Introduction
With the release of Sony’s Reader in 2004 and the subsequent release of Amazon’s
Kindle in 2007, the introduction of consumer ebook platforms remains within the
realm of recent memory. The relative newness of publishing literature in both
open and proprietary formats — whether they are marked with html, epub, pdf,
mobi, KF8, or ibook suffixes — demands that publishers and authors take chances
with the digitization of literature and accept the risk of modifying literary
meaning through digital presentation and dissemination. Since their initial
release, each of these formats has been changed and tweaked from version to
version. New functionality and bug fixes continue to improve and modify these
technologies in subtle increments. The introduction of new formats and platforms
has produced an unprecedented period of literary experimentation where
versioning becomes the hallmark of software development and academic work in the
humanities alike. As the titles of their works become marked by these file
format acronyms, contemporary authors are now responding to the digital context
in which their works are published with a renewed attention to the materiality
of publishing. Simultaneously, the normalization of reflowable text is upending
the fixity of print and the stability of the venerable codex. I argue that
contemporary novelists are engaging with this new and fluid digital publishing
environment by experimenting with the possibilities of print. Because the novel
has always been an experimental form — insofar as it has always presumed to be
new — a renewed interest in experimental print texts has come
to express an anxiety about the proliferation of digital texts and digitized
distribution models for literature. For this reason, I wish to discuss Tree of Codes (2010) by Jonathan Safran Foer because
it is highly experimental in form and also acknowledges the work of creating
digital versions of paperbound books.
This book is, I believe, one of the most coherent responses to the current shift
in reading technologies and offers insights into the role of books in the
preservation of human history through mechanical reproduction. Foer’s text works
as an extension and modification of Johanna Drucker claim in
The Century of Artists’ Books (1995) that the artist
book is representative of the 20th century social, cultural, and technological
development. In a 21
st-century context, the generic
strictures of artist book do not necessarily apply to Foer’s work, but he has
taken up a similar formalist avant-garde sensibility in exploring the artistic
possibilities of paper in a digital environment. However, any academically
situated discussion of Foer’s book demands that such a text submit to some kind
of citation, reference, or quotation. This is a book that presents many problems
for academic or critical discourse because it cannot be reliably cited.
Tree of Codes is written by die-cutting words from the
pages of Bruno Schulz’s 1936 novel
The Street of
Crocodiles. The result is a fragile paper latticework of paper tabs
that allows the reader to peer through several pages at once and read the
remaining text. The experience of reading
Tree of
Codes calls to mind the fragility of art and the realization that so
much of our artistic legacy has been lost. In this case,
Tree of Codes is a physical reminder of the literary
meaning that has been lost to war and the need of art to reconstitute and
imagine our past. Schulz was a Polish artist and author of Jewish ethnicity
living in Drohobych when the Nazis invaded in 1941. After being kept alive for
his skills as a draftsman and storyteller, he was murdered in November of 1942
at the hands of a Nazi officer. The excised text in
Tree of
Codes is a physical representation of this loss and the loss of much
of Schulz’s corpus during the war. The result is, as Foer describes it by
borrowing Schulz’s words, “a geometry
of emptiness” and a highly material — even sculptural — reading
experience [
Schulz 2008, 65]. Foer has also said, in a
publicity video for his publisher, “I
hope that
Tree of Codes in some ways
contributes to the conversation we are now having about what’s possible with
literature and what’s possible with paper.” This book presents an
experience of remediation — of representing one medium through another — in its
production and printing. By building on Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s
basic proposition that “remediation is
a defining characteristic of the new digital media”
[
Bolter and Gruisin 2000, 45], I argue that
Tree of
Codes represents a version of Schulz’s story that helps to preserve
and revive its memory by paradoxically losing vast swaths of the text.
Furthermore, Foer has presented a printed object that offers a profound
experience of loss and also captures something of the history of literature that
has been preserved from WWII. In a 21
st-century
publishing environment, however, the possibilities of paper now comment on the
experience of loss in digital media.
