Foer's Tree of Codes

I just finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes and it is amazing! To create it, he cut holes in a copy of Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles so that a new narrative is created, partly from the words remaining on each page, and partly from the resulting combination of words on the page one is reading and later pages that one can see via the holes cut in each page. It is postmodern fiction at its best: a text that questions the concept of the book itself while still being a beautiful work of art that affirms the necessity of narrative for human existence.


It is only 134 pages long, and reads more like a long poem that consists of page-long, haiku-like poems than like prose. There is a basic narrative present, but it is secondary to the physical form of the book, which is just as much a piece of plastic art as it is a piece of literature. It is more empty space than text, and some pages (e.g., 60) are virtually all open space.


Here are three of my favorite page-poems (a full list would be about a third of the book's pages):


"Apart from them, mother and I ambled, guiding our shadows over a keyboard of paving stones. we passed the chemist's large jar of pain. we passed houses," 10
"her boundaries held only loosely, ready to scatter as if smoke. all her complaints, all her worries her no purpose, her eyes reflected the garden" 17
"he spoke almost incoherently. he blinked in the light, spilled darkness at each flutter of the lids. he said he had lost the way and hardly knew how to get back. perhaps the city had ceased to exist" 106


But it is difficult to get the full power of these fragments just from reading them; their physical manifestation is just as important.


One of my favorite aspects of the book is its inclusion of various metafictional statements that reaffirm the slipperiness of what the reader experiences:


"It was a dialogue" 29
"our creations will be temporary" 51
"tree of codes suddenly appears: one can see" 94
"nothing can reach a definite conclusion" 95
"The tree of codes was better than a paper imitation" 96
"Perhaps the spaces suggested by the mind did not exist?" 107 (this one is especially true, as the book is so well-constructed that it is often difficult to discern whether what one is reading is on the current page or a following page)
"The interior formed itself into the panorama of a landscape" 117


Tree of Codes is well worth its $40 cover price (amazon.com has it for $26); it is an essential text. I can't wait to teach it sometime!