Second Edition of Five Wounds

My first novel, Five Wounds, a dark fantasy created in collaboration with the illustrator Dan Hallett, was originally published in Australia in 2010 by Allen & Unwin. That edition is now out of print, and rights have reverted to me, so I have prepared an updated second edition, with many improvements. I'll shortly make this second edition available as a free pdf download, or as a print-on-demand paperback (details to follow). 

Here's a synopsis and some quotations from reviews of the first edition:

Shortlisted for an Aurealis Award 

Surreal, darkly beautiful, and unsettling, this richly illustrated novel is by turns hilarious and horrific, grotesque and tender. 

A cruel and arbitrary world, where disturbing lapses in logic are commonplace. A city built on water. Five people, isolated from those around them, but mysteriously connected to one another. 

Gabriella is a mutilated angel, haunted by her inability to interpret prophecies. Cur is the rabid leader of a sect of dogs, desperate to escape his inheritance. Cuckoo is a gambler with a wax face, determined to find a fixed identity before his luck runs out. Magpie is a thief in search of the perfect photographic subject, terrified of going blind. Crow is a leper trying to distil the essence of death as an antidote to dying. 

Everyone’s connected,’ Gabriella said. ‘You, me, Cur, Crow, Magpie.’ She ticked the names off. 

    ‘Five fingers,’ Cuckoo said, watching her hand. 

    Gabriella picked up the theme. ‘Five wounds.’ 

    ‘Five wild cards,’ returned Cuckoo. 

    ‘Or five marked cards. Someone’s playing games with us.’ 

At the end of the game, who wins and who loses? Who escapes their fate, and who fulfils it? 

Reviews for the First Edition:

Five Wounds … is like Christmas for book nerds. It’s like Christmas in July and regular Christmas combined, that’s how good it is. … The five senses are a common theme in Five Wounds and it seems fitting then, that it appeals to the senses in such detail. I have literally tried everything short of licking the book. 

Dave Drayton, Vibewire 

The stories and studies of these characters intertwine with increasing intricacy as the novel builds to an immensely exciting, haunting, heartbreaking and ultimately satisfying conclusion. The depiction of this alternative Venice is dreamy and surreal, but the author paints a world that feels completely authentic. The illuminations by Dan Hallett are a joy, and bring a lot to the book. Sometimes striking and colourful, and at other times comical and cartoonish, they reinforce the idea that this is a fairy tale for grown-ups. … All in all, a very handsome book and a story that is symphonic in its poetry, breadth and cohesion. It is tempting to think that the author lives by the same motto as one of his characters; "Either Ceasar, or nothing." 

James Scott, The Spit Press 

One of the strangest books I've come across recently is the peculiar and wonderful Five Wounds, by the writer Jonathan Walker and the artist Dan Hallett (and designed by Zoe Sadokierski). Any attempt to categorise it is doomed to failure, but as a starting point it can best be described as an illustrated novel informed by the typographic structures of the King James Bible and inflected with various postmodern antics touches. And it has a talking dog. I've never read anything else quite like it. 

Caustic Cover Critic 

The story itself is a beautifully written and illustrated journey, but for me what made the novel truly ‘illuminated’ was the way in which the book refused to settle. Five Wounds is no summer beach distraction, it’s an intensely involved reading experience. For me the journey of reading the book was one of active problem-solving and code-breaking, … [For] those who will take its challenge the book is a truly unique project, and its reading reaps truly unique rewards. It is a beautiful and worthy piece of art, and with each stripping back, the heart of its mystery becomes more and more elusive, and yet more and more meaningful. Perhaps I will never uncover all of its secrets, but I have nonetheless thoroughly enjoyed the journey. 

Lyndon Riggall, Literary Minded 

Five Wounds’s story would stand proud in any format, but the combination of Walker’s rich cityscape and Hallett’s spidery imagery results in something beyond a conventional book with superfluous pictures. Text and imagery feed off one another like Siamese twins, to the extent that it’s difficult to imagine either element surviving if separated. … whether you find greater meanings bellow its soiled surface or reach Walker’s dual endings scratching your head, Five Wounds: An illuminated Novel remains immersive, satisfying and consistently inventive. 

9/10, Carl Doherty, Shelf Abuse 

Five Wounds is inspired by Jeanette Winterson's The Passion, Italo Calvino's versions of Italian folk tales, the history of Venice, the Bible, and the films of Terry Gilliam, especially Jabberwocky (1977). The last is a very good approximation of my novel's tone, approach and aesthetic.  

When the book first came out, I posted a lot of related discussion on this blog. Because I've simplified the design for the second edition, some of that discussion needed updating to avoid confusion. I've amended the most important posts as required, and reposted them all in succession below.

Five Wounds: Video Trailer

Five Wounds Trailer from Jon Walker on Vimeo.

The video above is an extremely abstract trailer for my novel Five Wounds. It consists of a sequence of twenty short phrases, which are displayed via twenty successive screens. Each screen uses two colours, out of a total of five: one for the text, and one for the background. In the book, and thus in the trailer, each of these five colours represents one of the five protagonists: blue for Gabriella; red for Cur; black for Cuckoo; silver for Magpie; gold for Crow. 

Amateur statisticians may note when viewing these screens that the entire sequence represents every single possible combination of two of the five colours (excluding those combinations in which the same colour appears twice). The first few screens run through these combinations according to the order that they appear in the Five Wounds hand, after which the sequence progresses systematically. The lettering on each successive screen is in the same colour that appeared as the background in the previous screen. The logic of this progression is therefore not entirely dissimilar to the terza rima rhyme scheme used by Dante, which I described in a previous post. 

The entire sequence of twenty screens is as follows: 

1. Blue text on a red background: Get out while you still can. 

2. Red on black: Don’t turn back. 

3. Black on silver: You have to choose. 

4. Silver on gold: Don’t move. 

5. Gold on blue: You can’t win. 

6. Blue on black: Run faster. 

7. Black on red: I can’t keep up. 

8. Red on blue: He’s right behind you. 

9. Blue on silver: I don’t understand. 

10. Silver on red: It’s your funeral. 

11. Red on gold: It’s eating me up. 

12. Gold on silver: I’m not your friend. 

13. Silver on blue: Cut it off. 

14. Blue on gold: I’m not like you. 

15. Gold on red: Give up. 

16. Red on silver: Dust to dust. 

17. Silver on black: No-one will help you. 

18. Black on gold: I’m not afraid. 

19. Gold on black: Don’t scream. 

20. Black on blue: Bet everything. 

These short phrases - mottos or slogans - are rather banal when taken individually, since they are entirely without narrative context here, and they also use a restricted vocabulary, which is deliberately inexpressive. Individually, they are flat and affectless; but collectively they should give a sense of increasing menace and claustrophobia. This echoes the style of the book, which similarly lapses into flat, affectless tones during the most violent or disturbing episodes. 

The sequence itself is also a coded message. Each screen represents one of the five protagonists 'talking' to one of the other five, and, in doing so, revealing the way in which they understand their relationship to that other person. So the first screen, which says 'Get out while you still can', in blue letters on a red background, represents Gabriella talking to Cur; the second screen, 'Don't turn back', in red letters on a black background, represents Cur talking to Cuckoo; and so on, until the final screen, 'Bet everything', in black letters on a blue background, which represents Cuckoo talking to Gabriella. Like the heraldic coats-of-arms at the beginning of Five Wounds, the sequence is therefore a coded map of the book's contents. 

The schematic nature of this exercise caused some problems. The sequence is in part derived from heraldry, but it ignores the heraldic 'rule of tincture', which forbids placing, for example, gold against silver, because with this and similar combinations it is difficult to distinguish the foreground from the background. However, since the sequence here must by definition include every possible combination of two of the five colours, it follows that it must break this rule. Moreover, the cross-hatched patterns under the pigments sometimes 'interfere' with the letter forms, making it difficult to read the text. The (imperfect) solution to this problem was to display the text for each screen in two states: first in empty white, with the letters reversed-out, and then in the relevant tincture, on the theory that at least one of these two states would be legible. It's not perfect, aesthetically, because of the legibility issue (compounded in this version by a noticeable image deterioration). 

Nonetheless, the sequence gives a flavour of Five Wounds, which also includes puzzles, riddles and allusions. Both the trailer and the book use text visually, as an element in the design, and both are structured according to hidden principles. But the trailer probably works better as commentary for those who have already seen the book than as an introduction for neophytes. 

[Video credits: Painted textures by Dan Hallett; video created by Sarah Lyttle and Adam Hinshaw; concept and art direction by Jonathan Walker. Thanks to Peter Newman for permission to use an edited extract of one of his compositions as the soundtrack.]