Publishers have come to play an increasingly important role in the production of
such experimental literature, but this is a very old genre. Experimental
literary precedents have long drawn on a common thread of scientific and
methodological exploration of humanistic thought. In the words of Emile Zola,
perhaps the first commenter on the experimental novel, “The idea of experiment carries with it the idea of
modification. We start, indeed, from the true facts, which are
indestructible basis; but to show the mechanism of these facts it is the
genius in the book”[
Zola 1893]. While Zola is writing
as a champion of the emergent 19th century naturalist school of thought in
French writing — which of course had its correlate in U.S. fiction with authors
like Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Upton Sinclair — the
American equivalent sought to challenge the deterministic impacts of the
scientific thought of psychology, evolution, and economics that fated the
livelihoods of so many Americans at the time. As a kind of extension of
scientific method, experimental literature must not confine itself, says Zola,
“to those lofty regions that lie
beyond the boundaries of science”[
Zola 1893]. Instead,
experimental literature tests the limits of form and the mechanism of medium in
an attempt to challenge the limits of what can be known and said. Bruno Latour
has been arguing for the use of scientific experimentation in humanities
discourses since at least the 1987 publication of
Science
in Action, where he defined experimentation as simply a scientific
methodology to explore, test, and modify “a core of common problems and methods” in
academic and scholarly knowledge creation [
Latour 1987, 16].
It is not until 1999, in
Pandora’s Hope, that
Latour comes full circle and claims that “an experiment is a story” (124). While
experimental texts have long challenged the norms of social and academic
discourse, experimental print literature has recently turned the locus of its
critique towards the limitations of digital publishing, while relishing the
materiality of paper. As a work of intermedia — between technologies and
discursive fields — the tools and critical tradition of the digital humanities
is perfectly suited to logically integrate experimental literature and analyze
broader shifts in medium and genre in the face of technological change;
prototyping becomes a way to link the means and methods of cultural inquiry as a
unified gesture.
[1] As Alan
Galey and Stan Ruecker describe in their essay “How a
Prototype Argues” (2010), the position of this interpretive gesture
exists somewhere within “the messy
middle ground between interpretation and making”
[
Galey and Ruecker 2010, 406]. A prototype in a humanities context is a
generative and creative artifact that enacts a literary and critical gesture,
but a prototype is also a kind of scholarly outcome that must be experienced as
it performs a theory or argument alongside a discursive intervention. A critical
engagement with literature requires a creative act that seeks to bridge formal
constraints, but such a creative and critical gesture also offers the
opportunity to explore fundamentally paired themes within Foer’s text: the
fragility of human life and the fragility of print.
Lost on the Way
In a 2012 issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly,
Paul Stephens marveled at the “extraordinary cornucopia of recent avant-garde writing” (6). This
comment arose from his discussion on the recent “metadata
revolution” that has sought to catalogue and aggregate vast
datasets into accessible archives that are usable by contemporary authors for
creative works (1). Foer’s text represents a corollary gesture that Stephens
identifies, but Foer takes Schulz’s The Street of
Crocodiles as his sole archive. While I have proposed that Foer’s
text intentionally resists digitization in response to our current digital
context, the manufacture of Tree of Codes suggests
that this text must not be confused for somehow resisting technology in general.
The publisher of Tree of Codes, Visual Editions, is
a small boutique-like company dedicated to experimental writing. The demands of
the project required Visual Editions to seek out a variety of highly technical
processes from different craftspeople and companies and a whole host of
sophisticatedly engineered manufacturing processes. So, while the pages were
printed by the Belgian firm die Keure — who were chosen because of their
experience with printing art books and custom government forms like voting
ballots — the actual die-cutting was done by Cachet in The Netherlands. Finally,
the pages were returned to Belgium for individual hand-finishing, only to return
to The Netherlands to be bound into a final product. Because of technical
restrictions of a book that lacked so much bulk, Tree of
Codes could not be released as a hardcover. While at once forgoing
the anachronistic tradition of releasing a hardcover object that is associated
with status, expense, and durability, the intensive labour required to produce
each book also makes for a quite expensive paperback. My copy, on its initial
release, cost $45.95 Canadian, before taxes. Tree of Codes
implicitly raises questions about the purpose of technology in the
humanities and the production of literary art through an implicit understanding
of its manufacture. However, if it is possible to suppose that technology is no
mere means, humanities scholars must take account of these implicit meanings of
the tools used to analyze cultural products of all kinds.
