reader is to cue you,
me, the actual human readers,
to notice or feel certain
things, or (if you are Nabokov)
to be misled in certain ways.
Think of the prologue from John
Ray Jr.
which misleads us in reading
that novel.
He's our double,
but he's there to trick us.
I don't think that Alex is here
to trick us.
And, just to note how he cues
us, let's look on 142 and 3.
This is one of the letters
where Alex is less busy with
self-presentation by this point
in the novel,
and he is really responding to
what Jonathan has sent him.
This is in the middle of 143.
Those things that you
wrote in your letter about your
grandmother made me remember how
you told me on Augustine's steps
about when you would sit under
her dress,
and how that presented you
safety and peace.
I must confess that I became
melancholy then and still am
melancholy.
I was also very moved--is this
how you use it?--by what you
wrote about how impossible it
must have been for your
grandmother to be a mother
without a husband.
It is amazing,
yes, how your grandfather
survived so much only to die
when he came to America.
It is as if,
after surviving so much,
there was no longer a reason to
survive.
When you wrote about the early
death of your grandfather,
it helped me to understand in
some manners the melancholy that
Grandfather has felt since
Grandmother died,
and not only because they both
died from cancer.
I do not know your mother of
course, but I know you and I can
tell you that your grandfather
would have been so so proud.
It is my hope that I will be a
person that Grandmother would
have been so so proud of.
We're being cued to be moved,
to be moved by the story in
these particular ways,
to take his reflections on his
grandmother, which are indeed
very lovely, and to be moved by
them.
But one reservation I guess I
have about the success of this
move is just its boldness,
I guess.
I'm being told that I should be
moved by these passages.
There are also moments when we
get reflections that seem like
they would never stand if they
were not embedded in Alex's
voice, and this is on 68-69.
This is Alex talking about how
he came upon Little Igor,
his brother,
crying.
I knew why he was a
little less than crying.
I knew very well and I wanted
to go to him and tell him that I
had a little less than cried
too,
just like him,
and that no matter how much it
seemed like he would never grow
up to be a premium person like
me,
with many girls and so many
famous places to go,
he would.
He would be exactly like me,
and look at me,
Little Igor.
The bruises go away,
and so does how you hate,
and so does the feeling that
everything you receive in life
is something you have earned.
[And then I'm going to skip
down.
So, he starts to laugh then at
his brother and he is not quite
sure why he is laughing.]
I attempted to rise so that I
could walk to my room,
but I was afraid that it would
be too difficult to control my
laughing.
I remained there for many,
many minutes.
My brother persevered to a
little less than cry,
which made my silent laughing
even more.
I am able to understand now
that it was the same laugh I had
in the restaurant in Lutsk,
the laugh that had the same
darkness as Grandfather's laugh
and the hero's laugh.
I ask leniency for writing this.
Perhaps I will remove it before
I post this part to you.
I am sorry.
As for Sammy Davis,
Junior, Junior,
she did not eat her piece of
the potato.
Those reflections on laughing
and crying: I think they might
sound quite maudlin if they were
not in Alex's voice,
that a writer needs to judge
very carefully whether to
reflect in those direct ways
about big themes like laughter
and crying or how you hate.
So, these are the topics that
will be a pitfall for any new
writer sitting down to say,
"I am going to write about
love."
I used to teach creative
writing, and one of the
exercises that I did was,
I would sit my students down
and I would say,
"Okay.
We're going to have a little
in-class writing today.
Here are some topics that I
want you to write about just for
ten minutes," and I would give
them "love," "your
childhood"--what else--"death."
I can't remember what else.
And so, then,
they would very earnestly do it
and then I would say,
"Okay.
Now I want you to take your
paper and I want you to
underline every single
cliché
that you wrote," and they would
come up with papers full of
clichés.
And it was a little exercise
just to get them to understand
that choosing a topic can get
you into trouble if you choose a
very abstract,
big, important question.
Of course we want books that
move us and tell us about death
and love and separation and
desire,
but how do you get there,
and how do you talk about those
things?
So, I think that Foer has
taken a risk of a sort,
here.
He can do it because it's in
Alex's voice.
Is the distance achieved,
the self-distancing achieved,
by inhabiting a foreign voice,
with its little funny jokes
that come up because of its
incorrect usages?
Is that enough to prevent
sentimentality,
rather than sentiment?
Is it powerful enough language,
in the abstract,
that it moves us as a discourse
on laughter and loving?
Is the detail of Little Igor
and Alex's love for him enough?
Now, remember we know nothing
about Igor as a character,
his brother as a character.
Do we feel that the
relationship between the two is
earned for us as readers?
Maybe we do.
Sometimes I did.
Other times I didn't.
So this is something that I'm
still thinking about.
Does it succeed at what
Franzen, too,
was trying to do,
which is to infuse intellectual
word play with human resonance?
Does it succeed?
If you look at the
dedication to the novel,
I think you learn something
too.
This is under the
acknowledgments.
Did any of you read this?
These are the acknowledgments.
"At least once every day since
I met her, I have felt blessed
to know Nicole Aragi.
She inspires me not only to try
to write more ambitiously,
but to smile more widely and
have a fuller,
better heart.
I am so, so grateful,"--and you
hear that "so,
so" again from the passage I
just read--"and it is my
pleasure and honor to think of
the wonderful people at Houghton
Mifflin as family,"
so on and so on,
"whose advice in literature and
life seems always to boil down
to "feel more,"
which is always the best
advice."
So, feeling is very much on the
surface of the effort here.
What would it mean to read this
as a sentimental novel?
Does the playful treatment of
shtetl life disable our
connection with those
characters?
One of the things that I think
succeeds wonderfully about this
novel is Brod as a character.
I think you do want her to have
a good life, as Alex does,
and you feel the tragedy of the
life she gets.
And, I think you get that
payoff because she is developed;
she has time to develop,
in the course of the story.
So, for all its time travel
back and forth,
for all its playfulness,
for all the jokes and riffs,
Brod has time to develop,
especially in relation to her
father and in relation to the
Kolker,
her husband,
and we learn things that make
her more complex over time.
And so, when we finally learn
what she asked the Kolker to do
after she was raped and before
she agreed to be his wife,
when we learn that--and I won't
reveal it 'cause I don't know if
you're all there yet--it gives
us a much more complex version
of what she is as a person,
of who she is as a person.
So, I think he earns it,
with Brod.
That, to me,
is a kind of achievement,
because of the role that
riffing plays in the development
of that story.
Riffing on Jewish behavior in a
novel by a Jewish writer is
certainly well-trodden ground.
Roth has been treading that
ground for many decades.
I think what Foer does,
that Roth didn't do,
is fully identify with the
community in a convincing way,
while he's doing it,
and this is related to what I
will say about his use of the
Holocaust in my next lecture.
I am going to stop there,
and I hope you will be sure to
finish the novel by
Wednesday.
