Playing With Words: More on the Page as Tableau

I’ve kicked around the word ‘tableau’ in these posts but didn’t define it: it means a vivid arrangement or spread. Think of a mural, or a buffet, or even a store layout. The objective is to let you ‘take in’ the entire scene, and at the same time to ‘invite you in’ to explore further.

The page is a tableau, but not a very good one. The words themselves, left unaccompanied to their own devices, usually have to draw you in, which is why the cover art, and the first paragraph of a book, are so important. Some writers have decided the page should be more than a uniform, linear display of as much text as will fit. One of the first was Marshall McLuhan, who understood that the medium is the message. He must have driven his publishers mad with books full of pages like the one above, whose small print (written 40 years before Lakoff) reads:

Tom Peters’ ‘wow’ books take a similar approach, though, in my opinion, his layouts are more about getting attention and lack the aesthetics of McLuhan’s work (though, to be fair, McLuhan’s books featured a graphic designer and a ‘producer’ as ‘co-authors’):

Gotta love Hugh MacLeod, though. His profound sayings with accompanying sketches on the back of business cards are a brilliant idea:

The words are still the most important, but now the medium really is the message: the handwritten script drips with a kind of self-loathing offhandedness that Arial and Times New Roman just couldn’t put across. And while the sketches are usually abstract, they add profoundly to the tone of the message.

Betcha you’re having more fun reading this article than my usual posts, right? The graphics, the experimentation with different typefaces and scripts, the playfulness of the tableau, all make the content both richer and more interesting. They add emotion and context, and therefore value. Maybe that’s not fair (especially for those of us who aren’t artists), but it’s real.

There are other ways and reasons for making the page more than words in rows. Peter Senge with his systems thinking approach uses boxes and arrows with his words to convey the relationships between the concepts and content, in ways that words alone cannot:

Mindmaps, concept maps, and social network analyses do the same thing:

Mindmap, using FreeMind.

Concept map, using IHMC’s CMap tool.

Social networking map, from Entopia

And there are also, of course, timeline charts, process diagrams, and tables, which show words in different ‘organized’ ways, and even more sophisticated visualizations that carry tables a dimension further:

Visualization from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Poets have been using tableau layouts for centuries, like ee cummings

in Just-
spring       when the world is mud-
luscious the little lame baloonman 


whistles       far       and wee 


and eddyandbill come 
running from marbles and 
piracies and it's 
spring 


when the world is puddle-wonderful 


the queer 
old baloonman whistles 
far       and       wee 
and bettyandisbel come dancing 


from hop-scotch and jump-rope and 


it's 
spring 
and 
the 
goat-footed 


baloonMan       whistles 
far 
and 
wee

…and John Hollander

One could even consider conversations as oral word tableaux, with the words of each participant, coming from utterly different ‘places’ (different brains) interleaved in space and time, with so much of their meaning (body language, pheromones, tone of voice etc.) utterly lost in the transcription to the linear written page.

Take a look at these two page layouts, which are mostly text. See how much more the tableau conveys, how much more meaningful and expressive the tableau is, than the words alone could ever hope to be:

Page from an old MacIntosh Design Manual

Page from the new book Crows, by Candace Savage (my review coming shortly)

What am I getting at with all this? Two things, which I’ll present as a list, another form of word tableau:

1. We as writers need to liberate ourselves from the constraints of the page, which to some extent the scrolling screen has removed (though you’re kind of annoyed having to do so much scrolling to read this article, aren’t you?), and we need to open our imaginations to discover all the extra-verbal ways we can use the Internet medium to convey so much more than mere lines of words can — and, especially, convey emotion (anger, joy, play|ful|ness) to enrich what we write. Those who teach English and ‘creative writing’, are you listening?
2. We are too constrained by HTML. I appreciate the purpose of HTML — allowing people with different screen sizes, window sizes, fonts and resolutions to all read what we write, to make websites and weblogs legible. But right now if I want you to see my handwriting with scribbled circles and arrows, or an unusual script, or a word tableau that involves wildly different typefaces, sizes, colours, splashed across the screen with figures and halftones cutting across and underlying them like the Instruments page above, I have to use a graphic format instead of a text format, and that is extremely expensive, memory-wise, and the result is often illegible when I have to accommodate those with small-resolution screens by shrinking them to a maximum width of 500px. How can we fix this, so that my scanner becomes my composition device of choice, instead of my WYSIWYG editor?