[_]Tree[_] of C[___]od[__]es

PRINT

Jonathan Safran Foer's experimental novel-cum-book sculpture Tree of Codes begins, "The passerby had their eyes half-closed. Everyone wore his mask. Children greeted each other with masks painted on their faces; they smiled at each other's smiles growing in this emptiness, wanting to resemble the reflections...whole generations had fallen asleep" (8). While this imagistic prose immediately signals to a reader that Tree of Codes is not a typical straightforward narrative, seeing the re-quoted text conceals the book's central experimental conceit. For here are the same lines in their proper textual form:

But even this image doesn't adequately convey the singular reading experience of Tree of Codes, because this is what a reader encounters when first opening the book:

Tree of Codes is a novel constructed through a process of erasure, Foer using a die-cut technique to literally carve his text from the pages of Polish author Bruno Schulz's 1934 novel The Street of Crocodiles. Taking elements from the traditions of found poetry and artists' books such as Tom Phillips' A Humument, Foer has created a sculptural text that emphasizes the print novel's status as a visual, tactile, and fundamentally material medium.

Few contemporary writers have elicited as divisive a response as Foer. While his first two novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, have met with widespread acclaim and mammoth sales, they have also encountered unusually vociferous denunciations. While some of this certainly has to do with the glowing profile pieces that routinely mention Foer's youth in close proximity to the obscene size of his advances, book contracts, and movie options, many of the critiques suggest not simple resentment at presumed unearned success, but righteous indignation toward what is seen as outright manipulation, the belief that his novels offer a veneer of sophistication masking a calculatingly soothing sentimentality at its core. These critics question what they see as Foer's appropriation of historical trauma as an opportunistic shortcut to literary pathos (the Holocaust in Everything is Illuminated, 9/11 in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). A representative example of this critique is Steve Almond's assessment that the latter "is ultimately a wish fantasy borne of the sorrows of 9/11. It peddles the seductive notion that our best response to those attacks need be no more mature than a childish wish that evil be banished from our magic kingdom." (My take, in brief: on the thin line between poignancy and melodrama, between moving affect and saccharine sentimentality, Everything is Illuminated falls successfully on the side of poignancy while Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close falls resoundingly on the side of manipulative melodrama.)

Critic and novelist Walter Kirn, in his New York Times review of EL&IC, rightfully questioned the novel's depiction of the "triumph of human cuteness over human suffering." But Kirn also held particular disdain for Foer's extra-textual experimentation with images, typography and page layout, dismissing these gestures as empty "hijinks" from the "avant-garde toolkit." Kirn, and readers like him, would probably assume, upon description, that Tree of Codes is more of the same. Foer has moved on, one might cynically assume, from aping the magical realism of his favorite novels to directly cutting them up. But those assumptions would be misguided, as Tree of Codes demonstrates the intellectual sophistication and emotional complexity that Foer's previous works, according to his critics, have lacked. The novel elicits a complex emotional register by means of formal experimentation, giving rise to a pathos that provokes rather than assuages. Foer has, through his experimental process of die-cut erasure, created a moving novel that meditates simultaneously upon authorial influence, the phenomenology of reading, and the ways in which the material page embeds multiple temporalities connecting reader, writer, and the long string of history between. 1

It is this emphasis on embedded temporalities within the physical page, in particular, that connects Tree of Codes with its parent text, making the book more than a rote example of sculptural book art or an Oulipo-ian exercise in random, algorithimic constraint. Foer has said, "I was in search of a text whose erasure would somehow be a continuation of its creation" (138). He chose The Street of Crocodiles as his source text because it offers a paradigmatic example of the impossibility of a reader separating conflicting temporalities from his or her experience of a text. In other words, it stages reading not as an unmediated portal to a narrative that transcends time and place, but rather as a complex convergence of the imagined world of the narrative, the author's historical context, our present, and the unspooled history that lies between. It is this history - the unknown future of the author as he/she wrote, the unalterable past of readers - that cannot help but loom over any reading of Schulz's work.