To accurately cite
Tree of Codes in ann online
journal, I have found it necessary to encode this complex text using HTML, CSS,
and an open source page turn script developed by Google. Therefore, digitizing
experimental literature becomes a prototyping framework for testing the
limitations of the presentation semantics of the web and the inherent meanings
held between print and digital versions. In the words of Geoffrey Rockwell and
Stéfan Sinclair in a draft essay by the same name,“There’s a
toy in my essay!” The “embedded hermeneutical toy”
in my essay “can be explored for
technique,” but I believe that such an act of remediation is also an
interpretive gesture that is in sync with the thematics of loss within
Tree of Codes. The markup I produce functions as an
elaborate quotation mark that attempts to describe the complex aesthetic
experience of reading the material text of
Tree of
Codes; it has, I hope, as much to say about digital humanities
methods and experiments as it does about literary analysis. However, between the
limits of print and the limits of web-based presentation, digital humanities
discourse engages with certain poststructuralist philosophies of language, text,
and signification more generally. Poststructuralism arose by questioning the
assurances of meaning associated with the Saussurean sign, and the
poststructuralist conception of language demands that the meaning of a text is
also bound to its context and must signify new meanings for new contexts. If
digital texts are situated within the context of markup languages, the shifting
and reflowing contexts are boundless in ways that theorists of the last century
could not anticipate. Jacques Derrida’s essay “Signature
Event Context” acts as something of an invitation to Galey and
Ruecker’s prototyping theory and methodology. During a colloquium on the theme
of communication in 1971, Derrida describes the philosophical basis of citation
as follows:
Every sign, linguistic or
nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as
a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation
marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender
infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not
suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that
there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This
citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is
not an accident or an anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a
mark could no longer even have a so-called “normal”
functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin
could not be lost on the way? (“Signature”
320-321)
As a way of answering Derrida’s question, it is necessary to consider the
material context of the sign; the mark that cannot be cited is the mark that is
bound to its material support or substance. When a substance functions to
support the meaning of a text, the citation of printed marks now demands
supplementary markup. In other words, postmodern emphasis on iterability now
finds its full expression in the versioning logic of software developers and the
digitization efforts of digital humanists. By limiting his definition of
citation to only quotation marks, Derrida has limited the citationality of text
unnecessarily.
In what little critical attention Foer’s book has received, Katherine Hayles and
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth’s essays are good examples of the limits of citation.
Both authors are forced to cite the physical spaces in the text with slashes,
and cannot attempt to cite the layering and linking of meaning between pages.
Hayles attempts to cope with the problem with a system of angle brackets
intended to signal the relative depth of a word appearing through the holes in
the text [
Hayles 2013, 229]. While Hayles offers an
insightful statistical analysis of relative word prevalence between the original
story and Foer’s text, she ultimately accepts “a limitation of digitization” because Foer
“predeformed his text, with the
result that it resists further deformation”[
Hayles 2013, 230]. The language of deformation has been used by many in digital
humanities discourse, but I believe that the language of supplementation is more
representative of the critical and creative acts of contemporary literature.
Lisa Samuels and Jerome J. McGann’s essay, “Deformance and
Interpretation,” served to found this logic as a means of describing
the performative aspects of an interpretive method that sought to alter the
original text. Samuels and McGann’s goal at that time, in many respects, was to
describe the necessity of altering a text to archivists, whose very profession
is defined by the act of preserving the original. However, Stephen Ramsay
inherits this language in
Reading Machines by
describing how the “risks of
deformation” are inherent to all criticism, which equally risks
deforming meaning through critical rhetoric and argument. Ramsay settles on a
broader critical digital literacy that demands that digital humanists “contend not only with deformed texts, but
with the ‘how’ of those deformations” (63). As a final rejoinder
to this tradition, Alain Liu describes his “deformational forms” as containing “something of the flavor of
deconstruction”
[
Liu 2009, 505]. Because a digital version always modifies
the original, it must be understood as both a supplement to the paper text and a
new creation. If the purpose of a good citation honors the original in good
faith, it is incumbent upon those working in the humanities to simulate the
original context in every way possible, including the experience of variable and
uncertain meanings. The kind of versioning that I describe avoids the entropy of
deformation through a practice of making that is both technological and
creative. Between print and digital manifestations of Foer’s text, markup
functions as an elaborate, malleable, and generative language of citationality.
Markup is the performance of a quotation that leaves traces of code behind.
Conspiracy of Winking
If Foer’s highly material text openly resists digital technology — though a
“tree of codes” at least obliquely references a tree-like
file system directory — what can possibly be learned by attempting to digitize
this print object? In the essay “Beyond Remediation”
(2009), by the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) group, a founding
premise of the project argues that the “relationship between old and new
media is reciprocal”
[
Galey 2009, 4]. While Foer’s title suggests a somewhat contradictory link between print
and programming, I claim that any difference between versions represents the
traces of the print medium left behind in the digital form. While there has been
a sense that digital texts will long be bookish in design, the reciprocal
exchange between media necessitates that print texts are capable of enacting
digital characteristics. In the context of the previous language of deformation,
Foer’s supposed deformation of Schulz’s novel would be further deformed in any
critical discourse that struggles with citation. My prototype, therefore,
represents the attempt to push the limits of what is condoned and possible with
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) schema and what is supported by browsers as
a generative process of supplementation. Simply because a browser does not
support a standard does not mean that a given or aesthetic goal is invalid. The
history of web standards has demonstrated how tools, techniques, and
capabilities that are implemented by developers and used by the public become
the norm. The acceptance of JavaScript is one such example of usage dictating
its acceptance as a standard. In the words of Douglas Crockford in
JavaScript: The Good Parts, “JavaScript’s popularity is almost completely
independent of its qualities as a programming language” (1.0) and
still owes a great deal to its adoption by Netscape Navigator 2 in 1996.
Furthermore, artistic and creative endeavors are always pressing against the
norms of presentation, and web development must follow a similar path. This kind
of methodology demands that a new version of a text, even a version that loses
so much tactile meaning through digitization, leaves behind traces of readerly
intention and more critical possibilities. Presentation semantics of the web are
simply more strict and documented than the cultural norms of print in previous
periods. I can only describe the instances of reading through the text by
flipping pages but also by catching glimpses and sidelong glances of different
pages. The interplay between text and object is lost each time it is read
because the experience of reading the print version cannot, by and large, not be
repeated, while the imagistic language in Schulz’s original story appears and
overlaps in confusing and sensuous ways. Foer’s text echoes this rush of imagery
through its form; pages slide into view unexpectedly and reappear in new
contexts again and again.
I have found that the whisper is the most salient metaphor to describe the
experience of reading this book.
Tree of Codes asks
readers to relinquish the strictly conservative — in terms of the preservation
function — value of a text as an unchanging entity. While it is safe to assume
that the meaning of any text will change as the readers change,
Tree of Codes goes further by asking that readers
renew their experience of the novel through a varied attention to these visual
whispers. The reader of
Tree of Codesis complicit
in Foer’s rewriting of
The Street of Crocodiles.
One passage on a single page reads as follows: “the room grew enormous
/ filled with / whispers, / a conspiracy of / winking / eyes / opening up
among the flowers on the wall / .” (
Tree
27). Reading a single page and ignoring the pages beneath produces a coherent
sentence, but the text begs our eyes to wander. The underlying text whispers
from within the book as our eyes move over the page. The “conspiracy of
winking” generates a new text, with gradients of emphasis that are
unique to each reader. This same page may also be read, “Then / anger, choking
/ the room grew enormous / he would fall / into / , filled with / whispers /
transformed / beyond / his thoughts / a conspiracy of / a storm of sobs /
grown unfamiliar winking / He would /eyes / his breath and listen / opening
up / among the flowers on the wall / .” (27).
[2] Some decisions are made consciously
and some are unintended slips of the eye. Words are completed by the reader and
grammatical correctness is made out of necessity and habit.
Tree of Codes has many of the hallmarks of newer web-based media,
but this text is constantly shifting despite its decidedly static print form.
The discrepancies between the inline citation above and the
HTML prototype I have
built
[3] are
profound and drastically shape the meaning of the text and the context of my
interpretations.
