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.

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.]

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.

Five Wounds: The Making of

Following on from the previous post, this one has more detail on the collaborative process involved in the creation of Five Wounds.

Dan and I met in Cambridge in 2001. I was a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge University. Dan was studying for a degree in illustration, and was working in a comic shop, where he took my order for a copy of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Here are some other salient facts: 

1) Our collaboration works entirely by e-mail correspondence. Since 2002, we have only been in the same place once: in London in 2006, when we spent most of the afternoon walking around trying to find a screening of Mirrormask by Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman. We failed. 

2) Dan is probably the only person capable of interpreting my weird scripts. Scientific research has proven that they cause migraines and disorientation in other illustrators. 

3) Dan created the illustrations for my first book, Pistols! Treason! Murder!, which is about a real-life Venetian spy, who was executed for perjury in 1622. These illustrations are all in the style of seventeenth-century allegorical woodcuts. 

4) As a child, my bedroom was full of half-assembled model aeroplanes; Dan’s was full of insects in jars. This seems somehow significant. 

Dan and I began with a shared interest in comics, which offered a set of guidelines for how it might be possible to work together. Mainstream comics companies operate by means of a highly specialised division of labour, not only between writer and artist, but between writer, penciller, inker, colourist and letterer, et al – a system that was probably inspired by the factory assembly lines of Henry Ford rather than by any sense of its creative potential. The goal was to maximise efficiency for an industry in which the turnover of product was very rapid (weekly or monthly), and insofar as there was a coherent creative vision involved, it was arguably that of the editor, whose role in the process was analogous to that of a Hollywood producer. 

Even so, one may adopt analogous, if rather less rigid, divisions of labour for reasons other than industrial efficiency: for example, a conviction that collaboration, if entered into in the right spirit, will inevitably increase a work’s range and power. It was important that Dan was trained as an illustrator – that is, in a discipline that accepts collaboration as a sine qua non of its existence – because the goal for any collaborator should not be to protect the integrity of their individual contribution; rather, it should be to serve the story and the book as a whole. 

For me, faced with the task of writing a script for Dan to work from, the central question was, how do you describe a picture that doesn’t exist yet? And how do you relate that description meaningfully to other descriptions of other pictures that also don’t exist yet? The ancient rhetorical convention of ekphrasis suggests some historical answers to this question, but more recent practical help was available via several examples of published scripts for comics. 

The earliest set of illustrations created for Five Wounds were the plates, which are included in the printed book as separate pages at the end of several chapters. I wrote hundreds of words of instructions to Dan for each of these. Below, for example, is the script for what is now the first of these plates, Initiation, and which concerns a character called Cur. Dan had of course already read the novel when he received this script, but for blog readers, some additional contextual information might be helpful. 

In Initiation, then, Cur has been kidnapped by dogs, and is being introduced to their group in a quasi-magical ritual. Also of relevance is an earlier incident, in which chickens were killed by the dogs as one of them bit three fingers from the hand of Cur’s father. In my script, both the chickens and the fingers are transposed to the later scene, and the fingers also ‘stand for’ three of the other protagonists of the book, who are identifiable by coded references to heraldic colours superimposed on the different fingers.

Hence this script instructs Dan to synthesise a number of scenes from the written narrative, and also to make certain ideas explicit visually that remain implicit in the text.  

SCRIPT FOR INITIATION 

A straight down overhead shot and a ‘non-literal’ pic. A wailing, crying baby Cur is lying on his back at its centre (relatively small within the frame). Underneath him are the internal lines of a pentangle in white. It will be clear from another illustration that each of the points around the pentagram stands for one of the book’s five protagonists. The sequence (running clockwise and starting from the upper left) begins with Gabriella, then Cur (the subject of this image, whose nominal assigned place is at the apex of the pentagram), then Cuckoo, Magpie and Crow. 

The left arm of baby Cur is reaching out, grasping in the direction of Cuckoo’s point on the pentagram. Around baby Cur, the pile of overlapping, slaughtered chickens will be laid in a circle along an implied outer circle, to convert the pentagram into a pentacle. Outside this circle are three severed fingers (the middle, the third and the little respectively). You should over-size them dramatically; that is, put them at a different scale to that used for Cur and the chickens (this is not apparent on my sketch). You’ll probably also need to exaggerate the nails and possibly the joints to make it clear what they are – maybe use a blood stain where they end too. 