Colour in Five Wounds

‘Painters complain, art historians complain, that everyone these days sees only transparencies, which are the colours of light, not the colours of pigment. And so they get the wrong ideas, they see wrong, these people say. I say, this is new, it exists, we all see this light – we can learn from it – we could even learn to paint things to be transparent – ’
A. S. Byatt, Babel Tower, p. 227

In this excerpt from Babel Tower, the painter Desmond Bull is talking about the effect on his students of encountering oil paintings only via photographic reproductions, which take the form of projected colour transparencies: as if the original canvas had been miraculously transformed into stained glass. The setting for this part of Byatt’s novel is an art school in the late 1960s, so it is probably necessary to point out that the transparencies in question were analogue slides: i.e. positive colour images approximately 35mm by 24 mm on a transparent celluloid base, which were backlit by a projector to be displayed at enormous magnification on a white screen. The effect is similar to digital Powerpoint projection but the technology is quite different.

Bull’s remarks relate to a basic distinction in optics between reflection and transmission: between looking at light bouncing off an opaque surface, and looking at light passing through a transparent surface. An image perceived via transmission - e.g. a colour slide - will always seem more intense, even though it is also, in a sense, more immaterial than an image perceived via reflection - e.g. a painting on canvas. In analogue black-and-white photography, negatives and prints are similarly distinguished. It is notoriously difficult to preserve all the information from a negative in a print, not only because of chemical differences between celluloid and paper, but also because a negative is perceived via light transmission through a transparent celluloid base, and a print is perceived via reflection off an opaque white base.

So the translation from a negative to a print always involves a loss of information; conversely, as Bull points out, the translation from an opaque painting on a canvas to a transparent projection on a positive colour slide arguably adds something that cannot be found in the original. According to the guardians of art historical tradition, it is therefore a bad or garbled translation, which misrepresents the original. Bull disagrees: or rather, he argues that this misrepresentation has interesting consequences.

The translation from paintings to photographic reproductions not only means changing from reflection to transmission. It also involves converting unique, individual pigments into mathematical combinations of cyan/magenta/yellow. Colour photographs are made up of three layers (these are separate emulsions in a colour slide), which are sensitised to different wavelengths of light, and the combination of these three layers creates all the hues in the final image.

The use of colour in Five Wounds is mainly confined to the novel's heraldic coats-of-arms, in which the various tinctures stand for the book's protagonists: blue for Gabriella; red for Cur; black for Cuckoo; silver for Magpie; gold for Crow. However, colour is also used in a few other illustrations: notably the Synesthetic Diptych (above), which I have discussed before (including an explanation of how its composition is based on a section of Tintoretto's Paradise). Here I want to think more about how colour works in this illustration.

The pigments used in the original painting by Tintoretto, with their highly specific and heterogeneous ingredients (some of which are indicated in the written description of the painting in the novel), and with their own chemical histories, are transformed for the purposes of the visual reproduction in Five Wounds, which restricts itself to the heraldic tinctures of blue, red, black, silver and gold. Is this transformation analogous to the combination of dyes on a colour slide?

In the language of heraldry, it is only the idea of ‘red’ that counts, and not the particular pigment that embodies that idea. As in the passage from oil painting to projected slide, colour therefore becomes an entirely abstract category in heraldry, almost equivalent to number in mathematics, or a phoneme in linguistics (or a verse in the Bible?): an atomic element that cannot be subdivided or analysed further.

So in fact the analogy is not quite right. The conversion of any hue or pigment into a combination of constituent CMY elements in a photographic reproduction is not consistent with the conception of colour in heraldry, in which any given tincture cannot be expressed in terms other than itself, and also cannot be mixed with any of the other tinctures.

In keeping with this conceptual singularity, when the various tinctures are combined in a heraldic shield, they are never ‘mixed’ like paints on a palette, or like the dye layers that make up a colour slide: rather, their combination, in, for example, a division of the field, is a matter of juxtaposing independent segments, all of which by definition contain only a single tincture (as in a painting-by-numbers exercise). In any given shield, the constituent tinctures are therefore articulated like words in a sentence. The borders between them remain inviolable conceptually, even when (as in the heraldic shields Dan created for Five Wounds), the actual paint overruns the indicated borders.

And so to return to the written description of Tintoretto's Paradise in Five Wounds, Cur, standing before that painting the Ducal Palace, actually experiences it in a manner that is opposed to colour theory in both its photographic and its heraldic versions. For Cur, there is no absolute separation between pigments; but also, things are identifiable in terms of their history and their usage as well as their abstract, theoretical relations to other things. To return to the analogy with language, one might say that, while both photography and heraldry are interested exclusively in how colours may be combined within a closed system, Cur is interested in the etymology of colours (their origins and derivations), but also in the ways in which new combinations of pigments can generate new meanings.

The visual translation of Cur’s experience in the Synaesthetic Paradise diptych introduces these various ideas on colour theory into the subtext of the image, even though they are alien to Cur’s own way of thinking, because these theories place Cur’s experiences within the broader conceptual universe of the novel: that is, the images do not in fact reproduce Cur's experience so much as they relate it to that of the other four protagonists in the novel, who are represented in the diptych not only by their likenesses (which substitute for the four evangelists and Christ in the original painting) but by their associated heraldic tinctures.

I am not sure that any of this makes sense, but it all relates to the idea of translation. To the extent that certain nuances or concepts may be ‘lost in translation’, other nuances or concepts may be added, as Desmond Bull suggests. The Synaesthetic Paradise diptych translates both the original painting by Tintoretto and the written description of its constituent pigments on pp. 28-29 into its own visual idiom: one that draws on heraldry and photography as well as on painting. In doing so, it both removes aspects of the original painting and adds elements that are not in the original; similarly, it both reinterprets and adds to Cur’s experience of the painting (as described in the text) by superimposing several entirely different conceptions of colour onto it.

To summarise, the various conceptions of colour at play in the Synaesthetic Paradise are:

1) Colour as the product of the chemical properties of particular pigments. This conception underlies the written description, in which Cur perceives colour in terms of the smells of these pigments rather than their appearance.

2) Colour analysed in terms of optics and physics as the product of particular combinations of primary colours (cyan. magenta, yellow) or wavelengths of light along a spectrum. This conception of colour remains implicit in Five Wounds, in which the only available photographic technology is that of daguerreotypes, which are purely monochromatic images. However, Cur’s character is always opposed to / linked to that of Magpie, who is the novel’s daguerreotypist, so Cur's experience of the painting therefore implicitly invokes an opposed possible photographic reading of its contents.

3) Colour as a grammatical element within a semiotic system: i.e. heraldry. Individual colours therefore have no positive meaning, but instead only acquire meaning in combination with other colours, and only when they are articulated into grammatical statements (i.e. heraldic coats-of-arms). In terms of this system, the Synaesthetic Paradise is nonsensical: a gobbledy-gook visual statement that uses the heraldic tinctures, but fails to articulate them in any coherent or meaningful way, like a word salad. In that sense, it does correspond directly to Cur's initial impression of the picture.

4) Colour as one term in a binary opposition, which in this case is that proposed by Giorgio Vasari’s theory of art, which opposes Florentine disegno to Venetian colore: rational form to sensual content. This opposition corresponds to several other analogous binary oppositions, all of which can be used to organise elements within Five Wounds. Thus: disegno is to colore as line is to tone; as reason is to the senses; as theory is to data; as transcendence is to immanence; as the picture space is to the picture plane; etc.

The written description of the Paradise involves conception 1, and, implicitly, conception 4 (hence the accompanying running head is COLORE); the visual translation of this description into the Synaesthetic Paradise diptych involves conceptions 3, 4, and, implicitly and of necessity (since the book was actually printed using a CMYK process), conception 2.

Guest Post for the 'Big Idea' Feature at Whatever

I wrote a guest post for the 'Big Idea' feature at John Scalzi's popular Whatever blog in 2011. It is on the advantages of illustrated books as a format, and it includes some detailed discussion of the 'Synaesthetic Paradise' diptych from Five Wounds, which I use as a case study to explain the relationship between text and image in the novel. I'm drawing attention to this guest post again here, because it builds on my posts about Tintoretto and Andrei Rublev, which are immediately below.

Below is an excerpt from the post at Whatever:  

According to an old set of critical prejudices, the adult pleasures of true literature are entirely separate from the infantile sugar rush of pictures, and the presence of the latter in a book is therefore a kind of an implicit admission of failure on the writer’s part. The very word ‘illustration’ is part of the problem here, since it implies redundancy and subordination. Illustrations understood in this pejorative sense are somehow both more direct and more naïve than language. They cannot be paraphrased, but nor can they dissemble. They do not require interpretation, and they cannot contain a subtext. They are, by definition, un-literary.

Inspirations: Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky

 

The clip above includes (from about 00:45) the final sequence in Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky, a (very) unorthodox biographical film about a fifteenth-century monk and icon painter in Russia. The action of the film directly dramatises selected scenes from Rublev's life in black-and-white, but after the action concludes, we enter this colour sequence, which consists of a series of slow tracking shots (interspersed with equally slow zooms and / or push-ins) over the painted surface of Rublev's surviving icons. This method of animating static paintings has become a cliche in TV documentaries about art, and Tarkovsky's production notes from 1962 indicate that it was already established as a convention even then.

