Old and New Medialities in Foer's Tree of Codes

Intertextuality may refer to how texts "are," in general, but also to how texts "do," in particular: to, respectively, the fact that every text is a node in a web of other texts, and thus always already absorbing these texts, but also to local connections between texts--if they refer to each other, and how, if the one imitates or rewrites the other, and how both of them partake of a particular literary tradition (on the theory and practice of intertextuality, see, e.g., Juvan; Kristeva). What is a text without other texts? Yet, texts do not only relate to other texts. Sometimes texts do not want to be written texts at all, but try to be like paintings or works of music--or how they think painting and music "do." Sometimes novels are like films, even without being aware of it, as Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856) was "cinematographic," or at least "scenographic," before film had even emerged as a cultural medium. Novels and poems may materialize or perform the new media of the twentieth century, while words sometimes try to do what they--to all appearances--are not "meant" to be doing. Thus, Gerhard Ruhm's concrete poem "Jetzt" ("Now" 1954) is a poem about the present: a poem consisting solely of the word "Jetzt" scattered across the page in different sizes, places, and fonts. This is a play and typography, one might say, of actuality: as if every "now" (twelve in total) suddenly appeared on the blank page (on Ruhm, see Fisch). A concrete poem is a poem in which words become objects, form and content coincide. Ruhm's poem shows the seeming impossibility of words to capture "now" ("Jetzt") as now. "Now" is over before we know it, before we have even uttered the word. It moves, it is ungraspable. And words do not move, they register--or do they here? Ruhm makes words into things to be looked at, but these things "do" nevertheless. His poem is a composition of word-things in a white space, some far away, others close by, some printed in bold, others vague and thin. They all appear in a different font, because no "now" can ever be the same. Every "now," every word in this poem is a trace of "now" as a singular event--a tribute to the difficulty to capture such an event. And yet it says: now, Jetzt. When we read and see these words, "now" happens after all, in a flash. When we read these words aloud, for just a split second, "now" sounds. Perhaps this poem is a score, a text to be performed, rather than one to be read alone. Perhaps words here have a performative function and perhaps they thus perfectly serve the "now" here happening: they do precisely, immediately, what they say. Now!