It is generally accepted that memory is a dialectic involving both remembering and forgetting. Also, there is agreement among cultural memory scholars that acts of memory seek to counter the effects of forgetting: they serve the imperative to remember and impede the work of forgetting. This article develops the concept of amnesiology to explore forgetting and forgetfulness not as a failure of memory but as a made condition, produced and reproduced. Focusing on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, a book which was carved out of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, it inquires into the relationship between memory performance and the production of oblivion and explores the role of language and literature in it. As I argue, the die-cut pages of Tree of Codes invite reflection on the narrative and technological dimensions of memory as well as on the role silence, repression and absence play in it as technologies of forgetting.

It is generally accepted that memory is a dialectic involving both remembering and forgetting. Also, there is agreement among cultural memory scholars that acts of memory seek to counter the effects of forgetting: they serve the imperative to remember and impede the work of forgetting. This article develops the concept of amnesiology to explore forgetting and forgetfulness not as a failure of memory but as a made condition, produced and reproduced.

Focusing on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, a book which was carved out of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, it inquires into the relationship between memory performance and the production of oblivion and explores the role of language and literature in it. As I argue, the die-cut pages of Tree of Codes invite reflection on the narrative and technological dimensions of memory as well as on the role silence, repression and absence play in it as technologies of forgetting. For, forgetting and the forgotten are part of agnotology, which they define as ‘the study of ignorance making, the lost and forgotten’ (p. Tetriscpl Download Itunes. Ignorance, as they argue, is produced and maintained, ‘in diverse settings, through mechanisms such as deliberate or inadvertent neglect, secrecy and suppression, document destruction, unquestioned tradition, and myriad forms of inherent (or avoidable) culturopolitical selectivity’. And indeed, there is no denying that ‘collective amnesia’, as scholars in memory studies have been studying it, is integral to epistemology, formative of the structural base of knowledge – of what we know and of what we remember.