Tree of Codes forges, much like Tom Philips' A Humument, a new narrative from the elements of an already existing text in of a process of selective reading. Although where Philips adds to his novel, supplying and creating new images with which he occludes (and thereby focuses on) elements of the original text, Foer engages with his source text (Bruno Schultz's short story collection Street of Crocodiles) in a process of erasure, literally cutting huge swathes of the text away. The tale of the book's construction is well-known, the intricate process of die-cutting with a different pattern for every page by independent London publisher Visual Editions and Belgium's die Keure (the only printers in the world who would take the challenge) is understandably ubiquitous in every review – the book is, whatever your opinion on it, a remarkable construction.
Visual Editions' videos document well the reactions Tree of Codes engenders, typically those of wonderment/surprise tinged with a hint of confused suspicion. And people are right to be suspicious. Despite my documented love of ergodic/postmodern fictional experiments (Danielewski, Foer & Steven Hall making canonical presence) I came out of Tree of Codes wondering if it can even be categorised as a novel at all?
Not that that's a bad thing. Tree of Codes is an incredibly interesting piece of work, sitting somewhere between A Humument and Brian Dettmer's book sculptures it manages to be something else entirely. Experientially Tree of Codes is unlike anything else (extremely well described by Jonathan Gibbs at Tiny Camels); the die-cut pages create a particularly focused reading, one I found very akin to poetry, while its physicality and conceptual impetus frame it far more as a work of art. There's a specific kind of self-reflexivity here, not coming propositionally in the text, coming rather all in the form. There is of course a danger of seeing the work as pure gimmick, which if you try and read it as a traditional novel, you definitely will. But Tree of Codes is not a novel. It's not an art piece either. It’s an artifact for the McSweeney’s generation, sitting somewhere between the two, outside any fallacious binary between art and literature.
Tree of Codes
The comparison with poetry is actually rather fruitful; the book's grammar, syntax and phrasing are very akin to those of poetry but considering its construction the presence of unique turns of phrase are hardly surprising, it's more the quality of these phrases that stay with you, Foer's choices of which words to bring together. Each word becomes incredibly important, in navigating the physical gaps between you hold each one for longer than you usually would with prose, weighing it like the poetic line-break, testing its relationship with words to come while keeping in mind the sentence(s) already past – it becomes Foer's 'dialogue swollen with darkness'.
Tree of Codes actively slows you down as a reader, constantly drawing attention to its linguistic construction with its physical construction. This slowed down reading is actually rather pleasant once you get into it (it is definitely disconcerting at first); considering the book's (understandable) brevity – there can't be more than 4000 words in the whole book – you spend a fair amount of time negotiating its pages. The story is haunting and beautiful, the turns of phrase lingering on after you've passed them, in both their own right and from the fragmented form forcing you to consider each word and its presence within this book of absence. There's a sort of double-read going on here, where you slowly read Tree of Codes' sentences while keeping aware of the haunting backdrop of Schultz's absence. As a reader you're constantly aware of the choices Foer has made, choosing these particular words, and when the sentences work the pleasure is twofold – at both the phrasing in-itself and also at Foer's skill in finding the phrase in his source text.
Tree of Codes' interior
Much has been made of the significations of the book’s form, as perhaps a Postmemorial embodiment on the losses of the holocaust (along with his life much of Bruno Schultz’s oeuvre was lost to the atrocities of WWII) or perhaps a Postmodern comment on reiteration and reusing in literature (everything having been already said we must reuse existing books), or a Poststructual praxis subverting any fallacious linear unity (in revealing sentences yet to come the book becomes a synchrony of significations). Whatever ‘post’ label you want to apply to Tree of Codes (and perhaps it is all and none) it is certainly something interesting and unique, which despite the hefty price tag of £25 is worth owning for its originality as artifact and revisioning of the literary text.
While many other authors have disrupted the process of reading, drawing attention to the book as a construction while changing the topographic negotiation of that construction (see House of Leaves for the finest example I can think of), Foer here has done something I've never experienced before. The book feels like an artifact from a Borges story, it feels like it shouldn't exist outside of a gallery, like it couldn't exist in your home, on your bookshelf; owning Tree of Codes feels special. Whether or not it should be classed a novel or an art piece becomes irrelevant in the face of this; the experience of Tree of Codes is like nothing else, it's something you go back to again and again, a physical artifact you want to (re)experience every time you see it on your shelf, and an experience I highly recommend.
Pick up your copy of the book here.
Pick up your copy of the book here.