This prototype simultaneously makes arguments about the limitations of the
browser and the limits of text to be digitized. Such an argument follows closely
from Galey’s claim about “the web browser as a vital yet
unacknowledged agent in the sociology of texts in the present”
[
Galey 2011, 197]. The experience of this discrepancy offers insight into several issues
for digital humanists. The basic languages of the web — HTML, CSS, and
JavaScript — are all highly accessible and offer a promise of backward
compatibility and format longevity for humanities projects. While the browser is
far from a transparent rendering of web content, the first web pages at CERN
developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992 are still readable by modern browsers (see
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html). So, despite being
excellent at rendering text, modern browsers each have an individual bias
towards experimental code, and render the W3C standards with varying success and
clarity. In addition to the legal limitations of copyright and contemporary
literature, this digital prototype of
Tree of Codes
represents an opening of academic discourse to a global conversation on the
capabilities of the web. However, as the relatively new HTML5 and CSS3 schema is
implemented across browsers, support for certain features approved by the W3C
remains spotty and uneven. In the implementation of a mix of CSS keyframe
animations and JavaScript page turns, the current support for animations and 3D
transforms represents a great deal of variability across browsers. Additionally,
there were several changes in browser rendering engines during the development
of this prototype. Notably, Google announced on April 3, 2013 that the Chrome
browser would be forking the Webkit rendering engine and producing their own
version called Blink, which they have been working on since 2007 under the title
Webcore. Shortly before Google’s announcement, the Norwegian-based Opera browser
made an announcement of their own and committed their change from the Presto
rendering engine to Google’s development trajectory. While this shift has the
potential to further divide browser performance, it is important to remember
that the open source Webkit project — initiated by Apple in 1998 — is not a
wholly unified project. The Chrome and Safari implementations of Webkit have
long differed in their respective V8 and Nitro JavaScript engines. An early
prototype using keyframe animations was unsuitable because of how differently
each browser rendered 3D transforms, and the book opening ultimately needed to
be animated with the Transit JQuery library (
http://ricostacruz.com/jquery.transit/). As open source
implementations of Webkit continue to fork and diverge from the original source
code, the aesthetics of the web will undoubtedly remain heterogeneous. In short,
the culture of experimental presentation and endless versioning is built into
the very fabric of the web.
Due to this variability, digitizing Foer’s text for the purposes of citation or
distribution requires an acceptance that such an intermedial versioning will
generate errors, gaps, and an experience of loss. Because any reproduction must
fall within the auspices of academic fair use and not violate the terms of
Foer’s copyright, this task represents a departure from many digital humanities
prototyping or archiving activities. Perhaps more significantly, Foer’s text
fulfills the theory and practice of Zola’s description of experimental
literature as the performance of modification. The experimental text, Zola
insists, must “show the mechanism”
of its manufacture to modify the seeming stability of the form. This formal
modification is not a passive lens through which one language or mode of
communication is interpreted. It is a supplementary text that negotiates between
media contexts. For example, the “find” function that allows users to
search for words within a single page becomes a powerful tool to read
through this prototype. Because all modern browsers have this
functionality, it is possible to drill through a text and mine for word
frequency and position. Searching for “father” reveals eight instances of
the word and are numerically significant given the small sample size, but their
placement in three dimensions allows readers to assess the physical structure of
text in addition to iteration.
