Ironically, the man who correctly identifies the "strange, drawn-out cry" as a word is a kabbalist whose devotions transform truly meaningless sounds into "words" that remain unintelligible. Feinbroyt spends his days transcribing the incidental sounds of eating and digestion—such as "zhaloup," "gluk," and "grepts." He then meditates on these sound effects as mystical words that lead him to angelic visions. In a trance, "he ascends a luminous staircase emblazoned with strangely familiar words of no earthly language"—the aforementioned "zhaloup," "gluk," etc.—before reaching a curtain at the end of the seventh palace of the seventh heaven. On this curtain, a single "understandable word" is embroidered, "a crude, onomatopoeic representation of the eternal sound of relief": GREPTS.

Figure 7

Whereas the other heavenly "words" are written in English, "GREPTS" appears in both English and Yiddish. These panels [fig. 7; 33.7-8] mark the only occasion where Katchor couples a Yiddish word in Hebrew characters with its transcription into English. Up to now, "grepts" has only been seen in English transcription, appearing in word balloons as an onomatopoeic sound effect on the order of the ad hoc and meaningless "zhaloup" and "choup." But the elevation of "grepts" with Yiddish spelling reminds us that the narration describes it as the "one understandable word" in heaven, and in fact it is not mere noise but an actual word, albeit imitative: the Yiddish word meaning "belch."

The label on the doorway to heaven's inner sanctum bears a word that denotes a nonlinguistic utterance, and that word itself approximates the sound of a belch. indeed, the earlier appearance of "grepts" not as a word but as a sound effect within a bubble shows how comics are peculiarly effective in expressing nonlinguistic sounds in an intelligible way. The dramatic context of seeing a man eat an oyster tells us that a word balloon reading "zhaloup" designates the sound of his slurping. Purely textual words can also represent onomatopoeic sounds, but they'd need glossing: a word such as "grepts" or "zhaloup" would be incomprehensible in a poem or short story unless explained with a phrase such as "he said" or "she belched" or "he gurgled." Such visual media as theater and film can simply show a person belching, but to hear an actor emit a grunt in a play or movie is not to hear a sound that we interpret as a word: a grunt or belch sounds like a grunt or belch, and it is not be seen as an utterance that can be transcribed. The visual character of comics can provide the dramatic background that explains a sound as a belch or grunt, while the textual aspect renders all such sounds as words, represented by letters.  continue...