Transnational and Intergenerational Uncertain Legacies in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) has been one of the first novels tackling the issue of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This essay looks at the novel within the framework of criticism related to the notion of precarity focusing on the issues of trauma and postmemory. It stresses the problematic lack of temporal distance from the traumatic event that is at the core of the narrative, while also emphasizing aspects such as the novel’s dialogic imagination, plurivocality, and intermediality. Questioning the possibility of the transgenerational communication of memory, the heteroglossia of the text does not produce a real dialogue among the characters. Yet, decentering the unilateral narration of the 9/11 attack – connecting it with other national tragedies such as the 1945’s bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima – and shifting points of view from the victims to the persecutors, Foer’s novel contributes to expanding the framework of interpretation for such collective traumas. A descendant of victims of the Nazi genocide, the author succeeds – at least partially – in fostering empathy for what is perceived as utterly “Other,” articulating a version of that ethics of vulnerability and precariousness (J. Butler) that seems to have been too quickly buried under the rubble of the Twin Towers’ collapse.