What's Possible with Paper

It took me a long time to acquire a copy of Jonathan Safran Foer's newest book, Tree of Codes, a book I needed (and I mean this in a physical sense--I had a pica for it) because it is a visual text, and visual in a particular way that is not all that common.

But the book was hard to find. I could not find an online vendor with a copy, and though they'd promised me copies would come soon I waited months for one. Copies sold by used booksellers began at an unacceptable $99 (for a softcover book [there is no hardcover edition]). Finally, I found a copy only 50% above the cover price and I bought it, only to discover on receipt that it was marked as a second edition, though I'd designate it a second printing. The first edition is now too expensive to justify its purchase.

Tree of Codes is a work of cancellation writing, but two facts about it make it unique. First, it is a book of cancellation prose, which is quite rare. Usually, cancellation, which usually means the blacking out of some of the text of an extant text to create a new text, is a sign that what you are reading is poetry. Second, and more importantly, the cancellation in this book consists of the complete removal of those parts of the pages where the cancelled text existed. So this is a book where every page is a completely different diecut experience from every other page.

As a visual experience, this interior of the book, with most of its guts cut out, is a stunning experience. In certain places the near-aleatoric action of removing the page as to deepening layers of pages or, sometimes, dark crevasses of nothingness. The visual experience, though planned at the page level is aleatoric at the level of the book. The patterns we see are not designed; they are the unavoidable effects of another action, one not focused on the visual, but on the syntactic and narrative.

For what Foer does is extract most of the text of Bruno Schulz' book of short stories, The Street of Crocodiles, to create another story, a story of a narrator and his (or her) father and mother, a story that is surrealistic in a tender way, and a story that changes in sometimes dramatic ways when Foer starts cutting through (which he doesn't seem literally to have done himself) the pages of different short stories. There is not a father in every story, and one story (obviously, "The Street of Crocodiles") is filled with references to a tree of codes. This makes the story Foer creates a little jerky and shaky, but still somehow becoming.

What is most remarkable is not the narrative itself. What is is the physical act of reading itself, how delicate the simple process of turning a page has become. All that holds the book together is its margins, which give the book some heft. But squeeze or poke the book in the middle, and your fingers sink into depressions. The book is essentially hollow, and its pages have become fragile by the fact that there is so little of them to each.

In the end, though, Foer plays a little with the visual action of excising text, leaving at times periods hanging in the air or beginning a sentence with a lower case letter. But he is fanatical about ensuring that each sentence is properly punctuated, even if he has to wait more than half a page for a closing quotation mark, and that each is a pure syntactical unit. He has a little help with this last part from the English translation of Schulz' book that he uses, and he liberally uses long extracts of Schulz' own writing to create his own.

I can't really agree, though, with the blurbs that grace the back of the book. This is not a revolutionary work. Cancellation writing has a long history now, certainly over half a century, but probably much longer. It is even in vogue right now, so Foer is doing little more, technically, here than riding an already running river. His resulting writing, almost by intent, is as haunted by its parent text about as much as cancellation writing can be. And this is one of the potential weaknesses of this form of writing, one I much enjoy. Just as Ronald Johnson's book of poetry, radi os, remains the work of Milton, retains the voice of Milton, so does Foer's work with regard to Bruno Schulz' book of short stories.

And diecutting out text is not Foer's invention either. I don't know if anyone else has done it (though I'm sure it's the case), but I created one poem in this manner a few years ago now. I don't claim that invention of this type is essential to the production of good or great works, but the designation "revolutionary" seems to imply that it does--and that Foer is the mastermind of something remarkably new. He is not. But he's famous enough to have a very interesting new press spend a remarkable amount of money to produce this remarkable book object.

What this book is, though, beyond literature--and what it most importantly is--is an unstated defense of the physical codex, of the book as something a reader holds in a lap to flip through its pages. Books like this cannot exist digitally. Their effects cannot be the same. So these books help keep the physical book alive, try hard to defend its continuation, even in the face of its unavoidable death.

But this book is, also, evidence of that oncoming loss of the physical book. Trying so hard only makes a book that is a piece of book art, that becomes something rare and precious (and hard to find a copy of), that relegates books to the realm of the wealthy, or at least the well enough off, like me.

And I say this as someone who loves the physical book. I do not buy physical music anymore or physical movies. All of that is digital, and I feel no loss in its being so. I feel only freedom from the weight of physical objects. But with the book I still want a book to hold, pages to flip, the feel of paper, its smell, and my house is filled with books, thousands and thousands, and I'll never read them all, and I never want to be without them.

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Foer, Jonathan Safran. Tree of Codes. Visual Editions: London, (2010), 2011.

ecr. l'inf.