The Persistence of Books

26 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 B ooks persist. The rise of the Internet and digital media has not decimated book culture. People continue to collect, restore, and cherish old books, and they also continue to purchase new books in print, even while branching out to audio and electronic formats. Some of the small presses that have nourished the publication of borndigital literature, such as Visual Editions, have also nourished the publication of new kinds of literature designed for paper, whose composition and distribution is made possible by digital technologies but whose embodiment in print is crucial to the content and operations of the work. The media scholar N. Katherine Hayles has written in this context about Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, which was published by Visual Editions in 2010. As readers will know, Foer’s work is an adaptation of The Street of Crocodiles, Celina Wieniewska’s English-language translation of Bruno Schulz’s 1934 collection of short stories, first published in Polish as Sklepy cynamonowe. In Tree of Codes, Foer has cut out words from the pages of the book, so that we see both gaps (literal cutout spaces in the paper) and words from other pages, which lie beneath those gaps. Tree of Codes (the title itself involves paring away letters from The Street of Crocodiles) uses the codex—the structure of paper sheets lying one on top of the other—to engage readers in the turning of pages, encountering holes, and registering loss or absence. Moreover, as Hayles points out, the reader’s intensive experience of her own body is meant to evoke by contrast the unfelt loss of other bodies, essay The Persistence of Books by Rebecca L. Walkowitz Recent fiction by Junot Díaz, Paul Kingsnorth, and Ali Smith offers an emergent project for contemporary world literature by yoking the history and politics of world literature to the history and politics of print. WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 27 especially the loss of the novel’s author, who was murdered by a Gestapo officer in 1942. Loss, gaps, and absence are a condition of the novel’s history, which Foer seeks to make palpable through his adaptation. Foer’s work registers the absence of English words but generally forgets—and allows readers to forget—the absence of Polish words. There is no direct reference in the text or in the afterword to the original language of the work. In this sense, Tree of Codes is interested in the history of the book but not especially interested in the history of books: their movement through the world in multiple editions and languages , their debt to translators, and their reliance on English as a medium of translation . Like many other recent works of world literature, Tree of Codes animates the medium specificity and sensuous effects of the printed page. However, works such as Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her, Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, and Ali Smith’s How to Be Both emphasize not only the experience of pages but also the experience of world languages on those pages: their font, shape, arrangement, spelling, punctuation; their absence; their presence; their appearance next to images; and their appearance as images produced through the arrangement of letters. These works utilize the resources of paper to reflect on the history and future of world literature. Many writers of the novel today know that books are not simply containers for language. They also establish the location of language. They do this, for example, by reproducing the national lexicon (the words that count as US English) while marking out and distinguishing, through italics, words that are foreign or outside that lexicon. Typographically, literary fiction since the nineteenth century has served to affirm the borders between local and global diction. Junot Díaz makes this point—and upends it—in his 2012 collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her (see WLT, Mar. 2013, 138). Díaz’s fiction is concerned with the relationship between English and Spanish. When his works move into other languages, translators have had to figure out how to communicate the formal dimensions of that theme. In particular, they’ve had to grapple with

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