For Schulz's tragic history is, as Foer argues, "in many ways, the story of the [twentieth] century" (137). Born in 1892, Schulz lived his entire life in Drohobyzcz, which was at the time a small town in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia. An artist and an author, his surreal writings merge the mythic with the everyday in prose that recursively loops around key themes, images, and phrases, all while making description-defying leaps in narrative and linguistic logic. When the Germans seized Drohobyzcz in 1941, the Jewish Schulz distributed his artwork and manuscripts to a variety of gentile friends for safekeeping. A German officer, upon discovering Schulz's skill as an artist, conscripted him to paint murals for his child's bedroom in exchange for the officer's protection. He lived in this Scheherazade-like scenario for over a year, until one day his German patron killed a Jewish man who happened to be the 'favorite' of another officer. In response, this other officer walked up to Schulz in the middle of the street, in broad daylight, and shot him in the head, killing him instantly. Schulz's two previously published works, The Street of Crocodiles and The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, are his only extant writings. Not a single manuscript, out of all those he entrusted to others, survives.

Foer insists that Tree of Codes is "in no way a book like The Street of Crocodiles. It is a small response to that great book" (139). Through the die-cut process he literalizes the concept that all writing is, on some level, an act of re-reading, a performative reworking of earlier works, a process of pulling words, images and idea from out of the lines one has read and loved and recasting them into something new. Remarking upon Schulz's striking prose, Foer suggests that just as he took Tree of Codes from The Street of Crocodiles, "there must have been some yet larger book from which The Street of Crocodiles was taken" (139). He continues:

It is from this imagined larger book, this ultimate book, that every word ever written, spoken or thought is exhumed. The Book of Life is the Temple that our lives strive to enter, but instead only conjure. The Street of Crocodiles is not that book - not the book - but it is one level of exhumation closer than any other book I know of. (139)

And so Tree of Codes is a homage. But it is more than that as well. The narrative that emerges is a re-reading, yes, but it is also a response to that very act of reading, to the unsettling effect of reading The Street of Crocodiles from the distance of the twenty-first century, for the narrative that Foer exhumes from the pages of Schulz's work is haunted by our knowledge of Schulz's tragic biography.  It is a narrative about the specters that inhabit the gaps we can never traverse, the gap between what had not yet come when Schulz finished writing The Street of Crocodiles in 1934, and what for us is an inescapable, indelible part of our history that hangs over any reading of Schulz's work. As Foer says: "Schulz's surviving work evokes all that was destroyed in the War: Schulz's lost books, drawings and paintings; those that he would have made had he survived; the millions of other victims, and within them the infinite expressions of infinite thoughts and feelings taking infinite forms" (138).

The narrative of Tree of Codes operates according to a dream logic that approximates this sense of displaced, layered time.  It is told from the perspective of a boy who first loses his mother and watches his father fall apart in the aftermath, only to then somehow have the father die first, the mother now beset by grief as the father wanders as a ghost, hiding in corners, the boy trying to find meaning in a world of faceless masks, of faces pressed mutely against glass, of crowds forming, watching, standing silently by, amidst shadows and more shadows. The boy struggles to live within this Dhalgren-esque town where ontological rules shift from moment to moment, the narrative finally concluding with an impending armageddon in the form of a comet, a doom that is inevitable, unavoidable: "One day brought the improbable news of the imminent end. In mid-sentence as it were, without a period or exclamation point the world was to end" (129-130). As Foer has said, "at times I felt I was making a gravestone rubbing of The Street of Crocodiles, and at times that I was transcribing a dream that The Street of Crocodiles might have had" (139). In other words, Foer pulls out haunting adumbrations of what was to come, finding in Schulz's phrasings and images echoes of the history that we, as readers, cannot forget. From Schulz's surreal depiction of a city awash in pure potentiality Safran Foer culls a narrative of loss, a process that evokes the bitter irony of Schulz's vision of infinite possibilities brutally cut short. And yet, this impending apocalypse in the form of "that fateful comet aimed unerringly at the earth and swallowing miles a second" (132), which echoes the history of war, concentration camps and gulags that would swallow Schulz and so many others, does not ever arrive in Tree of Codes.  Instead the destruction is miraculously staved off by the narrator's father's act of sheer will. Thus, Foer finds embedded in The Street of Crocodiles echoes of Schulz's own tragic future, but also of another path, one that offers a different solution, the possibility of salvation. 2

