Der Sturm vol. 10 no. 7, page 99
The pattern
This still is filed under Exhibit in the column.
Define
An image is dropped into the column of type so the reader meets picture and argument in one scan.
Mechanism
In-flow exhibit. The figure is not a separate see fig. 2. It starts the paragraph. Eye and mind start together.
Verdict
Long copy must show as well as tell: a product cutaway, a before/after, a map in the story.
Why it works
The comedy is built on register mismatch: the narrator uses the vocabulary of event logistics - the butcher is booked for half past six, the telephone is nearby, the doctor next door in case a spectator faints - to describe his own butchering. Schwitters then breaks the prose with bracketed intrusions lifted from advertising and devotional print ('Sunlight', 'Glaube, Liebe Hoffnung', 'Zeitschrift für Haus- und Grundbesitz'), so the page reads as a collage in running text. The layout reinforces the method: the same heavy bar and bold-sans head that separates poem from prose is the visual equivalent of the bracket, a hard cut between incompatible materials.
Steal this when
Steal the bracketed-intrusion device when you want to show how commercial language contaminates ordinary speech - drop real slogans, verbatim and unexplained, into the middle of a straight narrative. Steal the layout when a single page has to hold two different text forms without a page break.