Faith Gravenstreter
Vincent Haddad
ENG 2120
10 Dec 2014
The History Of Love Versus Cosmos
Lean on Me is a short narrative favoring the figurative story of life and how it affects one
being to another. It is a raw story about love and loss, which in turn correlates with The History
of Love and Cosmos. Lean on Me takes on a different direction and regenerates the themes of
absence, loss, and trauma to become a new modern escapade of emotions and confusion for the
characters that lead them to their eventual demise and or fragile human state of mind.
Being specifically inspired by the romance that Nicole Krauss created with such delicacy;
Lean on Me was created as a story that had a different kind of delicacy, a modern-day emotional
and mental subtlety that occurs between two lovers that, over the span of 2 years, fall off the
grid. In the article Critical Inquiry, Dominick LaCapra explains Lean on Me’s ending act
precisely, stating, “To blur the distinction between, or to conflate, absence and loss may itself
bear striking witness to the impact of trauma and the post-traumatic, which create a state of
disorientation, agitation, or even confusion and may induce a gripping response whose power
and force of attraction can be compelling.” This correlates with the ending of the story, when
Emma wakes up and has to re-adjust her mental state and the memory of Liam’s death by rereading the note Liam left her stating his suicide this is similar to when Leo Gursky is left alone
as a old fragile man to accept his lover, Alma’s death. There are some similarities between The
History Of Love’s ending and between Lean on Me because of the heartfelt and emotional
climatic scene. In Lean on Me, Emma is in a traumatic stance; she was left to believe she killed
Liam, as her conscious made her feel guilty for his suicide. Making the decision to end the story
as such was done in order to create a compelling and closed ending that wraps up the confusion
held by the events in the preceding parts of the story. In The History of Love there is a similar but
simultaneously different approach, where Leo Gursky is in love with Alma, who moves away
and eventually dies. This is where the relating themes of loss and absence come in, comparing
the two stories. Both end with a climatic, drama filled ending with a twist that concludes
preceding confusion.
Complimenting the ideas of Nicole Krauss, Witold Gombrowicz gave an idea in Cosmos
of how fragile the human mind is. Throughout the story, Witold, the main character, is dealing
with psychological tricks that curve his perspective on the world, almost making him
hypersexual. This in turn created interest in Lean on Me to create a psychological disorder in one
of the characters, which is the anchor to the plot. Emma’s delusions of Liam’s suicide coincide
with the delusional and somewhat obsessive perspectives that Witold and Emma endure, but in
different emotional ways. Throughout the novel, Gombrowicz creates a plotline that required
mystery and connecting points. Lean on Me is a convolution of these aspects in a way that, while
the plot isn’t a mystery, the non-linear trait of the story creates mystery by itself. Dedicated to
taking on a different approach, a non-linear plotline deemed promising to create mystery in
relation to the mystery in Cosmos. Deciding to create a disorder in Emma was the twist that
changes the story and the non-linear plotline is performed in order to achieve the desired job of
connecting the points as closure is ensured.
The idea to cause a death of a main character and a disorder in the other was simply to be
different from the novels read before. In a way, Lean on Me was meant to be an arc of the two
novels, The History of Love and Cosmos, but simultaneously different. Appreciating the two
novels is what narrowed down the genre and plot, and gave the figurative aspect of a life story.
The reasoning for the events in the story was purposefully placed to grab the reader’s attention
by using romance intertwined with the powerful themes of absence, loss and trauma, which in
turn allowed the reader to relate to the characters, and induce a successful emotional ending,
which is what Nicole Krauss did so well. The events also appalled to keep interest in the story as
mystery was prevailed within the non-linear aspect. The parts of the story that were specifically
original was the non-linear aspect of the story, allowing an attention grabber at the beginning,
background information developing the themes of absence and loss, and a climatic meander
revealing the last theme; trauma.