What makes Tree of Codes especially interesting is the fact that Foer enacts these thematic concerns not just within his prose, but also within the material pages of the book itself. For instance, his exploration of the multiple temporalities of reading is achieved through his direct manipulation of the material book. He carves the page in a way that renders this abstract concept strikingly concrete, for as you read Tree of Codes you find yourself constantly imagining what was, what has been cut away, what has been lost. Furthermore, while unable to ignore the knowledge of all that has been cut away, the reader is also taunted by the specter of what's to come in the form of the forthcoming pages, glimpses of which loom into view, present sometimes for ten or fifteen pages, suggestive words and phrases such as "secret," "ceased to exist," "suffering," "shadows," and "shapeless mob without face" looming up into the text, pushing their way through the page you are reading.  But even seemingly innocuous words -"his," "her" "mother," "tomorrow" - modify the preceding pages, and as a result, each word and phrase becomes charged with portentous meaning. For example: as the novel nears its end something "almost unbearable" looms in the future - we can't see the rest of the page, so we don't know what it is that is "almost unbearable," and yet it imposes itself as we read the other pages, modifying, in turn,

"the age of exaggerated hopes," and then the suspicion that this was all a "coarse trick," and finally the yearning for human connection in the form of a "sympathetic if stammering articulation" (123-7). Each one of these, in turn, is shadowed by the phrase - "almost unbearable" - while the phrase itself, the page on which it actually resides not yet read, simultaneously shifts in meaning and tone with each new juxtaposition. When this something "almost unbearable" is finally reached, the phrase's page-context reveals: "We all shut our eyes to the almost unbearable ordinariness," a poignant evocation of daily life in an occupied city in a time of war (127). This foreshadowing made literal upends the typical temporality of reading; that is, instead of what has come before informing the reader's perception of the current page, here you see through the page, your eye burrowing into the future, the oracular glimpses of what's to come shaping your interpretation of where you are. (This also inverts archaeological metaphors, which envision depth as a movement toward the past). This polyvalent sense of time, although generally overlooked, is inherent in any act of reading. As Wolfgang Iser argues in The Implied Reader, "Every sentence contains a preview of the next and forms a kind of viewfinder for what is to come; and this in turn changes the 'preview' and so becomes a 'viewfinder' for what you have read" (279). This effect, endemic to all reading, is made literal by Foer, who also folds into this a historical awareness that informs and intensifies any reading of Schulz. Just as a reader of Tree of Codes cannot help but be influenced by the words pushing up into view from the future, one cannot read Schulz's descriptions of his hometown in The Street of Crocodiles, magical and effervescent in the eyes of his child narrator, and not think of what would happen soon after.

With the awareness of all that has come before (in the form of all that has been cut away) and the glimpses of the future revealed through those same gaps, the novel's insistent presence of absence produces a present, embodied within the individual page, that holds only a scant few words and is exceptionally tenuous and fragile. As Foer says: "Reality is as thin as paper. Only the small section immediately before us is able to endure" (92). Tree of Codes is a transformative re-reading of The Street of Crocodiles that foregrounds reading as a multi-sensory interaction with a book's materiality, defamiliarizing the oft-taken-for granted form of the print novel, and thereby emphasizing the book as a mediating technology rather than a translucent conveyor of narrative. The novel confronts the reader not just with the question of how to read it - a move familiar from many modernist and post-modernist experimentations - but with even more fundamental questions: What is the unit of meaning - the single flat page, or all text visible at any given time? What is the relationship between the printed word and the khoric medium upon which those words are impressed? (The pervasive empty space reminds the reader that the blank white page is not a void, but is itself a physical, visual presence.) At the most basic level, the reader must question how to even hold the book, as each individual page is rendered sculptural, fragile. Usually, a reader unthinkingly thumbs through a book, the page pragmatically rendered invisible; with Tree of Codes you find yourself caressing the page, as gently lifting and supporting it becomes an integral part of the reading process:

In these ways the book as object, as mediating technology, becomes un-invisible, the reader no longer able to think of it as only a passive transmitter of text, made aware that he/she holds a tactile object whose typography, design, production, and binding all shape his/her reception of the narrative. As artist Olafur Eliasson states on the book's back cover, Tree of Codes is "a book that remembers it actually has a body." (Of course, it is, ironically, only through its literal dissection that said body is brought into focus.)  From this perspective, the title - Tree of Codes - is a reminder that all reading is an act of decoding data that is mediated by a particular reading technology. And thus Tree of Codes, with its emphasis on the past and present embedded in the material page, its experimentation with the shape and form of the book itself, also speaks to questions about the role of the contemporary print novel in this age of digital media convergence. For as new media scholars such as Henry Jenkins and Katherine Hayles have pointed out, the initial doom-sayers who proclaimed the death of the book are misguided insofar as old, established media forms do not simply die when usurped by new media.  Rather, the cultural status and roles of such media shift and are redefined. In other words, in an age where the codex has lost its status as the primary conveyor of narrative, authors must seek to articulate what it, as a medium, can offer that other narrative forms do not. Many contemporary authors, in arguing for the novel's continued relevance, have emphasized fictional interiority and the empathy this engenders.  But with Tree of Codes Foer emphasizes the mediating possibilities of the material page. In other words, the manipulation of the physical page, the reader's somatic relationship to the text, the way that the page as a single unit bounded within a larger whole makes you constantly aware of your physical location within the book and how that physical location brings the present into relation with both the past (what you have read) and the future (the pages to come) all speak to the fact that narrative construction operates in the print novel in ways unique to the medium.