In our film there will not be a single shot of Rublev painting his icons. He will simply live, and he won't even be present on-screen in all episodes. And the last part of the film (in colour) will be solely devoted to Rublev's icons. We will show them in detail (as in a popular scientific film). The on-screen demonstration of the icon will be accompanied by the same musical theme which sounded in the episode of Rublev's life corresponding to the time during which the icon was conceived [quotation taken from Robert Bird, Andrei Rublev, p. 37].

In the colour sequence, the music fills the entire soundtrack and thereby assumes an importance that recalls the ending of Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped: i.e. it seems to signal transcedence even as it literally emphasises immanence and materiality (the surface of the painting).

Robert Bird describes the significance of the colour coda to Andrei Rublev in the following terms (p. 10):

[It] consummates the halting narrative, retrospectively revealing its underlying logic and transforming its deep textures into glorious surfaces. However, the icon display also suspends the complex weave of dialogue, music and ambient sound in a pious supplication. In effect, it dissolves the film's heavy temporality in its eternal patterns, as if Tarkovsky was ceding authorship to St Andrei Rublev. Several of Tarkovsky's subsequent films end in a similar confusion of temporal and spatial planes, a feature which irks some viewers as an 'easy transcendence' of the characters' otherwise torturous progression across the dolorous earth. However, by extending his searching gaze into the transcendent plane, Tarkovsky is also raising the stakes of his aesthetic gamble. Instead of the certainty of faith, he contemplates the possibility that there can be no true ending, possibly no true story at all, under the weight of time [Bird, Andrei Rublev, p. 10].

I first saw Andrei Rublev in about 1991. Its coda had a transfixing effect on me, and I have spent the twenty years since trying to re-enact this effect in one way or another. One of the immediate, enabling ideas it seemed to suggest was that the dialectic of realism vs. abstraction was a question solely of the scale of observation: that is, any image becomes abstract if you zoom in close enough; and any apparently flat surface is revealed to be sculpted if you blow it up large enough. I have therefore engaged in numerous attempts to photograph the surface of historical paintings in microscopic detail. Below are two attempts at this: close-ups of the surface of paintings from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, which are part of icon-like renditions of gold fabrics, in which imprinted abstract patterns achieve their effect by textural means.

In Five Wounds, Dan and I do something similar by isolating a fragment of Tintoretto's Paradise, and then translating it into a collage of abstract shapes of different colours, which are juxtaposed as if in an insane painting-by-numbers exercise. This exercise combines the literal and abstract within the same scale of representation: i.e. by means of a mosaic effect, it combines the perspective of the 'establishing shot', which shows the whole painting, with the isolation of particular details or fragments that characterises the close-up.

In the endpapers of the first edition of Five Wounds, this manipulated visual citation from Tintoretto was rendered even more abstract by being presented as a blown-up fragment of a fragment, thus:

Many icons are literally mosaics of course, and Tarkovsky compared the unusual structure of Andrei Rublev to that of a mosaic:

You can stick your nose into some fragment, beat it with your fist, and scream: 'Why is it black here? It shouldn't be black here! I don't like to look at black!' But you have to look at a mosaic from afar and on the whole, and if you change one colour the whole thing falls apart [quoted in Bird, Andrei Rublev, p. 38].

The mosaic is an ancient pictorial technique, but the ending of Andrei Rublev is - despite its eschewal of dramatisation and mise-en-scene - intrinsically cinematic, or rather, photographic, because slow-motion and the close-up are both quintessentially photographic effects, which initiated a new way of looking at the world by giving us access to what Walter Benjamin called the optical unconscious. Photography also revolutionised the way we think about paintings, not only by making it easy to reproduce them, but also by making it easy to isolate details from them (and even, via X-rays, to analyse their constituent elements).

Tintoretto's Paradise

The version of Paradise that Tintoretto painted for the Ducal Palace in Venice in 1592 is reproduced above. It is referred to several times in the text of Five Wounds (although I never name the artist in the novel). It is also quoted visually in a diptych on pages 28-29. In the standard scholarly biography of Tintoretto, by Eric Newton, there is a long passage on the painting, which I sent to Dan as reference material. Starting on p. 198, this passage reads as follows.

The finished painting is, as it were, a colossal three-dimensional wall-paper, a vast pattern representing space itself, marked out in dark patches, between which one’s eye [199] seems to penetrate into a radiant, crowded infinity, as though innumerable groups and clusters of figures had arranged themselves like galactic systems one behind the other in the interstellar void.

At first glance this absence of formalized planes and, in particular, the lack of a base with a firmly established foreground, confuse and bewilder the eye, but gradually the brave pattern, with the noble silhouettes of Christ and the Virgin as its climax, asserts itself. One begins to see it as the only possible solution to the problem. .... The finished painting is ... governed by none of the normal optical laws. The effect is not of standing in this world and gazing into the remote distances of the next but of seeing through a glass wall into a celestial aquarium in which both light and distance mean nothing. Single figures and groups of figures float through this supernatural ether, towards or away from the glass wall, in a ceaseless rhythmic movement, not under the spell of gravity but in obedience to the magnetism that radiates from Christ and the Virgin who bend gently towards each other above them. The gaps between them are not areas of radiance but glimpses of interstellar space, and that space is not so much occupied by the myriads of the blessed as composed of them. The radiance in which they have their being has become interchangeable with their being itself. The world of visual experience with its vocabulary of ‘near,’ ‘far,’ ‘upper,’ ‘lower,’ ‘towards,’ ‘away from,’ no longer exists. This, in purely practical terms, gives Tintoretto the immense advantage of being able to enlarge or diminish any figure at will without contradicting the laws of perspective; it retains the medieval system of scale by importance without abandoning the Renaissance system of scale by distance.

Newton’s insistence on seeing the Paradise as the crowning achievement of Tintoretto’s career (he died in 1594) seems misguided, given that the painting is now usually attributed jointly to Tintoretto’s son Domenico, a much inferior artist, and to the workshop. With this revised attribution in mind, the peculiar composition seems less the result of unconventional artistic genius and more like incompetence, but this illustrates a more general point about the nature of interpretation, which is always the result of a series of enabling preconceptions. As Gabriella concludes in Five Wounds, an illegible message was easier to transcribe if one already had some idea of what it might say.

Newton starts with the presumption that the painting is by Tintoretto, and Newton knows that Tintoretto is a genius. Everything in his account follows from that basic premise. My own, admittedly uninformed, first impression was that it was rather turgid, whoever painted it, but that makes Newton's achivement in this passage even more impressive. It is a brilliant piece of creative writing, insofar as it succeeds in reinscribing this apparently mediocre work as a masterpiece. Even so, Newton's approach seems rather old-fashioned now (the biography was published in 1952), and not only because it is based on obsolete research.

Newton is a late descendant of a tradition of conoisseurship that goes back to Giorgio Vasari, who founded art criticism as an academic discipline in the sixteenth century, and in the process suggested what it is that critics should be doing. Vasari’s purpose was three-fold: to provide clear descriptions of paintings that, in an age before photographic reproduction, could often only be viewed in situ; to establish a set of criteria by which one could distinguish great painting from good, and good from bad; and to establish a canon of painters who, collectively, embodied those criteria.

Vasari was perhaps the first major theorist of Western art, but one of the first important art critics in the same tradition was Pietro Aretino, whose literary output was far more varied and whose ideas on art were far less systematic, but whose letters and sonnets about Titian helped to establish the latter as one of the most successful painters in Europe in the middle of the sixteenth century. For example, Aretino described Titian’s portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino (above), painted c. 1536-8, as follows.

The union of colours laid in by Titian’s brush expresses, besides the concord that reigns in Eleonora, her gentle spirit. Modesty [modestia] is seated with her in an attitude of humility, purity resides in her dress, consciousness of her virtue [vergogna] veils and honours her breast and hair. Love fixes on her his lordly glance. Chastity and beauty, eternal enemies, are in her likeness and between her eyelashes the throne of the Graces is seen.

The flattery is obviously aimed at Eleonora as well as Titian, but its effect depends on the assumption that Titian’s painting displays her character rather than merely representing her appearance. According to Aretino, the painting opens a window into Eleonora's soul. Eleonora, the painting, Aretino's description: each of these things is, in some sense, identical with the others. There is no mediation. Everything is transparent.

Aretino claims to be ‘reading’ the portrait, but what he’s actually doing is interpreting it, and, as with Newton's description of the Paradise, reinscribing it: that is, writing meaning over it. I defy anyone to look at this picture unprepared and say, ‘I see the concord that reigns in Eleonora, her modesty, purity, etc., etc’. Aretino is trying to influence the way we read the portrait by annotating it, but at the same time insisting that his annotations add nothing that is not already there.

