The Philippine Online Chronicles

Jonathan Safran Foer's constant use of innovative representations of ideas have gained him kind words from critics, but have also earned him a bit of an unpleasant reputation. He has been described as: “insufferable, pretentious jerk,” someone who is “hardly inventive”, or a writer who’s part of the “McSweeney’s generation” (a loosely-used term describing the kind of literature published by McSweeney’s, a Dave Eggers-founded publisher that experiments with unconventional processes in writing, using tools like graphs, tables, sketches, typography, etc).

His most recent book, Tree of Codes, is not likely to put an end to this; in fact, it could be said that it is not a book at all.

Foer’s unconventional writing techniques are present in most of what he’s published so far: his debut novel Everything is Illuminated, for instance, uses broken English for narration (one of his Ukranian characters uses the thesaurus to speak and write English), and his second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close contains flipbooks and photographs. These have annoyed some readers -- reviews of his early books always make for interesting debate on how much of a joke/genius he is. This dichotomy could more or less make him one of the most significant writers of his generation.

What could perhaps be his most ambitious book yet, Tree of Codes was made possible with the help of Visual Editions, design firm Die Keure, and designer Sara de Bondt. Foer used a die-cut method, literally cutting text from another book. He carved out a new story from The Street of Crocodiles, a 1934 book by Polish writer Bruno Schulz (Tree of Codes was released 8th November 2010).

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The book states in its Publisher's Note: “In order to write Tree of Codes, the author took an English language edition of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles and cut into its pages, carving out a new story.”

Foer explained his sentiment further. “I thought: What if you pushed it to the extreme, and created something not old-fashioned or nostalgic but just beautiful? It helps you remember that life can surprise you,” he said in a Vanity Fair interview.

The whole idea of this book challenges publishing, as it’s something that very few have done before (one of Foer’s examples is Tom Phillips’s A Humument). Reading this book will only take about 20-30 minutes, and this already includes the task of gently turning the fragile pages and making sure that you pass through every single word and punctuation mark.

Foer always gives the reader something else to see other than letters and sentences, and uses these tools so well that you’d deem it impossible for the book to survive without them. In his short story “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease,” he uses symbols as tool for dealing with heart attack. His nonfiction book Eating Animals uses a page to literally illustrate the fate of many chickens. With Tree of Codes, he takes his “visual writing” to another level.

While conceding that the visual component in literature is not essential, Foer believes that “it would be well served to lower the drawbridge.” Before it was released, the book was shown to random people on the street, and above the responses of bewilderment and wonder were smiles. Upon opening the book and seeing the holes, these people had the face of joy, and expressions that said “wow”—not unlike the way one would react upon seeing a moving painting hung in a gallery.

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The absence of paragraph breaks, the illustrations, the photographs—all these things make Foer a bold writer who is always determined to use more devices for telling stories. His ideas may not have all been approved by critics, but he certainly knows how to explore new ground. It cannot be denied that he takes risks and remains unafraid of every new thing he comes up with, could defend his point to anyone with questions, and would play along with those who wish to squeeze more answers from him, ie. simply smiling when Stephen Colbert eats bacon in front of him (Eating Animals discusses factory farming, vegetarianism, and Foer's decision to stop eating meat).

“This book is mine. His book is a masterpiece, this was my experiment. My story has nothing to do with his story. There’s the sense that every book ever written is like this, if you use the dictionary as a starting point. This is a more limited palette, but it’s the same idea,” Foer said of the work.

The thing that makes this book more impressive is the fact that it really does have a story; that it is more than a book of pretty words put together. It has Foer’s tone; if you’ve read his other fiction, you’d know it’s him. There is a need to forego the proper rules of punctuation, but each sentence is given sense. If all these carved words were put in a piece of paper in the conventional way, it would still stand on its own, and there would still be a great story, for instance:

“Already for some time our town had been sinking at the edges, lowering under the fantastic domes of night. We lived in one of those dark houses, so difficult to distinguish one from the other. This gave endless possibilities for mistakes. the wrong staircase, unfamiliar balconies, unexpected doors strange empty courtyards."

It's unlikely that we'll see a movie adaptation of Tree of Codes (Everything is Illuminated has been adapted into a movie, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is on its way to Philippine theatres in February), so this book may not necessarily get the world's attention easily. This book will not come out as a hardcover (“If it were a hardback it would collapse in on itself,” Foer explained) and it obviously couldn’t easily come out in a Kindle or an iPad. These limitations highlight the bold move by both Foer and Visual Editions. He has once again outdone himself by creating something unique and “very, very cool”. You may not consider it a book (according to Foer, this book “is a story in its own right, but it is not exactly a work of fiction, or even a book”), but it is something that definitely captures one’s attention.

Though not everyone approves of Foer’s approach to writing, it cannot be denied that the mere idea of coming up with something this daring is an accomplishment in itself. When another die-cut book comes out in the future, perhaps Tree of Codes will be part of the list of related literature or basis for the bashing.  Foer’s book may not be liked by all, but it will be important, along with A Humument or Raymond Queneau's A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems.