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2015-04-30 Body Modification: Recombinant Materiality and Ethics in the Remediated Print Wor(l)d
Moynihan, Bridget
Moynihan, B. (2015). Body Modification: Recombinant Materiality and Ethics in the Remediated Print Wor(l)d (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25153 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/2200 master thesis
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Body Modification:
Recombinant Materiality and Ethics in the Remediated Print Wor(l)d
by
Bridget Moynihan
A THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH
CALGARY, ALBERTA
APRIL, 2015
© Bridget Moynihan 2015 ii
Abstract
This thesis examines two case studies of experimental print texts in order to trace how their materiality shapes their meanings. My case studies are Tom Phillips’s A Humument
(5th ed., 2012) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), both of which are altered texts that have materially manipulated an existing print text in their creative processes. Guided by the materially-focused and interdisciplinary theories of Bruno
Latour, I strive to model a reading of these case studies that pays heed to the specificity of their materiality, as well as connecting them to related networks of other texts and material histories that are revealed by their interactions with the texts they alter. Through these case studies, this thesis therefore examines the communicative role of materiality more broadly, while questioning the attendant consequences, and even the ethics, of altering or appropriating this materiality.
iii
Acknowledgements
I offer my sincerest thanks to the following people and organizations, without whom this thesis would not have come to be:
1. My supervisor and mentor, Dr. S. Forlini, as well my committee members, Dr. K. Bourrier and Prof. L. Carreiro.
2. The Government of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for providing generous grant support
3. The University of Calgary’s Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Department of English for providing generous scholarship support
4. The many professors and fellow sojourning students that I have worked with across my undergraduate and graduate degrees in the Department of English at the University of Calgary
iv
Dedication
In dedication to: my friends, family, and mentors, who form the networks of support without which I would be lost.
v
Table of Contents
Abstract ...... ii
Acknowledgements ...... iii
Dedication ...... iv
Table of Contents ...... v
List of Figures ...... vi
Introduction: Remediated Ethics and Recombinant Materiality ...... 1 Reading towards an Ethics of (Re)Mediation ...... 4 Experiments by the Book ...... 14
Chapter 1: Unfolding A Humument’s Foldings ...... 26 Contextual Unfoldings ...... 27 Textual Unfoldings ...... 37
Chapter 2: Cutting Stories and Violent Remediation in Tree of Codes ...... 53 Mediating Stories ...... 56 Cutting Histories ...... 61 Cutting Stories ...... 69
Ever Circulating: Concluding Remarks ...... 83
Citations for Creative Adaptations of Bruno Schulz and His Works ...... 88
Works Cited and Consulted ...... 90
vi
List of Figures
Fig. 1: Physically distressed pages from A Humument, 5th ed...... 40
Fig. 2: Page 53 from A Humument, 5th ed...... 42
Fig. 3: Depictions of Toge in A Humument, 5th ed...... 43
Fig. 4: Differing treatments of page 6 in A Humument between
the 4th and 5th editions ...... 46
Fig. 5: Differing treatments of page 4 in A Humument between
the 1st and 5th editions ...... 48
Fig. 6: Tree of Codes ...... 53
Fig. 7a: Page 8 of Tree of Codes with text isolated ...... 57
Fig. 7b: Page 8 of Tree of Codes with interpenetrating text ...... 57
Fig. 8: The wall after segments of Schulz’s murals were removed
by Yad Vashem ...... 62
Fig. 9: Schulz’s murals on display at Yad Vashem ...... 63
Fig. 10: Comparing page 3 of The Street of Crocodiles
to page 7 in Tree of Codes ...... 77
Fig. 11: Differential treatment of two passages from The Street of Crocodiles
(page 10) in Tree of Codes (page 20) ...... 78
1
Introduction: Remediated Ethics and Recombinant Materiality
Materially-experimental literature, artists’ books, and book-based art have each a long history that bring to the fore the materiality of the print book while simultaneously challenging, or even subverting, what and how this materiality means. The trajectories of these non-traditional forms of the book offer much more than a glimpse into a few peripheral and incidental experiments in print culture; rather, they provide access to a record of some of the fundamental interrogations that have been made into the book as a material, social, cultural, and archival technology. I further argue that attention to contemporary experiments with the book provides readers and critics alike with one of the most explicit sites of exploration into the present and emerging status of the book object in today’s digital media ecologies. This thesis examines how contemporary non- traditional print texts emphasize the inherently communicative role of materiality itself— in any medium—and so by extension prompt questions surrounding the consequences of altering or appropriating this materiality. Although acts that alter the communicative materiality of a text, including the digitization of “born-print” texts, are not inherently unethical, I argue that any act of alteration impacts the presence of this text, as well as the meanings that it communicates, and so entails an ethical dimension that must be considered to determine the impact of such changes. To trace some of the specific impacts of material alterations in detail, my thesis will therefore focus on two case studies of experimental print texts that have altered an existing print text in their creative processes: Tom Phillips’s A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (5th edition, 2012) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010). Importantly, although both A
Humument and Tree of Codes are experimental altered texts that rely on their materiality 2 to communicate meaning, I will also work to show how both texts enact differing relationships with the materiality and history of their respective source texts.
A Humument was created by Phillips through a process wherein he unbound, painted over, and sometimes even cut or burned the pages of A Human Document (1892), a Victorian novel by W. H. (William Hurrell) Mallock (1849-1923). Phillips uses these material interventions simultaneously to obscure some of Mallock’s words and to create new sentences, narratives, and characters out of others. Phillips began work on A
Humument in 1966 and he first displayed the unbound manuscript in museums, as well as releasing an unbound print edition of the book, before he released the first mass-produced paperback copy in 1980. Over the next three decades, four subsequent print editions of the book were released, each of which contains as many as 80 newly retreated pages. In addition, Phillips has created both a website, humument.com, and an Apple App for iPhone and iPad based on A Humument, while continuing to display the originals of his treated pages in art galleries and museums. A Humument therefore offers access to an altered text that has worked continually to alter and remediate its own body, as well as that of its source text. However, its very openness to acts of alteration and remediation can work to obscure the import of materiality for this text—an obfuscation that my reading of A Humument will work to reverse.
My second case study, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), is one of the most recent examples of an altered text. Foer created his text through a process of erasure performed on The Street of Crocodiles (1963), an English translation of a 1934 collection of interrelated short stories by Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), originally titled Sklepy cynamonowe or Cinnamon Shops. Wherever Foer excised a letter, word, or sentence 3 from Schulz’s text, the page in Tree of Codes has been physically cut, creating a book that is comprised as much from the holes in its pages as from ink on paper. These incisions create a fragile latticework that allows the words from some pages to peer through the holes in others, thereby disrupting the two-dimensional surface of the page and emphasizing the three-dimensionality of the book object. However, these incisions echo, and as I will argue, even re-enact, a violent and fraught history that surrounds the material remnants of Schulz’s life. While A Humument presents an open point of entry to examining the changes in meaning that take place across mediating forms of materiality,
Tree of Codes illustrates more forcefully the ethical imperatives that are at stake within acts of alteration and remediation.
In order to analyze my case studies, this introduction will propose and explicate the particular theoretical and methodological approach that I will utilize—an approach that relies on the materially-focused and interdisciplinary theories of Bruno Latour. This introduction will therefore outline Latour’s theories, while also focusing on how his approach can be adapted to a model of reading. In performing such an adaptation, I am further guided by the explicitly literary insights on materiality offered by literary and media theorist N. Katherine Hayles. Once this theoretical framework is established, the introduction will situate A Humument and Tree of Codes within their creative and critical contexts, while also introducing some key terminology that I use to describe these texts’ particular processes of alteration, before a detailed analysis of my two case studies begins in the chapters that follow.
4
Reading towards an Ethics of (Re)Mediation
As Hayles argues, when approaching experimental texts that explicitly “employ their bodies to create narrative complexity,” attention must be paid to the “physical involvements readers undertake to access [the texts’] materialities—including smells, tactile sensations, muscular manipulations, kinesthetic perceptions, and proprioceptive feedback” (“Combining” 231). Hayles further argues that attention to the form and materiality of any text, experimental or not, is required because to change “the physical form of an artifact is not merely to change the act of reading . . . but profoundly to transform the metaphoric network structuring word to world” (Writing Machines 23). In other words, the material instantiations of a text will impact what audiences are alerted to within the text, the logic that guides their readings, and the meaningful associations that they make. Taking up Hayles’s call for a practice of reading that pays heed to the material body of literature, the methodology for this thesis will, itself, comprise an experiment. Rather than relying solely, or even primarily, on close readings of the words in either A Humument or Tree of Codes, I will work to enact a different manner of close reading, one that pays heed to these texts’ material processes and their resulting bodies, as well as to their unique positions as altered texts derived from existing bodies of print literature. I assert that understanding how these experimental texts embody their metaphoric networks and modes of meaning creation offers a way of understanding the signifying role of materiality in any text or object.
In focusing attention on the communicative role of materiality, Hayles is not alone, and her approach to reading literature is in conversation with the materially- focused and interdisciplinary theories of Latour. As a sociologist in the field of science 5 and technology studies, Latour has not as of yet been widely integrated into models of literary criticism; however, his work has had a vast influence on how humanistic and scientific fields communicate and are seen to intersect. As Aaron Mauro articulates,
“Latour has been arguing for the use of scientific experimentation in the humanities discourses since at least . . . 1987”, while also arguing that a scientific “experiment is a story” rather than a disinterested interrogation of natural phenomena (“Versioning Loss” n. pag.). Furthermore, although Mauro does not explicitly pursue a Latourian reading in his work, he indicates a particularly intimate connection between Latour’s theories and experimental literature because this literature acts as “an extension of scientific method” and works to test “the limits of form and the mechanism of medium in an attempt to challenge the limits of what can be known and said” (n. pag.). Picking up from Mauro’s suggestive gesture toward the applicability of Latour’s theories to reading experimental literature, I assert that Latour’s methodologies can be effectively used as a model for literary criticism, especially when paired with the insights on materiality offered by
Hayles’s more explicitly literary approach.
Latour’s understanding of materiality relies on his differentiation between an intermediary and a mediator. Latour defines an intermediary as a passive conduit that
“transports meaning . . . without transformation” and can therefore be replaced or disposed of without any impact to this meaning (Reassembling 39). In contrast to intermediaries, mediators are material entities that actively “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements that they are supposed to carry,” therefore demanding that “their specificity . . . be taken into account every time” they are encountered (39). Latour argues that a mediator comprises “an original event [that 6 creates] what it translates as well as the entities between which it plays the mediating role” (Modern 78). In other words, the meanings, connections, and realities that any one mediator is able to relay arise in part because of the mediator itself, and this remains true of each mediator that a meaning, connection, or reality relies on. Thus, even a chain of interconnected mediators remains a system of originating events that adapts the meanings it enables at every stage and that changes entirely if even one mediator is lost, replaced, or added. Latour’s mediator therefore reinforces Hayles’s claim that to change even the form of a text from, for example, print to digital media, is to change the mediating function of that text.
Once Latour has offered his distinction between an intermediary and a mediator, he then complicates this binary by arguing that a mediator is not an exception; rather, all materiality always already mediates meaning. An intermediary is only a misrecognized mediator that has become too stabilized in its particular systems of meaning to be acknowledged for its mediating role. Rather than a static category of materiality then, the intermediary designates a particular approach to a mediator, and any intermediary may be reactivated and reacknowledged as a mediator if this approach is changed. I assert that it is precisely such misrecognition of mediators that often takes place where book objects are concerned. By the twentieth century, the book as a reading technology had become the default choice for disseminating textual information and archiving ideas, turning the book object into an intermediary that could be looked through, rather than at.
Nonetheless, particular artists and authors alike persist in seeking out ways to reactivate the print text as a mediator and to reassert the ways in which the material forms of the objects that we read matter. The twenty-first century’s wide-spread integration of digital 7 technologies into previously print-dominated media ecologies further works to make visible and reimagine the mediating role of the print book object, even while the new ubiquity of other mediators, such as digital screens and interfaces, become increasingly familiar and so closer to the status of intermediary. The status of a single mediator therefore reveals itself to be a constantly cycling process that is shaped by human attention, as well as habituation and the changing status of many other related mediators, even though the mediating function of materiality persists, whether or not we pay attention.
Latour’s focus on not only the form of the mediator but also its availability to change signals the applicability of his theories to processes of remediation and the ability of the mediator to reorient theoretical approaches to remediation. As historically defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their influential book Remediation:
Understanding New Media (2000), “remediation” refers to a “complex kind of borrowing in which one medium is itself incorporated or represented in another medium” (45). An example of such remediation can be found in the way that the material necessity of turning a printed book’s pages has been incorporated into the aesthetic of digital books, even though this turning feature is no longer functionally required and entails the creation of code and interfaces specific to the digital instantiation of this aesthetic. Hayles later built on the concept of remediation, arguing in Writing Machines (2002) that the incorporation and representation of media is not a neutral process and that “the specificity of form” must be attended to along with the “citations and imitations of one medium in another” (30). Thus, Hayles’s definition emphasizes that turning a page on a screen does not simply harken back to turning a print page, but that it also engenders its own practices 8 and associations, such as swiping to turn, or prompting a page refresh on an e-reader as a result of a page turn. As used in literary and media theory then, remediation primarily refers to the evolutions that take place between types of media and media objects as a result of their interaction with one another.
In our increasingly digital media ecologies, however, broad media categories such as print and digital are quickly becoming an inefficient method of distinguishing between mediators, as indicated by Hayles when she asserts that “print books are now so interpenetrated with digital media at every stage of their production that they may more appropriately be considered an output form of digital texts than a separate medium,” despite the fact that a print text still performs a different mediating function than a digital text (“Combining” 226). To account for the complexity of contemporary media ecologies, I argue that remediation needs to be nuanced beyond the concept of media categories that rests at the heart of the word remediation. Although I maintain that understanding the way that forms of media impact one another remains an important line of inquiry, I shift my focus in such inquiries away from strictly media categories to
Latourian mediators. Such nuancing allows remediation to describe the processes through which embedded meanings are changed and created when highly active and non-neutral mediators influence each other, whatever their media category, and thus performs a two- fold function. First, a focus on mediators resists a collapse of differences between two distinct mediators simply because they are grouped under the same type of media, and second, it draws attention to the fact that acts of remediation tend to reactivate, or re-mediate, once-overlooked intermediaries involved in these processes. For example, the simple act of turning a page in a book was not considered to be worthy of much attention 9 until it was found to be absent in early e-readers. I further argue that nuancing remediation through Latour’s mediator proves particularly relevant to altered texts, including A Humument and Tree of Codes, because, although both source and altered text appear within the print medium, each text contributes characteristics and structures that impact the other text, even while source and altered text perform very different mediating functions, as this thesis will show. Alteration processes can therefore be understood as a form of remediation that occurs within a single medium.
