Jonathan Safran Foer is an American author best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). In 2009, he published a work of nonfiction titled Eating Animals. A graduate of Princeton University with a degree in philosophy, he currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Below is an edited transcript from the public discussion Foer had with Jenny Davidson, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, as part of the “Literature and Terror” series sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University.
Jenny Davidson: I was thinking about what would be an appropriate question to open with. Your books are very funny, but I would more honestly describe them as serious books about serious people. I thought I’d ask you a question that seemed to me at the heart of both of your novels and something I would love to hear you just think out loud on. It seems to me that there’s a kind of paradox at the heart of your writing, that you have an incredible command of language and a love for language (why write novels unless you love language?), and yet you’re also very attracted to these moments in history, moments of violence when language or words seemed to fail.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Well, first of all, thank you. Thanks for having me here. I’m honored to keep company with the other people who are being interviewed, so I’m very grateful. And I also have a very bad cold. So if my voice sounds particularly radio-like or something, that’s why. So, why?
Davidson: If why is too awful, you could approach it more as, how did you first find yourself bumping up against those questions?
Foer: It’s a really peculiar thing. In a way, I feel like the unifying theme of my writing is the difficulty surrounding communication. On the one hand, I’ve committed my life to a certain kind of communication, a very specific kind of communication, one that doesn’t have any obvious use in the world. It’s not like verbal speech has an obvious use in the world. Physical violence has an obvious use in the world. Literature does not have an obvious use in the world. Obviously, I have found, or I think I’ve found, some kind of value or significance in it; otherwise, I wouldn’t continue to do it. But one of the things that I find most engaging about it is actually how complicated that significance is: What is it that it’s actually doing? In any case, I find myself writing a lot about people who have a hard time speaking. And sometimes it’s literal, like a translator, the hero of my first book. Or in my second book, one of the heroes, I suppose, is somebody who has absolutely no access to spoken language.
Davidison: And yet is incredibly drawn to verbal communication with the words on the hands and the writing, compulsive writing, and so forth.
Foer: I mean, it’s interesting. The moment I felt most like a writer — and that might sound like a strange thing to say, but even though I spend all day or a lot of the day doing it, I don’t very often feel like a writer — but the moment I did feel like a writer was in my first book, where there’s a section about this image of an encyclopedic history that this village keeps of itself. And I describe how [the villagers] began it by simply reporting major incidents, like wars and famines. And then they got into smaller, but still significant, events like marriages and deaths. And then [the history] got smaller and more precise, like, “So-and-so did this the other day, and so-and-so did that.” And then it became an archive of everything everybody was eating and sleeping. It was a journal of every single event that happened. And they got so consumed with this observation — in fact, not observation so much as recording — that eventually the spaces between events were filled with their writing, “We are writing, we are writing.” And I noticed that when I wrote that, I felt like I was getting at something that I cared about. One of the complicated things about talking about writing is that the things that I will say are almost never things that I was thinking when I was writing.
Davidson: The retroactive benevolent falsification of memories . . .
Foer: Right. That was a lot of words. I’m not exactly sure. [Laughter] People mistake the language of criticism, the language of talking about writing, with the language of producing writing. I don’t think it’s any more true than discussing why a basketball player decided to pass instead of shoot. Was the basketball player in that moment really conceiving of all the different options and picking the one that he thought was best? Or, was it something more intuitive that was based on what he knew his body could do, or experiences that he had or she had on the court? Instinct. I find writing to be very instinctive and visceral. So a lot of these things that I’m going to say in response to this answer, specifically, are retrospective and are me speaking as a reader more than as a writer.
In any case, there is this funny irony that I’ve committed my life to a kind of expression that, with each passing day, I see a little bit more the futility of. When I started to write my first book, I was very, very romantic about writing. I thought, “This is just going to be terrific. I’m going to create something that will express 100 percent of me.” I thought of writing only in terms of self-expression, and I thought of it as a complete act. A total work of art would be a perfect autobiography, not a factual or a journalistic one, but an expressionistic one.
And then I wrote my first book, and I looked at it, and I thought, “God, this is not — this is, like, two percent of me.” I actually found it very depressing once I’d finished my first book, because it felt so unrepresentative. “This is so Jewish; I’m not necessarily that Jewish. It was so concerned with family, and I’m not that concerned with family. This doesn’t even mention all of these other things that I’m not only concerned with but obsessed by, passionate about.” So I said, “Okay, well, I have a second book. Maybe I’ll aim my sights a little bit lower; I’ll express 90 percent of who I am.” Then I wrote my second book, and it was only one percent. It was like a diminishing return. The machine was getting less efficient. So this would be just wholly depressing and would lead somebody to stop writing, but I started to appreciate those little percentages more and more. They meant more to me.
I think that when I write about — just to return to your question — characters who have a difficult time expressing themselves, and often in the context of some kind of conflict or crisis, it’s putting on the page the thing that I’m always feeling when I’m writing that I think everybody feels, writers or not. Nobody’s found the perfect venue for expression. It doesn’t seem to be telephone calls; it doesn’t seem to be e-mails; it doesn’t seem to be conversations across a table; it doesn’t seem to be letters written by hand; and it doesn’t seem to be novels. There is no perfect expression, and yet we long for it. And I think that longing has been sort of the real subject of my writing.
Davidson: I’m struck, as you’re talking about this, by how much you’re using the language of communication or expression. It does seem to me that in both books multiple characters are desperate to communicate despite the barriers of language or of history that may make it really difficult for them.
Foer: Well, I think it was a kind of perfect storm for me, growing up. My mom was born in Europe, a daughter of survivors. There’s an awful lot we didn’t talk about in our dinner-table conversations. I mean, an awful lot. I don’t know that I ever had any strong sense of the effect on me when I was younger. I didn’t have any particular curiosity. I never thought, I would love to ask about this, but I won’t. It was just kind of understood that there were things that we didn’t talk about. The other half of this is that I found, as I imagine a lot of writers did, high school very difficult and adolescence very difficult and frustrating. The frustration of constantly feeling like you were sending out inaccurate representations of yourself, like, “This is not who I am. If you would just know who I was, it would be different. If I could just share who I was, it would be different.” On certain occasions, like prom night, you really want to communicate. [Laughter] You want to facilitate, I should say.
So at a certain point, I discovered writing. And I did not grow up an avid reader. I did not grow up a diary keeper or an aspiring writer. I came to it through the back door. It was the combination of these various silences and frustrations with an appreciation of the flexibility of the form of the novel. It can stretch in ways that this kind of conversation can’t stretch. Phone conversations and e-mails can’t stretch, because you’re time-dependent on another person. I think there’s a freedom that a novel affords that no other form of communication I know of affords. And that was really exciting to me.
