War of the Words

At first glance, you might easily mistake Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel for a human interest magazine. Between its covers, you can find pictures of the World Trade Center, tennis player Lleyton Hewitt, and Laurence Olivier as Hamlet. Foer isn't alone in including non-typographical embellishments in his work. Ever since Dave Eggers's celebrated memoir came illustrated with various charts and graphs, young literary writers of fiction and non-fiction have rushed to furnish their texts with all manner of pictorial elements to liven up the tedium of all that black ink. Add to that the critical acclaim accorded to the prose of the late W. G. Sebald, and the practice of mixing image with text now comes stamped with a highbrow pedigree. If a European middle-aged man (who met an early and tragic demise) writing about the Holocaust can illustrate his prose with pictures, surely nice young middle class American boys and girls can do it too.

This generation isn't the first to use extra-textual decoration in their work, as anyone who's read Jon Dos Passos or Donald Barthelme knows. However, Dos Passos and Barthelme were writing in a time when there was no Tivo or HBO on Demand, when people filled their home libraries with books instead of DVD sets, when the written word wasn't constantly being debased in favor of visual excitement.

Now more than ever, we as writers need to cling firmly to our belief in words. We need to venerate the magic transaction that occurs when black ink marks on a page paint pictures, when black ink marks make us feel more in one sentence than reams of celebrity photos or hours of our favorite Sex in the City episodes.

This is not to argue against experimental writing, but rather to argue for authors to conduct their experiments with language. Have we really exhausted the possibilities of language so thoroughly that we have to resort to telling stories with pictures? If that's so, then how do you explain the glorious surprises achieved by David Foster Wallace's footnotes, Lorrie Moore's self-help stories, Rick Moody's italicized snarls, and yes, Safran Foer's enchanting play with English as a second language in his first novel, Everything is Illuminated? And what about writers like Michel Houellebecq whose work leaps off the page without the help of Lleyton Hewitt or footnotes or any other stylistic fireworks, but simply because of the powerful clarity of his voice and his vision?

If you feel that no word or combination of words can express your vision as powerfully as an image, then the question must be asked, what business do you have working with words? Why not be bold and honest enough to go all the way and declare yourself a visual artist? It's much easier to compete as a writer among artists than with other writers. And these days you don't even need to take your own photographs or paint your own pictures to be taken seriously as a young artist. Simply select a nice image, add your text above or below, choose a sleek black frame, and you've arrived.

To be fair, I haven't read Foer's book, so I can't comment on whether his particular experiment has failed or succeeded. Perhaps he has succeeded brilliantly and his book is a worthy heir to writers like W. G. Sebald and Donald Barthelme and others who effectively use elements other than texts in their books. Still, as much as I admire them, I want these writers to remain glorious exceptions, not models for the future. Also, writers like Sebald and Barthelme are prose magicians, who use pictures to amplify their already finely-wrought sentences, not as substitutes for places in their writing where they're stuck and don't want to bother searching for just the right word any longer. Can the young practitioners of scrapbooks as literature honestly say the same thing about their own work?