Other words

When considering the opposition between painting and sculpture, literature seems mostly to resemble the first. As in Leonardo's definition, one might say that the writer "deposits," adding words to words and sentences to sentences and thus progressively making the details of what he or she is trying to portray increasingly precise. The sculptor, in contrast, "subtracts" and this has suggested, a bit mystically, that his or her activities are more akin to finding a hidden form than to true invention; in this sense, nothing could be further from creating something from nothing, whether on the page or the canvas. But does this comparison make sense?

Jonathan Safran Foer's latest book, Tree of Codes,  would lead one to think not. Recently published in England by Visual Editions, a publishing company specializing in "great looking stories," Tree of Codes  is presented as a violently censored text or as a book that was  plundered by the paper-cutter of an author of an anonymous letter. On each page are just a few words or a few sentences; among them, vast areas are cut out to allow the reader to perceive  the continuation of the book, suggesting the original placement of those fragments in a "full"  and traditional layout, but without being able to reconstruct its context. Those fragments - those words - compose a story. That story is Tree of Codes  by Jonathan Safran Foer;  but it has not always been his. Originally, it was buried between the still intact pages  of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.

As a purely literary project, the idea of physically cutting the pages of a book, leaving only fragments to compose another one has a distinguished lineage from Oulipo's  research to Nanni Balestrini's   experimental poetry to the centone (pastiche) of classical poetry. But Safran Foer admits that, although the idea of  such a book intrigued him greatly, only by thinking about Schulz's book did he decide to go ahead with the project; not only, or not so much, because it was his favorite book but because in some way, the book demanded it. It is one of the only two works left to us by Bruno Schulz; who knows how many others were entrusted to the author's friends and neighbors  while he was  sent to a concentration camp. Schulz was never to leave that concentration camp; his work never left the hands it was entrusted to. What's left? Exactly what remains of The Street of Crocodiles in  Foer's book: fragments, waste, deletions, visible at intervals among the wounds on the page - the holes and cuts. To be able read the book, it is necessary to skip over them, trying to ignore them. But anyone who picks up Tree of Codes soon realizes that it is impossible. The other words are still there.

The idea behind Tree of Codes is that two autonomous texts can be united through a relationship of inclusion; it is an idea that encourages iteration. In one direction, these iterations lead to increasingly shorter texts, increasingly boxed in the original: Schulz includes Safran Foer, who also includes other, shorter and more  enigmatic buried texts, awaiting another writer  to reveal - "by subtracting" - a new sculpture in the pre-existing form. In the opposite direction, each of these texts is buried within Safran Foer's, which in turn is buried within Schulz's. The image, of course, suggests another text, on a higher level, which includes them all. It could possibly be the partial complete works by Bruno Schulz, or a text on a higher level which includes the complete works and all the others: a Borgesian dream, or a dictionary of every language periodically and endlessly repeated.

Foer's voids seem to allude to this text. It is a text within which every writer -  now sculptor - can find all possible texts, the Divine Comedy and the Tree of Codes, the Italian Constitution, Constantine's edict, the first page you ever read, the next one that you will read. They are there, among the other words. Vincenzo Latronico