Davidson: One moment that I particularly like in your first book is that scene where Alex’s grandfather is asking questions of Augustine, and Alex is repeating and translating. It struck me as a really effective device for drawing attention to the forcefulness of just very plain words. And I can see in both of your books that you’re playing around with the question of this sort of palpable silences that come up in houses — the notion of the apartment that’s divided into somewhere, nowhere, all of that sort of thing. That really resonates with what you’re saying now.
Foer: Yes, and I don’t know exactly why. There’s the old saying that I find myself coming back to a lot, “An ant is not an entomologist,” or, alternately, “A bird is not an ornithologist.” There are any number of versions. Just because you do something doesn’t mean you know why you do it. It’s one of the things that I value about writing, struggling to figure out why I do certain things. What is it that I’m caring about when these things keep coming up? What am I? What is unresolved?
The thing that I’m most attracted to in all kinds of art — not just writing, but music and the visual arts and dance — is when there’s a precipice of meaning. I think this is something a lot of people are attracted to in art: the moment when it gets slippery. Like when it’s stopped, when it’s in between sense and nonsense. The wrestling, trying to wrestle out meaning.
So I was just working on something today — just a side thing, because I was interested in it — and all these themes kept coming up: people speaking different languages, people who are able to bring back things that other characters had said before. There’s a moment when this woman, in a couple, says something really clichéd and ridiculous. And she prides herself on being a very smart person, but it just comes out of her mouth. And the guy who’s walking with her, he grabs the air right in front of her mouth and says, “Listen to what you just said.” He opens his hand, and we hear the little echo of what she just said.
I think all of these things that are impossible in life are what I’m attracted to in fiction. Instead of the clock going “tick, tock,” it goes, “tock, tick.” Instead of people misunderstanding, there’s a chance to explain in a different way. So it’s particularly useful in moments of crisis, because the stakes are raised and it becomes so important. Ordinarily, it doesn’t matter if we’re misunderstood. You know, it happens a million times a day, and nothing is lost. But in a traumatic situation or a situation in which real things are on the line, we feel a necessity to be understood. And I think those are the context for this theme.
Davidson: Letters and phone messages that go astray or find their destination in an unexpected way, that would be another theme that I see in your books. I really enjoyed Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and I loved it, in part, because it seemed to me it has a very fresh and original voice. It’s also a wonderfully literary novel in all sorts of ways, not least because it has references to Hamlet. I heard echoes of a couple of books that I particularly like, and I thought I would just run them by you and ask for thoughts on them or on other books that were on your mind, perhaps more directly as you were writing. One of them is Helen DeWitt’s novel The Last Samurai, which is a particular favorite of mine. And surely your character owes something to her character, Ludo. The other book, maybe on a more serious thematic note, was W. G. Sebald’s Natural History of Destruction — his writing and approach more generally, that striking combination of images and pictures. I think you’re doing something different in many ways than what he was doing, but perhaps inflected by some of his thinking. Do you want to reflect on either of those or both?
Foer: I do love both of those books. I’m not sure I’d read them both before I wrote my book, but it really doesn’t matter.
Davidson: It’s a question of homologies rather than influence, I suppose.
Foer: The funny thing is, I remember one of the very first interviews I ever did on stage was at the 92nd Street Y. The interviewer went on and on about how much she liked the specific reference to some Shakespeare play or another in my first book. And I had never read the play.
Davidson: You honestly hadn’t read the play?
Foer: I hadn’t. And I thought, “Do I just pretend? Do I nod? What do I do? Is it going to embarrass her, if I say the truth?” So I said, “I just hadn’t read that play.” And she said, “No, surely you had. It’s so specific, your allusion.” I said, “No, I’m telling you the truth. I really hadn’t read it.” She said, “No, it’s so specific. Maybe your parents read it to you when you were a baby.”
Davidson: It might be that Shakespeare is just out there in the cultural consciousness.
Foer: Maybe. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, I couldn’t even persuade her. And I think that she’s right: that’s the point of books. The point is not what I was intending to do; the point is what you take away from it. I didn’t mean to get lit-critty about this, but it’s exciting for me. The reason to have someone read your book is not to have some positive reflection thrown back at you, but to have meaning contributed to your book. Books are like wells. They’re not like lectures. Lectures are often an inappropriate metaphor for writing. They’re much more like vessels — not really wells — more like vessels, and readers contribute to them.
I don’t know. Maybe I did hear that play when I was a kid, or maybe it’s somewhere in the sort of cultural ether. It doesn’t matter. Books that are successful over time are not the books that were most well written. They’re the books that are most open, most inviting, most accessible, not in the sense of being easy to enjoy, but being easy to contribute to; they’re the books that make readers complicit in the authorship. It just so happens that the two books you mentioned are books I really did like, and I’m sure that I, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, imitated or took lessons from them.
Davidson: But more a question of a shared sensibility than a direct influence?
Foer: I think so.
Davidson: Another thing I was thinking of — I’m sure people ask you about this all the time — is a book that I just absolutely loved when I was a teenager, Slaughterhouse Five, and the famous running backward that Kurt Vonnegut does at the bombing of Dresden. Was that something that was on your mind, or is that just another one of those things out there?
Foer: Well, you can believe me or not, but it really wasn’t on my mind. I had read that book an awfully long time ago. I can’t remember all that much about it. It didn’t make a great impression on me at the time, or maybe it did and I just didn’t know it. But I’ve always been obsessed with things going backward. I don’t know why. I love it when it happens in movies. I love it. I just find it very effective.
Davidson: It is. It’s a great thing. And I must just indulge myself by asking you about Hamlet, which I bet that you have read. Your character is obsessed with Hamlet, right? He’s got this funny part in Hamlet. Was that just one of those fortuitous things that sort of came to you? I loved the Olivier picture in the book.
Foer: It’s a really good picture.
Davidson: That seems to me one of the most excellent things that you’ve done with this combination of text and images. It’s so funny and yet so touching in the context of the book.
Foer: Joseph Brodsky said, “The rhyme is smarter than the poet.” Often when you’re working, things just get in your way, and they end up being so much more useful than the things that you set out in front of you. So, I was writing that book, and I ended up spending a couple of weeks in Connecticut one summer, in a little town called Norfolk. There was a library there, and Hamlet happened to be in some prominent place. “Oh, Hamlet. This is a good play. Look at it again.” And you look at things, and they influence you. It’s why it’s better to get out than to stay inside, because the scope of influence is so small when you stay inside.
So, it found its way in. But that’s sort of how writing is for me. I’ve never designed anything. I never have an outline; I don’t have a plan. It’s more like, these are the various things that interrupted my plans in the course of three years, and lo and behold — and that’s what’s amazing — they belong together. I mean, the moment of greatest frustration in writing comes right before the moment of greatest relief. It’s when I feel like I’ve been working so hard for so long on nothing. It doesn’t make any sense. I have 100 disparate nothings. And then it’s like, “Oh, actually, it’s one thing.” And I didn’t realize that. You know?