Further illustrating the different mediating potentials that can exist within a single medium, rather than between different forms of media, Craig Dworkin analyzes experimental works of literature, art, and music that take seriously Marshall McLuhan’s famous edict that “the medium is the message.” In these works, Dworkin emphasizes the ways in which a medium typically used as a substrate is made to mean on its own, and so problematizes the tendency to see even a piece of paper as a uniform, stable form of media. As Dworkin explains, “in the absence of inscription, the substrate can be seen not as a transparent signifier but as an object in its own right—replete with its own properties, histories, and signifying potential” (5) and he repeatedly describes the ways in which blankness or silence proves that there is no a priori blank slate. Thus, he shows how blank typing pages bound together with a price stamped on the cover by author
Aram Soroyan become a comment on the book as commodity, while The Little Review’s editor Emma Goldman used blank pages in the September 1916 issue of the journal to protest what she perceived as a lack of publishable writing submissions and artist Tom
Friedman used a single sheet of paper as both object and a kind of substrate for one 10 thousand hours that he spent staring at this sheet over five years.1 Although Dworkin does not reference the work of Latour explicitly, I argue that Dworkin’s focus on substrates comprises an act of making visible the mediating function of a mediator that has become an intermediary, and so models a focused attention on materiality that has to be present in a Latourian practice of reading.
Dworkin’s approach to actively acknowleding, or re-mediating, media substrates finally leads him to assert that there is “no single medium [that] can be apprehended in isolation” (25), but only multiple media, which, in his definition, are not objects, but rather specific “analyses of networked objects,” such as the network of speakers, wires, lasers, plastic, and electricity that are required to play, for example, a compact disc recording of a live musical performance (32). I maintain that Dworkin’s characterization of media as “analyses of networked objects” echoes another of Latour’s concepts, namely
Latour’s articulation of mediating networks that give rise to meaning. For Latour, networks do not simply arise from the fact that mediators exist in close proximity to one another, or even that they engage in contact, although these relationships exist. Rather, a mediating network is “a string of actions where each participant,” whether human or nonhuman, conscious or not, “is treated as a full-blown mediator” (Reassembling 129). In other words, every mediator in the network is understood as being part of a distributed agency that necessarily extends the creation of facts, meaning, and/or social reality beyond the control of humans. In order to emphasize this difference between interconnected mediators as a distributed agency and a bounded, conscious actor as agent,
1 To this list, I would also add the satirical political statement made by Bob Silber with his 102-page blank book titled Going Rouge: A Candid Look Inside the Mind of Political Conservative Sarah Palin (2009). This book clearly parodies Palin’s memoir Going Rogue: An American Life of the same year, and it is interesting to note that, as of 12 Feb. 2015, Amazon.ca has the price of Palin’s paperback listed at $14.43 CAD, while Silber’s blank text retails for $30.87 CAD on the same site. 11
Latour has come to refer to human and nonhuman mediators as “actants”. He further maintains that networks can only be accessed by following, or unfolding2, the proliferating material instantiations of, and connections between, the many actants involved. Interpreting a cultural text, participating in social theorization, or assessing the impact of a technology, for example, all require a careful and slow accounting of the mediators that occur as unique events and that comprise the text, society, or technology of interest.
How Latour’s concept of networks can be adapted toward a practice of reading is illustrated, perhaps surprisingly, by Latour’s interpretation, or reading, of a hammer.
Although easily perceived as a simple piece of technology, Latour reveals that this hammer can be unfolded to reveal its complex entanglement as a mediator amongst mediators, and by extension the inherent complexity of any mediator. As he discusses, in the hammer exist “heterogeneous temporalities,” extending from the age of the minerals in the steel to the brief number of years since its production as a hammer (“Means” 249).
There are also folded a vast range of “heterogenous spaces” involved in the emergence of this hammer, spanning “the forests of the Ardennes” to the store from which it was purchased (249). Lastly, in the hammer exist “the astounding variety of forms which [the] mundane hammer has inherited,” including the “force, direction and disposition” provided to the human arm through the addition of the hammer (249). With this last point, Latour describes how the hammer has provided humans with new opportunities for
2 Latour adapts the concept of folding and unfolding from an existing philosophical concept, particularly as discussed by Gilles Deleuze in his books Foucault (1988) and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993). For Deleuze, the fold initially refers to the fact that there is no true inside, but only a folding of the outside onto itself that creates the appearance of an inside. Through this concept, Deleuze considers subjects as diverse as, for example, the folding of human subjectivity within material bodies, through to the folding of time. 12 action beyond the ability of the unassisted human body, even while the human activates the hammer as a tool. Latour therefore provides an example of one of the ways in which our technologies shape us through a process of what Hayles refers to as “technogenesis”, or the reciprocating processes of feedback and feedforward loops that enable “humans and technics” to “coevolve” (How We Think 10). However, Latour warns that regardless of the hammer’s efficacy and participation in dense mediating networks, the temporalities, spaces, and processes of technogenesis that it brings to bear quickly become invisible and subsumed within the mundane body of the hammer when it is not unfolded as the active mediator that it proves to be.
If a hammer demands such careful unfolding, our texts, which are already understood to be complex social and cultural objects, demand at least as much attention in order to take account of the many histories, spaces, forms, and material practices that they bind together and engender. Importantly, however, the work involved in recognizing and activating a given network comprises more than a necessary step for theorization or analysis for Latour; rather, this work rests at the heart of an actant’s ethical mode of being, or what he terms “morality” (“Means” 247). As Latour explains, morality begins with an exploration into the existence of mediators and “is concerned with the quality of this exploration, with the number of mediators it leaves in its wake, always wanting to verify if it proliferates the greatest possible number of actants that claim to exist” (256, emphasis in original). To foreclose or otherwise ignore these actants’ claims allows for a passive reception of any and all processes that have gone into these actants’ emergences.
For example, ignoring the environmental practices that gave rise to Latour’s hammer, such as the mining and forestry practices that extracted the wood and steel, as well as the 13 labour practices involved in the production and sale of the hammer, could mean that the actant who purchases this hammer unknowingly supports unethical deforestations or the exploitive treatment of workers, not only turning a blind eye to such practices but actually enabling them to persist by participating in the circulation of the impacted mediators. Just as Latour rejected the need to predicate agency on consciousness through his concept of an actant, his approach to morality removes the condition of human subjectivity for being a subject of morality, showing instead that the unethical treatment of any mediator necessarily impacts every other mediator connected to it, both human and nonhuman alike. Latour’s ethical mode of being therefore relies on a “ceaseless circuit of concern” (258) and, above all, on the willingness to slow down in our examinations of mediators. Engaging in a Latourian practice of reading means engaging with a specific understanding of unfolding as an ethical approach to any mediator, including a text, and an awareness that “[n]othing, not even the human, is for itself or by itself, but always by other things and for other things” (256).
Informed by Latour, my thesis will work to model a materially-aware and ethical mode of reading that pays heed to A Humument and Tree of Codes as networked mediators, while also accounting for the implications of their remediating alteration processes and the mediating presence of their source texts. Before unfolding each text individually in the chapters that follow, the remainder of this introduction will work to situate A Humument and Tree of Codes within their creative and critical contexts, while also introducing some key terminology that enables a more adept unfolding of their communicative networks.
14
Experiments by the Book
As indicated by Mauro’s previously cited definition of experimental literature as that which “tests the limits of form and the mechanism of medium in an attempt to challenge the limits of what can be known and said,” experimental literature is a term that can variously and simultaneously refer to experiments in, for example, techniques of writing, forms of narrative, material representations of printed text, production techniques, and the utility of language, grammar, and/or punctuation. Often cited as the earliest example of experimental literature (Hayles, Jessica Pressman, Patricia Spacks),
Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767) managed to destabilize the emergent print and narrative conventions of the still-nascent novelistic form and genre through narrative and typographical experiments, including its famous “black page” used to symbolize the death of a key character. However, one might arguably cite the handmade, cut-and-pasted Little Gidding biblical concordances of the
1630s as even earlier experimental texts, to offer only one alternative point of departure.
Since these early experiments, the term “experimental literature” has become ubiquitous with the twentieth-century traditions of modernist writing that emerged within and out of the work of writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Jean Rhys, and
Samuel Beckett, even as the term extends to the avant-garde and/or postmodern work of writers such as B. S. Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges,
15 and William S. Burroughs, to name only a few.3 Meanwhile, experimental poetry functions as an umbrella term for such diverse twentieth-century poetic forms as imagism, concrete poetry, visual poetry, verbal cubism, and conceptualism, and is used in reference to the work of individuals including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein,
John Cage, E. E. Cummings, and bpnichol. Experimental literature of the twenty-first century displays a marked rise in technological narratives and hypertextual fiction, as particularly exemplified by the work of Mark Z. Danielewski, but also reflected in the work of, for example, Jeff Noon, Stephen Hall, and Paul LaFarge. Much experimental literature of the twenty-first century also informs and is informed by the eclectic fields of electronic literature and cybertexts. This brief sketch of some of the literatures, genres, and individuals associated with the term experimental literature illustrates that experimental practices are not new, even if they are historically and socially specific, nor are they easily defined and delineated. Across this complex history, however, there is a persistent effort to reform or redeploy mediators, including language, materiality, and/or modalities, in ways that make visible their mediating functions.
Further complicating the history of experimental literature, and as already indicated by the painterly quality of A Humument and the sculptural body of Tree of
Codes, as well as by ostensibly literary categories, such as visual poetry, experimental literature can quickly bleed into non-verbal modes of meaning creation and
3 I use the distinctions of modern and postmodern here loosely. Modernism typically refers to the late- nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries, wherein there was a pervasive desire to break with tradition, particularly the realist tradition. This movement is therefore often characterized through Ezra Pound’s edict to “make it new,” wherein “it” might refer to any artistic, linguistic, or philosophical representation. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is typically characterized through its deconstruction of all forms of representation and its distrust of any stable, singular signification or truth. Postmodernism is also often closely connected with poststructuralist approaches to language. However, as pointed out by many critics, such as Mary K. Holland, both modernism and postmodernism are contested terms. Moreover, they are deeply entwined with each other, and indeed there is no consensus on when, or even if, modernism ended and postmodernism began. 16 communication. Understanding this history therefore necessitates engaging with another, related trajectory: that of the artist’s book. In her authoritative work The Century of
Artists’ Books (2nd ed., 2004), Johanna Drucker cites William Blake’s eighteenth-century illuminated texts and William Morris’s nineteenth-century Kelmscott Press editions—two clearly literary examples—alongside the livre de peintre (or painter’s book) as crucial historical precursors to artists’ books. The alliance of the literary and the artistic for
Drucker is not incidental, but rather foundational to her understanding of what the artist’s book is. She maintains that “[n]ot every book made by an artist is an artist’s book” (9), nor is an artist’s book simply a book produced by a small-scale, even independent, press in the style of “fine printing” usually associated with “letterpress, handset type, and limited editions” (5). Instead, artists’ books in her definition “call attention to the specific character of a book’s identity while they embody the expressive complexity of the book as a communicative form” (359). As she explains further, although artists’ books can
“take every possible form, participate in every possible convention of book making, every possible ‘ism’ of mainstream art and literature, every possible mode of production, every shape, every degree of ephemerality or archival durability” (14), they nonetheless maintain “some conviction, some soul, some reason to be and to be a book in order to succeed” (11, bold in original). In other words, the artist’s book is not a clearly demarcated space that exists apart from literary texts, but rather explorations that interrogate, even as they remain committed to, the material forms that have shaped literary texts as mediators for centuries. It is also clear that not only A Humument, which is pervasively categorized as an artist’s book, but also Tree of Codes exhibits this concern 17 with the material and mediating form of the book that comes to define an artist’s book for
Drucker.
As open as Drucker’s definition of the artist’s book is, however, she maintains a very clear demarcation between the artist’s book and book-based art—a demarcation that
I assert needs to be challenged. Emerging most predominantly since the 1970s, book- based art refers to artistic interventions into book objects that engage in myriad activities such as carving images into or out of the pages of books, stacking or arranging books into sculptural forms, and/or gluing, locking, or otherwise making inaccessible books in order to deny performatively any possibility of these texts being read. For Drucker, book-based art is best understood as installation art that may function as an icon of the book and its associated practices, but that no longer embodies an experience of the book qua book.
However, Garrett Stewart offers a slightly different approach to book-based art, or what he calls “book-works.” Similar to Drucker, Stewart defines book-works as artistic works that appropriate the book form in order to conceptualize it as a “sheer physical object”
(Bookwork xiv) that is “rendered unreadable” (17), rather than as a medium “released to linguistic transaction” (xiv). Stewart departs from Drucker, however, in his assertion that,
“even if only by negation or erasure, [book-works] can be stationed to reveal—and at fresh strata of apprehension—what happens when the book works” and what happens when it does not, thus enabling the artistic interventions to be understood as a “textual participation” not unlike a practice of reading (xix). Stewart’s nuancing of book-based art indicates that the mediating power of such art relies on at least a familiarity with the function of a print book object, because the audience needs to recognize both that the textual material expected to be present in a book has been negated and that, by extension, 18 they are being denied the ability to become traditional readers. Furthermore, book-based art demands the development of alternate media literacies, such as an interpretation of the art’s visual or tactile aesthetic qualities, in lieu of the traditional reading practices that such art explicitly denies to its audience. While not an artist’s book in the sense of being a bounded book object, book-based art nonetheless aligns with both artists’ books and experimental literature in that it foregrounds how its materiality and mediating structures communicate meaning beyond the linguistic and narrative conventions typically associated with literature, while also signaling the networks of mediators, including legible print objects and readers themselves, that this communication relies on.
Although it is clear that A Humument and Tree of Codes belong within the diffuse network of experimental literature, artists’ books, and book-based art, greater nuance is needed within these categories to unfold both texts. I therefore situate A
Humument and Tree of Codes within a subcategory of experimental print texts, namely, those that engage in the appropriation and alteration of an existing print text in their creative processes.4 Although intersecting with other experimental traditions, such as the cut-up technique used by authors such as Burroughs5, Graham Rawle, and Helen
Brunner, I argue that altered texts are unique as a subcategory of experimental texts in
4 It is interesting to note that the trope of altering texts has started to extend into fiction as well. For example, in 2013 Jon Scieszka and Mac Barnett wrote a children’s book called Birthday Bunny, which they then altered through the fictional persona of a child named Alex. Alex is given his own font that approximates a child’s handwriting and he crosses out lines from the original text, as well as adding his own lines. Through Alex, Scieszka and Barnett change the name of their book to Battle Bunny, and the story, which ostensibly focuses on a surprise party for the eponymous Bunny, is changed to recount a battle leading up to a doomsday party. Illustrator Matthew Myers likewise draws original pictures for the book that he then alters with a black pen as Alex, adding grenades, rockets, and other battle equipment to the images. Another example of a fictional altered text can be found in J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013). Abrams and Dorst collaborated to write a fictional text titled The Ship of Theseus, which is then annotated by two fictional characters who communicate with one another in the margins of the text as they work to solve the mysteries surrounding the authorship and history of The Ship of Theseus. 5 Burrough’s work was key to making the cut-up technique famous through, for example, his trilogy The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964), 19 that they utilize in situ the language and materiality of the texts they take as their source, rather than excising words and phrases out of the source text and grafting them into a second text. Nonetheless, these remediating alteration processes result in new narratives and new objects that do much more than simply adapt the source text. Alongside A
Humument and Tree of Codes, one could list texts such as Juchen Gerner’s 2002 TNT en
Amerique, which is a blackout alteration of Hergé’s Tintin en Amerique (1945) wherein
Gerner paints over the pages of Hergé’s text with black China ink, leaving only isolated words and shapes on the page to create a visual text that comments on violence in
America. Similarly, Don Walsh’s current online comic series “Garfield minus Garfield” erases the Garfield character from Jim Davis’s Garfield comics “in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle” (Garfield minus Garfield, n.pag.).