However, to present the book's engagement with the contemporary media ecology as one purely of distinction and differentiation oversimplifies-indeed, threatens to miss altogether--the larger trans/inter-medial exchange that the book represents. For it also bears the undeniable imprint of the digital, both in the form of its production and within the text itself. First, the book's construction (on a mass scale and at an affordable price) was only made possible via a whole slew of new media: it was published by the London based Visual Editions, and printed by a Belgian company, Die Keure, who used cutting-edge technology to produce the book's intricate structure. Furthermore, Foer's die-cut approach can be seen as a form of textual "sampling" that parallels the remix/reappropriation aesthetic that is the defining creative strategy of so much contemporary digital art, music, and literature. And the title - Tree of Codes - recognizes that even this most bookish of books is still imbricated within digital systems, the titular metaphor mixing the organic and the cybernetic, referencing the hybrid nature of the book, in whose production physical paper (the product of literal trees) is inscribed with text produced through digital code. Furthermore, the very nature of computer code resonates with the themes of the book: it could be said that the entirety of our digital culture is built upon the constant manipulation of presence and absence, insofar as computer code, consisting entirely of 0s and 1s, is at its core a language of presence and absence.  This language mirrors the gaps and spaces in Tree of Codes, which in turn echoes the dual sense of loss and ominous foreshadowing that is an inescapable aspect of reading The Street of Crocodiles.

Within this context, Foer addresses the limitations of the novel as receptacle of history, as the narrator laments that "our city is reduced to a tree of codes" (94).  This seems to acknowledge the fact that even a book as wonderful as Schulz's is still an inadequate substitute, a pale reflection of his life, a mere shadow of all the other lives, neighborhoods, and cities lost. But this acknowledgment of textual insufficiency is immediately followed by the insistent "and yet, and yet - the last secret of the tree of codes is that nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Nowhere as much as there do we feel possibilities, shaken by the nearness of realization...

...The tree of codes was better than a paper imitation" (95-6). The Tree of Codes - this book, all books - is more than "a paper imitation," for imitation implies a false, incommensurate depiction, but the book as a narrative form, as a form of artistic representation, does not just imitate, it mediates, and in the process it transforms.  Tree of Codes transforms a pre-existing novel into a meditation on that novel, performing a close-reading on the text itself while exploring the book's status as both a container of cultural memory and a representative of lost history. Every word removed represents a search for a narrative that might begin to convey the enormity of the loss of all those words never written and lives not lived. It is a book that enacts in its physical form the dual nature of the post-modern (or post-postmodern) condition: the simultaneous attempt to understand the new while still trying to come to terms with the "long shadow[s]" (137) that stain the twentieth century. Tree of Codes offers yet another example of the fact that the presence of new media doesn't signal the death of the print novel, but has instead catalyzed self-conscious explorations of the form, explorations grounded in the relationship between readers, writers, and the book as a material object.

Matt Rager is a PhD. student in the English Department at Yale University, where his research focuses on the role of the novel in today's digital culture, with particular emphasis on the intersections of contemporary experimental literature, media studies, and book history.

Works Cited

Delany, Samuel. Dhalgren. 1974. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print.

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything is Illuminated. New York: Harpers Perennial, 2003. Print.

--. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Print.

--. Tree of Codes. London: Visual Editions, 2010. Print.

Hayles, Kathryn. Writing Machines. Boston: MIT Press, 2002. Print.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1974. Print.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New

York University Press, 2008. Print.

Philips, Tom. A Humument. 4^th ed.  New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005. Print.

Schulz, Bruno. The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories. New York: Penguin Classics, 2008.