Sometimes it’s not the 100 nothings that you thought were your novel. It’s the letter I’ve been writing to a friend that’s in one part of my computer — this here, this there, an essay, and then all of a sudden you realize. This has happened to me every year; every semester in college, taking five courses, four courses, whatever it was, and then all of a sudden I’d realize I’m taking one course. They’re all about the same thing. And it’s always at a certain moment in the semester. “Oh, my God. My psychology is my statistics is my philosophy.” And that is really exciting. I think that’s what creativity is. It’s never generating something out of nothing; it’s recognizing connections and it’s finding the rhymes — you know, getting in the way of useful accidents.
Davidson: In both of your novels, your protagonists are doing things that have some similarities with that process. Alex is searching for a story that he doesn’t even really know about but intuits that it must exist, and he starts to be increasingly compelled to find it. Oskar, in a clearer way, is on a quest that’s making sort of a coherent meaning out of these clusters of excavated fragments that he digs up, and so forth.
Foer: Definitely. I’ve never felt as if I had the luxury to write about different things, like asking myself, “I have five ideas. Which one should I pursue?” Usually, it’s just pumping out stuff without knowing exactly what it is or where it’s going and then realizing, “Oh, this was my set of concerns. This is what I cared about and was thinking about.”
In my second book, for example, one question I’m asked sometimes is, why did you choose to write about September 11? Well, whether or not I was thinking I was actually writing about it is a different question, but I always find that to be a really strange question. I just assume that most people — whatever they do, whatever kinds of writers they are — can’t help being drawn to the things that they’re thinking about and feeling. That can take lots of different forms. It can be explicit; it can be implicit. It can be subtle, or it can be in your face. In the case of my second book, it was rather explicit and in your face, but it didn’t feel like an exceptional decision. If anything, it felt like the unexceptional decision.
Davidson: So really less of a conscious choice than, as you were writing about characters and things that had caught your attention, it emerged that September 11th was part of the imagination of catastrophe that Oskar was having? One of the funniest and most dreadful moments in the whole book is when Oskar is giving his school presentation about the bombing of Hiroshima, and the teacher doesn’t know how to stop him. I like the pulling together of these different incidents of terrible violence in the 20th century. I thought that you really did find a way to do that very well, very effectively.
Foer: Thank you.
Davidson: I’m thinking that now would be a good time to turn this over and start taking questions from the audience. We’ve got a lot of people here, and I’m sure they have interesting things to ask.
Audience Member 1: I loved both the novels, and so I was really struck by the different reactions to each novel. It seemed that a lot of critics felt that you had a right to write about the Holocaust, but you somehow hadn’t earned the right to write about September 11. I thought that was just an absolutely absurd way of thinking about literature, as something that you have to earn the right to write about certain events. It seemed like a very limited way to think about the imagination. So I just wanted to ask you, what do you feel is the role of experience in creating fiction?
Foer: I can’t really speak on behalf of other people and their opinions, but there are a couple of things I noticed. Maybe it’s because of the amount of time that’s passed. When writing about [WWII], we accept that people are producing versions. But with September 11, it was as if people were expecting a definitive edition, as if this is the definitive telling of it rather than a version, a perspective. Which is to say, here’s one perspective and here’s another perspective. This time it could be from a New Yorker’s perspective, this time from a child’s, this time from a European’s. There is a yearning for something that would somehow be objective. I think it’s because we were still in a journalistic mode of understanding [the event]. I mean, it’s interesting. So my book came out four years after September 11, and I found myself often answering the question, “Did you feel like it was too soon to write about it?”
Davidson: It’s an idiotic question, really, isn’t it? I mean, you wrote about it; clearly you didn’t feel it was too soon.
Foer: Well, in that sense, it’s fairly idiotic. [Laughter] It’s also clearly not a question. Nobody would have asked a New York Times journalist on September 12, 2001, if it was too soon. Nobody asked Tom Brokaw, as he was rushing to Ground Zero, if it was too soon. So what does it mean that for certain forms of communication four years might be too soon, and for other forms of communications 30 seconds is the appropriate amount of time to wait? So, it’s worth asking, what are the prices we pay for getting these versions wrong, or what’s gained from getting them right?
Let’s just say my novel was a complete catastrophe, a failure, the worst novel ever written. What happens? Nothing. The book goes out of print, maybe? It’s taken from the shelf. My life might get a little bit more difficult, but the world doesn’t suffer. Nobody in the world would suffer. What happens if journalists get their stories wrong? There are serious ramifications. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the war in Iraq happened, to some extent, because of journalistic errors. So it’s very strange, the double standard. There are probably a lot of ways of explaining it, but it does seem like there’s a certain amount of suspicion about art. You wouldn’t expect it, and you don’t see it very often, but in these times of crisis, or when people feel like the stakes are very high, it’s very revealing.
To be honest, I didn’t feel that my first book was about the Holocaust. I guess I didn’t that like my second book was about September 11. If I’m lucky enough that my second book is read in a couple of years or in five years or in ten years, I hope and imagine that it would be read differently, where that event becomes context rather than the foreground.
Davidson: When I was reading your second book, I was reminded a lot of Kurt Vonnegut’s quote along the lines of, “I feel the same things you feel. I think the same things you think. You’re not alone.” I was wondering if that was something you intentionally do in your writing, try to connect with the fears your readers may have, the thoughts they may have, or if that’s one of those things that just kind of comes naturally.
Foer: No, I really did not try to do that. I don’t imagine any kind of readers when I’m writing. I think doing so would really betray the point of writing, which is that we can’t anticipate the things that we share with other people. To try to do so can really be the worst kind of mistake. James Baldwin said that before he wrote, he always assumed that the things he felt most deeply most alienated him. Nobody was depressed the way he was depressed; nobody was joyful the way he was joyful. Then, when he started reading and later writing, he realized that the things he felt most deeply most connected him to others, just not the others he would have necessarily anticipated.
When I finished my first book, I thought that the only people who would like it or engage with it were people like me, young Jewish people like me. Then lo and behold, a lot of young Jewish people really didn’t engage with my book. Lo and behold, some of the nicest, kindest letters I first got came from Japan. I remember I did an interview once on a call-in radio show. Somebody called in and said, “I just wanted to thank you for Everything Is Illuminated. You really told my family’s story, and I hadn’t heard it told like that before. It really meant a lot to me, because it filled in a hole.” And I said, “Thanks.” And so what am I imagining in my head? Me on the other end of the phone. Then the person said, “I’m a 56-year-old black man. I live in Trenton, New Jersey.” And I was like, “Whoa, that was not what I was expecting at all.” [Laughter]
Then, I felt ashamed that I wasn’t expecting it at all. What did I think literature was? What is the point of all of this, if not to try to approach the themes and concerns that come before all the circumstantial things that would seem to separate us, like the color of your skin, your age, where you live, or when you lived? My favorite works of art are often made by people who are dead — dead and halfway around the world. I think if I ever tried to anticipate what a reader might feel, I would be making that cardinal sin, the exact thing that writing is the antidote to.