A Deeply Humanistic Way of Knowing
Due to the experiential nature of using a prototype to explore a text,
unanticipated results can lurk within the code and are often exposed only by
making and using the digital version. There is a tension between the
experiential discovery of making and prototyping and forms of large scale text
analysis. In the context of Ramsay’s “algorithmic analysis” and Franco
Moretti’s “distant reading,” the digital humanities offers a promise to
lessen the labor of humanistic inquiry and distance the human reader from the
initial experience of the text. Michael Witmore first made the connection
between this aim and certain strains of philosophy in a blog post. The so-called
speculative realists — led by Alan Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, and Graham
Harman — have found that the absolute meaning and clarity afforded by the
analytic tools of mathematics and computer science has produced a viable
alternative to a metaphysics predicated on a correlation between language,
thinking, and being. This brand of realist philosophy draws its inspiration in
part from a long tradition of experimental literature that identifies the
tension between the literary experience and generalizing literary meaning
through number. In
The Number and the Siren (2012),
Meillassoux works to “bring to
light a procedure of
encryption” housed within Stéphane
Mallarmé’s
Coup de dés
[
Meillassoux 2012, 3]. This is a text, Meillassoux claims,
that can and must be read algorithmically. The text’s procedure, once
deciphered, allows the precise determination of the “‘unique Number’
enigmatically evoked in the poem”
[
Meillassoux 2012, 3]. By contrast, the individual experience of the direction and production
of light offers a significant change in the meaning of
Tree
of Codes. In Foer’s print version, the text has shadows and
gradients of light and visibility — and therefore intelligibility — that the
digital version does not quite simulate. The screen itself is the source of
light and the “shadows” are a product of the linear-gradient
function. It is the interaction design — or even the highly constructed user
experience of the paper book — that allows for leaps in logic and meaning to be
read — quite literally —
through the work. Mallarmé’s
Un Coup de Des (1914) is, of course, a direct
precedent for this blocking of text that is set in a visual and spacial array,
but Foer’s text resists algorithmic analysis despite their formal similarities.
Visual or aesthetic similarity does not always guarantee similar meaning. So,
while Mallarmé’s poem differs greatly from
Tree of
Codes, Foer’s rewriting of Schulz through a process of redaction has
been taken up more recently in Michalais Pichler’s version of
Un Coup de Des (2008). In this formal gesture of
emptying out the text, he rewrote the original text by masking the text in a
constellation of black bars. As a visual statement about omission and the chance
erasure of texts — whether they are incriminating official documents or poetry —
reworking and often annihilating past texts in this way makes comments on the
state of the historical record and memory in general. So, while Meillassoux
celebrates the loss of human experience even as Pichler and Foer demand it, the
loss of our direct experience of a text represents a powerful new motif within
21st century experimental literature.
Through a kind of tactile encryption that resists algorithmic methods, Foer’s
novel echoes the linking and layering of digital texts and becomes a kind of
paper correlate of hypertextuality. I find it surprising, therefore, when
literary journalists cast
Tree of Codes as an “object of anti-technology”
[
Kachka 2010]. In a
New York Magazine interview, Foer put
the issue of physicality like this: “It’s a way of remembering something about books,” he says. “I think there’s going to be
something that happens now, where books move in two directions, one
toward digitized formats and one toward remembering what’s nice about
the physicality of them”
[
Kachka 2010]. In an earlier
Vanity Fair interview held
with Heather Wagner, Foer describes the early inception of the novel by saying, “I started thinking about what
books look like, what they will look like, how the form of the book is
changing very quickly. If we don’t give it a lot of thought, it won’t be
for the better. There is an alternative to e-books. And I just love the
physicality of books. I love breaking the spine, smelling the pages,
taking it into the bath. . .”
[
Wagner 2010]. Later in the interview with Wagner, Foer is sure to say that he is no
iconoclast and does not want to be perceived as rejecting the digitization of
literature. Instead, he describes his motivations by saying, “I love the notion that ‘this is a book
that remembers it has a body.’ When a book remembers, we remember. It
reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as
burdensome are actually the things that make us more human”
[
Wagner 2010]. Foer continues his use of the metaphor of the
embodied text in a
New York Times interview with
Steven Heller when he says, “On the
brink of the end of paper, I was attracted to the idea of a book that can’t
forget it has a body”
[
Heller 2010]. The book, for Foer, has an important historical
function that digital technologies have difficulty simulating. There is no
digital metaphor for smell. They cannot simulate wear and tear. How do you water
stain an iPad without voiding its warranty? They do not collect marginal
comments, pressed flowers, or old train tickets. Indeed, the closest analogy
print has for deleting an ebook is to burn it. While Foer’s thoughts on the
status of the printed codex betray his paper bias, his thinking about print has
become saturated in a reaction to digital media. His concern for print books is
fundamentally inflected by digital culture, and his resistance to digital media
has become a reciprocal exchange.
