Transnational Traumascapes in the Narrative of J. Safran Foer

In 2005 Maria Tumarkin wrote about Traumascapes as: "places across the world marked by traumatic legacies of violence, suffering and loss, (where) the past is never quite over". When places are struck by traumatic experiences, altering their social, cultural, and economic balances, as a consequence national landscapes turn into transnational traumascapes carved out of new geographies of fear and anguish. Often collective traumas are related to natural disasters or epidemics, or historical events of great account, such as wars, pogroms and, recently, terrorism. Events that end up in opening scenarios inhabited not only by the victimized subjects of the so-called "states of exceptions"; (Agamben) but also by the phantasmatic presence of their un-mourned losses. Literature, as the place where such ghostly and disquieting presences are often dealt with and taken care of, opens thus new geographies shaped upon personal psychic quests rather than moulded upon the traditional borders of the political nation-state. In the novel by J. Safran Foer "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close", the trans-national and the trans-temporal mark of loss are embodied in three traumatized generations facing each other in a post-9/11 scenario. New York, after becoming a traumascape, turns into a contact zone of tragedies and phantoms in the same family: the Shells. Oskar Schell is just a nine-year-old boy. His father has died in the World Trade Center terroristic attack. Oskar's struggle against depression intersects with the subplot dealing with his grandparents' past, who survived the World War II bombing of Dresden. The two traumatic stories represent how historical catastrophes create an imaginary axis that burrows deep down in time and space, connecting haunted people, joined in grief and bloodline but divided by age, language and birthplace. This axis passing through generations, from one country to another, from a century to another, affects the deepest structure of subjectivity claiming, at a certain point, the opening of a transnational familial scene where to try to overcome old and new un-mourned losses. J. Safran Foer moves forward from his first popular novel, Everything is Illuminated, putting at the core of his story the theme of trans-generational trauma coped with a quest across a wounded land, moving from Ukraine to Dresden and New York. My paper sets out to read Foer's novels trying to pose also the question whether, as our understanding of the consequences of psychological trauma expands, is it still possible to eliminate the effects of trauma in the lives of individuals without removing the sources of psychological trauma in society.