Audience Member 2: I’d like to get back to the question that Jenny started with, and that’s the relationship between language and the ineffable, the sayable and the unsayable. That takes multiple manifestations. Certainly, one of the problems in modern literature is the relation between words and things, the ways in which they fall apart. And, yet, that which remains unsayable, in terms of the registers with which you work, can be understood theologically. Starting in the Jewish tradition, the relationship of the sacred to language or to image representations is slippery. So to say that language is the opposite of that which is unsayable is too simple, because the unsayable is that which is not being articulated. It’s not a simple opposition, but how language’s failure is precisely part of the task of writing.
Foer: Well, the description of the failure of language is part of what can be generative, actually. That’s an idea I’ve always liked. This is in the category of things I like but I don’t know if I actually believe, but there’s a Jewish notion of words being generative, that they literally make things, that they contribute and participate in the creation of the universe. So, when you say you’re married, you become married. That’s what being married is: It’s saying “I do” in front of a community, and it makes something that didn’t exist before. One of the first acts in the Bible is when God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. It’s not, “God said, ‘Let there be light’ and waved a magic wand, thunder came rolling in, and there was light.” It’s not, “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and he blew three times on his hand.” He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. The articulation was generative.
That can sound kind of out there and abstract, but it’s interesting when it’s grounded in our world. There is a really wonderful essay by a linguist about the creation of modern Hebrew, bringing it back into popular use. Apparently, it wasn’t until the 1970s that there was a word in Hebrew for “frustrated.” So, this linguist says, until this moment, Israelis were never frustrated — as hard as that is to believe. [Laughter]
So you’re in the car, and you’re feeling frustrated. Your partner turns to you and says, “God, what’s wrong?” And you say — well, you search your sort of mental dictionary of emotions. What am I? What am I? Am I pissed off? Not exactly. Am I angry? Not exactly. Am I aggravated? Sort of, but not exactly. I’ll just go with ‘aggravated.’ It’s the closest thing. “I’m aggravated.” “Oh, you’re aggravated?” And then you become aggravated. So words are self-fulfilling prophecies. Emotions are the words that we apply to our emotions. It is not just the case that [a word] pinpoints an emotion; it generates an emotion. The word “frustrated,” it allows people to be frustrated.
This is the most decanted version of what I want to do as a novelist. It’s never as literal as simply inventing a word for an emotion that doesn’t exist, or very rarely is it that simple. A couple of times in my writing, I felt I was kind of getting at something, a feeling that didn’t have a word. So it becomes metaphorical. Like, situations happen that, at the very least, I can point to and say, “You see this? That’s the thing that I was feeling.” Or, “You see what Alex does in this situation? That’s what I was feeling. And next time I can’t describe it to you, I’ll just point to that.” I don’t, literally, but that is how it feels. It’s naming the things that exist that can only have a half-existence until they’re named.
Audience Member 2: And I’m curious as to how you started to select the pictures for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, because I’m just wondering about the relationship between the unsayable and the images you’re using. The story has such a distinctive voice. The pictures sometimes have the feeling that they’re viral writing. But then some, particularly the closing snapshot of the body falling, feel much more kind of like a generic image. And I was wondering how you chose them, or was that in any way conscious in your mind?
Foer: I didn’t think of choosing the pictures and doing the writing as separate activities. Sometimes I wrote something and thought of a picture I would like; sometimes I found a picture I liked and thought of words that I wanted to surround it with. I never thought of them as having to do with the unsayable. I don’t think that books need images, and I definitely don’t think that they need them in order to fill some kind of hole that words leave, like a silhouette that words trace. To me, it was a different, particular form of expression that I wanted this book to take. And again, I found this a little bit peculiar, or I found the reaction to it peculiar. If a painter includes words in a painting, it’s totally un-noteworthy. I mean, nobody would ever really think twice about it and certainly wouldn’t ask about it or write about it. And yet when a writer includes an image in a book, it is something that feels like it needs an explanation.
So, as I said, I didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer. There are bad things about that, and there are good things about that. The bad things about it are that I had to learn a lot of lessons the hard way. And I had to learn them intellectually, rather than learning them as almost like a muscle movement, you know, the way younger people are able to learn things. The good thing is: I never acquired any real reverence for the form of the novel. So if someone said to me, “You know your second book? We can’t really file it in the fiction section at Barnes & Noble. We have to put it with the — whatever other section,” that wouldn’t bother me. I wouldn’t lose sleep over that, because I just didn’t care in the first place. I mean, what I care about is having a book that’s a good vehicle for me, that takes me to the places that I want to go.
And a vehicle, I think, can be a very good analogy. I don’t love to fly on planes, but I really do love the way that they get me to places that are far away in very little time. But if someone else invented something else, like a teleportation device, I would do that very happily. To me, the book is a vehicle. And if I have to alter the form to make it a better vehicle, then that’s fine. I’m not doing it in the interest of being experimental. I’m only doing it in the interest of making it a better vehicle for my purposes.
Davidson: I do have a follow-up question, if I can take the moderator’s privilege. I was curious about your first novel. You do some interesting things with layout and language that are still within the bounds of what, after modernist fiction, writers get to do pretty regularly on the page. But in your second book, you’re definitely doing some stuff that people don’t usually do. And the frivolous version of this question is, was it a pain to get the publisher or the designer to work with you to really make it the way you wanted it? And the more metaphysical question is, in what ways does that stuff matter to you, in the same way as your choice of a particular word or phrase matters to you, or do you see it as something different?
Foer: Well, to answer it in reverse order, it matters to me in exactly the same way. I’m only making an object: that’s how I think about books. I think of it, really, almost like a little sculpture, like putting sentences one after another and liking the way that they look and fit together. At a certain point, it’s like how a phone number can be a string of seven digits or it can be three digits with four digits after it. There are ways of chunking information.
If you were to take a very long sentence, let’s say the sentence, “If you were to take a very long sentence,” and I were to ask you to memorize these letters, you’d have an extremely hard time doing it without recognizing that they form different words.
So there are a lot of different ways to work on a book. I can work on it in terms of trying to pick just the right word for each sentence. But then you can also start looking at blocks of text, like, how do these things respond to these other things? Finally, how do I want the pages to look? How do I want the feeling of moving through 20 pages, how do I want that to feel? Do I want the quotations to each have their own line, or do I want them to be enjambed? And all of this, whether we think about it or not, seriously influences the experience of reading a book. I’ve had many books blown for me because the font was weird or the margins were weird.