This reciprocal relationship is also shaping common conceptions of history and
memory. In the drive to digitize and archive paper texts for the purposes of
faster access and safe storage, it is also becoming increasingly difficult to
forget or lose digital footprints and works of literature alike. With the
degradation of electronic files through bit-rot notwithstanding,
Tree of Codes implicitly argues that loss has meaning
that is valuable and is a crucial aspect of human life; the loss that is
experienced through any digitization attempt is a means of accessing this type
of meaning. In the words of Matthew Kirschenbaum in
Mechanisms , “Versions are the textual
differences that make a difference”
[
Kirschenbaum 2008, 188]. By borrowing the language of programming tools, versioned code makes for
easier debugging and helps facilitate backup throughout the development process.
Comparing versions between media is a fundamental function of the digital
humanities’ ethos of thinking through making. However, versioning was designed
precisely to have a perfect record of code development. Therefore, by following
Kirschenbaum’s play on the word, there is a paradox within the heart of digital
humanities methodology. Creating a digital version preserves documents while
also resulting in a loss of certain kinds of medium specific meaning.
Tree of Codes offers an experience of versioning loss.
It is an experimental text that demands an experimental methodology, and it is a
material text that gestures to the digital in a way that offers an experience of
loss at the heart of the story. The text implicitly asks its readers to consider
meaning when meaning is lost. In an era when digital footprints are becoming
more and more indelible,
Tree of Codes recalls the
loss of life and loss of meaning during WWII to make meaning in the 21
st-century digital world. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
has argued recently that digital memory requires expiration dates to mimic the
norms of human experience while also equalizing the “stark imbalances of
information power”
[
Mayer-Schönberger 2009, 202]. In other words, deleting data must become meaningful and valuable. He
ominously turns to the “tragic case” of the Dutch registry of
citizens used by Nazi forces to conduct their genocide as a historical example.
The history of the Holocaust and of the Jewish diaspora is never far from Foer’s
writing. In the context of Schulz’s life and the precarious position of his
oeuvre as it emerged from post-war Europe, his books come to embody the
fragility of paper in Foer’s hands.
The nuance and detail demanded of any reading of
Tree of
Codes must be situated within the history and life of Schulz. In the
afterword to
Tree of Codes, Foer supplies his
readers with an account of Schulz’s death: “Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer in
charge of the Jewish labor force in Drohobycz, became aware of Schulz’s
talents as a draughtsman, and directed Schulz to paint murals on the
walls of his child’s playroom”
[
Foer 2010, 138]. Though kept like something of a pet, Landau was only able to save
Schulz’s life until November, 1942. Schulz had obtained falsified papers and was
planning to escape, when a Gestapo sergeant named Karl Günter decided take
revenge for Landau’s earlier murder of his Jewish dentist. The common account,
which Foer relates in his afterword, is that Günter told Landau, “You killed my Jew. Now I’ve killed
yours”[
Foer 2010, 138]. All that remains of
Schulz’s reportedly great artistic output of stories and drawings can be
assembled into a single volume. The two surviving short story collections,
The Street of Crocodiles and
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, are all
that remain of his writing, despite having entrusted a single copy of a larger
manuscript entitled simply
Messiah to non-Jewish
friends. This manuscript remains lost to history. Yet, this profoundly affecting
story is not entirely settled. In the wake of the war, historians were eager to
claim great artists and tragic figures as part of a coherent narrative of
antisemitism and a unified Jewish identity to justify the establishment of
Israel. Brian R. Banks describes the conflicted claims placed upon Schulz’s
ethnic, religious, and racial identities in this fraught political arena: “Yes he was of Jewish blood but also
an aggregate of Polish blood (significantly he sought to flee west not
to east at the end) and also Drohobycz blood (which he could not flee)
in the sense of being the landscape of his life, merged with a
profoundly artistic spirit that does not necessarily exclude forms of
personal faith borne out by the scattered scriptural metaphors”
[
Banks 2006, 257]. Banks argues that Schulz’s national and religious identity was so
locally situated that he could hardly stand in for these global events. Indeed,
Banks goes so far as to claim that Schulz was not even killed primarily because
of his ethnicity but “due to a personal rivalry between
murderers who enjoyed legitimacy for their barbarism”
[
Banks 2006, 258]. The casualness of his murder emphasizes the profound sense of loss
throughout
Tree of Codes, but this casualness also
demands a certain fastidiousness or attention to detail in Schulz’s memory.