The fingers are to be cross-hatched in the appropriate heraldic tones: checks for black Cuckoo, towards whose finger Cur’s left hand seems to be grasping, while his right hand lies open and passive in the direction of where Gabriella’s shield would implicitly be; a blank white third finger for Magpie, and a dotted little finger for Crow. Cur’s feet appear to be kicking against the latter two as he wails and cries. 

The severed fingers should be curled over and placed casually in roughly the right place, but not geometrically aligned or pointing inwards toward the centre. 

Cur’s tears could be highlit as blank white trails to contrast with a full black trail of blood down his face that is placed at the central point in the shaving scene pic. 

Outside the first circle of chickens that occupies the position of the pentacle circle is a second, looser circle of intertwined dogs, of different breeds and in different postures. They don’t all have to be huge and grim and black, but no Yorkshire terriers or Chihuahuas please. Their coats should be shaded using different ‘pasted on’ corruption effects (one for each dog). 

These two circles (the inner chicken one and the doggy outer one) foreshadow the two circles of the exploding palace illustration (which in turn reference Tintoretto’s Paradise in the ducal palace). 

Reduce the outer circle to four partial arcs, one in each corner. The dogs in the circle are not seen realistically from overhead, but from varying partial viewpoints, whatever is most useful to get an intertwining effect. Lots of emphasis on teeth and tongues please. 

Fill any empty space with ‘effects’, which here should emphasize fluid, flowing, overlapping stains and discolourations: that is, they should resemble water damage, since Cur recalls this experience in later life by way of a dream of drowning.  

I also drew a crude storyboard sketch to accompany this script, which I reproduce below (click to enlarge).

Since putrefaction and decay are major themes in the book, many of the Plates are marked with signs of their own physical degradation. The term ‘effects’ in the script therefore refers to these signs, which, in this case, Dan created using coffee and tea spilled on paper. Can you predict what the finished image might look like on the basis of the script above and the sketch? This was Dan’s task: to first imagine that image, and then to create it. Below is the result.

 

Above: Plate 1, Initiation, from Five Wounds (click to enlarge)

Some images went through several drafts, not because of any deficiencies in Dan's execution, but because I struggled to think clearly about what the proper relationship between image and text should be, or in what way precisely the image should embody broader themes from the book. 

Below, for example, are the initial instructions for what eventually became Magpie in the forest, followed by successive revisions of the image itself, the latter interspersed with selections from my e-mails to Dan. 

 SCRIPT FOR MAGPIE IN THE FOREST 

A track through a forest (Goya trees and shadows around Magpie).). A bat above, foreshadowing the incident with the first daguerreotype. We are looking at Magpie from the side and in long shot. He is holding a mirror reflecting the moon, the same mirror that Cuckoo holds in Plate 6, Cuckoo’s reflection, but Magpie is much less dominant within the frame than Cuckoo is in Plate 6. 

Magpie is dwarfed within the skeletal, snowy landscape of trees, which are layered and compressed on different planes. He is almost lost or tangled up among the tree branches, which overlap in front of him and partially obscure him, but his head, cloak and mirror remain clearly visible, as do the sky, stars and moon in the upper third of the frame. He appears within a small break in the trees (see reference pix from Blankets and Black Hole for this effect). 

The moon should be absolutely realistic and as detailed as possible, but ‘solarized’ at its upper edge as the black sky bleeds off into ‘deteriorating daguerreotype’ effects. The moon in the mirror is miniaturized but clearly recognizable. The snow falling and in drifts between the bare tree outlines allows you to rhyme the dappled effect on Magpie’s face with black and white tonal variations in the landscape. 

Compare the Blankets pix for how to show snow, dark forest and highlit figures within. There are also various good dark forest shots in Black Hole (without snow). I attach a fantastic snow effect scene from Sin City, although note that a lot of Miller's effects rely on his omission of half-tones: i.e. everything is either pure black or pure white in each frame, which is a quite different technique to that I want for the Plates, where the tonal range is longer and flattens off towards the two extremes.  