These remediated comics, still bearing Davis’s signature despite their alteration, typically show cells in which Jon, once talking to Garfield, now appears to talk to himself. Other relevant examples include work by Nick Thurston and Buzz Spector. Thurston released an English “edition” of Maurice Blanchot’s L’Espace litteraire (1955), titled The Remove of Literature (2006), which did not print a word of Blanchot’s text, instead leaving blank spaces where his text would have been and printing only Thurston’s marginalia that responds to and comments on Blanchot’s now-absented text. Meanwhile, Spector works on volumes of existing texts such as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) to colour over, excise, and even rip out vast numbers of the texts’ pages in order to reveal, for example, abstract sentences in the parts of the pages that remain and to draw attention to the material components of the book object that typically structure a text, including precisely sized pages that allow a narrative to be read page by page. Thus, in alteration processes, 20 the material, visual, and/or semantic structures of the source texts are deployed as a formal constraint for the altering author/artist’s processes while also forming a rich foundation without which the altered text cannot speak.
Focusing on this subcategory of altered texts within the experimental tradition, this thesis seeks in part to explore the entangled relationship forged between source and altered text in remediating alteration processes in order to ask what impact these processes have on how both texts are read, as well as what these processes can reveal about practices of remediation more generally. In analyzing how altered texts perform their mediating function, a turn to the critical terms that have been utilized in relation to these texts highlights some of the primary ways in which altered texts and their processes have been conceptualized to date. Some critics, such as Gill Partington and Hayles, follow the example of Phillips in referring to alteration processes as “treatments” that result in “treated texts”. Both of these critics also emphasize that the intervention of creative processes on the source text can reveal (or can be at odds with) a latent subconscious, or subtext, of the source text. Although not directly acknowledged by either Partington or Hayles, the term “treated text” therefore resonates with these critics’ understanding that the source text undergoes a psychoanalytic, as well as material, treatment in alteration processes. Other critics, such as Renée Riese Hubert and Judd D.
Hubert, refer to these texts in the terms that I use in this thesis, namely as altered texts. In their understanding of this term, Hubert and Hubert emphasize that altered texts engage in editing as a generative process, and so acknowledge the necessarily dual role of the altering author as both reader and writer. However, Hubert and Hubert acknowledge that alteration processes work the editing process in reverse by fragmenting previously whole 21 texts, and they therefore suggest that altered texts are best understood within what Anne
Moeglin-Delcroix refers to as a “poetics of the palimpsest” (qtd. in Hubert and Hubert,
71). Similarly, Drucker draws on palimpsests in her description of “transformed books”
(93). As she explains, transformed books use “an existing work as their base, and then make a palimpsest which is a combination of textual, visual, and material manipulations of the original” (93). Drucker therefore maintains that transformed books are first and foremost “an intervention” into a text and an object that “is already articulated or spoken for” (109).
While I find each of the terms treated, altered, and transformed useful for understanding aspects of texts that are involved in alteration processes, I assert that none of these terms adequately address the specific relationship, and indeed entanglement, of source and altered text as a result of the remediating alteration processes that they undergo together. While the concept of treated texts acknowledges the effect that the treatment has on the source text, the ability of this source to speak back to the resulting treated text is largely obscured. Instead, the emphasis is on the ways in which the source text is decoded and/or deformed by the treatment and the resulting altered text. Likewise, in focusing on alteration as an editing process, Hubert and Hubert’s definition of altered texts emphasize a unidirectional flow of influence from the source text being edited to the resulting text, rather than a symbiotic process wherein the two texts perpetually speak back to and reframe one another. Moreover, the concept of editing implies that the altered text is effectively an edition of the source text, rather than a discrete, although highly interconnected, mediator that is distinct from its source. Palimpsests, and particularly
Drucker’s positioning of the palimpsest within her definition of transformed texts, 22 provide the most compelling description of the interconnected nature of both source and altered text without conflating the two; however, there is a fundamental difference between a palimpsest and alteration processes for texts like A Humument and Tree of
Codes. A palimpsest covers over a text in its entirety in order to allow the creation of a new text, and thus any text that bleeds through from the first source-turned-substrate to the second text is an accidental intrusion. In the process of altering a text in the manner of
Phillips and Foer, the intrusions of the source text are not only planned and carefully integrated into the altered text but are actually necessary for the altered text to speak.
In place of terms such as treatment, alteration, transformation, or palimpsest, I propose applying the term recombinant to alteration processes that are performed on existing texts to create altered texts. At its most general, the scientific definition of the word recombinant refers to “any process”, whether natural or artificial, in which “a diploid or partly diploid cell . . . generates new gene or chromosomal combinations not found in that cell or in its progenitors” (National Centre for Biotechnology Information, n.pag.). When applied to engineered DNA sequences, the term recombinant refers more specifically to “a novel DNA sequence formed by the combination of two nonhomologous DNA molecules” (National Centre for Biotechnology Information, n.pag.), and these recombinant processes have resulted in creatures such as Yorktown
Technologies’ patented GloFish, which combine the DNA of fish, such as Zebra Fish, with bioluminescent DNA from jellyfish to create a new species that glows in the dark with distinctive neon colours. Although a text has no direct equivalent to DNA, the process of recombining disparate mediating elements within the body of a source that 23 hosts the new elements, even as the source is altered by this recombination, offers a compelling analogy to the processes that give rise to altered texts.
An analogy between recombinant genetic processes and recombinant textual alteration processes explicitly draws attention to the fundamental level at which the source and altered text are entangled in one another. Much more than a palimpsest, the source, or host, text acts as a textual, material, and/or conceptual constraint on both the altering author/artist and the altered text, and so asserts itself as a mediator. The source text is then combined with, and remediated through, new elements that are formed around this constraint. Sometimes these new mediators are experienced as additions, such as
Phillips’s paintings, and sometimes they are experienced as negative space, such as
Foer’s network of holes that erases Schulz’s words and the gaps in Phillips’s paintings that allow words from Mallock’s text to be seen. In either case, the altered text is only the end result of the process that weaves together these various mediating elements with the source text. Recombinant processes therefore characterize the messy, in-between space created by the interaction and entanglement of both source and altered text, while accounting for the material impact that the mediating elements of each text brings to bear on the presence of the other. It therefore quickly becomes clear that texts involved in recombinant processes demand a Latourian engagement that works to unfold the network of mediators that contribute to the emergence of the altered text.
In acknowledging the demand to unfold altered texts and trace their participation in networks that include the material histories surrounding their source texts as well as this source itself, it is important to address the fact that altered texts necessarily rely on practices of erasure and negation. As Drucker states, the process of altering or 24 transforming an existing book is “an intervention” that “generally includes acts of insertion or defacement, obliteration or erasure on the surface of a page which is already articulated or spoken for” (109). Altered texts that result from recombinant processes depend in part on the awareness that more text exists than is readable and that the text’s ability to communicate relies on the silencing of other “already articulated” messages.
Recombinant processes and altered texts therefore make explicit the altered text’s reliance on what Jacques Derrida has termed the trace. As Derrida argues:
no element can function as a sign without relating to another element which itself
is not simply present. This linkage means that each “element” . . . is constituted
with reference to the trace in it of the other elements of the sequence or system.
This linkage, this weaving, is the text, which is produced only through the
transformation of another text. Nothing, either in the elements or in the system, is
anywhere simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and
traces of traces. (Positions 37-38, emphasis in original)
For Derrida then, the absence of a true origin is unavoidable and deconstruction seeks to make visible the contingent structures of language, and even thought, that rely implicitly on the trace, thereby destabilizing the privileged position of that which is present in modern modes of thinking. Derrida also emphasizes throughout his work that a lack of attention and concern for these traces enacts a more permanent silencing and denial of them, while allowing the elements that they support to appear self-sustaining. Applying this line of deconstructive thought to altered texts, Drucker makes a similar observation when she notes that recombinant interventions resulting in an altered text are inherently ambiguous in that they may just as easily subvert or suppress the source text that gives 25 rise to them as help recuperate the value of these sources. By unfolding the material networks of actants, and revealing the impact of mediators that may no longer be present, such as the temporalities bound up in Latour’s hammer or the passages that exist under erasure in an altered text, I argue that a Latourian unfolding resonates with the work of deconstruction and can help both to reveal the effect of an altered text’s interventions on its mediating network, and, in some cases, to re-mediate a source text and its traces that have become subverted by a particular recombinant process.
Part of the work of this thesis will thus be to pause and unfold the consequences of recombinant practices. By showing audiences the power of the mediating print body to create, change, and embody meaning, experimental books, and those resulting from recombinant processes in particular, remind us that any change to or erasure of this materiality cannot be dismissed as a neutral process. I therefore ask: What are the ethical implications involved in erasing one textual body in order to allow another body to speak? What roles do these recombinant processes and the resulting altered texts play in the afterlives of the authors whose texts they alter? What mediating networks do these recombinant texts engender and how can these networks inform a reading of the text?
With these questions in mind, I turn now to the first of my two case studies.
26
Chapter 1: Unfolding A Humument’s Foldings
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. -- Jorge Luis Borges “A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw”, 214
Over its more than fifty-year history, A Humument has come to occupy a prominent place within the developing canon of artists’ books, and is consequently one of the most well-known examples of a text created through recombinant processes.6
Importantly, Phillips’s recombinant acts extend far beyond the initial interventions that he made on Mallock’s text to produce A Humument. Since 1980, Phillips has produced multiple editions of A Humument, each with newly treated pages that often share nothing in common with previous iterations of these pages. Furthermore, Phillips has remediated both A Human Document and A Humument across multiple digital platforms, including websites, apps, and audio files, and has used both texts as inspiration for new artistic pursuits, including, for example, an experimental opera. It therefore becomes clear that A
Humument must be approached as more than an isolated text, and more than even a multi-bodied text created through recombinant processes. Rather, A Humument must be approached through its extended network of the many texts and media that demand to be taken into account and unfolded in order to gain access to A Humument’s full mediating presence. A Humument therefore performatively proves Borges’s claim in the epigraph of this chapter that a book is an inexhaustible “axis of innumerable relationships.”
6 Indicative of the privileged position that A Humument holds in the canon of altered books, Hubert and Hubert even suggest that Phillips can be credited with having “invented the altered book” (73). This assertion is, however, erroneous, as evidenced by the long history of altered books that includes, for example, the Little Gidding biblical concordances of the 1630s mentioned in the introduction of this thesis. 27
The goal of this chapter is to perform the careful unfolding demanded by A
Humument’s mediating network and to use this network as a way of better understanding how A Humument functions as a text. Across this exploration, I assert that A
Humument’s mediating presence is unique in the openness of the foldings that its body performs; however, due to A Humument’s perpetual participation in recombinant and remediating acts, it may become tempting to dismiss the import of materiality within each instantiation of A Humument and to see this text instead as one that transcends materiality. Phillips himself has stated that, although he has digitized A Humument for online access, “the art stays the same” (qtd. in Durno, n. pag.). To accept such an assertion would be to subvert the very openness of A Humument’s foldings and to move towards a conflated understanding of the text as a disconnected intermediary whose material forms do not impact meaning; this would be akin to the misrecognition that would reduce Latour’s hammer to a mundane tool. As open as A Humument is, I therefore assert that it requires a Latourian reading to acknowledge fully and keep active its status as a mediator. To enact such a reading, this chapter will begin by contextualizing A Human Document and A Humument both historically and within their media ecologies, before performing a materially-aware close reading of A Humument as a recombinant text.
Contextual Unfoldings
The source text for A Humument is Mallock’s 1892 novel, A Human Document, which tells the story of an affair between a married woman named Irma Schilizzi and a social-climbing man named Robert Grenville. However, the novel itself begins with a frame narrative, wherein the narrator is provided with letters, journals, and various other 28 ephemera written by Irma and Grenville after both characters are said to have passed away. The inheritor of the documents, and a friend of Irma’s, asks the narrator if he will work the fragmented pieces “into some presentable form, and publish it” (17). Although the narrator first states he is “dismay[ed]” at the sight of the documents, which have been pasted into “a great folio volume bound like a photographic scrap-book,” he nonetheless agrees (7). The following story of Irma and Grenville is therefore presented as the fruits of the narrator’s labour, and so A Human Document claims to be a text that has made whole and intelligible the scraps of two people’s histories. Through its framing narrative,
A Human Document also reveals a certain awareness of itself as a novel, and further, as a bound and ordered book object that exists in opposition to unwieldy, unordered scraps of paper.
Although A Human Document did not become widely famous in its time, it was popular enough to be printed first in a three volume set, and then later in the same year, as a single volume in both British and American editions. This is likely due in part to
Mallock’s own notoriety, which he had accrued following the publication of his first, very successful book, The New Republic (1877) — a thinly veiled roman à clef that deploys “skillful parodies of the views of Matthew Arnold, [Walter] Pater, [T. H.]
Huxley, [Benjamin] Jowett, and [John] Tyndall” (Peters, n. pag.). After this initial success, however, critics and readers alike found Mallock’s novels, including A Human
Document, to be generally “contrived and the characterization superficial” (n. pag.). As
Phillips also notes, A Human Document reveals Mallock’s “class prejudice and imperialist hauteur,” as well as clear anti-Semitism as expressed toward Irma’s Jewish 29 husband. By the time of Mallock’s death in 1923 then, his works were already falling out of print and into relative obscurity.