One way of clarifying this problem is to reverse the terms of the relation between word and image. Would someone who only had Aretino’s description of Titian’s portrait – or Newton’s description of Tintoretto’s Paradise – be able to visualise the paintings in question accurately on the basis of the description alone? The answer is surely, ‘No’.

I am interested in this question for practical reasons, because my collaboration with Dan involved writing descriptions of pictures that did not yet exist, which Dan then used to bring these potential pictures into actuality. In this case, the description generated the picture, rather than the other way round, but that actually makes the role of interpretation more explicit. Dan’s illustrations were always a loose translation of my instructions, inevitably, because they were rendered in a different medium by a different process and via a different sensibility. They always added something to the written description, no matter how exhaustive my instructions aspired to be. So I could never predict what they would look like.

One might argue that Dan was doing the same thing that Newton and Aretino were, but in reverse. I think it's a bit more complicated than that. We may see Tintoretto's and Titian's paintings in a new light as a result of their efforts, but Newton and Aretino are not actually attempting to open a conversation: rather, they aim to have the last word. The painter, or rather the painting, has no right of reply. In the classic version of connoisseurship, the definitive interpretive act is an attribution: 'Yes, this painting is an authentic Tintoretto'. But the authority of that attribution derives not from Tintoretto himself, who lacks the insight to understand his own talent (Tintoretto does not know what it is that makes him Tintoretto), but from the disinterested mind of the connoisseur.

What I was doing, by contrast, was inviting Dan to alter the meaning of my work, to divide the responsibilities of authorship with me (quite literally in the case of Five Wounds).

Five Wounds: The Art of Grief

[N. B. When I originally wrote this post, the essay referred to below was available online, but I have since removed it.]

Five Wounds is a parable as well as a fairy tale. Throughout, it refers to an invisible, suppressed source: ‘The Art of Grief', an abandoned essay on the deaths of my parents, but this essay is never acknowledged directly within the novel.

‘The Art of Grief’ is a key, which unlocks hidden meanings in Five Wounds. However, the relationship between the two texts is more complex than that of a riddle to its solution or a joke to its punch line, because Five Wounds has an independent life of its own. Its characters act according to their own natures, and make their own choices. They are not mere ciphers, condemned to act out episodes of my biography in a disguised, pathological form. The characters may be fantastic, but they are real within their own world, even when they unknowingly refer to events beyond its borders. 

In this case, then, one text does not solve the other. Rather, Five Wounds places stolen fragments of ‘The Art of Grief’ in a new setting, which transforms their meaning, as the Venetians studded the façade of the church of San Marco with pieces of marble looted from Constantinople. Here, however, the arrangement is reversed. It is not the loot that shines brightly, but the container, within which the quotations are safely hidden away, like bones in a reliquary.

Inspirations: Gerry Anderson

Above is the title sequences to Thunderbirds (1965-66), one of many shows created by Gerry Anderson, working with his then-wife Sylvia Anderson. Most of their programmes involved elements of science-fiction, and were ‘Filmed in Supermarionation’, as the inventive title cards put it. In other words, they featured puppets and miniature models rather than actors on full-scale sets. Puppets were both cheaper and easier to direct than actual human beings. Unfortunately, they were also far less expressive, a limitation that Anderson tried to overcome by creating more and more ‘realistic’ facial features and bodily proportions as his career progressed, with mixed results. Ironically, greater verisimilitude meant less mobility, and so the most detailed puppets also had the clumsiest movements.

Of course, no-one watched Gerry Anderson’s programmes for emotional catharsis. In most cases, the rudimentary and highly repetitive storylines were obviously pretexts for the special effects sequences, which involved intricately-designed futuristic vehicles (rockets, aeroplanes, spacecraft, submarines), and lots of explosions. The most characteristic setpiece in any Anderson series was the sequence in which pilots were delivered (usually via tubes or hydraulic chairs) to their waiting vehicles, followed by a complicated lift-off protocol. Below is the title sequence from Stingray (1964), which is exemplary in this regard. Indeed, the title sequence of an Anderson show is usually the most dramatic and effective statement of the show's themes. It often features flash-cut excerpts of the episode to come (a device borrowed recently by Battlestar Galactica), and it always has an extremely catchy theme tune.



In most cases, the characters in an Anderson show were members of a quasi-military organisation with a ludicrous acronym and an entirely abstract structure, most notably the colour coded SPECTRUM agents in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, in which the titular protagonist was aided in his struggle with the titular alien antagonists (and their possessed factotum Captain Black) by agents such as Captain Blue, Lieutenant Green and Colonel White.

Less obviously schematic, but along the same lines, was the distribution of the various Tracy brothers (Scott, Virgil, Alan, Gordon and John) among the consecutively numbered Thunderbirds in the show of the same name, in which they were in effect extensions of the craft that they piloted, or at least they were only ever distinguished in terms of the different functions assigned to the various Thunderbirds. These latter were all vehicles organised under the umbrella of the secret philanthropic organisation, International Rescue, which operated from a disguised island headquarters, under the direction of the Tracy brothers’ father, Jeff.

The obvious absurdity of these various premises (I have not even mentioned Captain Scarlet’s indestructibility, which severely limited dramatic tension in his adventures) did not affect their popularity, which derived in part from their effectiveness as early examples of what is now sometimes described as '360 degree marketing': meaning, in this case, that the programmes were accompanied by a multiplicity of associated toys, which ultimately derived their justification from the original television narrative(s), but which could also be used to create quite different narratives in the heads of consumers at home.

The most famous example of this kind of cross-platform marketing is the Star Wars universe, but the closest recent equivalent to the spirit of Anderson’s output is something like Pixar’s Toy Story, in which the synergy between the films and the related products is built into the premise on which the fictional world rests, since the characters are all toys, whose appearance can therefore be duplicated exactly by toy manufacturers.

Toy Story is (much) better written than Anderson’s work, but his programmes are better designed, and the worlds they depict are three-dimensional, even if they are miniaturised. Indeed, every aspect of their production – sets, objects, vehicles, costumes – is remarkably coherent. This unity is only emphasised by the literally wooden acting, which adds to the impression of an entirely self-contained fictional environment, but the production design remains striking even in the live-action successors to Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet: UFO (1969-70) and Space 1999 (1975-77). And since all the futuristic vehicles were models, they, like the characters of Toy Story, were relatively easy to duplicate as die-cast metal toys.

Above are the toy versions of the Spectrum Patrol Car and the Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle from Captain Scarlet, made by Dinky, in whose catalogues they joined versions of British Leyland cars and other tediously mundane vehicles. The Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds toys were more exciting, not only because of their ready-made backstories, but because they incorporated spring-loaded weapons and other detachable gadgetry. Their only obvious competition at the time in this regard was from the Dinky versions of various James Bond cars, such as the Aston Martin with ejector seat and retractable machine guns, originally from Goldfinger. Models that were too delicate or complicated to cast in metal – such as the Angel interceptors from Captain Scarlet – were instead sold as plastic model kits, which were assembled and painted at home. These were produced by Airfix. They were less robust than Dinky toys, but they afforded the additional pleasure of participating in their process of their recreation.

In many of Anderson’s programmes, the original narrative therefore served as a set of instructions for how to play with the toys, but this strategy can only work when the template provided by the programme is as generic as possible. Every episode of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet is more or less interchangeable with every other episode: the former always features a daring rescue in the face of an imminent disaster (often the result of sabotage), while the latter always involves a race to foil the latest Mysteron conspiracy against Earth (which the Mysterons always announced helpfully at the beginning of the episode), usually culminating in some new test of the limits of Captain Scarlet’s indestructibility.

One might describe this process as quintessentially postmodern, since it invites the reader / viewer to participate directly in the story, or rather to invent new variations upon simple story types, which are, in another sense of the word, ‘modelled’ by individual episodes. It is not, however, a new idea. A similar process is perhaps implied in the various reiterations of story cycles like the Arthurian and Grail legends, which the original listeners were encouraged to internalise and imitate in their own behaviour.

My novel Five Wounds shares a tendency towards highly schematic organisation with Gerry Anderson’s work, notably in its application of colour coding to the five protagonists, who are also puppets, in the metaphorical sense that their fates are overdetermined. They are at the mercy of their allotted role in the story structure: that is, at the mercy of forces external to their own nature. Indeed, the idea of the miniature, along with the related ideas of the doll and the automaton (both closely related to the puppet), all suggest a world that is simultaneously hyperreal, in its use of precise detail (as in the production design of Anderson's shows), and weirdly artificial, in its recourse to caricature (as in Anderson's use of puppets).

I doubt that anyone has ever described Anderson’s work as uncanny before, but that is what this combination of elements suggests.