Try and keep some the textural detail of the folds of the cloak, but have the cloak down instead of up.

 

Plate 10: Version 1

E-mail dated 18 May 2006: We need a daguerreotype version of the moon, not a drawn one. For the 'solarized' effect, you may need to create a smoother texture than is possible with pen and ink, using cloning in Photoshop with a dull metallic dark grey. Anyway, see what you can do. Also, too chiaroscuro. Flatten out the midtones by adding a background layer of mid-tone grey in Photoshop.

 

Plate 10: Version 2

E-mail dated 2 June 2006: Lose the bat and close up the cross-hatching where it currently is. Also, I think we need a bit more snow, especially in the central and lower areas, where it is more or less absent. You could have another go at getting an effect whereby the snow is both a distinct layer ‘on top of’ the picture space, but also continues inside the picture space and blends into a corrupt background, although I appreciate that this may not be possible. 

In addition, Magpie's left hand (the one not holding the mirror) needs greater definition of form. It is currently a bit amorphous and not very hand-like.  

E-mail dated 2 June 2006: It took me a while to register that your moon is rotated ninety degrees. The effect of this is actually rather interesting. It is completely 'wrong' from an astronomical point of view, since the moon is never lit from below but always runs through its phases along the vertical axis, and in your version its features are also all in the wrong place (for an astronomer, it will be like seeing the globe tilted ninety degrees on its axis). However, I think that perhaps it's a nice way of signalling on a subliminal level that there's something not quite right or logical about the world of FW. Everything is a bit skew-wiff - as the moon is - so in that sense it's 'right', and I'm inclined to leave it alone.

 

Plate 10: Version 3

E-mail dated 8 June 2006 The grey layer is (as I read it) 'behind' the black outlines of the trees and the sky above. Add some grain / white specks, etc. to it – another different representation of snow – but this should not interfere with the black ink that makes up the tree shapes and shadow outlines or with the black sky and the moon above. 

If we divide the picture up into blocks and layers of tone and completely ignore the perspective and recession, it breaks down into: 

Foreground / top layer: drifting snow and moon 

Midground / middle layer: sky, black outlines of trees and their shadows below, Magpie in middle 

Background / bottom layer: layer of amorphous grey tone 'underneath' the drawn outlines (most clearly visible as such in the space immediately surrounding Magpie) - to which add white specks / grainy interference. 

Does this make sense? Hopefully it does. 

There were some further adjustments to the moon in the top left. The final image therefore looks like this.

 

Plate 10: Final Version

As a final twist in the production process, the written scene that originally inspired Magpie in the forest was actually removed from the manuscript during the structural edit. However, since I liked the image so much, I invented an entirely new scene, whose sole purpose was to provide a textual justification for the continued existence of this plate. Indeed, I frequently rewrote sections of the novel in response to Dan’s work, because the illustrations often clarified ideas that were insufficiently developed in the text, or brought things to my attention that had not occurred to me during writing. 

In retrospect, the level of detail in the scripts I wrote for the plates, as sampled above, seems excessive, although the obsession with control betrayed by this accumulation of detail had interesting aesthetic consequences. All the plates feel cramped and constrained, lacking in spontaneity (natural enough since many of them went through several drafts), but this feeling accurately reflects the world that they describe and the state of mind of the characters they depict. 

In later phases of our collaboration, however, when Dan and I had both gained confidence, my instructions were far less prescriptive. The feel of the later illustrations is therefore quite different from that of the plates, which helps to vary the tone and rhythm of the book’s visual elements. Some examples of these later scripts and illustrations can be found on Dan’s blog, where he discusses their creation from his own perspective: Jean in the Jar, The Black Dog, and The Bagatto. 

I look forward to seeing where our collaboration will take us next.

How do you edit an image?

During the production of Pistols! Treason! Murder! and Five Wounds, a curious discrepancy was apparent. The text was subject to minute editorial supervision. Every word choice and aspect of the storytelling had to be justified. By contrast, Dan and I received very few critical comments on the illustrations.