As recounted by Phillips, the origins of his now-famous intervention on Mallock’s text began with a boast to writer Ronald Brooks Kitaj; Phillips wagered that he could buy a second-hand book for three pence and turn that book into a long-term project. The ninth printing of the single-volume British edition of A Human Document was selected at random for what Phillips describes as its “tempting title” – a title which Phillips would modify through crasis, or the act of folding together the words “human document” to create his invented word “humument” – and for the fact that it was being sold at the requisite price (“Notes”, 5th ed., n.pag). Once Mallock’s text was selected, Phillips unbound A Human Document’s pages and began to mine found lines of poetry and prose from within the text, while also painting over the pages both to create a visual art piece and to obscure those of Mallock’s words that Phillips did not retain. Importantly, Phillips did not approach the pages in order, instead approaching each side of Mallock’s pages as a self-contained entity that forms a constraining unit for Phillips’s treatment. The resulting narrative created by this process is therefore abstract and fragmented, with no single sentence or image carrying over from one page to another. Long before the advent of digital remediations then, Phillips was involved in the remediation of novels to paintings, pages to canvases, words to images. Furthermore, and as suggested by Hayles,
A Humument can be understood as a reversal of the processes performed by the narrator in A Human Document, who sought to make a whole from fragments and who shuddered at the sight of an unwieldy and materially-dense scrapbook. 30
The art pieces that resulted from Phillips’s remediating processes were first displayed in art museums and, in 1973, Tetrad Press released the first, unbound print edition of A Humument. Then, in 1980, A Humument was published by Thames &
Hudson and returned to bounded book form, as well as returning each of Mallock’s pages to their original order. Since this initial printing, A Humument has been released in four subsequent print editions, the most recent of which came out in 2012. In each of these editions, Phillips retreats as many as 80 pages, including retreatments of the same page multiple times across editions. Phillips has stated that he wants to prove through A
Humument “the inexhaustibility of even a single page,” therefore pushing Borges’s belief in the inexhaustibility of a book even further, and, as a test case, Phillips has created more than twenty “variations on page 85” alone (“Notes”, 4th ed., n. pag.). Consequently, each new print edition of A Humument comprises, not simply an updated, edited version of the edition that preceded it, but rather a new corpus of texts that, while entangled with earlier editions, remains distinct in each case.
Phillips is careful to acknowledge the presence and history of both Mallock and his text in their significant, albeit potentially unwilling, collaboration in Phillips’s processes, and thus indicates his awareness that there is an ethical dimension at stake in his processes. Phillips states himself that he has “ransacked and upturned [Mallock’s] writings like a wrecked room, subverting them to say things that would have dismayed and disturbed him” (“Notes”, 5th ed., n. pag.).7 Similarly, because Phillips works on the
7 In this statement, Phillips relies in part on the stereotypical belief that Victorian novelists and readers were shocked and appalled by all topics pertaining to sex and sexuality. Of course, the very fact that Mallock writes about the affair of a married woman belies the fallacy of this stereotype. Nonetheless, Phillips’s statement shows his awareness that Mallock’s words have been changed and altered without Mallock’s consent or knowledge, and thus that these altering acts exist beyond the intentions, known and unknown, of Mallock as author. 31 original 1892 pages of A Human Document, rather than, for example, on facsimile copies of these pages, he also in some sense destroys each copy of A Human Document that he alters. Phillips has therefore ensured that an intact edition of A Human Document has been archived in the Sackner Archive in Miami, an act of preservation that may not have been afforded to the ninth reprinting of Mallock’s text otherwise. In addition to this act of preservation alongside destruction, it is undeniable that Phillips’s interventions have brought a relatively obscure author and text back into creative and critical discourses.
Critics, including Hayles and Partington, have read A Human Document in order to assess the changes that Phillips has enacted, while Phillips himself has become an expert on this text, having read it countless times for each iteration of A Humument that he makes. Further evidence of A Human Document’s renewed valuation exists in the fact that, since Phillips’s intervention, the ninth reprinting of A Human Document that
Phillips purchased for three pence in 1966 now sells for upwards of £80 in 2015—a cost higher than the cost of a standard paperback edition of A Humument itself. Of course, it must be acknowledged that this renewed valuation stems, not from the content of
Mallock’s book as an isolated text, but rather from its value as the textual inspiration and material foundation for Phillips’s processes. Nonetheless, Mallock’s text is being newly engaged by a readership that it likely would not have attracted otherwise.
While unfolding the mediating network surrounding A Human Document and A
Humument requires the preceding preliminary consideration of how these two texts have interacted with each other, this unfolding also requires considering how these texts interact with and are remediated by other mediators. To begin with, alongside print editions of A Humument, Phillips has made both his text and Mallock’s available to a 32 wide range of digital remediations. In the mid-2000s, Phillips first introduced a website, which digitizes the “untreated” (but still remediated) pages of A Human Document as they appeared before Phillips intervened on these pages. Mallock’s pages are digitized as isolated pages, without their cover, frontispiece, or binding, and are placed alongside
Phillips’s similarly unbound, treated versions of these same pages, allowing the digital reader to access a simultaneous archive of changes that these pages have undergone over time in a way that readers of a single print edition cannot. Following this initial foray into the use of digital pages, Phillips released the Humument App in 2010, which again remediated the pages of A Human Document and A Humument for the backlit and handheld screen of the iPad and iPhone. Phillips incorporated random reading algorithms into this app through a feature called the Oracle, which randomly matches and displays two pages from A Humument, allowing unexpected and unintentional correlations to become visible between the two pages. The app also allows users to incorporate social media, including Facebook and Twitter, into their reading practices through sharing, commenting, and tweeting. In 2013, Phillips released A Humument USB, which contained flash animation of Phillips reading 112 newly retreated pages from A
Humument. That same year, Life’s Work opened, an art exhibition at the Massachusetts
Museum of Contemporary Art containing over 1000 individually framed pages from A
Humument’s long history. Phillips therefore displays a remarkable ability to adapt his processes to new technologies and to open his texts to new reading practices, including algorithmically-assisted reading and reading informed by social media, more than five decades after A Humument was originally created and more than one hundred years after the publication of A Human Document. 33
Although this network of texts, extending from Mallock’s print text through to the proliferating online pages of A Humument, is already vast, A Humument is dispersed across a wider field than even these texts reveal. For example, in 1985, Phillips produced a text titled A Heart of a Humument that subjected a central rectangle of text measuring
3’ x 4’ x 4’ from each page of A Human Document to the same processes that Phillips used to create A Humument. Phillips also reworked fragments of A Humument as illustrations to a 1983 translation of Dante’s Inferno and a 2011 edition of Cicero:
Orations. Moving beyond the book object, Phillips has used pages from A Humument as découpage source material that he applies to eclectic objects, including terrestrial and celestial globes in 1989 and a human skull in 1996. Phillips has also used A Human
Document as a source for the characters, libretto, and even stage directions of his experimental opera, Irma (1969), and this is only a sampling of the work that exists under the purview of Phillips as altering author/artist. Beyond Phillip’s own initiatives exist several experimental texts that draw inspiration from A Humument, including Canadian author Derek Beaulieu’s Local Colours (2008). In describing the creation of this text,
Beaulieu directly references A Humument as inspiration and explains that his text is “a page-by-page interpretation of Paul Auster’s 72-page novella Ghosts [1987]”
(“Character” 67). Each of Auster’s characters is named after a colour, which inspired
Beaulieu’s graphic treatment of the text, wherein he “removed the entirety of Auster’s text, leaving only chromatic words—proper nouns or not—spread across the page as dollops of paint on a palette” (67). These retained chromatic words are then placed under erasure by a rectangle that is coloured in the hue described by the chromatic word.
Similarly, critic Kiene Brillenburg Wurth draws a direct line of influence from A 34
Humument as an altered text through to Foer’s Tree of Codes, another altered text and the second case study that I will discuss at length in the following chapter. This extended network of texts illustrates that A Humument and its remediating processes continue to spawn new ways of looking at and engaging texts, while also informing and reforming the contexts in which A Human Document and A Humument circulate.
Once the great number of related texts, artistic interventions, and forms of media surrounding A Humument are acknowledged, it becomes clear that when critics and readers approach A Humument, they come in contact with not only a multi-bodied altered text, but also a Latourian network of human and nonhuman mediators that includes the readers themselves, Mallock, Phillips, every print and digital remediation of both A
Human Document and A Humument, and even texts like Tree of Codes. It is also once this growing, mutable, and recombinant network is acknowledged that A Humument reveals itself most completely. As Partington describes:
A Humument ceaselessly absorbs other kinds of pages into itself . . . A
Humument does not simply anthologise or ‘represent’ the history of the book; it
places itself in the flux of that history, so that the very concept of ‘the book’ as a
coherent, bounded, and stable entity comes into question. Rather than dealing
with two fixed, discrete, complete works – an original novel and its ‘treated’
version – it seems we are faced with an irrevocably tangled network of material
(and now digital) pages. We cannot unpick these threads or trace them back to a
single, pristine, untreated source. (77)
More than beautifully summarizing the history of A Humument and its participation in various networks, I argue that Partington’s assessment of A Humument as questioning 35 both the book form and pristine origins indicates how A Humument acts as a catalyst that prompts its readers to engage in the work of unfolding that Latour calls for. Furthermore,
Partington’s emphasis on A Humument’s engagement with pages signals a significant difference between Phillips’s text and Drucker’s definition of an artist’s book. For
Drucker, an artist’s book is bound to the book form in order to exist, while Phillips shows little concern for the book form itself. As discussed earlier in this chapter, Phillips unbinds Mallock’s pages, constructs a narrative that can be read in any order, and atomizes both A Human Document and A Humument to the level of the page through his website and app, with no effort to represent digitally a book object through which to frame these pages. However, Phillips is still fundamentally tied to the unit of the printed page in his work. I therefore argue that, rather than the book object, Phillips focuses his efforts on the printed page and its structures, and it is for this reason that I assert A
Humument functions not as a single text, but rather as a corpus of interrelated, yet nonetheless distinct, page-length texts.
Somewhat paradoxically, however, Partington’s acknowledgement of A
Humument’s interrogation of the printed page as enacted through its “rapacious intertextuality”, and I would add intermediality, moves her towards a reading that forecloses the material specificity of these mediating pages. Partington’s reading does not simply position the printed pages of A Humument as being in conversation with its online pages, pages framed as art, or recordings of pages read aloud, but actually as “absorbing” these pages into itself. Under such a reading, A Humument no longer names a mediating text, or even a uniquely open and interconnected corpus of page-length texts, but rather folds many mediators together under the same name, and so risks conflating them. To 36 resist such a conflation and to carry the unfolding of A Humument further, I assert that A
Humument shows the pervasiveness and continued efficacy of the printed page as a unit of reading and writing across our current media ecologies, even as it explores how this unit is being reconceptualized in remediated forms.
As A Humument has evolved over time, its pages have begun to interact with technologies, such as iPads, that were unimaginable in the earlier years of its history.
These technologies have not, however, caused Phillips to abandon the materiality of his source text, nor the materiality of his interventions on the pages of this text. By maintaining the efficacy of the printed page as mediator, even while exploring other types of pages, A Humument makes visible the ways in which these various print, altered, and digital pages inform each other. For example, when bound in book form, the glossy pages of A Humument belie themselves as paintings that need not be bound and that exceed the limits of the book object, while the unbound manuscript pages of A Humument as shown in art galleries cannot escape their presence as altered pages that were once accessed as literary objects. Moreover, beyond Phillips’s interventions, the printed page as mediator continues to hold cultural significance for readers today and is translated into the digital by informing, for example, our separation of electronic documents and websites into new kinds of pages. Phillips’s various print and digital pages therefore enable a comparison of the differences between a back-lit screen and a printed page, or between random reading performed by an algorithm and that performed by a reader flipping open a book. Far from simply absorbing endless pages into an amorphous, immaterial intermediary then, the remediated pages of A Human Document and A Humument maintain a connection to 37 their print-based materiality, which persists as a mediator that forms and transforms these pages across a variety of media instantiations.
To this point, I have worked to unfold the material networks surrounding A
Human Document and A Humument, with particular emphasis on how these texts have been remediated, both across forms of media and through different mediators. With an understanding of this network established, I turn now to an examination of A Humument as an altered print text specifically. The remainder of this chapter will therefore focus on how A Human Document and A Humument remediate one another through recombinant processes, while also working to recognize and parse the specific mediating elements that
A Humument as a printed text relies on, including the print pages of Mallock’s text and the recombinant manuscript pages of A Humument.
Textual Unfoldings
As Hubert and Hubert emphasize, Phillips’s intervention on A Human Document necessarily began with Phillips as reader, albeit a subversive reader who chose to read out of order and with the intent of breaking Mallock’s text into fragmented pieces.
Consequently, every edit, erasure, and transformation that Phillips performs on Mallock’s text becomes the physical extension of Phillips’s own particular practice of reading and his resulting process of writing through erasure that relies on Mallock’s text to speak.
However, Phillips’s recombined sentences, paintings, and other material interventions on
Mallock’s text prove that, although Phillips’s intervention on A Human Document relies on erasure, Phillips does not simply subtract elements to produce a condensed version of
A Human Document; rather, he introduces new mediating structures that communicate his own authorial voice, as well as his textual and artistic interpretations of Mallock’s 38 already articulated text. Thus, I argue that A Humument arises through recombinant processes as I have defined them in this thesis and so relies on the mediating presence of both source and altered text to communicate its meanings, as I will show in the remainder of this chapter.
To indicate what words from Mallock’s text that Phillips intends to group together, Phillips creates “meandering rivers”, or thin, outlined tracks that connect one word on the page to another (“Notes” 4th ed., n. pag.). Within the rivers that form a text group, Phillips retains a left to right reading order, and his sentences flow down the page from top to bottom. Far from wholly linear, however, one text group can intersect with or occur alongside other text groups on the same page at many points. While the reader can therefore choose to impose linearity by reading text groups as they appear in order from left to right, or perhaps from top to bottom, there is no clear indication of which text group is meant to precede any other. Further disrupting a traditional reading practice,
Phillips’s sentences are often abstract, and even include non-words that echo or imply
English words for conceptual effect, such as Phillips’s reference to an “odd / broken / novel / poken” (A Humument 5th ed., 5)8, which simultaneously evokes ideas of a spoken novel and a novel riven with holes, or the plea to “! / separa / me”, which echoes the word separate even as it performatively separates itself from this cognate through its fragmentation (5th ed., 196). Phillips’s rivers therefore guide the reader in re-performing the fragmented nature of Phillips’s initial reading, while also acting as the medium for
Phillips’s authorial voice in A Humument.
8 I adopt a manner of citation for A Humument wherein breaks in Phillips’s sentences due to erased words or lines in Mallock’s text are noted by a forward slash. 39
Of course, Phillips’s interventions are not limited to the textual realm, nor are they simply linguistic. Once Phillips established his text rivers on each page, he then used them as a guide to treat Mallock’s pages through techniques such as: painting; the scrapbook-style cut and paste of cartoons, postcards, and photographs onto the pages of
Mallock’s text; pictorial or textual collage, sometimes using previous editions of A
Humument as the source text for these collages; and distressing the page through cutting, folding, or even burning (see Fig. 1.). These various material treatments continue
Phillips’s initial act of textual erasure by obscuring the words that Phillips chose to omit, but they also perform their own interpretation and foregrounding of the page they alter.
