I say it is incomplete, however, because neither version of this text, Schulz’s nor Foer’s, is more real than the other they both are full, rich texts in their own right. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.’ And that is what Foer has accomplished, he has physically replaced the original text with something that is just as real.
Simulacra are perfect imitations of things, that ultimately end up replacing their original. Baudrillard explains the critical phenomenon as this: ‘It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. ‘At times I felt I was making a gravestone rubbing of ‘The Street of Crocodiles,’ and at times that I was transcribing a dream that ‘The Street of Crocodiles’ might have had…’Ī ghostly echo of Shulz’s original, Tree of Codes becomes an incomplete Baudrillardian simulacra.
It’s a sculptural artifact, a labyrinth of potential critical analysis and I want to sink my teeth into it.įoer himself described the process as an arduous and fluctuating one: Tree of Codes is all the things that get a post-modern critical theory PHD student hot under the collar it is hyper-meta-recursive-self-referential-narrative in nature and I can’t help but be taken in by it too. All matter, including art, is recyclable and there’s something beautiful in that. While some may argue that it is a cynical way of looking at art, I see it as a positive statement. While there are faults in this argument, I do enjoy its implications for literature. He even goes so far as to argue that in a sense, every book ever written is chopped out of another one, i.e.
Despite it colonizing and reappropriating Shulz’s work, he argues that what has resulted is a completely different book, all owned and created by Foer himself. The cut-out begins from the very title of the novel if you take The Street of Crocodiles and cut out certain letters, you can spell out Tree of Codes, the title of Foer’s book.įoer has insisted: ‘This book is mine.’ It no longer resembles Schulz’s original. This is a die-cut book by erasure, taken from Bruno Schulz’s original The Street of Crocodiles and cut into ribbons to create a new narrative.
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