Five Wounds: Card Games, Part 2

 

[Discussion continues from the previous post:]

One of the protagonists of Five Wounds is a card player: Cuckoo (above). In a crucial chapter of the book, he explains his theory about the iconography of a specific card in the Tarot pack: trump number 1, ‘The Bagatto’, a name of uncertain origin which is usually (mis)translated into English as ‘The Magician’. The Bagatto, almost uniquely, also has a recurrent and unusual role in game play, in that it is a card to which a high number of points are assigned in the count at the end of each hand, even though it is the lowest ranking Trump card. Cuckoo has a theory on how this role might, pace Michael Dummett, relate to the card’s name and iconography, a theory that is (as far as I know) original, i.e. I’m pretty sure that I invented it. You’ll have to read the novel to find out more, but in that context the point of the digression is that Cuckoo’s theory about the Bagatto offers a commentary on his relationship with his wife Gabriella, to whom he is speaking.

In the early versions of Five Wounds, I specified Cuckoo’s favourite card game as Mitigati, and I described the basic structure of its rules. Mitigati is a Piedmontese game played with a Tarot pack, the rules of which were first described in print by Dummett. Mitigati shares with many other Italian card games a fiendishly elegant scoring structure, in which players are assigned a score at the end of each hand in terms of their deviation from a mathematically average performance. In Mitigati, there are 129 points at stake in each hand, which means that, since there are always three players, the average score for each player in each hand is 43.

How does this work? Let's consider a hypothetical hand, in which player 1 wins cards that add up to 73 points, and player 2 gains an exactly average total of 43; by definition, player 3 must therefore have gained 13 points. The three scores for that hand are then calculated by subtracting 43 from the number of points gained by each player, so that player 1 scores + 30, player 2 scores 0, and player 3 scores – 30. If you add these three scores together, you will always, and again by definition, get a total of 0.

Let’s say that our three players then play a second hand, in which player 1 gains 53 points, player 2 also gains 53 points, and player 3, again unlucky, gains only 23 points. The score for that hand will thus be + 10 for player 1, + 10 for player 2, and – 20 for player 3. These individual scores are now added to those from the first hand to yield the running, cumulative total: player 1 has + 40, player 2 has + 10, and player 3 has – 50. Note that this running total again, by definition, must add up to 0.

The extraordinary elegance (or rigor) of this system is now revealed. The running total continues to indicate the player’s deviation from an exactly average performance, and it does so in the precise ratios in which players will settle their debts at the end of play, since before commencing play, a fixed monetary value is assigned to a point. If our three players were to conclude their game after only two hands, the running total indicates that player 3 should pay player 2 a sum equivalent to 10 times the value assigned to a point, and pay to player 1 the value assigned to 40 points.

This scoring structure is common to many Tarot games. The thing that distinguishes Mitigati among them is that it commences with a bargaining phase, in which each player only receives part of her hand. On the basis of this partial hand, and based on their calculation of the likely outcome of a game played with the cards in their possession, all three players then negotiate by 'asking for' or 'offering' points. If they agree on their respective prospects (that is, if the three bids on the table add up to 0 at any point), then the deal is abandoned.

Much of the art of Mitigati therefore consists in avoiding playing when it is disadvantageous to do so.

The original account of all this in Five Wounds was less detailed than that provided above, but it nonetheless fell victim to the editor’s pen, with good reason. My original point was that Cuckoo’s preference for Mitigati revealed his approach to life, but that point was not made very efficiently or elegantly. The published version perhaps errs on the other side by not providing enough detail about Cuckoo's activities as a gambler. Readers who know nothing about cards will probably assume that he plays Poker. I actually had the ancestors of that game in mind – Primiero or Brag – but it does not much matter, since the description is so generic as to be applicable to any similar game of this type, and that now seems to me to be a weakness in the novel's worldbuilding.

There is, however, one remaining trace of the original account, in which Cuckoo, contemplating his own death, observes that:

When it happened, his face would dissolve into a final nothing. His open, unbreathing mouth would become an exactly average zero.

I remain fascinated by card games, which are a constantly evolving artform, but one with an open and continuous history, in which newer forms do not always displace their older variants. Like Cuckoo, I am fond of gambling metaphors, and I believe that card games offer the most sophisticated versions of these metaphors – but I no longer play Mitigati.

Five Wounds: Card Games, Part 1

Once upon a time, in another life, I was an expert on gambling in Venice, and on the history of card games in general. In the former capacity, I did a lot of original archival research, and I published an article on the subject in Past and Present, which is the only thing I’ve ever written that is cited on a regular basis (e.g. by Wikipedia). In the latter capacity, my ‘expertise’ was entirely second-hand, derived principally from works by David Parlett and Michael Dummett. Nonetheless, I was actually awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to write a book on the history of fortune (i.e. a book on how people have understood the concept of fortune, from a historical perspective), although in the event I got distracted in the archive by Gerolamo Vano, the protagonist of my first book, and I therefore wrote about him instead. 

From about 1995-98, I played a lot of obscure historical card games, many of them described by Parlett. One of Parlett’s great insights was to identify common motifs that recur across different card games, the rules of which can therefore be analysed comparatively as well as historically, as if all card games were derived from a common language or system of differences. Card games are therefore analogous to other aspects of popular culture, such as folk tales and songs, even though the ‘content’ of a card game is otherwise quite different to that of a folk narrative. Games can thereby be classified by reference to shared structural motifs, which the rules of any particular game rearrange and combine in various ways, in much the same way that folk tales and songs rearrange story motifs. Thus the common structural element that links all trick-taking games (‘tricksters’ as Parlett calls them, here meaning something quite different to the ‘tricksters’ of folk tales) manifests itself in different ways according to the other elements with which this basic motif is combined. In trickster games, a category that includes Whist and Bridge, one player leads with a card, and the other players ‘follow suit’ if possible (this is the origin of the metaphor). The highest card played from the opening suit wins the trick, unless it is ‘trumped’ by a card from a designated trump suit, which ranks higher than all the other suits. 

Whist and Bridge are both 'plain-trick' games (according to Parlett's classification), in which only the total number of tricks won counts, and the individual cards within the tricks are of no consequence after they have been played and captured by the winner of the trick. By contrast, many variant tricksters from continental Europe are 'point-trick' games, in which each individual card has an assigned numerical value, and the score for each player is calculated at the end of the hand by counting the value of all cards won by that player. This latter family of games includes the German classic Skat, and Picquet, once a very popular game all over Europe, including England. 

In Italy and elsewhere, Tarot cards are also used to play games – indeed, this was their original purpose, as Dummett's research has clearly demonstrated – and these games are always of the point-trick variety. In Tarot games, the famous named cards (Death, The Moon, etc., and The Bagatto, which features prominently in Five Wounds) are part of a permanent suit of trumps (or ‘triumphs’), which perform exactly the same function in play as the designated trump suit does in Whist or Bridge. The four suits with which English and American players are familiar (diamonds, hearts, spades and clubs) are derived from French models, but elsewhere in Europe, different suits are used. In Italy, standard packs of cards usually have the suits of Coins, Cups, Swords and Batons, which are only familiar in the Anglophone world from the Tarot (but in fact the Tarot suits derive from the 'normal' Italian pack, and not the other way round). The precise rendition of these suits, however, varies from region to region. In Spain, Switzerland and Germany, there are different suits again (for example, Germany has Leaves, Acorns, Hearts and Bells). The French suits probably originated as a visual simplification of the German, to facilitate printing, but they in turn were ‘translated’ from the Italian suits, the Italian pack being the oldest in Europe. 

An interesting aspect of the history and form of playing cards is that the images on the cards can also be analysed structurally, in terms of variation and recombination of repeated iconographic motifs, but this analysis is entirely independent from the mathematical analysis of the games played with the cards. The only obvious correlation between the iconography of the cards and the structure of the games is in the order of the court cards: so that Kings rank above Queens in play, and so on. Otherwise, as Dummett says of the Tarot pack: [T]he iconography of the cards had no bearing upon the purpose for which they were originally invented or used [i.e. to play games].  

[Discussion continues in the next post:]

Five Wounds: Cuckoo and Lacan's Mirror Phase

When I read the Icon Books title Introducing Lacan, I was struck by the description of Lacan's theory of the 'mirror phase', an elaboration of Freud's ideas on ego formation in the infant. The description corresponds exactly to (it mirrors?) the characterisation of Cuckoo in Five Wounds. Cuckoo is a man with no face, or rather a face made of wax, which he reshapes constantly in imitation of those whose identity he wishes to steal. He is also obsessed with his reflection, with which he can never fully identify.