To begin with, the material alterations are often more arresting than the text that Phillips retained (see Fig. 1). The gestalt of the page demands an attentiveness to Phillips’s material interventions on Mallock’s text, often before the viewer has had a chance to become a reader of Phillips’s textual narrative. Consequently, even when Phillips ruptures the materiality of the page through an act as violent and contentious as burning, the mediating effect of this rupture is used to reinforce, rather than subvert, the communicative efficacy of the page as a mediator.9
An accurate account of how A Humument communicates meaning as a print text must therefore acknowledge Phillips’s images and material treatments of the page as forming their own distinct visual text that cannot be reduced to simple illustrations of
9 This remains true both for the manuscript pages of A Humument and for the remediated copies of these pages in the print version of A Humument, although, in order to avoid conflating even the materiality of manuscript and print pages, it must be acknowledged that the manuscript pages provide material access to the physicality of Phillips’s interventions, while the copies of these pages rely more heavily on visual interpretations. 40
Fig. 1: Physically distressed pages from A Humument, 5th ed.
Phillips, Tom. “Page 81: First Version 1973.” Phillips, Tom. “Page 178: Second Version 1987.” tomphillips.co.uk, 2015. Web. 20 Mar. 2015. JPG. tomphillips.co.uk, 2015. Web. 20 Mar. 2015. JPG.
41
Phillips’s abstract narrative. For example on page 53 (see Fig. 2), the phrase “art / in the
/street / covered / deep / with / pictures / vivified” taken alone might be read as a reference to literal street art, or perhaps as a moment of self-reflexivity wherein A
Humument refers to itself as a text that covers existing mediating inroads with pictures.
In particular, the self-reflexive reading is complimented by the fact that Mallock’s text bleeds through the green background that Phillips has painted on the page, reminding the audience that the image they are viewing has covered over an existing text and page.
However, Phillips’s image also incorporates a circular cut-out of a London map, adding a new context in which “street art” might be referencing the art of cartography and thus providing new information not contained explicitly within the text itself. Together, this interplay between source and altered text, words and images, visible elements and those under erasure, creates a dense network of mediators that shape any reading of A
Humument. It is for this reason that Hayles asserts in her reading of A Humument that
“the page is never allowed to disappear” (Writing Machines 96), or to restate Hayles in
Latour’s terms, the page is not allowed to fade into the status of an intermediary. Instead,
Phillips insists that the audience of A Humument confront the materiality of not only A
Humument’s pages, but also the pages of A Human Document, and indeed of any page.
Phillips’s focus on the page as a mediator intersects with a crucial constraint that he imposes on himself in his recombinant processes. When creating his abstract narrative,
Phillips developed a protagonist named Bill Toge. In the English language, the letters that form Toge’s last name only appear in the correct order in the words “together” and
“altogether”, leading Phillips to decide that he would make use of every occurrence of 42
Fig. 2: Page 53 from A Humument, 5th ed.
Phillips, Tom. “Page 53: Second Version 1973.” tomphillips.co.uk, 2015. Web. 20 Mar. 2015. JPG.!
43 Fig. 3: Depictions of Toge in A Humument, 5th ed.
Phillips, Tom. “Page 273: Second Version Phillips, Tom. “Page 77: Second Version 1997.” tomphillips.co.uk, 2015. Web. 20 1987.” tomphillips.co.uk, 2015. Web. 20 Mar. Mar. 2015. JPG. 2015. JPG.
either word in Mallock’s text to conjure forth Toge, even if the words appeared more than once on the same page. Consequently, Toge is named 78 times within A Humument, and he becomes the touchstone character within Phillips’s abstract narrative, as he laments, ruminates on, and searches for art, love, and freedom. Importantly, Toge’s presence in
Phillips’s text is utterly dictated by Mallock’s language, and so Toge emerges, rather aptly, only when Phillips and Mallock speak together. Furthermore, Phillips uses rivers similar to those that connect his text groups to outline and sketch out visual representations of Toge (see Fig. 3). Thus, Toge’s image is comprised in part through the painted images that Phillips created and in part by A Human Document’s page as it shows through the rivers that outline Toge. The use of these rivers also means that 44
Mallock’s printed text persists as a shaping force for Toge, even in his visual representation, because the lines that sketch out Toge’s image must negotiate the spaces between excluded words and the words that Phillips wants to connect, leaving little room for a consistent rendering of Toge to occur. Instead, Toge’s image appears as protean, or, in the description that is popular amongst critics including Hayles and Partington, he emerges as a figure most “amoeba-like.” Toge’s representation in both words and images therefore works to emphasize his mutability and to complicate what it means to be a character and a subject in an experimental context.
Due to his ambiguity as a character, Toge has been convincingly read as a point of entry to a variety of A Humument’s key themes and issues. For example, Hayles approaches Toge as a “testament to the complication of agency” resulting from Mallock’s unwitting collaboration with Phillips’s processes (Writing Machines 165), while Huston
Paschal sees Toge as a surrogate for Phillips who allows Phillips to insert himself into his own narrative. However, I align myself most closely with Partington, who situates Toge as “a textual unconscious” (75) that emerges as a “negative image of the page” (74), and thus as a representation both of the text that Phillips has erased and of the materiality that so often gets reduced to being a simple substrate for textual narratives. In other words, for
Partington, Toge is a subjectivity that arises not from mental immersion into a conceptual space accessed through a text, but rather from an engagement with the material surfaces that support any text.
While I am compelled by Partington’s reading of Toge, I push her assertion that he embodies the negative image of the page further. I assert that Toge emerges simultaneously as a subjectivity of the recombinant page specifically and as a 45 representation of the page as an inexhaustible and mutable subject for Phillips. The co- mingled identities of Toge and A Humument’s pages are compounded by the fact that, as
I have already argued, each recombination of Mallock’s pages performed by Phillips across editions of A Humument comprise the creation of distinct texts, rather than editions of previous texts. For example, in the fourth edition of A Humument, Page 6 depicts Toge as a pinkish, amoeba-like figure in the centre of the image, apparently seated in an armchair that stands in a long hallway (see Fig. 4). On this same page, one of the text groups that floats above Toge’s head states that “in that very / narrative / passage
/ he sat dejected / myster / t,” thus asking the audience to see this hallway as a metaphorical passage of text that contains Toge, while phonetically referring to Toge as
Mister T. Meanwhile, another text group states that “parts of the / novel. T / of a man as photograph; / pieces of / writings of the / writings of / the names” (4th ed., 6), which can be read simultaneously as another reference to Toge as Mister T and as a reference to
“novelty”. Toge is therefore aligned with A Humument both as a novel form of communication and as having emerged from a visually and textually fractured novel.
In the fifth edition of A Humument, page six has significantly evolved (see Fig. 4), seeming to have acted on and developed the ideas that the fourth edition contained. The viewer is once again confronted with a seated figure, but this time a fractured male figure composed of cut up photographs that is nonetheless more concretized than the amoeba- like figure that preceded him. This figure is seated stiffly at a wooden table, and instead of being seated in a hallway, he appears to be contained in a small room. Above his head, the narrative passages have changed to read “in that / narrative passage / he sat dejected / 46
Fig. 4: Differing treatments of page 6 in A Humument between the 4th and 5th editions.
Phillips, Tom. “Page 6: First Version 1973.” Phillips, Tom. “Page 6: Second Version 2012.” tomphillips.co.uk, 2015. Web. 20 Mar. 2015. JPG. tomphillips.co.uk, 2015. Web. 20 Mar. 2015. JPG.
47 the / most literal / man / alone” and “The man as photograph” (5th ed., 6). No longer the amoeba named Mister T, Toge has become “the most literal man” in this text, and as his form becomes more concrete, the passages that describe him become less abstract and easier to understand. The interactions between page 6 in the fourth and fifth editions of A
Humument therefore communicate with each other as visual and linguistic texts, while functioning across editions to further the development of Toge as a character.
Toge’s evolution across pages and editions of A Humument proves that, although
Phillips actively and repeatedly remediates A Human Document through recombinant processes, he does not do so at the cost of creating a single, dominating re-visioning of
Mallock’s text. Rather, A Humument ensures that its own body is open to the same remediating and recombinant processes that intervene on A Human Document. No single treatment, reading, or rendering of the page in A Humument is given precedence or protected with an artificial air of stability, nor is an erasure ever a finalized, negating act.
A Human Document and A Humument are, as Partington argued, inextricably intertwined as texts; however, any particular instantiation of their relationship may be erased to make room for others, while erased elements may be mined again, recovered, and re-traced. The reversibility of Phillips’s erasures and ruptures can be illustrated through the example of how Phillips recombined Page 4 from A Humument across the first and fifth editions of A Humument.
In the first edition of A Humument, page 4 of Mallock’s text is dominated by dark, fractured images that resemble shattered glass (see Fig. 5). There are only two text groups on the page, one that reads “see, it is / feminine / this was broken by poetry,” and the other that states simply, “read on, / emotions” (4th ed., 4). In the fifth edition of A 48
Fig. 5: Differing treatments of page 4 in A Humument between the 1st and 5th editions.
Phillips, Tom. “Page 4: First Version 1973.” Phillips, Tom. “Page 4: Second Version 2012.” tomphillips.co.uk, 2015. Web. 20 Mar. 2015. JPG. tomphillips.co.uk, 2015. Web. 20 Mar. 2015. JPG.
49
Humument, this page has been drastically retreated as a memorial page to the events of
September 11, 2001 (see Fig. 5). In the center of the page, the roman numerals for 9 (IX) and 11 (XI) are drawn as mirror images of each other, separated by a single dot. On the right hand side of the page, Phillips has pasted in two artistic representations of monsters with the twin towers – King Kong in one image and a monstrous Saturn in the other. On the left hand side of the page, Phillips has painted two watercolour abstracts that mirror the size of the pasted-in images and, cutting across the page, two text groups state “pasted on to the / present / see, it is / nine / eleven” “the / time/ singular / which / broke down / illusion” (5th ed., 4). These two treatments of Page 4 evoke different emotional, physical, and social struggles through their images and words that cannot be conflated. Each treatment provides its readers with utterly different meanings that do not share a similar context with previous iterations, such as could be seen across the development of Toge on page 6. As a result of such vastly different renderings of pages, A Humument also demands that anyone seeking to engage with the intellectual and critical history surrounding this text must delve into the archive, not only of secondary writings, but also of past versions of A Humument itself. Referring to the fifth edition of A Humument while reading a critical interpretation of the first edition will quickly prove ineffective, albeit highly illustrative of the mutability and instability that Phillips introduces into A
Humument.
The instability of A Humument and the reversibility of its acts of erasure function as another way in which this text prompts its audience to pay attention to and unfold the mediating network that surrounds any single print edition of A Humument, including the other editions that inform, yet exist apart from, the edition of interest. However, this 50 unfolding needs to be renewed by each reader, and the network informing even a text as open to unfolding as A Humument can be ignored. For instance, when not unfolded, the network of mediators that give rise to A Humument are placed under a more forceful erasure than Phillips’s own recombinant processes. As stated in my introduction, Drucker is cognizant that the work of recombinant processes can work either to reactivate the source text or to reduce “the presence of the original” significantly, even negating it entirely (109). Such a reduction of presence seems to have occurred for Stewart, who, when writing about A Humument in his history of book-based art, states that A
Humument alters “the Victorian text A Human Monument” (Bookwork 162), rather than
A Human Document, thereby effectively reducing Mallock’s text to little more than a monument pedestal for A Humument and revealing an incomplete effort at unfolding A
Humument’s mediating network of mediators. This small error shows that A Humument is not exempt from participating in readings that negate the shaping presence of its source, even if the mutability and openness of its networks generally prompt an awareness of the many mediators that have shaped the current presence of A Humument as a text.
Without minimizing the ethical imperatives surrounding Phillips’s interventions on Mallock’s text and the role of critics and readers in unfolding A Humument, I nonetheless maintain that Phillips and A Humument provide ready access to the traces that they rely on, and Phillips works to at least acknowledge the ethical dimensions of his work. To parse the benefits of a Latourian reading for A Humument then, I return to my assertion at the beginning of this chapter that, despite and even because of A
Humument’s openness and its active exploration of the mediating effects of materiality, it 51 requires a Latourian unfolding to acknowledge fully its position as a mediator and to avoid conflating A Humument’s dense networks of interrelated and remediated texts into an amorphous intermediary. If this unfolding is not performed, A Humument can of course still be read, but its richness as a multi-bodied text that uses its materiality not only to communicate, but to comprise meanings not found in its words alone, will likely be lost. As this chapter has shown, the complexity of Toge has a character and the interplay of pages across editions and forms of media each contribute to the meanings that A Humument engenders, while the influence of A Human Document as a historical and narrative trace shapes A Humument, even as A Human Document is in turn changed by the interaction.
Building on the insights offered by A Humument and its availability to a
Latourian unfolding, my second chapter turns attention to Tree of Codes, a mediator and altered text itself that can be connected to A Humument’s networks. While recognizing that the import of A Humument’s materiality can be threatened by this text’s very openness, Tree of Codes represents a material text that makes it very difficult for its readers to forget about its body. Nonetheless, Tree of Codes’ participation in its mediating networks reveals that Foer often obscures Tree of Codes’ connection to, and impact on, these same networks, thus occupying a more ethically fraught position as understood through Latour’s redefined morality. A Humument and Tree of Codes can therefore be understood as existing on opposite ends of the same spectrum: A Humument requires a careful renewal of attention to its materiality in the face of multiple remediations, while its ethical dimensions remain more clearly acknowledged.
Meanwhile, Tree of Codes offers a captivating material surface that demands attention, 52 often at the expense of attention to its more ethically fraught impact on its extended networks.
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Chapter 2: Cutting Stories and Violent Remediation in Tree of Codes
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. -- Walter Benjamin “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, 256
Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010) is an altered text created through a process of erasure performed on The Street of Crocodiles (1963), a collection of interrelated short stories written by Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) and translated from the Polish-language text
Sklepy cynamonowe (1934). Conceptualized in collaboration with London-based boutique publisher Visual Editions, as well as several European design, printing, and binding companies, Tree of Codes’ publication developed and utilized an experimental die-cut technique, wherein the pages of Tree of Codes have been cut to represent physically Foer’s processes of erasure, while leaving only those words that Foer has retained on the page. More than simply excising words from Schulz’s narrative, these incisions create a fragile latticework that allows the words from some pages to peer through the holes in others, thereby disrupting the two-dimensional surface of the page and turning the book into a sculptural object that highlights its three-dimensionality (see
Fig. 6). While not adding to the pages of The Street of Crocodiles through paintings or collage techniques like Phillips, Foer has nonetheless introduced a mediating spatial structure into The Street of Crocodiles that includes the gaps as well as the latticework of paper and the words that Foer recombined. Furthermore, Tree of Codes forms around, and is at least partially constrained by, the existing text, language, and material structures 54
Fig. 6: Tree of Codes
My Photo. Taken 15 Mar. 2013. Used with kind permission ©Visual Editions Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer Book design by Sara de Bondt Studio Cover design by Jon Gray
55 of The Street of Crocodiles. I therefore maintain that, just like A Humument, Tree of
Codes arises from recombinant processes as I have defined them in this thesis, that is, from the combination of one or more external elements with a source, or host, text that acts to structure and constrain the resulting altered text, even as the source text is adapted by the recombination.