Davidson: I hear you.
Foer: Or the trim size was weird. So then the first question. Sorry, what was your first question again?
Davidson: Oh, it was, were your publishers lovely and fully amenable or was it troublesome for you?
Foer: It was probably some combination of the two. They were nice, but who knows? I don’t know what they thought. I only know what they tell me, you know? To me, they seemed very nice. And the designer, it was exciting for her because it was different.
Was it ever a pain? Yes. Did we ever disagree? Yes. But I wasn’t asking so much, was I? I mean, there was a version of the book early on when I wanted to have things die cut, cut out of the pages. I was really interested in holes in the book. That would have probably been met with a different response, if I had kept that. [Laughter]
Davidson: But you let Oskar have an extravagant die-cutting experience that made up for you not being . . .
Foer: Does he? I don’t even remember.
Davidson: Yeah, he gets a quote of $250.00 for the die cutting, doesn’t he?
Foer: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Davidson: You’ve said a couple of times tonight that you never intended to be a writer. So how did you become a writer? Did you dabble in journalism? Did you write little short stories? How did it evolve?
Foer: I became a writer in large part because of a class that I took with Joyce Carol Oates. I took it really on a whim. I took a lot of different classes on whims when I was in college. And I came early to class one day. I didn’t think anything of what I was doing. I tried very hard, but I don’t know. I certainly didn’t feel strongly about it. And she came up to me before class. We were there early, and she said, “Oh, I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to just tell you outside the context of the class that I’m a fan of your writing.” And it was really revelatory for me, not only for the obvious reason that “Oh, here’s this esteemed, great American writer who is saying something nice,” but because it really hadn’t occurred to me that there was such a thing as “my writing,” that it was taking a shape that was recognizable, that it was adding up to anything. I thought I turned in assignments. Everybody turns in assignments, and then they disappear.
So I don’t know. I was very impressionable at that moment in my life, and a couple of kind words just really got me thinking, to be honest. Teachers should take that very seriously, because there were things I was turned off from for life because of a few words that people said to me, and there were things that totally redirected my life. So then I started experimenting with it and realizing that it was much more flexible than I thought, and that it could do things for me. And I just decided to give it a try.
Audience Member #3: Your [first] book magically appeared in my sister’s locked car after a party down the block from it. And we all felt compelled to read it because of this weird event. And we all loved it, but then we were all scared to see the movie, because we’re like, “Oh, I hate it when books turn into movies.” And then we loved the movie, and thought it was amazing, and just loved the images in it, and felt like it had transferred into a movie really well. And I wanted to ask how that experience was for you and also how that’s influenced your current writing.
Foer: A ’97 blue Civic, right? [Laughter] I spent one very long night . . . [Laughter] What was my experience of the movie? I didn’t have a very full experience of the movie. I didn’t participate in the making of it; I didn’t work on the screenplay. I actually saw the movie in a theater, just as you might have. So I don’t have a whole lot to say about it, actually. I wrote the book the way I did because it was the only way that I could have imagined it being. It’s not to say I think it’s the best way it could’ve been; it’s not to say that I would have any strong arguments with somebody who disagreed with choices that I made. It’s a very subjective thing, a very fiercely subjective thing.
So when a movie comes out, obviously, an adaptation is going to be different, and this adaptation was very, very different. Half of the book was not in the movie. So obviously it was awkward for me; it was difficult. I can say it’s not the way that I would’ve done it, but I wouldn’t have done it. I mean, I’m not a filmmaker. So, imagine that a very good actor were to go on stage and imitate you and imagine it was an extremely attractive actor, who did a very convincing impression. You would still feel extremely awkward watching it, and I guess something like that was my relationship to watching the movie.
Audience Member 4: In your second book, it seems like you’re trying to do a lot of stuff with the book that you wouldn’t naturally do, like the images on different pages and stuff. And just going to your Web page, I was struck by its construction. It seemed like you’re trying to take the book — or rather trying to take writing — outside of the confines of the book, trying to do different things. I was wondering if you could say something about what you’re trying to do with your Web page, whether you feel — I don’t know — unbound by your Web page, and what might be happening with that.
Foer: Well, I actually don’t know very much about making Web pages, to be honest. I had a friend who was helping me with it, and I would sort of describe what I thought might be a neat way of doing things, and he would make it happen. But there’s only so much that we can ask of a friend, even a really good friend, before you have to pay them, which I wasn’t going to do. [Laughter] So it went by the wayside. It’s not my thing. The Internet is not my thing, although one would be fooled into thinking it was my thing if they observed me for a couple of days.
There’s nothing a book does naturally. A book doesn’t naturally make noise. And it doesn’t naturally smell. But I don’t know. I didn’t think of my second book as pushing against any kind of limitations. And I wasn’t interested in pushing against any limitations. It’s just not something that excites me, the idea of experimenting.
What excites me is getting the thing exactly as I want it to be. I have an almost fetishistic relationship to it. I think a lot of writing actually comes from these kind of fetishistic impulses, and it has to do with a pre-verbal itch you want scratched. And you sometimes don’t know that you want it scratched until someone comes and scratches it. And I imagine many of you have had that experience, listening to music or reading books. A lot of people have it the first time they read A Hundred Years of Solitude or Borges, Calvino, or the first time they see Robert Rauschenberg’s work. You know, “Ah, this is the thing I wanted, I suddenly realize.”
So a lot of the way I write seems to be in response to wanting to create fingers, essentially, to scratch these itches. But it doesn’t come from the place of asking, what would be an interesting itch to have? Or what would be an interesting finger to create? It’s much more necessary than that.
Audience Member 4: Yeah, I was wondering about your approach to the beginning of your second book, dealing with an event that’s about the present. I know in my own writing, what used to be my first page is now my 200th page, and I went through about 200 revisions. And with each one, I was convinced that the beginning could be nothing else; it would be the best first page. What I ended up with, believe it or not, was a cliché. A cliché happened to be the best possible choice. I suppose Anna Karenina started with a cliché. So I’m wondering, how much did you struggle? Your writing seems like it came from this smooth and relaxed point of view. Do you think you struggled enough?
Davidson: If I could just chime in here. I was thinking about your last answer, and I definitely see what you’re saying. I say I have the obsessive soul of a copy editor. I really, really, really care about every detail of the words in the sentence and so forth. And there are certain writers whom I find I can’t read because I feel that, whatever their sensibility is, they’re insufficiently attentive to detail within their own sensibility and rules.
