‘Contributing to the conversation’ about books & paper

Tree of Codes is one book laid on top of another … or more accurately, one book carved out of another. The author (JSF) has taken his favorite novel, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, and ingeniously mined a new story from its text. By cutting away sections from Schulz’s book, he brings out a story in a story.

Asked about his technique, JSF was quoted as saying, “At times I felt that 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. … I’ve never memorized so many phrases, or, as the act of erasure progressed, forgotten so many phrases. Tree of Codes is a small response to a great book. It is a story in its own right, but it is not exactly a work of fiction, or even a book.” (More on this last part in a moment.)

Next there was the little matter of getting the work produced — each page of the envisioned volume is a different die-cut. The publisher, Visual Editions, was turned down by printer after printer, who said it “just cannot be made.” Eventually, a Belgian printer, die Keure, accepted the challenge.

Watch the video and see three amazing months of production in three minutes:

Despite the author’s disavowal, readers will have no difficulty identifying Tree of Codes as a book — it has pages, print, covers. Of course that’s just the beginning. It’s something else, too, but just what got me pondering.

Precedents
Manipulating existing text in various ways has a long ancestry, from parody in Classical Greece — Aristotle credited Hegemon of Thasos, ca. 320 BCE, as the originator — to William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” method. Physically transforming an existing book has an ancestry, too — probably best known to Americans is Thomas Jefferson’s version of the New Testament, from which he cut out all references to the supernatural, as well as what he considered “misinterpretations.”

Titling his work The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson was motivated to portray what he thought were the “pure principles which [Jesus] taught,” without “the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests.” Like Foer, Jefferson did his literary surgery with a razor, cutting out and rearranging verses from the Gospels to create a single narrative.

Altering, excising, manipulating, emending
Often the term bowdlerize is applied to the alteration of existing works. While the term carries the notion of excising material, it’s the intent of the removal that matters. According to trusty Webster’s, when a text is bowdlerized:
a. Material is being taken out because it is considered offensive or improper; and
b. Its removal makes what remains weaker and less effective.

Some would argue that the new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn that removes the 200-plus instances of the n-word is an example of bowdlerization.

In Jefferson’s personal Bible, it’s clear he found the supernatural content offensive and considered it improper … but it is also obvious he thought his version of the New Testament was better than its progenitor … even though he never allowed it to be published during his lifetime.

I leave it to you, reader, to decide which alteration is 1) truer to the text, and 2) more useful.

Back to Foer
JSF’s Tree of Codes isn’t bowdlerization, but a complete metamorphosis. The manipulation is textual and physical — both the book and the word order are changed. This makes Tree of Codes different from, say, the artist/designer Stephen Doyle’s sculptural books-as-objects, which Felt & Wire covered here. Isaac Salazar’s “physical translation” of books into 3D statements (which you can read about here) is a similar approach.

Like the works these two artists create, Tree of Codes is sculptural, even thought it’s a mass-produced object. This novel is also, in its form, a kind of codebook: One of the time-honored ways of coding messages is via a sort of stencil that can be laid atop a seemingly innocent text to reveal a secret message. Literary types and book lovers will quickly be alerted to the extra-thematic possibilities in Tree of Codes, as I was. Whether this is a distraction to enjoying JSF’s story or not may depend on your degree of wonkishness.

In any case, you won’t be reading it on your Kindle (I checked). The reason why a digital form is impossible is because the book’s codes — the die cuts — are physical … they create “physical meaning.” The phrase may be incongruous and clunky, but this approach, along with the story, make Tree of Codes unusually thought-provoking.

The author says he hopes the book “in some ways contributes to this conversation we’re now having about what’s possible with literature and what’s possible with paper.”

Just so. In Tree of Codes, Foer shows the power of the book to contextualize and activate meaning. I doubt he ever expected it to sell big numbers like Everything Is Illuminated. As kids, we all “learned” the book as object, read to us aloud, in a physical form, with text and often artwork. The book is the original multimedia device; some books, like Tree of Codes, can’t be rendered in any other way. For now.

You can buy Tree of Codes at the Visual Editions website, from your local bookseller, or here.