In contrast to A Humument’s perpetual and explicit efforts to fold and unfold its mediating networks, however, this chapter will also work to illustrate that Tree of Codes’ practices of recombination and remediation rely on more subtle lines of connections amongst the mediators involved and so require careful work on the part of its reader to activate Tree of Codes’ networks. While some of these subtleties are highly suggestive, prompting an engaged and productive interaction with the mediating network in which
Tree of Codes circulates, I also argue that other connections are actively negated, thereby undermining the network and the circuit of concern that keep mediators active.
Consequently, within Latour’s understanding of morality, Tree of Codes represents a more ethically fraught altered text than A Humument – a position that is only made more fraught in light of Foer’s choice to intervene on The Street of Crocodiles, a text with a violent and fragmented history, as the source for his recombinant processes. To reactivate the circuit of concern around Tree of Codes, and to re-mediate the network of mediators that inform this circuit, I will begin by situating The Street of Crocodiles and Tree of
Codes within their media ecologies and in relation to Schulz’s history. I will then return to Tree of Codes’ textual body to enact a materially-aware close reading of this body and the ethical implications folded into its presence.
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Mediating Stories
Schulz’s Polish text Sklepy cynamonowe [Cinnamon Shops] is a collection of surrealist short stories that are loosely based on Schulz’s own childhood and are set in a mythologized version of Drohobycz, the town where Schulz lived. The narrator’s father persists as a common presence across the stories, although the nature of his presence changes drastically. At times, the father is portrayed as almost supernatural in his ability to see beyond accepted reality, and at others, he is reduced to a man on the edge of sanity who prompts comparisons with cockroaches and vultures. Through characters like the father, as well as through characterizations of the town itself, including the street where the eponymous Cinnamon Shops can be found, Schulz explores themes of ambiguous and deviant sexuality, magic realism, madness, powerful femininity that is often depicted as threatening, and the efficacy of the inanimate world. These explorations, combined with
Schulz’s complex use of metaphor and the richness of his language, have captivated
Polish-language readers for decades. Reflecting this diverse readership, Sklepy cynamonowe has also been translated into 43 languages around the world, including
Celina Wieniewska’s now-standard 1963 English translation, which renamed the collection The Street of Crocodiles after one of the short stories contained therein.
It is, in fact, Wieniewska’s English translation that serves as the source text for
Foer’s intervention on Schulz’s stories. As described above, Foer worked through processes of erasure to recombine Schulz’s words in translation and to create a new
10 narrative that traces the narrator’s “enormous / last / day / of / life” (11). To access this narrative, however, the reader must isolate the page being read by lifting it away from the
10 As with A Humument, I use forward slashes in citations of Tree of Codes to indicate gaps in Foer’s sentences where he has erased Schulz’s words. 57 network of words and spaces below that are made visible by the die-cut holes in the pages. Writers of various online reviews of Tree of Codes have even suggested inserting a blank piece of paper behind the page being read, thereby flattening the sculptural body of Tree of Codes and reinstating the page as a more traditional unit of reading. Tree of
Codes thus requires that its reader work to create a linear and structured experience of the text, while also showing that this relationship is neither necessary nor inevitable.
Alongside the possibility for linearity in the text, Tree of Codes offers the possibility of reading through the simultaneity of its pages, and so reveals the mediating function of the network of holes that are more than simply blank space. For example,
Foer has constructed a sentence that begins “children / greeted each other with / masks / painted on their faces / ; they smiled at each other’s / smiles” (8). The isolated text that comprises this phrase is shown in Fig. 7a. When the interpenetrating words and sentence fragments from other pages are allowed to interject on this same phrase, as shown in Fig.
7b, we can variously read that “children greeted each other with jar masks painted on their faces pain” or that “we pass; they smiled at each other’s secret” or even of the
“secret of The sleeping smiles.” While divergent from the sentence Foer constructed, these found phrases nonetheless become part of an emergent and transient narrative created by the interaction between the body of Tree of Codes and its readers. How and when readers revel in or repress the interpenetrating narratives directly impacts their
58
Fig. 7a: Page 8 of Tree of Codes with Fig. 7b: Page 8 of Tree of Codes with text isolated. interpenetrating text.
My photo. Taken 30 March 2013. My photo. Taken 30 March 2013. Used with kind permission © Visual Editions Used with kind permission © Visual Editions Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer Book Design by Sara de Bondt Studtio Book Design by Sara de Bondt Studtio Cover Design by Jon Gray Cover Design by Jon Gray 59 experience of Tree of Codes and demonstrates Hayles’s claim, cited in the introduction of this thesis, that the material elements of a text impact readers’ interpretations.
Tree of Codes’ commitment to the mediating nature of its paper body further serves as a contrast to the open intermediality that characterizes A Humument’s relationship to its mediating networks. As Wurth and Hayles have respectively emphasized, Tree of Codes is an adamantly print text that enacts a resistance to a digitized version of itself. There is no official digital version of Tree of Codes11 and
Hayles describes how the fragile and layered pages of Foer’s text resist even the “rapid mechanical scanning” typically utilized in digital textual analyses, leading her instead to
“have the text coded by hand” in order to engage with this text digitally (“Combining”
230). Hayles further situates Tree of Codes within an emergent twenty-first century experimental aesthetic that Jessica Pressman has termed “the aesthetic of bookishness”.
Such an aesthetic manifests a “fetishized focus on textuality and the book-bound reading object” while actively experimenting with “the media-specific properties of print illuminated by the light of the digital” (Pressman 466), and therefore intersects with the concern for the book-bound object that characterizes artists’ books as defined by
Drucker. More than a passively symbiotic relationship between two forms of media,
Pressman asserts that digital media currently force print either to “respond with the necessary vigor to fight for its life” or to face obsolescence (469). Adherence to the book
11 Aaron Mauro has been working on a prototype of a digitized version of Foer’s text that currently includes 14 digitized pages from Tree of Codes (http://www.aaronmauro.com/treeofcodes/treeofcodes.html). However, as Mauro discusses in his article “Versioning Loss: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Materiality of Digital Publishing”, this attempt at digitization in many ways serves to illustrate what must be lost in digital representation. For example, although Mauro has attempted to show the physical depth of the network of pages visible through the holes on any given page, he references the difficulty of communicating depth without the play of light and shadows that take place in the physical text. I would also add that because Mauro has not digitized the back of Tree of Codes’ pages, the backs of these pages appear to be whole sheets of white paper, rather than the die-cut sheets that they are, and so the sense of depth is further subverted. 60 form in response to this challenge is not a rejection of the possibilities of the digital, but rather a way of reasserting the power of print in juxtaposition to the digital and forcing the two forms of media to interact productively. As Pressman states, the aesthetic of bookishness harnesses “the power and potential, as well as the fears and frustrations, of new media into print and onto paper” (480). Such a harnessing is evident in Tree of
Codes, as the digital permeates the creation of this text, extending from the machines used to die-cut the intricate pages through to the digital marketing of the book that includes videos of its production, even if it resists digitization in its final printed format.
With its electronically die-cut printed pages then, Tree of Codes takes up the challenge posed by digital media, as it renews and restores the reader’s interest in the communicative specificity of the print medium-as-mediator, while also pushing technologies associated with print beyond their traditional uses in a way that reinvigorates their possibilities.
As important as Tree of Codes’ efforts to reinvigorate the print medium are, I argue that it is at least as important to ask why Foer chose to enact these efforts by erasing The Street of Crocodiles. Where Phillips began his intervention on Mallock’s text by chance, Foer chose The Street of Crocodiles deliberately, stating that it is his favorite book and one “whose erasure” represents “a continuation of its creation” (“Author’s
Afterword” 138). Such a claim of continued creation needs to be evaluated in order to assess whether or not Foer’s impact on The Street of Crocodiles has proved as reinvigorating for this text as for the print medium more generally. Furthermore, it is through such an assessment that the circuits of concern are put in motion to enact an ethical mode of reading for both The Street of Crocodiles and Tree of Codes. In the case 61 of The Street of Crocodiles, this circuit must begin with a contextualization of Schulz’s own history.
Cutting Histories
As Foer explains in Tree of Codes’ afterword, “Author’s Afterword: This Book and
The Book,” Schulz was a Polish teacher and artist, as well as author, who spent his life in the town of Drohobycz. When the Germans occupied Drohobycz in 1941, Schulz, who was Jewish by descent, fell under the control of Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who admired Schulz’s artistic work. Landau subsequently forced Schulz to paint decorative murals on the walls of a playroom for Landau’s children. In 1942, and in spite of the meagre protection supposedly offered by the forced labour Schulz performed for Landau, another Gestapo officer shot Schulz, killing him in the streets of the same town that had framed all other aspects of Schulz’s work and life. Echoing Schulz’s own fate, the murals in Landau’s home were painted over and many of Schulz’s various writings, manuscripts, and artistic pieces, which he had scattered amongst his friends before his detainment, were lost.
Against these odds, The Street of Crocodiles has survived, and in this, it is not entirely alone. As Foer’s afterword states, a second collection of Schulz’s stories also survives, titled Sanatorium pod klepsydra (1937), or Sanatorium Under the Sign of the
Hourglass (1978). However, Foer does not mention the additional recovery of three short prose works by Schulz, a collection of some of his correspondences, and numerous drawings, paintings, and sketches, most of which were collected thanks to the efforts of
Jerzy Ficowski, a friend of Schulz and poet himself who devoted his life after WWII to finding and publishing Schulz’s works. Perhaps most surprisingly, Foer also neglects to 62 mention that in 2001, German documentary filmmaker Benjamin Geissler recovered the murals that Schulz was forced to paint for Landau, as well as the fact that, since their recovery, the murals’ ownership has been surrounded by deep controversy.12 Only three months after Geissler found the murals, representatives from the Yad Vashem museum in
Israel traveled to Schulz’s town, now known as Drohobych in the Ukraine, and removed several sections of the mural. This action was done swiftly, under contested approval by
Drohobych authorities, and it permanently fractured the already partial murals that were still in the process of being restored (see Fig. 8).
Following the actions of Yad Vashem, a seven-year struggle began to determine who would hold the rights to these fragmented pieces of art. Yad Vashem’s representatives maintained that the works were the Holocaust art of a persecuted Jewish man, produced under horrific terror and violence that were perpetuated by individuals from both the Ukraine and Poland, and so should not remain within the borders of either country. Importantly, the museum was not without support, even from within Poland and the Ukraine, in this position (Paloff n.pag.). However, there were many other voices, including Geissler, Ficowski, and Polish government officials, who argued that Schulz’s nationality and language figured him as a Polish citizen of Drohobycz first and foremost, and that his works should remain in the town that was his home. The final decision on the matter, as reported by Yad Vashem on 28 February 2008 in a press release, “recognized
[the murals] as the property and cultural wealth of the Ukraine,” although they will remain on “temporary loan at Yad Vashem for 20 years, after which the loan will be
12 Geissler documented his search for and discovery of the murals in a 2001 documentary entitled Bilder finden or Finding Pictures. 63
Fig. 8: The wall after segments of Schulz’s murals were removed by Yad Vashem
Wall1 image courtesy of Benjamin Geissler and used with kind permission. See http:www.benjamingeissler.de/ENGLISH/index-EN.htm for information on Geissler’s work.
64
Fig. 9: Schulz’s murals on display at Yad Vashem
Hollander, Jim and European Pressphoto Agency. “Painting Under Coercion.” 28 February 2009. The New York Times, 2012. Web. 3 October 2012. Photo. Used with kind permission from European Pressphoto Agency. 65 automatically renewed every five years.” In 2009, only one year before the publication of
Tree of Codes, Yad Vashem officially unveiled three of the mural sections in an exhibit titled “Bruno Schulz: Wall Painting Under Coercion” (see Fig. 9). Remaining sections of the murals not transferred by Yad Vashem to Israel were eventually removed from the walls as well, some of which are currently on display in Drohobych’s Palace of the Arts
Museum.
Schulz’s murals sharply mark the atrocity of a man forced to paint a children’s mural for his captor to save his life and the controversy surrounding them concisely illustrates the very real tensions that still surround the material remnants of the
Holocaust; however, their impact does not end with even these vast implications. The murals’ very absences and presences over time become an indictment of history and its archives, highlighting the violence embedded within any cultural object that Walter
Benjamin so clearly and painfully sees in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
Benjamin’s perspective, introduced in the epigraph to this chapter, needs to be quoted at length:
[The spoils of history] are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist
views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures
he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe
their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have
created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no
document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the
manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. (256) 66
From the very first, Schulz’s final murals were meditators embedded with the violence that marked the event of their creation. Then, for almost sixty years, the murals were relegated to the realm of myth within Schulz’s history as each retelling of his story made mention of the murals that he was forced to paint, but seemed satisfied with them as an abstracted absent presence. Meanwhile, the murals themselves, painted by Schulz’s hand and comprising the material record of the events surrounding their creation, were threatened by deterioration and destruction. Once they were found and recognized as the cultural treasures that Benjamin describes, the murals’ violent removal from the wall and from Schulz’s town, whether for justifiable reasons or not, added to a history already permeated with violence. As of 2013, this history has been partially reenacted through a mobile exhibit and digital visualization, titled The Picture Chamber of Bruno Schulz, that was opened by Geissler. The visualization digitally reconstructs the room in which the murals were found and repeats the cycle of their recovery and dissection in this remediated form, reinforcing that the cycle of violence surrounding the murals is an ongoing process.13 Regardless of this fraught and still-cycling history, Foer remains silent on the murals within the pages of Tree of Codes, and does not acknowledge the resonances between the murals’ treatment and Foer’s own processes—resonances that I
will return to at the end of this chapter.
Schulz’s murals therefore poignantly illustrate that the violence of history for these artifacts is not an isolated event, nor is it confined to the past, but is rather a repeating and compounding process that is folded into their constitution, and indeed that of any mediator involved in the afterlife of Schulz, which extend beyond the works, present or absent, that Schulz himself created. Schulz’s work, life, and death have prompted a vast
13 For more information on this exhibit, see http://www.benjamingeissler.de/ENGLISH/index-EN.htm 67 body of critical and academic work that numbers in the thousands and spans numerous
14 languages. Multiple creative adaptations of his writings are also prevalent, including
15 films, plays, and novels, while Schulz himself has been creatively adapted as both a literary and historical figure, invoked by numerous artists and writers who represent him
16 as a character within their creative works. Consequently, by intervening on The Street of Crocodiles, Foer, Tree of Codes, and even Tree of Codes’ readers, enter into a diverse and highly productive mediating network that comprises the afterlife of Schulz. Like each of the preceding adaptations and appropriations, Tree of Codes represents a chance either to become a point of repetition, whereby the cycle of violence continues, or to enact an opportunity to proceed more slowly and try to account for the many mediators connected to Schulz’s afterlife.