Recently, however, the murals painted in Schulz’s distinctive style were
retrieved from the original cottage in which they were painted for Landau and
his children, but an Israeli documentary film team had taken them to Israel with
a great deal of controversy in 2001. They were exhibited in Jerusalem’s Yad
Vashem Holocaust Museum in 2009 despite Polish protests (Bronner). Repatriating
these works to unify the history of the Holocaust demands a critical attention
to context and a kind of citationality that finds these works in a radically
different context from which they were originally conceived.
The fragility of his life and the fragility of his literature is a testament to
the problems of ever maintaining an accurate historical record and the
provisional nature of any text. And yet, it is literature and the book that
functions as an imaginative canvas against which the very definition of literary
art and literary history is expressed. For example, the story that opens
Schulz’s
Sanatorium collection is entitled simply
“The Book” and relishes the childish wonder of
reading. In the story, the book is a near magical object:
the wind would rustle through its
pages and the pictures would rise. And as the windswept pages were
turned, merging the colors and shapes, a shiver ran through the columns
of text, freeing from among the letters flocks of swallows and larks.
Page after page floated in the air and gently saturated the landscape
with brightness. At other times, The Book lay still and the wind opened
it softly like a huge cabbage rose; the petals, one by one, eyelid under
eyelid, all blind, velvety, and dreamy, slowly disclosed a blue pupil, a
colored peacock’s heart or a chattering nest of hummingbirds.
[Schulz 2008, 116]
He has often been called the Polish Kafka, but comparisons to Borges are
equally appropriate. Schulz's vision of the book of life — or a living book —
shares similarities to Borges's “Library of Babel” or
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertus.” In such a context,
it is not unreasonable for
The Street of Crocodiles
to metamorphose through the wear and tear of time and the unforeseen losses of
history into
Tree of Codes. For Schulz and Foer,
the form of the book is the very source of imagination that springs from the
pages of literary art. The book is both animate and inanimate, alive and also
skirting with oblivion.
While these existential metaphors of literature and life are also at home in the
new forms of natively digital literature and the aesthetics of the web, it
remains important to maintain that such motifs continue to draw a tradition from
the book. Beyond any one sided appeal by designers and developers to reshape
reading, the artistic and historical foundations of literature’s place in
expressing something inherently human remain. Foer gestures towards our bookish
past when he says, “we / find ourselves / part of the /
tree / of / cod / es /. Reality is as thin as paper / . / only a small
section / immediately before us / is / able / to endure”
[
Foer 2010, 92–3]. What is lost in such a citation? If the relationship between old and new
media is reciprocal, the meaning of such an imperfect citation turns doubly
through valences of experimentation and authority. A Polish author, lost during
the horrors of WWII and translated into English, has continued to make meaning
by physically removing his words. The text continues to be cited and versioned
again and again. The original text moves further from its original context, but
it continues to speak to the theme of loss through a process of citing,
versioning, digitizing, prototyping, and making. Like Schulz’s surviving texts
and images, the preservation of this material history defines the enormity of
the challenge facing digital technology as a historical medium. Jerome McGann’s
reminder, in
Radiant Textuality (2004), that “the literature we inherit (to this date)
is and will always be bookish” may be inverted to accept the
possibility that print publishing will become — in some respects — digital [
McGann 2001, 168]. If experimental fiction can be a useful
yardstick to measure digital humanities scholarship and model new types of
digital texts, these new print prototypes, like
Tree of
Codes, are less about resisting digital technology and more about
pushing digital technology further with lessons from the past. As Elizabeth
Eisenstein’s vision of print history argues, the printing press has long been an
agent of social and political change, but it is also becoming a tool of
technological critique. As a prototype of the possibilities of print,
Tree of Codes is a reminder that digital publishing
platforms must find a way to incorporate the historical and formally creative
functions of literature. If an experimental remediation from one medium to
another represents the history and experience of loss, the methodology of
thinking through making may have found its ethical purpose. The loss of meaning
through digitization may simply represent an extension of a long tradition of,
in Kirschenbaum’s words, “a deeply humanistic way of
knowing”
[
Kirschenbaum 2008, 23].