Now here are some passages from Introducing Lacan (pp. 21-23):

The child identifies with an image outside himself, be it an actual mirror image or simply the image of another child. The apparent completeness of this image gives [him] a new mastery over the body. .... 'But all this at a price [says a picture of a child standing before a mirror in the Icon book]. If I am in the place of another child, when he's struck, I will cry. If he wants something, I'll want it too, because I am trapped in his place. I am trapped in an image fundamentally alien to me, outside me'. .... Lacan shows how this alienation in the image corresponds with the ego: the ego is constituted by an alienating identification, based on an initial lack of completeness in the body and nervous system.

There is a broader point here about how symbolism works: I mean symbolism in a general sense, rather than Lacan's more technical definition of what he calls the 'symbolic register', which for him complements the 'imaginary register' ('imaginary' from 'image'). For Lacan, language is the essential element that distinguishes the symbolic from the imaginary, so that in the symbolic register, the relation to the image will be structured by language (Introducing Lacan, p. 47). Cuckoo, by contrast, remains in the pre-linguistic, imaginary register, where the reflected image of his face cannot be described (in words or otherwise).

What I mean by 'symbolic' is rather the way in which Lacan's theory of the mirror phase describes an ongoing process (of ego formation) via an abstraction. It uses a single, signifying idea - the child looking at its own reflection - to stand for that broader process. The fictional character of Cuckoo then reverses that operation. I mean that Cuckoo's predicament takes Lacan's symbolic abstraction, and makes it both literal and definitive, so that it actually excludes other possible ways of understanding the nature of ego formation.

N.B. I am a big fan of the Icon Introducing series, which I am interested in for theoretical as well as pragmatic reasons: i.e. I am interested in how these unique attempts to present abstract ideas through a comic strip format work, beyond the information actually conveyed in any specific title. In this, they are natural successors to seventeenth-century emblem books. More on this in a future post perhaps ....

'Interpreting Dreams' by Sigmund Freud

Dreams feature prominently in Five Wounds, where they are prophetic messages, as they are in the Bible. 

I want to draw attention to the passage below on p. 300 of Freud's Interpreting Dreams (in the new translation by J. A. Underwood), referring to what Strachey had previously translated as 'overdetermination' in the dream-work, rendered by Underwood as 'multiple determination':

Each element of the dream-content turns out to be multiply determined - represented in the dream-thoughts several times. .... So I see what sort of relationship exists between dream-content and dream-thoughts: not only are the elements of the dream determined several times by dream-thoughts: individual dream-thoughts are also represented in the dream by several elements.

No doubt the same principle underlies all imaginative writing, as Freud states explicitly on p. 279:

Like every neurotic symptom, in fact (like dream itself, which is capable of repeated interpretation, at a deeper and deeper level - even requires it if the dream in question is to be understood), every genuine poetic creation will also have proceeded from more than one motive and more than one stimulus in the poet's mind and admit of more than one interpretation.

The principle of multiple determination is, however, particularly useful for interpreting internal relationships between textual and visual elements in a multi-modal text, such as Five Wounds, which also (perhaps not coincidentally) includes numerous accounts of dreams.

In fact, I didn't read Interpreting Dreams while composing Five Wounds. I should have - and I even bought a copy at the time, but it lay unread on my shelves while I was revising the novel. The role of dreaming in Five Wounds is therefore influenced more by early modern ideas on prophecy and divination. In fact, it was one of Freud's major insights that the meaning of dreams could be found in the dreamer's past rather than her future (p. 636):

For it is from the past that dream springs - in every sense. Granted, even the age-old belief that dreams show us the future is not wholly without truth-content. By showing us a wish as having been fulfilled, dream does in fact lead us into the future; however, the future that the dreamer takes as present is moulded by the indestructible wish into a mirror of that past.

As an additional point, I note that Interpreting Dreams uses a metaphor I thought I'd invented for the introduction to the 'The Art of Grief' (an autobiographical essay that provides several unattributed quotations in Five Wounds, and therefore relates to the novel as latent content relates to manifest content in a dream). On pp. 508-9 of Interpreting Dreams, Freud writes (in a variation of the archaeological metaphor for analysis of which he was so fond):

Like dreams, [daydreams] are wish-fulfilments; like dreams, they are largely based on the impressions of childhood experiences; like dreams, they enjoy a certain relaxation of censorship as regards their creations. Looking closely at how they are put together, one becomes aware of how the wish-motive that operates in their production, seizing the material of which they are constructed, has jumbled that material up, rearranged it and assembled it to form a fresh whole. To the childhood recollections to which they hark back, they stand in something like the same relationship as some of Rome's baroque palaces stand to the classical ruins whose columns and dressed stones provided the materials for their reconstruction in modern forms.

I would argue that in it, the unconscious is structured, not like a language (as Lacan famously insisted), or like an image (as Freud states explicitly within Interpreting Dreams), but rather, like a comic strip – or an illustrated novel.

Five Wounds: The Proverbs Sequence in 'A Meeting of Minds'

The only scene in which all five protagonists of Five Wounds are in the same place at the same time occurs in the chapter 'A Meeting of Minds'. On this momentous occasion, they all spout banal proverbs at one another. The implication is that they do so in a quasi-trance-like state, perhaps under the hypnotic influence of a divine voice that intermittently interrupts them with the refrain 'MeNe MeNe TeKeL UPHARSIN'. They speak as follows.  

1 ‘MeNe, MeNe, TeKeL, UPHARSIN,’ the voice said. 

2 ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ Crow said. 

3 ‘Freedom exists only in the kingdom of dreams,’ Gabriella said. 

4 ‘Give a dog a bad name and hang him,’ Cur said. 

5 ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ Cuckoo said. 

6 ‘Every bird thinks its own nest fine,’ Magpie said. 

7 ‘MeNe, MeNe, TeKeL, UPHARSIN,’ the voice said. 

8 ‘One must howl with the wolves,’ Cur said. 

9 ‘Better to be a knave than a fool,’ Magpie said. 

10 ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover,’ Cuckoo said. 

11 ‘The devil can quote scripture for his own ends,’ Gabriella said. 

12 ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ Crow said. 

13 ‘MeNe, MeNe, TeKeL, UPHARSIN,’ the voice said. 

14 ‘The cowl does not make the monk,’ Cuckoo said. 

15 ‘Love me, love my dog,’ Cur said. 

16 ‘Either Caesar, or nothing,’ Crow said. 

17 ‘Tell me who your friend is, and I’ll tell you who you are,’ Magpie said. 

18 ‘A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wise man,’ Gabriella concluded. 

This passage is illustrated by a plate, which is reproduced below.

There are several things going on in this image, which also relates to another plate, Initiation, but it receives its immediate textual justification from another passage in 'A Meeting of Minds': Crow imagined all the heads in the room separated from their bodies and floating in jars, dumbly, waiting for the inscription of ulterior motives upon them. 

Obviously the particular proverbs that each character 'chooses' to declaim tell us who they are, but the precise sequence is also important, and relates to the plate. The sequence breaks into three groups of five, within which each character speaks once (if we remove the three interjections of the disembodied voice, which are null characters in this interpretation). If we assign a letter to each protagonist according to the initial order in which they speak, and break up the sequence accordingly, it looks like this: 

 a (Crow) 

b (Gabriella) 

c (Cur) 

d (Cuckoo) 

e (Magpie) 

c 

e 

d 

b 

a 

d 

c 

a 

e 

b 

If you take this list, and use it as if it is a set of vector instructions for a diagram - as if the sequence is actually a program, as I also described the language of heraldry in a previous post - then you get the following layout, which I have scanned in its three successive states, to clarify how it is constructed.

So, if you follow the sequence, and fill in every line accordingly, you progressively build up the figure of the pentacle, as illustrated in Plate 12 above (and in Plate 1, for those who think to make the comparison). 

Some lines are drawn through twice as the sequence doubles back on itself, but never in the same direction: for example, the fourth transition runs from Cuckoo to Magpie, and the seventh goes back the other direction from Magpie to Cuckoo, but the rule is that once we have traced both directions, we can't then return to this arm of the diagram. 

This isn't perfectly logical. In that case, every possible direction would be represented (as it is in the video trailer, using a different set of principles), and for every possible direction to be represented, there would have to be twenty lines rather than fourteen. But this was the best version I could create that also allowed me to construct the pentacle line by line, which is what I was trying to do. I also tried several other ways of arranging the sequence of speakers, but this was the only variant in which I managed to trace all fourteen vectors as unique and unrepeated. 

I used a pentacle as the basis for this diagram because it represents the five wounds of Christ in medieval iconography, notably in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I read as an undergraduate (and which features a talking, severed head!). 

As for the mathematical games, either you are the sort of person that thinks in these terms, or you aren't, in which case the whole exercise probably looks insane. But even if it is insane, it does relate to the worldview of the protagonists. In particular, Crow and Gabriella, who are the intellectuals of the group, and who therefore appear as the first two points in this sequence, are inclined to think in these terms. 

[Plate by Dan Hallett; illegible sketches by me.]