And one thing that seems to me very clear about your writing is that there’s a real craftsperson’s attention to detail. So the interest in having some play with the red marking and stuff like that just makes sense to me, because it would have been bad if you did that but you were careless about your words and sentences. I could think of examples of writers who are kind of putting attention that they can’t really spare onto some stuff that’s for fun, when really there are some essential kinds of detail they’re not focusing on. But the sheer level of attention in every detail of the book — the physical artifact as well as the writing — does make your novel more in the category of certain kinds of painting or something like that than many people’s novels are, anyway.
Foer: To me, it matters what follows what, in a pretty serious way. And it’s funny, because, after my first novel, if I would do a book signing or something, people would come up to me and imitate Alex. So they’d be like, “Premium book,” or whatever. [Laughter] So first of all, don’t you realize the person in front of you just did the same thing? They would get it wrong, very often. And it really, really upset me. It was, you know, like the person who leaves the room with the lights on and you’ve gotta go run back and turn it off, or the person who plays a piano piece right up to the final resolve and then walks away and shuts the keys. You’re like, “Ahh!”
So it’s funny. Just yesterday I got the screenplay that someone wrote for my second book, and I was reading it. Right in the very beginning, it’s Oskar’s quote, and he says something like, “I used to be an atheist; now I’m not. It doesn’t mean I believe in God, but I believe that things are extremely complicated.” This screenplay says exactly that, except the end said, “I believe that things are really complicated.” And I just heard a hundred million fingernails scratching on a hundred million blackboards.
Davidson: Yeah, because Oskar would never use the word “really” in that sentence.
Foer: Not only that, but why would you so deliberately replace that one word? Every other word is identical. Did it stink so badly to you that you had to replace “extremely” with “really”?
I find beginnings hugely exciting, really the best part of writing — beginnings and endings. Like you, I go through a lot of beginnings, and the beginnings only rarely end up as the beginning. In the case of my second book, I had thought that I needed some kind of topic sentence. I didn’t know what, but something grand that explained the book or told you about the adventure that we were about to go on. And I had a slew of these. And then his first line, “What about a teakettle?” would come around the third paragraph. Then I was looking at it, and I was like, “Well, let me just cut out everything that isn’t pleasing, everything that isn’t good, everything that isn’t in motion.” And I stopped and I cut everything up to “What about a teakettle?” It felt like a very unlikely place to start because there’s something deflating about it or just maybe humbled. It’s not virile. It’s not muscular, you know? But ultimately it’s what I am and what my book is, and it turned out to be, I think, a good foot to start the journey on.
In my first book, what is now the second chapter was the first chapter for a very long time, almost right up to publication. And so the first sentence is something like, “It was March 17th, 1791, when Trachim B’s double-axle wagon either did or did not flip and sink to the bottom of the Brod River,” or something like that. So it’s the only sentence that reflects research that I actually did for that book, in a manner of speaking. I started to read a history of this village, Trachimbrod —there was such a place. My grandfather really did come from there, and, in fact, it was named after a gentile, Trachim, who supposedly drowned in this Brod River.
So the first time I wrote that sentence, it was, “It was on this date that the wagon flipped and sunk.” There was no “did or didn’t.” That, to me, sounded very virile and good. That was a very big sentence: “It was on this date, this sunk,” and this was good, and we’re into it. But then I thought, “I don’t know. It’s not really me.” To me, I would maybe let the guy get away or, at the very least, let him not know. Maybe we can have this book be more about ellipses than exclamation points or question marks. So I changed it, but then that became problematic because I wasn’t writing about Kalamazoo; I was writing about this village that my grandfather came from that was destroyed.
And my book, I didn’t know if it was going to be published. I didn’t know anything about it. But I knew that it was going to be a historical artifact, that it would, in some small way, matter. It really mattered to me. I took it very seriously. I felt like it mattered. So I thought, “Well, this is something that you don’t see with the mind’s eye; you see it with the eyes in your head; we’re not going to mess around with this.” But then I thought, “No, but I like it the other way, and that’s how I want to write the book.” I had this debate, and it took me quite a long time to write that first sentence. Ultimately, I sided with the mind’s eye, with the imagination, with ellipses, and the rest of the draft, I have to say, flowed very quickly after that decision.
In a sense, the conflict of the first book, which it shares with the second book, is between the mind’s eye and the eyes in our head, between imagination and reality, and the limits of each. At the end of the second book, it’s ambiguous. I don’t know if it’s hopeful or deflating, ultimately. Is Oskar’s imagination redeeming? Is it redemptive, or is it just the final signal of his inability to recover?
In any case, like titles, first sentences and beginnings can really frame the entire work. And often, once you can get those things in place, a lot of other decisions flow from them.
Audience Member 5: What do you think of terrorism as a medium, and what do you think about the interaction between literature and terrorism or terror?
Foer: What do I think of terrorism as a medium? What do you mean by that?
Audience Member 5: As a medium of communication.
Foer: Well, it’s extremely effective, in a certain way. In a certain way, there’s no more effective medium of communication. But then you have to get into what you mean by “communication.” I think of communication as being something that — well, this is a complicated question. I mean, is a punch in the face the most effective form of communication?
There’s slow and there’s fast communication. There’s communication that involves work, and there’s communication that’s passive. So terrorism is an extremely active and quick form of communication. Does it ultimately communicate over time? What would that mean? Is it effective over time? It’s never proven to be effective over time. There’s never been a case of terrorists who have gotten what they wanted, ever, historically. Often, the slow and subtle and nuanced forms of communication, which take much more work and find fewer champions, are the ones that are most successful over time.
In terms of the interaction of art and terrorism, it’s not something that I’ve given a lot of thought to, to be honest. And I’m afraid that whatever I would say now would just be too disrespectfully off the cuff. But both of my books, I suppose, contain forms of terrorism in them. But I think those are much more incidental to the book than the different kinds of what you would call terrorism or inflictions of harm, which we were talking about in the beginning — silence, the subtle and slow kinds of terrorism, things being off limits, things left to haunt one’s imagination. As a writer, those are the things that I’m most concerned with.
Audience Member 6: I just had a small question. I’m from the Netherlands, and my mom came home with your first book. And its cover was really interesting to me; it was very gray and showed two people kind of walking away in the mist. And I had that book in my room for three years or so. Then I came to the U.S., and I saw the U.S. version, which is a much more flashy, an artsy young writer kind of front. And I was just wondering, do you have any say in these things? What do you think about it? Does it say anything about your perception of the Holocaust in Europe?
Foer: You know, there’s a generous way of looking at it, and there’s a less generous way of looking at it. The generous way of looking at it is sort of how you asked it: Maybe there are real cultural differences, different levels of respect, perhaps, different ways of making the material that can be very difficult to approach more accessible. The less generous way of looking at it, which I would probably subscribe to, is that this is what sells in one place and this is what sells in another place. So the Netherlands, you’re a dignified bunch, in a certain way, maybe in a way that we aren’t, as much, here.
