Tree of Codes (2010)

Tree of Codes (2010)
Jonathan Safran Foer
Perfect bound paperback of die-cut pages. H220 x W135 mm. 284 pages. Acquired from Visual Editions, 30 January 2014.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The artist’s book “tradition” of excising words from the page goes back at least to Marcel Broodthaers’ and Mario Diacono’s renderings of Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard by Stéphane Mallarmé. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010) takes that tradition to the more complex plane that Tom Phillips reached with A Humument (1980-2016). In the hands of Foer and his publisher Visual Editions, the treatment becomes simultaneously more personal and mechanical. The more personal aspect is best expressed in Foer’s afterword (see below). The mechanical aspect is the use of die cutting for production and the reader’s use of a blank sheet to enable reading the text left over from Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles (1934, trans. 1963) that forms the new narrative of Tree of Codes.

During the slow “read” that Tree of Codes‘ mechanical aspect requires, the reader encounters a thicket of fragility, pricking corners and sharp edges, which matches the atmosphere of loss and vague disaster in the narrative. It also “embodies” the ghost of The Street of Crocodiles haunting Tree of Codes.

Although Tree of Codes and A Humument also share some inheritance from the experimental writing of the Oulipians, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and the Fluxists, their respective sculptural and painterly natures set them apart as artists’ books. In the realm of artists’ books, they show how narrative can become a material of art, and in Foer’s afterword, we see how the process of excavating, excising and exhuming that material and the human warmth of it can enliven book art.

Further Reading & Viewing

“‘Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira l’Appropriation‘ — An Online Exhibition“. Bookmarking Book Art.

Phillips, Tom, and W. H. Mallock. 1980. A Humument : A Treated Victorian Novel. London: Thames and Hudson.

Rifbjerg, Synne. August 20212. “Jonathan Safran Foer: Die Cutting a Novel“. Interview. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.