'Gouge Away' by the Pixies and the Alternative Endings to 'Five Wounds'

[Continues from the previous post:]  

To be chosen, to be condemned: two possible outcomes of the same process. .... The Trial and The Castle share a premise: that election and condemnation are almost indistinguishable. .... The main difference is this: condemnation is always certain, election always uncertain. Roberto Calasso, K. 

In the last post, we moved rather abruptly from Blade Runner to Robert Bresson. Here we make another abrupt cut to the song Gouge Away (jumping over Franz Kafka as we go), from which we shall return to the multiple endings of Five Wounds. 

 

Gouge Away is the final song on Doolittle, the breakthrough 1989 album by the Pixies, which Ben Sisario describes as:  

among the most violent pop albums ever recorded, if not in body count then in the starkness of its calamities. It features rape, mutilation of the eyes, vampirism, suffocation, smothering by tons of garbage, and the chaos of blind gunfire; for the punchline, everybody gets crushed to death. When not killing or maiming, the album turns to depraved sexual loathing and visions of apocalypse. ...

Sisario describes Gouge Away’s subject in the following terms (I quote his discussion at length because there is little I can add to it):  

The song is another bloody biblical adaptation, this one the story of Samson and Delilah from Judges 16. .... The story mingles sex and politics on a small scale with gigantic divine retribution, as Samson the seduced and ruined becomes Samson the instrument of God’s fury. [Songwriter Charles] Thompson’s 100-words-or-less summary: “Big strong Samson, toughest guy in town, partying with the Philistines – he’s got this Achilles’ heel thing, you know, with his hair. Somehow he lets some girl [the prostitute Delilah] know what’s up. That’s how the Philistines capture him. She goes in and cuts his hair. He becomes weak. God takes his strength away from him. There he is, chained, his eyes gouged out. Made a mockery by the pagans, you know. Chained there to the pillars. He asks God for strength one more time, to avenge these sinners. Pulls the columns in, causes the building to collapse on everybody. Pretty great story.” .... The recurring chorus suggests that all along Samson knows what’s coming to him. It’s no surprise. .... ‘It’s a taunt,” Thompson says. “Go ahead, have your fun. Gouge away, because something’s going to happen. No one here gets out alive.” Retribution rocks: Chained to the pillars A three-day party I break the walls And kill us all With holy fingers In the Bible, of course, Samson really does mean “kill us all” – he knows that he only has one chance to get back at those nasty Dagon-worshippers, and offers God the kind of prayer that might come from John J. Rambo. “And Samson said, ‘Let me die with the Philistines.’ And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life” (Judges 16: 30).  

[Quotations from Doolittle by Ben Sisario.] 

The world conjured by the lyrics and the sound of Doolittle is one familiar to me (I also listened to albums by Larry Norman, the Christian songwriter whose slogan ‘Come on pilgrim’ was used as the title for the Pixies’ first release). Here I want to draw out the relevance of the Samson story for the two alternative ending(s) of Five Wounds, and to relate this story back to the concept of the deus ex machina. 

Election and condemnation are almost indistinguishable. Samson invokes both: his divine revelation is an act of destruction. This story reveals (or perhaps hides) an essential truth: Forgiveness, like judgement, is always violent. It destroys the coherence and autonomy of everything it touches. I conceived the two endings of Five Wounds in these terms. The 'happy ending' is only possible because of an act of narrative violence comparable to that invoked by Samson, an arbitrary event that brings the fictional world crashing down around the ears of the protagonists because its occurrence violates a fundamental rule, a rule that - so we have been led to believe - is necessary for this fictional world to make sense at all. 

In Five Wounds, this event is not obviously catastrophic (unlike the mass murders that occur just before the book's climax, which are perhaps a more obvious comparison for Samson's apotheosis). Indeed, the final event hardly happens at all, the narrative barely acknowledges it. It is described only by the last sentence in the book, because nothing can continue to exist after it has taken place. Are you willing to pay Samson's price for a happy ending? Are you willing to bring the temple down around yourself by invoking the deus ex machina? Are you willing to be judged, or to be forgiven? You have to make a choice.

'Blade Runner' by Ridley Scott, and The Cinema of Robert Bresson

My novel, Five Wounds, has two alternative, and mutually-exclusive, conclusions. One is a ‘happy’ ending, and the other is a ‘not-so-happy’ ending. In the next two posts, I’m going to discuss some of the implications of using multiple endings, and of imposing a happy ending on a story that does not seem to support such an interpretation.

There are several precedents for alternative endings in literature, most notably perhaps The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, but the most obvious example from my own personal artistic canon is actually a film: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. In this case, the two alternative endings are never present together in any single iteration of the film, but rather belong to two different ‘cuts’: the initial commercial release, which imposed an explanatory voiceover throughout, and a happy ending, and the subsequent ‘Director’s Cut’, which removed both. The latter did not, in fact, ‘change’ the ending as such: it just removed from the first version the final couple of minutes; but, in doing so, it radically altered the tone of the film.

SPOILERS FOR BLADE RUNNER

Above is the ending of the initial release. The Director's Cut simply stops instead at about 0:12, and removes everything that follows.

Having seen the initial version of Blade Runner in the 80s, and then the Director’s Cut on its release in the early 90s, there was some debate amongst my friends as to whether the revision actually constituted an improvement. We were all familiar with the story, but would first-time viewers have any idea what was going on without the voiceover? It not only clarified events; it also clarified Deckard’s role as protagonist. Without it, he was a much more morally ambiguous character. Indeed, everything was murkier and more confusing.

In the video above, Frank Darabont puts the case for removing the voiceover, but it was also clear that the original ending was an arbitrary addition, not least from the contemptuous way in which Harrison Ford intones the relevant voiceover text, as if he can barely bring himself to say the words. But for some of us it was necessary to relieve the unmitigated gloom of the film up until that point. The original ending was like opening a window onto Scott’s fictional world, and letting light enter into it from outside.

The original version of Blade Runner is a classic example of a deus ex machina ending. Deus ex machina literally means ‘god out of the machine’. It originally suggested the introduction of divine intervention as a story device to resolve intractable plot complications. The phrase refers to the stage machinery that was used to frame such divine characters in theatres, where they descended (literally) from above, and the implication is that this kind of resolution was entirely alien to the logic of cause and effect that governs the succession of events within a realistic narrative mode. The gods descend from above: that is, from outside the sphere of the story itself. Thus the deus ex machina is a cheat, by definition, and the last resort of a desperate writer. While modern stories rarely resort to divine intervention, they do introduce such related, arbitrary devices as outrageous coincidence, or, in the case of the initial release of Blade Runner, the hitherto unsuspected revelation that Rachel, the android replicant with whom Deckard has fallen in love, is ‘special’: that, unlike all other models, she has an open-ended lifespan.

This is a deus ex machina move because absolutely nothing in the story thus far has prepared us for this eventuality. Indeed, the rules that give this fictional world its integrity would seem to actively preclude this possibility; and thus the revelation destroys the credibility of everything that precedes it. This impression is only reinforced by the visuals in the tacked-on ending, which reveals vistas of unspoiled nature, whose existence is similarly inconceivable in the polluted city that has been so meticulously constructed over the previous two hours (the final longshots were, in fact, borrowed from outtakes of Kubrick’s The Shining).

The whole concept of the deus ex machina implies a secular world view, in which divine intervention can never be the real subject of a drama, and so its introduction is always evidence of a failure of human imagination. But what if you actually want to say something about the nature of divine grace? By definition, it is arbitrary; by definition, it violates the laws of cause and effect; by definition, it is unmotivated and unforeseeable. Its true manifestations never provide closure. Rather, they radically destabilise narrative logic. That is what is implied by a conversion experience: that the entire story is rewritten retrospectively.

And this brings me to the films of Robert Bresson, which almost always conclude with some kind of deus ex machina. Or rather, the ending invokes divine intervention without dramatising it explicitly, as in The Trial of Joan of Arc. God does not actually appear; the contradiction is not actually resolved. It is up to the viewer to complete the story by making the requisite leap of faith (or not, according to one's personal beliefs). In Bresson’s earlier films, this invocation is presented as, generally, successful. Whether or not we choose to believe in it, the protagonists of his films experience that transformation as real.

This is a kind of negative theology. God is not a presence in Bresson’s films. He does not appear as a character, wheeled in from above, and therefore inevitably trivialised. He is instead manifest by His absence. He is arbitrary in cinematic terms as well as in narrative terms: that is, he is a non-diegetic effect, and as such, is associated with similarly non-diegetic cinematic effects, notably music, which in Bresson is often confined to the climax of the film.

This sounds like a radical Augustinian, Protestant theology, and Bresson’s background was Catholic, but perhaps of a Jansenist persuasion: that is, from a group within Catholicism that emphasised the unmotivated nature of divine grace, and the consequent inability of man to ever earn it. This allies him with Pascal, among others, for whom divine grace can never be an effect with a human (or a scientific) cause, and thus divine intervention can never be necessary in narrative terms.