And also we have very different reading cultures. Reading is, as you probably know, a much, much more commonplace activity there than it is here. It’s amazing how similar book sales can be in the Netherlands and the United States, given how wildly different the sizes of the populations are. So I really don’t know. I’m not a book marketer, but it may be that they were thinking, “O.K., what’s a cover that might appeal to the broad audience of readers that we have in the Netherlands?” as opposed to, “How are we going to shove this down the throats of the very, very few folks who cling to books in the United States?” I have no idea. I can tell you I really didn’t have anything to do with it. In the States, I became very friendly with the designer just because I think he’s so great, and I offered my two cents, but neither of these covers were my decision.
Davidson: You said recently that when you were writing the first book, you felt that it was going to be a historical artifact. So my question is, since the part in the shtetl is more reminiscent of Jewish fiction and old Yiddish fiction, did you mean that it was capturing that old country feeling? Or were you trying to capture the natural work of a people?
Foer: I don’t think I was trying to capture anything about them. I think I was trying to capture something about now. So much of the book is about revisiting the “them.” So this kind of magical realist style, which is familiar, as you’re saying, and in and of itself says something about the way that we have digested not only the event of the war but the time before the war. Certainly, one of the things I was surprised by when I wrote that book was to find all of the stories that I was told as a child coming back to the surface, things I hadn’t thought of in a long time. The two things that surprised me most were: one, how important the stories were that I was told; and, two, how important the stories I wasn’t told were. And that combination of those two things seemed to dictate every move that I was making.
So the kinds of stories that I grew up with had that kind of look; anything that’s lost is going to be remembered in a mythic way. And something that was destroyed so completely is almost necessarily going to be remembered in that folkloric, magical realistic way. Is that what life was like? No. Is my book riddled with anachronisms? Yes. Was I trying to write that kind of historical account? No. I mean, I hope that’s obvious.
One of the first criticisms I got from that book, Everything Is Illuminated, was from a linguist who said, “This is not how somebody learning English would speak, of course. The mistakes he’s making aren’t right.” And I was like, “Of course. I’m not a linguist. I wasn’t aspiring to write a linguistic textbook.” The question is, did those mistakes feel authentic? And oftentimes in books, you have to make factual errors in order to create these experiential truths. If you are to simply take a Dictaphone and record, for example, a nine-year-old and then transcribe it, the strange thing is, it might not sound like a nine-year-old. It might not feel like an authentic version of a nine-year-old. And yet each of us has — I don’t know where we acquire them, but we have these — tests of authenticity.
So if someone says to me, “I thought it was interesting how you wrote this 80-year-old man, and you’re not an 80-year-old man. Yet you did it in a way that was believable. How did you do that?” To the questioner, I would say, “Well, you’re even further from being an 80-year-old man than I am. How did you know that it was believable?” Because whatever it is in you that knew it was believable was what was in me. There are these strange, coiled-up authenticity tests inside of us that make certain things feel right and certain things not. And what’s problematic, and what’s ultimately the greatest thing about literature, comes back to what the young woman over there was asking about, sort of anticipating the reader’s reaction. Each of us carries around a different test, and you can’t anticipate what will pass each person’s test. So what might, to you, seem like or feel like an authentic depiction of this village at the end of the eighteenth century, to somebody else may seem preposterous and foolish or even immoral.
So all I can say is that there were many, many kinds of books I was not trying to write. I was not trying to write a history book; I was not trying to write a work of journalism; I was not trying to write a memoir. I was trying to write a novel, a work of the imagination and something that created a certain kind of atmosphere, a certain environment for the reader — the reader being me, when I was writing it — and something where all of the words were in their right places.
Davidson: If I might just add something here. I was struck by your use of the phrase “a historical artifact.” I took you to be saying that you were not writing a historical novel, that it was an artifact in the way that you were talking about your writing at the beginning of this conversation. Which is to say, at the moment that you’re crafting the book into its finished, final shape, it needs to be an authentic expression of you, yourself, and a truthful account of something, as you are capable of understanding it at that moment. It’s an artifact that will last even as you may have grown to other stages, so it needs to be something that you can live with. That was what I took to be sort of the emphasis, that it doesn’t matter so much whether a million people buy it and read it; it’s more a question of whether it will continue to stand up to your own standard of truthfulness.
Foer: Right. I mean, here’s an analogy. My grandmother, who came from Europe and was the only member of her family to survive from this very, very big family, brought a spoon with her, for some reason. And she gave it to my son. And it’s in this little frame, like a shadow-box frame with a little description that she wrote of it and an image of her right she just came to America. In his closet, I have my book. I have a little book collection for him. Whenever I meet an author, I’ll get them to sign a book for him and one day he can do whatever he wants with them. But I think of my book sort of how I think of that spoon. My grandmother doesn’t eat with that spoon anymore. It doesn’t serve its original purpose. But it’s an object, and it’s an object that carries a certain superphysical significance.
And when I said I was thinking of my book as a historical artifact, I actually meant in the context of my family. That’s the way I was imagining it. I didn’t mean anything larger than that. And so what is it? It’s a record, just as the spoon is something that has now taken on this otherworldly significance, but at one time you can imagine her holding it. You can imagine it in her mouth. You can see what the other set of silverware must’ve been like. It’s very, very evocative. And when I was writing my book, I was thinking about those evocations. I was 24, 23, a young Jewish person in 1998. And I had this particular experience, familial experience, and I was recording it. I was recording my version of it, which is not a definitive version of anything except perhaps of my experience. And then I did it, and that’s what it is.
If I wrote the book again, would I write the same book? No. I have a copy that I take around with me for readings. Every single page has edits on it. I’m totally embarrassed by large swaths of it. But I wouldn’t change it. I actually had the option to change it, when it came out in paperback. And it was hard for me, because I thought of ways that I could make the book better in a certain sense, but then I would have perverted this artifact. And that’s what I was striving for. Regardless of the quality of the book in terms of literature, I think it’s what I achieved. I really did express something about my experience of that particular moment in history, and I’m glad now that I have that.
Audience Member 7: In both of your books, I had this sense that there’s just this sort of past that is almost like a world itself because of how time moves. So much of history is uncovered in the stories. As you said about preserving your own sort of artifact of your own experience, what do you think about it as a sort of preservation of the past?
Foer: I don’t think about it. I don’t mean to deflate the process of writing at all, but I don’t think about anything when I’m writing. It’s just not intellectual. It is when I’m editing. But when I’m first composing something, I think of this line that either Auden or Forster said — I don’t know who said it, but I know one of them did — and it is: “I look at what I write so that I can see what I think.” And it’s not like I have all of these arguments to make or stories to tell or concerns about the fragility of history or the past. In the course of writing things, then I start to see what my concerns are.