14 While a comprehensive list is too vast to enumerate here, this output has been compiled and is consistently updated in the bibliography section of the Polish language website http://brunoschulz.org, which lists critical work regarding Schulz produced since the 1920s. This vast resource also contains information on the publication of Schulz’s various writings, and, where available, provides electronic access to Schulz’s original publications. 15 David Goldfarb’s article “Appropriations of Bruno Schulz,” points out some of the literary responses to The Street of Crocodiles, including David Grossman’s See Under: Love (1986), Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love (2005), Norman Ravvin’s novel Cafe des Westens (1991), and Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995); however, other adaptations extend beyond the literary field, including the Quay Brother’s 1986 stop animation film The Street of Crocodiles, Theatre de Complicite’s 1999 play The Street of Crocodiles, Frank Soehnle’s 2008 puppet theatre production Cinnamon Shops, and Teatr Formy’s 2010 pantomime and dance production Ulica krokodyli. Adaptations of Schulz’s other works include Wojciech Haas’s 1973 film Sanatorium pod klepsydra, Zbigniew Rudzinski’s 1981 opera Manekiny, Rolando Perez’s novel The Divine Duty of Servants: A Book of Worship (1999), Ontological-Hysteric Theater’s 2006 production Under the Sign of the Hourglass, Hand2Mouth Theater’s 2008 From a Dream to a Dream, and Double Edge Theatre’s production The Republic of Dreams, part of their 2001-2010 Garden of Intimacy and Desire cycle. 16 Some creative appropriations of the figure of Schulz are noted in Goldfarb’s “Appropriations of Bruno Schulz,” such as the work of Tadeusz Kantor (including his 1975 play Umarła klasa or The Dead Class), Philip Roth’s The Prague Orgy (1985), and Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm (1988), with Grossman’s See Under: Love and Krauss’s The History of Love (both noted above) also fitting into this category. However, there are many other representations of Schulz, including in Double Edge Theatre’s 1987-1999 The Song Trilogy, Amir Gutfreund’s novel Achuzot Hachof or The Shoreline Mansions (2002), Skewed Visions’ performance installation The Hidden Room, part of their 2006 Days and Nights series, 50 Letters’ 2012 production Pages from the Book of ... , and the Polish Institute in Tel Aviv’s 2013 production Bruno Schulz: The Incredible Century. 68
In assessing Tree of Codes’ impact on The Street of Crocodiles, however, there is a pervasive critical tendency to overlook the remediating effects of Foer’s recombinant acts on Schulz’s text, and so, by extension, on the network of Schulz’s afterlife. In one of the first reviews written on Tree of Codes, Michel Faber describes Foer’s process as having
“excised hunks of Schulz’s luxuriant verbiage” to “exhibi[t] a slimmed-down version of the master’s vision” (n. pag.), thus positioning Foer’s text as a condensation of Schulz’s.
Faber also reads Foer’s process as a treatment, in the dual sense often applied to A
Humument, that performs “a kind of psychoanalysis” alongside its physical treatment of the page to reveal latent elements of Schulz’s narrative (n. pag.). For Faber then, Tree of
Codes becomes “The Street of Crocodiles surviving in disguise, chopped to within an inch of its life but still clinging to its soul” (n.pag.). Similarly, Wurth overlooks the impact of recombination on The Street of Crocodiles in her otherwise highly-attuned article on Tree of Codes. For her, Foer performs “nothing more, or less, than [a] deep reading” (5), which she argues “visually epitomizes . . . the interplay of imagination, reality, and fragmentation central to [Schulz’s] text. We ‘see’ Schulz’s stories at a glance” (6). Through the readings of either Faber or Wurth then, Tree of Codes functions as an intermediary for The Street of Crocodiles, which maintains an essentialized and stable meaning in spite of the mediating structures and recombinant processes added by
Foer.
I further argue that readings of Tree of Codes like Faber’s or Wurth’s allow Foer’s process to become a self-contained act that draws from Schulz’s text, mediating networks, and history, but does not alter them. As Foer stated in a voice recording on
Guardian.co.uk, for him, The Street of Crocodiles “isn’t a work of art where when you 69 change it, it becomes vandalized or desecrated, . . . the great majority of . . . [The] Street of Crocodiles that will ever exist in the world won’t have been bothered by me. I was just trying to make . . . an experiment that . . . in a way actually collaborated with [Schulz’s] book.” In contrast to Phillips, who acknowledged the many ways in which his recombinant processes reformed and deformed Mallock’s text, Foer attempts to evade the ways in which his intervention has impacted and remediated Schulz’s. In order to resist this complacent and artificial stabilizing of The Street of Crocodile’s mediating function, the remainder of this chapter will work to situate Foer and Tree of Codes within the mediating network of Schulz’s afterlife, while also assessing the ethics of the recombinant relationship that exists between The Street of Crocodiles and Tree of Codes.
Cutting Stories
To situate Foer within the afterlife of Schulz, I turn to the work of David Goldfarb, who asserts that the readership of Schulz can be subdivided into three broad, although not mutually exclusive, categories. Placing Foer within Goldfarb’s framework therefore provides a necessary point of entry for assessing Foer’s intervention on The Street of
Crocodiles. Goldfarb’s first category consists of “Polish and other East European writers whose work is part of a continuous tradition with interwar avant-gardism” (Introduction xxiii). For these post-war writers, Schulz is not defined primarily by the war, but rather is part of a much wider tradition that began before the war, was then marked by it, and that they themselves build upon with their own work. This is a category in which Foer, as a second-generation, American Jewish author who does not speak Polish, cannot be part.
The second of Goldfarb’s categories is, however, much more applicable to Foer, consisting “mainly [of] Jewish writers” who “find in Schulz a connection to the lost 70 world of pre-Holocaust European Jewry,” but who also typically “know Schulz only in translation” (xxiv). Goldfarb’s third and final category likewise resonates with Foer’s position, as it is comprised of writers from any background who are drawn to “the universal significance of [Schulz’s] mythic world” (xxiv) while they search for such universal significance in their own words and worlds.
Foer’s afterword first presents Tree of Codes as a response to traumatic loss, and thus as functioning within Goldfarb’s second category of readers. Foer states that, for him, Schulz’s “surviving work evokes all that was destroyed in the War: Schulz’s lost books, drawings, and paintings; those that he would have made had he survived; the millions of other victims, and within them, the infinite expressions of infinite thoughts and feelings taking infinite forms” (138). Such an infinite heaping up of loss seems simultaneously to demand a response and render any such response impossible, leading to a confrontation with the limits of representation. However, Foer’s afterword also focuses on acts of creation from loss, and thus on the universal aspects of Schulz’s writing that interests writers in Goldfarb’s third category.
As stated above, Foer maintains that The Street of Crocodiles is uniquely a “text whose erasure would somehow be a continuation of its creation” (138), and to address this “somehow,” Foer imagines an “ultimate book” from which “every word ever written, spoken, or thought is exhumed” (139). Although The Street of Crocodiles does not become this book for Foer, he describes Schulz’s text as being “one level of exhumation closer” to it than any other book in his experience (139). He therefore conceives of The
Street of Crocodiles as having derived from “the transformation of another text” (139) which would have come from another text, and in this mis en abyme of texts, we see 71
Foer’s ultimate book emerging, a book not of presence but of constant deferral and supplement. Foer’s ultimate book therefore suggests itself as a deconstructive analogy for
Tree of Codes’ processes, in which the erasure and die-cutting simply manifest materially the ongoing processes of trace and absence involved in the creation of any text.
Foer’s position within Schulz’s readership and Tree of Codes’ afterword thus prompt an approach to Tree of Codes’ fragmented body through trauma theory and deconstruction, two related paradigms in which absence and the failure of representation figure prominently. Such a reading would not be out of place within the context of Foer’s work more broadly, as critical engagements with Foer’s preceding novels Everything is
Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) illustrate. Critics of these earlier works reveal a recurrent interest in Foer’s position as a third-generation postmemorial, Jewish author who at once engages with, and is distanced from, the
17 traumatic traces of the Holocaust. Those critics that do not focus on Foer as a Jewish author nonetheless pervasively read him as a deconstructive author of historical trauma, who utilizes fiction to access ruptured, fragmentary, or even entirely absent experiences
18 of these traumas.
As this critical tradition turns to Tree of Codes then, it is perhaps unsurprising that similar plays of the unrepresentable and loss are read through Tree of Codes’ fragmented pages. Paul Ardoin reads Foer’s text as being primarily “about the impossibility of
17 See for example Philippe Codde, Alan Berger, and Menachem Feuer. 18 Critical responses assessing the success and ethical implications of Foer’s engagement with trauma in Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are varied. Naomi Mandel stresses the instability of any fact, and therefore argues that Foer’s fictional engagements with historical trauma participate in a demand “not for truth but for additional, revisionary narratives” (240) that possess their own “ethics of truth” (254). In contrast, Ilka Saal asserts that Foer’s “allegorization, even mythologization, of events . . . purposefully effaces concrete historical circumstances that are important for understanding the trauma[s]” with which he engages (466-67). See also S. Todd Atchison, Francisco Collado-Rodriguez, Aaron Mauro, Matthew Mullins, and Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys. 72 finished representation, as well as the failure of any inscription—particularly the printed book—to do anything more than represent itself” (1007). Meanwhile, James Randall reads Tree of Codes as a memorial to Schulz’s body of work that functions, not as a recreation of that which is lost, but rather as a reimagined fragment that “stand[s] in relation to” the loss that it affirms (79). Finally, Mauro interprets Tree of Codes as a dual exploration into “the fragility of human life and the fragility of print” in order to argue that Foer’s experimental processes prove that “loss has meaning which is valuable” and which must be considered (n. pag.). Repeatedly then, the very material, and as I will come to argue, even violent, processes of erasure and cutting that Foer performs on The
Street of Crocodiles are downplayed or even bypassed by critics who focus instead on the unrepresentability of loss and Foer’s engagement with the traces of Schulz’s legacy.
However, Tree of Codes is a mediating, material print body that inescapably represents a particular remediation of, and approach to, The Street of Crocodiles. This approach not only pervasively aligns the present body of The Street of Crocodiles with absence and fragmentation, but also actively imposes new absences into this text.
As Foer states in his afterword, his engagement with The Street of Crocodiles began with the memorization of Schulz’s phrases as Foer worked and reworked the pages; however, “as the act of erasure progressed,” Foer states that this memorization quickly reverted to a process of “forget[ting]” Schulz’s words. A similar valorization of forgetting also occurs within Tree of Codes’ narrative. The unnamed father of the narrator offers up a desire: “How / beautiful / is / forgetting / ! / what relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents” (48). Father then states that “All attempts / are transient and / easy to / dissolve. / reducing life / is not a sin. It is sometimes / necessary” 73
(49). The father’s desire for emptiness thus prompts a description of him as one who is
“like a gardener / of / nothingness” (37-38). Both Foer’s process and the Father in Foer’s narrative therefore echo Derrida’s concept of the trace, reminding their readers that absence is unavoidable, and indeed foundational, to presence. As a gardener of nothingness, Father also becomes a poignant figure through which to interpret Foer’s position as the author of a text formed through erasure and processes of forgetting. If
Foer is likened to his gardener of nothingness, however, the valencies of meaning inherent in this figure cannot be overlooked—as one who might work to create from nothing and/or one that cultivates nothingness.
These valencies therefore problematize Foer’s repeated alignment of The Street of
Crocodiles’ surviving body with deferral, absence, and the unrepresentable, and return me to Derrida’s warning that deconstructive play, like remediation, is not a neutral process. While the destabilizing effects of deconstructive play can work against a totalizing or dominant structure of representation, this same process of destabilization can work to incorporate or supplant vulnerable traces within a more dominant structure. As already discussed with A Humument, Drucker similarly reminds us that what begins as an act to create through erasure or from loss can become an act of effacement, whether or not this was the intention behind the initial act. Thus, Tree of Codes begins to reveal itself as a text that subverts and obscures the traces that connect its body to the mediating network of Schulz’s afterlife, and so allows the impact of its presence in this network to go unchecked.
To unfold and assess the effects of Foer’s recombinant processes and of Tree of
Codes’ presence as a mediator amongst mediators in Schulz’s afterlife, I therefore turn to 74 a close reading of how Schulz’s and Foer’s text interact with one another, not through their absences, but through their present words and bodies. I begin with a consideration of
Schulz’s eponymous Street of Crocodiles, a dark and parasitical quarter in the town of
Schulz’s narrator, alongside its representation in Foer’s text. In The Street of Crocodiles, the narrator describes how the quarter came to be in its current state:
And yet, and yet—are we to betray the last secret of that district, the
carefully concealed secret of the Street of Crocodiles? . . . Let us say it bluntly: the
misfortune of that area is that nothing ever succeeds there, nothing can ever reach a
definite conclusion. Gestures hang in the air, movements are prematurely exhausted
and cannot overcome a certain point of inertia. . . . Nowhere as much as there do we
feel threatened by possibilities, shaken by the nearness of fulfillment, pale and faint
with the delightful rigidity of realization. And that is as far as it goes.
Having exceeded a certain point of tension, the tide stops and begins to
ebb, the atmosphere becomes unclear and troubled, possibilities fade and decline
into a void, the crazy gray poppies of excitement scatter into ashes. . . .
The Street of Crocodiles was a concession of our city to modernity and
metropolitan corruption. Obviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a
paper imitation, a montage of illustrations cut out from last year’s moldering
19 newspapers. (70-2)
These sections of The Street of Crocodiles communicate a place marked not by productive possibility, but rather by the permeation of unfulfilled, and therefore
19 It is immediately apparent that my ellipses have cut this three-page section of Schulz’s text; however, in my act of erasure, I have chosen to reproduce those portions of text that Foer utilizes in the corresponding section of Tree of Codes. Foer’s erasure therefore guides my own and allows a contextualization and reconstruction of at least those sentences that persist as fragments in Tree of Codes. 75 stultifying, potential. Such potential does not inspire the occupants of the Street of
Crocodiles, but rather accuses them. These sections can also be read anachronistically as a negative response to the deconstructive troubling of origins, stability, and presence.
When these passages are remediated through Tree of Codes, however, they become:
“And yet, and yet—/ the last secret of the tree of cod / es is / that / nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. / Nowhere as much as there do we feel / possibilities, shaken by the nearness of / realization. the atmosphere becomes / possibilities . . . The tree of cod / es was / better than a paper imitation” (95-6). Thus, in Foer’s narrative, the destructive elements of Schulz’s quarter are recombined to become elements of a creative and ongoing process of renewal, where the absence of a conclusion is invigorating. Moreover,
Tree of Codes remediates the surrealist representation of a street and a quarter in a town to become a self-reflexive representation of Tree of Codes that valorizes itself as a site of renewal and thus as more than “a paper imitation” of The Street of Crocodiles.
