Back in September of 2003, I wrote about Frédéric Beigbeder's self-indulgent, pretentious, and crass attempt to elevate himself with his novel concerning the events of September 11, Windows on the World. Here's what he had to say for himself:
"In the face of American self-censorship, I wanted to give form to this tragedy," [Beigbeder] said, adding that American television viewers saw "an asceptic, almost clinical" version of events. He said he wanted "to reinject colors, smells, noises, to reintroduce the human dimension that has been carefully removed," adding, "A novel should enter forbidden territory."
Now there's an American who has written a novel about the same events, titled Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Here's what 28-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer has to say for himself:
“Both the Holocaust and 9/11 were events that demanded retelling,” Foer said. “With 9/11 in particular I wanted to read something that wasn’t politicised or commercialised, something with no message, something human.”
The book concerns
... a nine-year-old, Oskar Schell, who is haunted by his father’s death. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, published next month, the boy roams New York looking for a lock that fits a mysterious key of his father’s.
Mr. Beigbeder's concept of "the human dimension" is that it is "forbidden territory" where, apparently, doomed people have sex before they're asphyxiated by smoke and crushed by debris. Author Foer's concept of "something human," on the other hand, involves delving into the concepts of loss, grief, and the obsessions of childhood.
To me, this perfectly illustrates the primary difference between those who dwell with their heads puffed up into the airy clouds of highly politicized literary theory, and those who live on the ground with the rest of us and are concerned primarily with the craft of telling stories. For the theoretician, telling a story about people is transgressive. For the genuine storyteller, that's what you're supposed to be doing. The first produces material that's masturbatory and ridiculous; the second produces human drama with depth.
In a larger sense, these works encapsulate two opposing attitudes towards the events of September 11, and, in fact, to any tragedy of such scale. One regards the casualties as a portion of a group, ready to be pulled and twisted and shaped to fit into some abstract political construct as the observer sees fit. The other regards the same casualties as individual human beings, with meanings and lives that fit within the panoply of human experience. There are exemplars of each attitude on both sides of the Atlantic.
Three years, five months, and 24 days on, I certainly know which attitude I prefer.
