Codex

[monroe at mpm.edu]

The New York Times
Friday, March 26, 2004
'Codex': A Bibliophilic Thriller
By POLLY SHULMAN

A little more than halfway through ''Codex,'' Lev Grossman's second novel,
an investment banker named Edward Wozny comes upon a bookcase full of
''books about books -- bibliographies of obscure literary figures, catalogs
of long-dispersed scriptoria, histories of printing and publishing and
bindings and typefaces.'' You could argue -- as literary theorists,
especially deconstructionists and their friends, did for years -- that all
books belong in that bookcase, since they engage with their literary lineage
at least as much as they do with the real world (whatever that might be).
However, ''Codex'' has a better claim than most novels to a spot there --
and not just because its title means, as a snooty scholar tells Edward,
''what someone like you would call a book.'' ''Codex'' takes its place on
the shelf of self-referential, bibliophilic page turners like ''The Name of
the Rose,'' ''Possession'' and ''A Case of Curiosities,'' and it's as
entertaining as any of them. 

Success has come early to Edward..... Before flying off to start his new
job, he pays a last courtesy visit to ... a pair of clients, the fabulously
wealthy Wents, Duke and Duchess of Bowmry. There he's given a task: to sort
through the duke's library of rare old books, which were brought over in
crates just before World War II and have been moldering forgotten ever
since. In particular, he's to look out for a book by Gervase of Langford, a
contemporary of Chaucer's, whose lost (or perhaps imaginary) ''Viage to the
Contree of the Cimmerians'' has tantalized scholars for centuries. The
duchess wants it found; the duke wants it lost. Edward wants to know why
it's so important. The quest takes him on a noir chase through library after
library, with a chilly but alluring graduate student at his side, a sinister
chauffeur at his heels and a glittering trail of money drawing him on. 

Why pick a banker to catalog your library? Why not, say, a librarian? The
Wents have a track record for getting their hooks into bright young people
like Edward, offering them freedom from the ordinary work world in exchange
for permanent feudal service....  But the choice works equally well as a
storytelling strategy. Although Edward has his own banking expertise and
jargon -- Grossman clearly adores expertise and jargon -- in the scholarly
world he's an outsider, a newbie. His ignorance provides readers with a
point of entry: as he learns more and more bibliographic esoterica, so do
we. 

Is the ''Viage'' a manuscript? Is it an incunable -- a book made in the
first 50 years of printing? Is it nothing more than an 18th-century
rewriting of a genuine 14th-century source text, done up in fake, ye-olde
language -- ''like a novelization of a movie based on a novel,'' as
Margaret, the sexy grad student, puts it? Is it a literary forgery like the
similarly named ''Culex,'' which claimed to be Virgil's juvenilia, or the
similarly themed ''Travels of Sir John Mandeville''? Could it be what
bibliographers call a ghost -- a book that has been documented but never
actually existed? 

If ''Codex'' can trace its parentage on one side to self-referential writers
like Laurence Sterne or Borges, on the other side it's descended from the
computer game Tomb Raider and its movie versions, the Lara Croft series....
A second line of narrative runs parallel to the book hunt, heading off to
meet it in the distance like a pair of railroad tracks, and taking us into
territory well mapped by members of the cyberpunk school of science fiction,
such as Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. 

[...] 

... Momus is an open-source code, collaborative software. ''Momus is big,''
Zeph tells Edward. ''Nobody knows who started it, it just bubbled up from
our collective unconscious via the Internet. Not even the Artiste knows
about everything that's in it. It's bigger than books. That library you're
messing around with? Obsolete information technology. We're witnessing the
dawn of a whole new artistic medium, and we don't even appreciate it.'' 

As the two stories begin to entwine, questions about the primacy of
narrative over form, or medium over message, begin to bubble up from beneath
the text. What does the shifting technology of storytelling do to the
stories being told? What happens to the single thread of narrative once
interactive forms like computer games introduce narrative multiplicity?
While such questions are a staple of the genre, they're easy to ignore if
you don't find them interesting. What sets Grossman's novel apart is not its
abstractions but the satisfying concreteness of his metaphors. During a
chase scene in a library, for example, Edward uses an office chair to prop
open the doors of an elevator: ''They munched on it noisily in the silence
like a monstrous baby gumming a chew toy.'' At the brink of making an
ethical choice, Edward imagines a line that he's about to cross: ''That line
was very, very near -- he could sense it, smell it buzzing dangerously like
a downed power line, yards away in space and minutes away in time.'' 

As with any mystery or fantasy, the tricky part is the ending. Grossman, the
book critic for Time magazine, hints that the devastating secret, as with
other bibliographic thrillers, might be a blank. ''It makes a good story,''
Margaret says. ''Not everything means something, you know.'' Such a good
story that in this case, its meaning -- or lack thereof -- hardly matters

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/books/review/21SHULMT.html