Images In Text

They're not graphic novels; they're not books with illustrations. Yet there are little images, which are PART of the text. Here are the bits that will escape the Library of Babel.

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From Fran Ross, Oreo, p. 3.

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From Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, p. 45.

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From Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, “Phreaking”.

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From Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor (trans. Stephen Snyder), Chapter 4.

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From W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Chapter 2.

As Du Bois says in his preface, “Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,—some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past.“  “The Sorrow Songs” is Du Bois’s name for songs sung by enslaved people, and is the subject of the final chapter of this powerful, essential work.

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From Gene Wolfe, “Alien Stones”, in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.

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From Paul Auster, City of Glass (1987), Chapter 8.

Incidentally, City of Glass was adopted into a superb graphic novel — which, of course, is ineligible for the theme of this blog.  (I discuss the graphic novel adaptation here.) The image above is from the text novel, one of a few it includes.

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From Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (included in various collections of his work).

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part 2, Chapter xi.

This blog concentrates mostly on fiction, but these seemed enough like the little images one gets in fiction (as opposed to standard nonfiction figures & charts) that I decided to use it. In fact, I have put in two: the duck-rabbit, since it’s the most famous example Wittgenstein used, and his box, because his comments are too à propos to this blog for me to resist. To make up for the repetition, I have given one in translation (G. E. Anscombe), and one in the original.

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Here are two from Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday (1973), from chapters 1 and 4.

I know of no book that has so many images that fit this blog’s theme.  Breakfast of Champions might almost be called an illustrated novel (and thus excluded), but I think — partly due to the style of the illustrations — it stays just on this side of the line. Thus I include it here — two chosen from a great many possibilities.

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From Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Chapter 23.

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From John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Aegypt, Volume 2), Book 2, Chapter 3.  The symbol is the monas hieroglyphica, invented by Dr. John Dee. 

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From N. K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky (Broken Earth, Book 3), Chapter 12.

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From Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 3, “The Adventure of the Dancing Men”.

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From Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual (trans. David Bellos) Preamble.

(There are other images here and there elsewhere in the novel.)

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From J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 2.

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From Tristram Shandy, Book 9, Chapter 4.