And when I said that I was working on what I thought was a historical artifact, I didn’t think that in the beginning. I mean, that was a little bit different because that trip did have some connection to my family history, but in terms of scene by scene, it’s just very intuitive. And I would go a step further and say — and I wonder if this is true of other people; I don’t know if it is — I don’t think I’m ever thinking, unless I am writing or unless I’m talking to somebody. I’m not somebody who walks down the street with an interior monologue. I just don’t have one. I know that people talk about interior monologues, but I’ve never experienced one myself. [Laughter] My thoughts are always reactive. I see something; I think something. And thank God I have writing.
Davidson: Contrary to popular belief, the main reason to write a book is to learn what you think about something. It’s really a lot of trouble to go to, and if you’re not going to find out something about what you think, that it’s the only way to get access to, it’s really not worth it.
Foer: Yeah, this is another one of dubious provenance, but I think it’s from the Talmud, the saying that an uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter. And to me, an unwritten book is like an unlived life. I just wouldn’t have any sense of what I was thinking or feeling if I didn’t write. I walk around with ideas about what I’m thinking and feeling, but that’s often in response to what I want to be thinking and feeling or what I want people to see me thinking and feeling. “Oh, yeah, man, do I care about the environment — so much. Oh, yeah.” But then I write, and it turns out other things come to the surface, and relentlessly. Like, I can’t stop them. So it’s why I think everybody should write. The world doesn’t need more novels, but the world needs more writers, because writing sends back these self-portraits that are just different than you can get anywhere else. And I don’t think they’re necessarily more accurate, but they’re different. And I don’t think one can have a complete self-image without writing.
Audience Member 8: I was curious about you as a reader and who you’re reading, what you’re enjoying, and what you identify with when you read and see, and how that illuminates your writing?
Foer: I don’t think that I read more than most people. I probably read about the same amount as most readers. I probably read more nonfiction than fiction, or just more of other kinds of books. I just recently returned to this book, which is my favorite of all books, called Life? or Theater? by a woman named Charlotte Salomon. It was written right before the war. And I was just talking about this with a friend. I said, “It’s the thing that I would make, if I could make anything.” It’s 769 watercolors, but with text incorporated into them, and it tells a story. It’s a proper book. Unfortunately, it’s been out of print for a long time, but occasionally, as an exhibit, it travels around the world. It’s going to be in San Francisco in about two years, I think. So anyway, I just revisited that. It’s the book that has me wanting to be on a desert island so it could be my desert island book. [Laughter] It’s just a really wonderful book.
But I am just finishing a work of nonfiction, so I ended up reading a lot about that subject matter. And things will catch my attention, and “I’d like to read about that.” I don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction.
Audience Member 9: So first off, I get very nervous speaking in front of people —
Foer: Oh, that’s a great way to start your question. [Laughter] You know, it’s funny. I’m not all that nervous now. I used to be an extremely — I’m only making you more nervous, I know. It’s like freezing the kicker before the final field goal. I used to have really terrible problems with stage fright. And I find that I cannot ask a question in a setting like this, even when I really, really want to because I get way too nervous. And yet for some reason answering questions makes me less nervous.
Audience Member 9: When I was in grad school, my friend Emily and I had a pact where we were both so nervous when we asked questions that our voices would shake and our hands would shake, so we made a deal with each other that we would each ask a question at every talk that we ever went to, and that’s how I became a fluent and comfortable question asker.
Foer: I took beta blockers. That was how I did it. And I couldn’t recommend them more highly. They really level you out. [Laughter]
Audience Member 9: And now for the question. All right. I’m trying to wrap my mind around a couple things that you said. Firstly, in response to the first question that was asked, where you said that hopefully in five or ten years, the event of September 11 will not be viewed so much as “the event” that forms the foreground in your second but as the context. I’m thinking about that in relation to another thing that you said a couple times, that you kind of use your books as vessels to communicate certain themes, like the silences and the desperation to communicate.
And so those two things, which might be a weird juxtaposition, but in relation to something which I think Adorno said, that life or art after the Holocaust is barbaric, something like that. Has it ever given you pause, or do you get criticism, that you are potentially using these events, and that’s the reason some people react negatively to your books because you’re using events to communicate these certain themes? You’re using these historical traumas as events, which may be exploitative or something like that.
Foer: Like borrowing rather than earning emotion?
Audience Member 9: Yeah. Right.
Foer: Well, I mean, it’s not an invalid opinion. I can’t really argue with it. I can only talk about my intentions. It’s funny. The expression “to make art out of” September 11, “to make art out of” the Holocaust, it really has one connotation, and it’s negative. And why is that negative? That just seems so strange to me. At least for me, the notion of making art out of something is the way that I’m most deliberate; it’s the way that I’m most sensitive. It is when I am paying the most attention to things. It’s when I’m being the most careful with subject matter. I wouldn’t make art out of something that I didn’t care about.
My only point is that I think for people who take writing and reading seriously, it’s not writing at the expense of all other forms of communication, but the lack of literature would be incomplete communication. We can’t have a full portrait of our world without these various means of expression. Imagine, after September 11, journalists had said, “It’s too soon to write about it.” Well, that would be unacceptable. That would feel really grossly negligent. Imagine if they were to say, “You know what? But we’re selling ads in our newspapers. In fact, we’re selling tons of ads, making millions of dollars.” Isn’t this exploitative in some way? And, oh, by the way, what was the headline on news programs so often after September 11? And the months and even years after? All the fear mongering? Because it sells, because it keeps people watching. “Threat to New York Subway System; Film at 11.” Well, everyone’s like, “Shit, I’d better watch at 11, because I take the subway.”
Nevertheless, despite all of the compromises that one could find in the journalistic story, we know that it’s necessary and we cannot live without it. To me, art is something I cannot live without and that the culture cannot live without. In fact, we’re beginning to see what happens when we live without it. And we’re certainly seeing what happens when our relations with other countries don’t include it. When you think about how impossible it’s become to translate Arabic literature, for example, into English, a certain version of our story — of our human story — is missing. And to me, it’s the version that most successfully communicates compassion or engenders compassion. It does it better than journalism does. It does it better than history does. I think it does it better than religion does and better than philosophy does. Not that these things are distinct, exactly.
But Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet, wrote that “the imagination is the instrument of compassion.” And that’s something that I very much believe in. So the idea of making art out of something, far from being manipulative or profiteering, is something that, ideally, engenders compassion. And anybody who wants to argue against that is taking up a losing argument.
Davidson: We really are out of time now, so I thank you all for attending. And I hope you’ll join me in giving a huge round of applause to Jonathan.