In Bresson’s later films, this negative theology is taken to its pessimistic conclusion. These films are about failed attempts to invoke transcendence, most obviously in Lancelot du Lac, which begins with the return of Arthur’s knights from their unsuccessful quest for the Holy Grail. Here the Grail is, like the ritual of communion (itself, in Catholic theology, a miraculous, inexplicable transformation), a kind of metonymic substitute for the Body of Christ, and thus a symbol of divine immanence. But in the world of Lancelot du Lac, as in Bresson’s subsequent films, the divine presence is always out of reach.

[Continues in the next post:]

Five Wounds: Dogs

 

Dogs occupy a prominent and sinister role in Five Wounds, partly because of events in the autobiographical backstory to the novel. But there are other reasons for this canine presence. Dogs are ubiquitous in modern Venice, which is actually quite baffling given the lack of parks in the city. Hence Venetian streets are notoriously littered with dog shit, which no-one ever bothers to clean up. Considering this, I imagined a variation on Kipling's animal tales ('How the cat got his tail', 'How the camel got his hump', etc.), in which a child might ask her father, 'Why are there so many dogs in Venice, daddy, and why are they so spoilt?', and the answer might be, 'Well, daughter, once upon a time, the dogs ruled this city, and they still have their ancestral privileges, although they have no real power any more'.

Below I review a menagerie of fictional and literary dogs, many of whom were barking away down in my subconscious as I wrote. I am just listing the ones that come immediately to mind now as I write. I didn't ever make a comprehensive list, and I omit here several relevant examples already mentioned in Dan's post about the Black Dog.

The most explicit historical reference to dogs in Five Wounds is to a passage from the Hierogylphics of Horapollo, which is quoted by Crow in the chapter 'A Meeting of Minds', as follows (I may have tweaked the text slightly to fit the context; I don't have the original in front of me):

When the Egyptians wish to indicate a scribe, or a prophet, or an embalmer, or the spleen, or a judge, they draw the hieroglyph of a dog. A scribe, since he who wishes to become an accomplished scribe must bark continually and be fierce and show favours to none, just like dogs. And a prophet, because the dog looks intently beyond all other beasts upon the images of the gods, like a prophet. And an embalmer, because he looks upon the bodies which he has taken care of naked and dissected. And the spleen, since the dog alone among other animals has a very light spleen. If death of madness overcomes him, it happens because of his spleen. And a judge, because as the dog gazes intently upon the images of the gods, so the judge of ancient times contemplated the king in his nakedness.

Horapollo's treatise is a neo-Platonic interpretion of Egyptian hieroglyphs from the early Christian era. It was very influential in the Renaissance, but it is based upon almost entirely erroneous premises, a fact that was not proved conclusively until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in the nineteenth century. Horapollo therefore fits the theme of interpretation / misinterpretation that runs through Five Wounds, which is why I was reading the treatise in the first place, but then I came across the passage on dogs, which could be made to fit my five protagonists.

Other dog references are less openly acknowledged, like the famous last line from Kafka's The Trial, 'Like a dog', which is quoted above in a comic-strip version of the novel, adapted by David Mairowitz and Chantal Montellier. The phrase is Joseph K.'s final reflection upon himself, and upon his treatment at the hands of the law, as the executioner's knife descends. Here the dog is a figure of the abject, of the pariah, who is excluded from human society, like the outlaw of medieval legend, whose figure is the wolf.

Several dogs in Dante's Inferno are rendered below in William Blake's illustrations. The first image is of the three-headed Cerberus, the guardian of the underworld from classical mythology (Dante's text, like Five Wounds, jumbles its mythological and historical frames of reference). In the Inferno, Cerberus torments the souls of the gluttonous, whose fate is elucidated in Dorothy L. Sayers' commentary, as follows (p. 107):

The Gluttonous: The surrender to sin which began with mutual indulgence leads by an imperceptible degradation to solitary self-indulgence. Of this kind of sin, the Gluttons are chosen as the image. Here is no reciprocity and no communication; each soul grovels alone in the mud, without heeding his neighbours - "a sightless company", Dante calls them. .... [Cerberus] is the image of uncontrolled appetite; the Glutton, whose appetite preyed upon people and things, is seen to be, in fact, the helpless prey on which that appetite gluts itself.



Later in the Inferno, Dante and Virgil travel through the Wood of the Suicides, in which the souls of the inhabitants are imprisoned in sterile trees. The trees cannot speak, unless their branches are broken, whereupon they bleed, and they can whistle through the coagulating blood, until it clots, when they are once again condemned to silence. Also trapped in the Wood of the Suicides are the Profligates, who run through it, pursued eternally by black dogs (aha!), and in fleeing, they tear the branches from the bleeding trees as they pass.



In the Inferno, dogs are therefore associated with the gluttonous and the profligate, and the latter group is also associated with suicide: All these ideas can also be linked to the theme of addiction.

At the beginning of the Inferno, dogs are also associated with avarice via the figure of one of the three beasts that terrify Dante in canto 1 (see illustration below): the She-Wolf, who can only be vanquished by the prophesied Greyhound, the Master-hound. Here is Sayers again on this image (p. 75):

The Beasts [Leopard, Lion and She-Wolf]: These are the images of sin. They may be identified with Lust, Pride, and Avarice respectively, or with the sins of Youth, Manhood, and Age; but they are perhaps best thought of as the images of the three types of sin .... The Greyhound has been much argued about. I think it has both an historical and a spiritual significance. Historically, it is perhaps the [p. 76] image of some hoped-for political saviour who should establish the just World-Empire. Spiritually, the Greyhound, which has the attributes of God (“wisdom, love, and power”), is probably the image of the reign of the Holy Ghost on earth – the visible Kingdom of God for which we pray in the Lord’s Prayer.



The following passage from Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 152, refers to Albrecht Durer's engraving of Melancholy (which features a sleeping - no doubt dreaming - dog), and which 'portrays the dangers of excessive study', a highly relevant theme for Gabriella and Crow:

One of the properties assembled around Durer's figure of Melancholy is the dog. The similarity between the condition of the melancholic, ... and the state of rabies, is not accidental. According to ancient tradition 'the spleen is dominant in the organism of the dog'. This he has in common with the melancholic. If the spleen, an organ believed to be particularly delicate, should deteriorate, then the dog is said to lose its vitality and become rabid. In this respect it symbolizes the darker aspect of the melancholy complexion. On the other hand the shrewdness and tenacity of the animal were borne in mind, so as to permit its use as the image of the tireless investigator and thinker. 'In his commentary on this hieroglyph Piero Valeriano says explicitly that the dog which "faciem melancholicam prae se ferat" [bears a melancholy face] would be the best at tracking and running'. In Durer's engraving [of Melancholy], especially, the ambivalence of this is enriched by the fact that the animal is depicted asleep: bad dreams come from the spleen, but prophetic dreams are also the prerogative of the melancholic.

 

Coincidentally, Dan also discusses Durer's Melancholy in relation to another illustration for Five Wounds, although it was not a reference that either of us ever mentioned to each other.

Another source I came across in the British Library in 2006, while I was researching Goya, is an English translation by Abraham Fleming of a Latin treatise by Johannes Caius, On English Dogs, first published in 1576. The following passage is from p. 17:

Of the dog, called the Thievish dog; in Latin, Canis furax.

The like to that whom we have rehearsed, is the Thievish Dog, which at the mandate and bidding of his master fleereth and leereth in the night: hunting conies by the air, which is leavened with their savour; and conveyed to the sense of smelling by the means of the wind blowing towards him. During all which space of his hunting he will not bark, lest he should be prejudicial to his own advantage. And thus watching and snatching in course as many conies as his master will suffer him; and beareth them to his master’s standing. The farmers of the country, and uplandish dwellers, call this kind of dog a Night Cur; because he hunteth in the dark.

I took one of the running heads in Five Wounds from this passage: 'Leavened With Their Savour'. Interpreted in the context of the novel, this passage might also be a way of linking the character of Cur, the dog-man, to that of Magpie, the nocturnal thief.

Finally, the barking of dogs represents the idea of non-sense or 'noise' (as opposed to 'signal' in information theory), as in the following passage from A. S. Byatt's Babel Tower, in which an expert witness testifies in court during an obscenity trial that serves as the novel's climax. The book on trial here is Babbletower, an allegory written by one of the characters within Byatt's novel, excerpts of which interrupt the frame narrative, along with several other competing, interpolated texts:

Well, let us start with the title. La Tour Bruyarde translates as the noisy, or shouting, or howling tower – the word ‘bruyard’ suggests the noise made by hound dogs. It is an image of the Tower of Babel which was constructed to displace God from Heaven, and was punished for its presumption by having a spirit of discord sent amongst its members, so that their languages were confused, they could no longer understand each other.