By self-reflexively interpolating its own body and recombinant processes, however,
Tree of Codes also reminds its readers of the debt that it owes to Schulz’s text. The ability of Tree of Codes to enact its self-interpolation within its pages relies on Schulz’s discussion of the Street of Crocodiles, as the words “tree of codes” are cut from the words “street of crocodiles.” Where the Street does not appear, Tree of Codes cannot.
Furthermore, a reciprocating process emerges, whereby new meanings accumulate around Schulz’s words as they lend meaning to Foer’s. In the context of Tree of Codes’ recombinant processes, Schulz’s statement “[o]bviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a paper imitation, a montage of illustrations cut out from last year’s moldering newspapers” (72), seems to speak directly to Foer’s process of cutting The 76
Street of Crocodiles. Likewise, Schulz’s indictment in The Street of Crocodiles of a reality that is “thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character” (68) suddenly appears in stark opposition to Foer’s assertion that Tree of Codes is “better than a paper imitation.”
The above examples indicate the ways in which source and altered text are able to productively interact due to their recombination. However, to a much greater extent than was evident in A Humument, Tree of Codes also engages in recombinant practices that destabilize and compromise its source in ways that can only be understood as violent. In working to understand the difference between the productive tensions that exist between the passages of The Street of Crocodiles and Tree of Codes, and more violent subversions, W. J. T. Mitchell’s work on ekphrasis, or “the verbal representation of visual representation” (696), offers crucial insight. Mitchell’s work focuses on remediating relationships that are not neutral and on the competitive tensions that can exist between media, providing an explicit analysis into the ways in which one mediator can enact violence against another. As he explains, ekphrasis can enact “an attempt to repress or
‘take dominion’ over language’s graphic Other,” becoming “a verbal strategy for repressing/representing visual representations” (710). In such cases, the visual is not simply adapted as it is remediated through the written or spoken word, nor does it lend its forms to the verbal; instead, the remediation becomes an act of violence that is used to support the dominance of the verbal over the visual, and indeed to replace the necessity of the visual mediator at all. Troublingly, the critical response to Tree of Codes seems to enact precisely such a destabilization of The Street of Crocodiles as a necessary mediator in understanding Tree of Codes when critics such as Wurth assert that Foer allows us to 77
“see Schulz’s stories at a glance.” Furthermore, Foer’s own processes and Tree of Codes’ body perpetuate precisely such violent destabilizations.
One of the most striking examples of this destabilization is evident in the spatial manipulations of Schulz’s text. At first, the holes in the pages of Tree of Codes are read as a present absence of The Street of Crocodiles, evoking Schulz’s text through the shape of the die-cut spaces that seem to stay true to his paragraphs and engaging Schulz’s text as a constraining force that shapes Foer’s acts of recombination. For example, as can be seen in Fig.10, not one word of page 3 in The Street of Crocodiles is used on the corresponding page in Tree of Codes, yet the erased name of the short story, the chapter number, and the approximate shape of the three paragraphs remain in the holes left by the die-cut process. However, Tree of Codes’ representation of space is not always as loyal to
Schulz’s text as this first example suggests. Placing an image of page 10 from The Street of Crocodiles alongside its corresponding page in Tree of Codes, I have identified two comparably-sized passages from The Street of Crocodiles that have been treated in significantly different ways within Tree of Codes (see Fig. 11). The first passage, highlighted in pink, is truncated, occupying a smaller space in Tree of Codes than would have been expected, while the second, highlighted in yellow, is noticeably drawn out across the page of Tree of Codes. This silent manipulation of space proves to be a repeating pattern. In fact, although Tree of Codes is comprised of 134 single-sided pages,
Tree of Codes’ publisher Visual Editions confirmed that if all of Schulz’s text had been included without these manipulations, either through spaces or printed words, Tree of
Codes would actually have been over 600 pages long (Visual Editions). This means that more of Schulz’s text is entirely absent than is represented either through the die-cuts or 78
Fig. 10: Comparing page 3 of The Street of Crocodiles to page 7 of Tree of Codes.
My photo. Taken 16 January 2013. My Photo. Taken 16 January 2013. Used with kind permission © Visual Editions From The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories. Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer New York: Penguin, 2008. Book Design by Sara de Bondt Studtio Cover Design by Jon Gray 79
80 the words left in Tree of Codes. Furthermore, it turns the present absence of Schulz’s text into a drastically manipulated absent presence that is used to accommodate Tree of Codes and its structure, while maintaining a pretense of loyalty to the source text.
Once the pretense regarding the spatial representation of Schulz’s text is recognized, it throws into relief other pretenses, namely that although Foer allows his text to be constrained by the language of The Street of Crocodiles, his process does not rely on the use or alteration of the actual body of any of Schulz’s texts. Rather, Foer used the
2008 Penguin edition of Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories as a guide to create typed pages on which to perform his processes. Furthermore, it cannot be forgotten that, while
Phillips works with Mallock’s words directly, Foer is working on Schulz’s words in translation, and thus on words already articulated through a remediated form. While I still maintain that Tree of Codes exists as an altered text created through recombinant processes, the efficacy of the source text as a constraining and active mediator in these processes is greatly reduced due to the invisibility of the many manipulations it is subjected to. Thus, Tree of Codes comes to resemble what Drucker describes as a transformed text that restructures and fragments the original to the point that it produces
“a Frankenstein monster of the original” (109). The body of Schulz’s text is used only where Foer finds it useful, rather than as a constraining and shaping mediator that is acknowledged for its own efficacy.
Tree of Codes’ pretenses and their effects cannot be ignored. I argue that the violence inherent to the act of cutting, even when used without a violent intent, cannot be separated from the violence of history that surrounds the artifacts that comprise Schulz’s afterlife, and in particular, the incisive resonance that exists between Foer’s processes and 81 the fragmenting of Schulz’s murals discussed at the beginning of this chapter. When this broader mediating network is acknowledged in relation to Tree of Codes, the pristine image of the presented murals at the Yad Vashem museum are directly echoed in the body of Tree of Codes—a body that draws attention to those parts of Schulz’s text that it needs, while the rest is neatly cut away. Furthermore, by mentioning only the murals’ coerced creation and remaining silent about the resonances between his recombinant process and the murals’ treatment, Foer’s afterword allows the murals to remain an abstracted entity seemingly lost in the flux of history within the pages of Tree of Codes and suppresses access to the network of historical mediators with which his text is unequivocally entangled. Alongside Tree of Codes’ ability to illustrate its own mediating power in the print medium and to engage its readers in materially-aware narratives, this text also prompts a self-enclosed approach to its history that folds, and even actively obscures, access to the mediating network that it nonetheless impacts.
However, the goal of this chapter has been to read against the grain of such an enclosed approach and to re-mediate Tree of Codes, asking what is folded into this text and tracing some of the mediating networks that reveal themselves once such a question is asked. Faced with the repeated and compounding horror of history, Benjamin describes the articulation of the past not as a recognition of “the way it really was” but instead as the effort to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger,” a danger that “affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers” (255). It is such a danger that I perceived in Tree of Codes and its processes. And yet, it cannot be denied that Tree of Codes can also provide a point of entry into the imbroglio of mediators that constitute the afterlife of Schulz, if it is approached carefully through Latour’s circuits of concern 82 and read alongside other mediators, including Schulz’s murals. Thus understood, Tree of
Codes does not absolutely embody the danger of an irreversible of folding—it is only capable of danger if it is too readily accepted as a totalized whole. This chapter has attempted to reassert Tree of Codes as a mediator amongst mediators, one that can participate in a constant cycling of concern rather than repeated violence and that can remain an open point of entry to, among other things, an ethical engagement with the afterlife of Bruno Schulz.
83
Ever Circulating: Concluding Remarks
As I have worked to show with my thesis, A Humument and Tree of Codes can only fully come into focus as mediators themselves when they are read alongside the many other mediators that are folded into their presence and their networks. While A
Humument’s rapacious intertextuality and intermediality relies on these circulating networks, this same openness threatens a recognition of the material specificity of each recombinant iteration of A Humument. Meanwhile, Tree of Codes is read repeatedly as a tribute and memorial to Schulz, therefore seeming to connect this text to its mediating networks, but such readings ignore the violence and potential for subversion, whether intentional or not, inherent to Foer’s act of memorialization. A Latourian unfolding of A
Humument and Tree of Codes ensures that the mediating materiality of each source and altered text is not erased, even if it is altered, while Latour’s reconception of ethics through a cycling of concern allows for a careful assessment of the ways in which these texts impact their various networks.
While A Humument and Tree of Codes clearly foreground their positions as material mediators and thrive under a Latourian reading, they are by no means unique in their positions as mediators amongst mediators. Similarly, Latour’s approach is not alone in its attention to the mediating networks that shape and inform any mediator. For example, Hayles has read media objects, including books and electronic literature, through theories such as her “media-specific analysis”, which pays attention to “the material apparatus producing the literary work as physical artifact” (Writing Machines
29), as well as “Comparative Media Studies” (How We Think 7), which compares the remediating relationships amongst and between media objects. Other literary critics, 84 including Bill Brown and Elaine Freedgood, read texts through the philosophical and critical theory known as “thing theory.” Thing theory can be described as focusing on the object matter of books before their subject matter in order to ask, for example, “how inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they animate them, [and] how they facilitate or threaten their relation to other subjects” (Brown Sense 18). Even practices of reading that are not explicitly concerned with materiality often move beyond a consideration of texts as primarily linguistic objects, as can be seen for example in distant reading, defined by Franco Moretti as a process that deliberately “reduc[es] and abstract[s]” specific texts to focus instead on these texts’ “overall interconnection[s]” and on the patterns that emerge from within these texts’ metadata (1). With practices like distant reading, researchers are granted unprecedented access to a text’s networks, while the development of computer technologies that assist distant reading bring about the integration of new mediating elements into many literary networks, whether or not these networks were previously primarily digital.
In light of these other theoretical practices through which A Humument and Tree of Codes could be approached, my conclusion addresses why I have specifically relied on a Latourian practice of reading. First, I maintain that although our digital technologies enable us to follow more readily the trail of interconnected mediators, increasing the extent to which any one mediator can be unfolded, they also increase the number of connections that we have access to, and thus the amount of time and care that we must expend on our networks. These mediators do not change the necessity of the unfolding, but they do alter the scope. Consequently, various forms of reading can be understood as responses to the daunting magnitude of this increased scope, including distant reading 85 and more emergent practices, such as hyper-reading, which Hayles defines as rapidly
“skimming, scanning, fragmenting, and juxtaposing texts” in a “strategic response to an information-intensive environment” (How We Think 12). However, while practices like distant reading and hyper reading quickly and usefully acknowledge networks as a whole, they often do so at the risk of losing sight of the individual mediators within such networks that need to be unfolded. In contraposition to these rapid assessments of mediators, Latour’s practice is inherently defined by the willingness to slow down in the examination of mediators and to undertake with care the unfolding that is required by each mediator.
My second reason for performing a Latourian reading of A Humument and Tree of Codes arises from Latour’s reconception of ethics, which indeed relies upon the slow unfolding described above. By asking that the greatest number of mediators be acknowledged as possible, Latour ensures that humans acknowledge their enmeshed position with other human and nonhuman mediators, while also redefining the basis of ethics away from a focus on consciousness. I assert that it is not incidental, nor accidental, that texts like A Humument and Tree of Codes are able to reveal the complexity of our networks of mediators and their ethical dimensions. As Latour states, even if somewhat grandiosely, “[i]nterest in texts does not distance us from reality, for things too have to be elevated to the dignity of narrative. As for texts, why deny them the grandeur of forming the social bond that holds us together?” (Modern 90). Our texts are cultural artifacts that directly mediate the ways in which we see the world, access our histories, and record our own presence as mediators, and thus deserve the careful unfolding that I have attempted to model in this thesis. This extension of rights and ethics 86 beyond the human subject is also proven important as experimental literature continues to push against the boundaries of what counts as text and writing. For example, Christian
Bök’s Xenotext uses the chemical alphabet of DNA to translate a short poem “into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans)” (Bök n. pag.). Recombinant literature takes on a new dimension within Bök’s work, and turns a living organism into the source text. In an age where not only an afterlife, but an actual life, can be written into another text, remediated and recombined, it becomes crucial to ask if such an act is being done for reasons that can be maintained within the ethical circuit of concern.
As Benjamin argued, our objects and cultural treasures can be vulnerable to misrecognitions and repetitions of violence that “affec[t] both the content of the tradition and its receivers”. Latour’s theories offer us a way of understanding how such a danger is possible by showing how the treatment of one mediator, human or nonhuman, impacts every network in which that mediator circulates. To buy a hammer is to participate with the temporalities, spaces, and actants connected to that object, and to interact with a historical artifact is to become one point in a constellation of historical interactions that have brought that object to its present moment in history. Thus, the material afterlife of
Schulz and the inherent barbarism that has become interred within the artifacts that comprise this afterlife hold an ethical imperative to recognition. Nonetheless, it is only by resisting fast and totalizing interpretations that artificially stabilize mediators into static intermediaries that we can gain an entrance to the worlds that are implicated in even our most basic material things and our everyday interactions with them. Thus, I assert that a
Latourian unfolding helps us as readers, researchers, and actants to avoid becoming 87 complicit collaborators and tacit points of repetition in problematic, violent, or unethical cycles of action.
88
Citations for Creative Adaptations of Bruno Schulz and His Works
Bruno Schulz: The Incredible Century. By Baruch Brenner and Ayelet Na’e. Dir. Baruch
Brenner and Sami Samir. The Polish Institute. TMUNA Theater, Tel Aviv. 9 Feb.
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Cinnamon Shops. Dir. and Adapt. Frank Soehnle. SCKM Puppet Theater. Krakow. 2 July
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From a Dream to a Dream. Dir. Luba Zarembinksa. Hand2Mouth Theatre. 5-7 June 2008.
Performance.
Grossman, David. See Under: Love. 1986. Trans. Betsy Rosenberg. London: Picador,
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Krauss, Nicole. The History of Love. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.
Manekiny. Comp. Zbigniew Rudzinski. Varsavia, 29 Oct. 1981. Performance.
Ozick, Cynthia. The Messiah of Stockholm. New York: Vintage Intl., 1988. Print.
Pages From the Book of ... . Dir. Andrzej Welminski and Teresa Welminski. 50 Letters
Theatre Company. 24 June 2012, 10-24 August 2012. Performance.
Perez, Rolando. 1999. The Divine Duty of Servants: A Book of Worship. New York:
Cool Grove, 2004. Print.
Ravvin, Norman. Cafe Des Westens. Red Deer, Alta.: Red Deer College P, 1991. Print.
Roth, Philip. The Prague Orgy. 1985. New York: Vintage Intl., 1996. Print.
Rushdie, Salman. The Moor’s Last Sigh. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1995. Print.
Sanatorium pod klepsydra. 1973. Dir. Wojciech J. Has. Mr. Bongo Films, 2008. Film.
89
Street of Crocodiles. 1986. Dir. Stephen Quay and Timothy Quay. Zeitgeist Films, 2007.
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90
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