One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that Dan and I work the illustrations over thoroughly before anyone else sees them: that is, we edit them ourselves. Whereas I need an outside perspective on the text, which is supplied by the publisher, for the images Dan and I provide that perspective for each other.

In practice, therefore, editing an image might mean changing the composition so that so that it exemplifies broader themes that run through the book as a whole. In other cases, we adjust stray details so that nothing detracts from the overall effect: as below in the transition between the first draft of what is now Plate 2, Cur's first murder, in Five Wounds, and the amended, final version underneath.

These two kinds of adjustment - to the underlying structure of the image and to particular details - correspond roughly to the structural edit and the copy edit of the manuscript. In other words, you edit an image according to much the same principles that apply when you edit text.

Five Wounds: An Anti-Historical Novel, Part 2

[Historians] have always … written in the mode of magical realism. In strictly formal and stylistic terms, a text of social history is very closely connected to those novels in which a girl flies, a mountain moves, the clocks run backwards, and where (this is our particular contribution) the dead walk among the living.  

Carolyn Steedman, Dust, p. 150  

This was a psalter in whose margins was delineated a world reversed with respect to the one to which our senses have accustomed us. As if at the border of a discourse that is by definition the discourse of truth, there proceeded, closely linked to it, through wondrous allusions in aenigmate, a discourse in falsehood on a topsy-turvy universe, in which dogs flee before the hare, and deer hunt the lion.  

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, p. 69  

In an earlier post, I described Five Wounds as an ‘anti-historical novel’. It relates to early modern Venice, the subject of my historical research, in much the same way as the marginalia in an illuminated manuscript relate to the sacred text that they accompany: except that in this case the sacred text, which alone justifies the marginalia, is absent or has been rewritten in a profane form. Here, then, the marginalia are promoted to the centre of attention, where they blasphemously assume the outward form of Scripture (I mean that the text is typeset in imitation of the Bible). 

In the quotation from Umberto Eco above, the topsy-turvy world in the margins is related to the central reality of Scripture through the lens of mockery. Mockery also has a central place in Five Wounds, but violence is an equally important organising principle. So the novel literally describes a violent world, in which mutilations and murders are commonplace, but that violence is not restricted to the events described in the plot. The novel’s mode of representation is also violent, in that it deliberately misrepresents historical sources: it forces them to say things that they did not intend. 

The action of Five Wounds is set in an unnamed city that is obviously a version of Venice, but is equally obviously not the historical Venice. Rather, it parodies selected aspects of that historical context, in a manner that sometimes draws upon the so-called ‘anti-myth’ of Venice, in which the Venetian state is portrayed as a corrupt, disguised tyranny rather than a virtuous, transparent republic (the anti-myth also underlies my first book Pistols! Treason! Murder!, which is a biography of a Venetian spy). In Five Wounds, there are also numerous garbled references to Venetian topography, including (notably) the Ghetto, which is here occupied by dogs, and is on the site of an abandoned foundry, this last taking up an etymological speculation about the origin of the word, ‘Ghetto’, and rendering it literally. If Five Wounds is set in several different historical periods simultaneously, as I suggested in that earlier post, then perhaps we might ask, Which, and in what proportion?

Much of the setting seems to be, roughly, mid-nineteenth century: dagurerreotypes, gas lighting, top hats. But some people wear eighteenth-century-type clothing. And the city's constitution parodies that of the Venetian republic, which ceased to exist in 1797. With regard to the book’s conceptual universe, there are references to theoretical arguments put forward by a variety of early modern thinkers, for example Machiavelli and Paracelsus; to early modern theories about the physiological origins of anger and rabies; to Neoplatonic debates on the meaning of hieroglyphs (which are garbled interpretations, based on erroneous premises); and so on. Moreover, a large painting of Paradise in the ducal palace, based on one created by Tintoretto (or his son and workshop) in the late sixteenth century, is newly painted and installed in the novel.

Similarly, some of the more complex illustrations (the plates, which appear at the end of selected chapters) incorporate photographic elements and textures into images that otherwise resemble etchings: that is, they superimpose two quite different image-making technologies.

