Tree of Codes

#783
 Title: Tree of Codes
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
Publisher: Visual Editions
Year: 2010
139 pages

Foer here uses die-cut pages a form of collage/assemblage to produce a story from within a story--"a dream that The Street of Crocodiles might have had," as he says in his afterword. It's not only a dream of that novel, but a dream of the dream, with cut-outs framing full or partial words and phrases from later in the book so that for page upon page, the reader sees below the current text "darkness" or "his eyes darkened and suffering." The effect of this palimpsest is a powerful sense of foreboding.

Tom Phillips played with a similar technique in multiple renditions of  A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. There, Phillips extracts text by blocking or partially blocking text on an intact page with drawings and colors. As with Tree of Codes, other text is often evident, though in Phillips's work it's the contextual language whereas in Foer's it's only the extracted text to come, and thus more self-referential.

A fun experiment, and a fun "found" text. Its contribution to literature is more in its form than its substance.