Disaster dialogues: Word, image and the effective/ethical spaces of illustrated books

Subsequent to the events of 11 September 2001 both Jonathan Safran Foer's illustrated fiction novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Art Spiegelman's graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) attracted substantial criticism for their use of images to represent private responses to public catastrophe - particularly their use of images depicting falling bodies. With reference to Foer and Spiegelman's texts as exemplars, this paper investigates the illustrated book as a narrative form able to articulate the experience or witnessing of disaster via the creation of spaces (effective, ethical) between words and images. Such spaces are not only fundamental to the functionality of illustrated books, the 'closure' required by the reader in the act of interpreting these spaces is central to representing the 'unrepresentable' resultant from public instances of disaster.