“Reflections on how Jonathan Safran Foer writes”

Upon reading a certain passage from Foer’s “Everything Is Illuminated” I began to think about my own ways of making graphic design.

“….yes (dusk spills across the nightscape, the night sky blots up the darkness like a sponge, heads crane), yes (eyes close), please (lips part), yes. (The conductor drops his baton, his butter knife, his scalpel, his Torah pointer, the universe, blackness.)

He uses words to structure and communicate his ideas in such a beautiful way. There is something in the way he writes, the way he layers ideas, and the actual physical construction of sentence forms – that reminds me of layering visual elements to create a visual narrative.

…on time
His narrative becomes a deep deep space to venture into, rather than look at. It above all has a strong sense of temporality, of the story moving back and forth in time fluidly. Everything feels fluid in his writing – ideas bleed into others in a way that reminds me of one visual form bleeding into another. The connection between his ideas, the jumps he makes, for me have the texture and resonance of visual transitions – dark becoming light, type becoming image, sharpness becoming blurry.

…and on visual metaphor
His leap from one object to another reminds me of working with visual metaphor. One makes an object stand for a thing (an idea, a concept), but the physicality of the form of that object informs the concept it stands for. So if a solid letter O represents Othello, the actual visible components of that letter on the screen/page create new associations, the vertical bands of the O become bars, the negative space between the bars becomes a clear sky. The object begins to morph of its own free will. It designs its own plot, its own storyline, and its own world to inhabit.