This game of historical mix-and-match bears some resemblance to what anthropologists and cultural theorists call ‘bricolage’, a sort of ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude to culture, in which a world is made out of borrowed odds and ends, which are put to use without much interest in their original or intended function. Bricolage replaces the idea of misinterpretation with that of appropriation. Misinterpretation presupposes an original meaning that retains priority over all subsequent readings. It excludes unbelievers and heretics. By contrast, appropriation permits anything. It knows no sin. Its only law is, 'Do what thou wilt'. 

I remain committed to the idea of misinterpretation, if only because a world without sin - without laws - is profoundly boring. We are told that it is possible to deconstruct any literary text: to force it to the point of self-contradiction. But Five Wounds positively invites you to do this. It it does not really make sense, and in particular it does not make sense when considered from a historical point-of-view, but it is not even internally consistent. 

This superimposition of contradictory references is also apparent in the plot, which culminates with two alternative endings, a state of affairs that is foreshadowed throughout the book, especially in the illustrations. Thus the hand icon on the cover, which is inspired by an illustration from a seventeenth-century treatise on palmistry, presents to the viewer mutually exclusive readings: that the bearer will live long, and die young; that he will die by fire, and by drowning; and so on.

Above: the Five Wounds hand

This doubling  to a character named Cuckoo, who is, in certain respects, the central figure in the book. He is a gambler with a face made of wax, which he manipulates freely. It is his fate that is at stake in the two different endings, and he is therefore represented as doubled in several images, i.e. as a copy of himself. At the heart of this fictional world, then, there is a vacuum. Everything it requires to sustain stable meanings has been erased, or is ‘under erasure’ - simultaneously asserted and denied, like a phrase that is crossed out but still remains visible - a condition that is again alluded to in the person of Cuckoo, who is always represented in the illustrations with his face scratched out.

 

Above: Cuckoo the trickster

What is the point of all this? It is an attempt to explore the limits of historical explanation by violating all of its essential preconditions. It is also an exploration of the nature of interpretation. As such, Five Wounds opposes a book like The Da Vinci Code, which does not admit the possibility of error in interpretation. In The Da Vinci Code, this means this, and that means that; therefore this, with all the seductive inevitability of a false syllogism. In Five Wounds, mistakes are what drive the plot, or rather, the characters never know whether or not their interpretations are correct.

Even blasphemy admits of too much certainty. Self-contradiction is the only honest strategy.

[All illustrations are by Dan Hallett.]

Five Wounds: Archetypes

We often think of fairy tale characters in terms of archetypes, but many such characters – the werewolf, say – are now so over familiar that they have been tamed imaginatively. They have lost their teeth. One way around this problem is to retrace the genealogy of a particular figure, and return to its primitive prehistory rather than use its domesticated modern variant.

For example, Five Wounds features a character, Cur, who is not a werewolf, but is nonetheless animated by the same conflicts that drive the character type of the werewolf (human vs. animal, reason vs. instinct, free will vs. involuntary response). Cur is not affected by a full moon; nor is he ever physically transformed into an animal. Rather, he has a mutant strain of rabies. This links his condition to very old ideas about the physiological origin of anger, which was once thought to be caused by the heating of the blood. That’s why ‘in cold blood’ is still a synonym for ruthless premeditation, as opposed to reactive, spontaneous violence, which is by contrast ‘hot-blooded’. Anger was thought to make men brutish, and in particular to make them canine, so rabies was understood as an acute case of infectious anger in its most concentrated form. [1] 

 [1] These ideas are explained in more detail in Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance.

Five Wounds: Review in 'The View from Here'

The literary magazine The View From Here has just posted a review of Five Wounds, written by Paul Burman. Below is an extract. Dan and I also did a joint interview for them, which will be available in a few days.

Jonathan Walker’s delight in playing with words, names, images, extends to Dan Hallett's wonderful illustrations. There’s the sense that each picture adds extra detail to the story – beyond the words. Take, for instance, the description of the public servant’s half-eaten salami sandwich when Cur is receiving instructions for an assassination. The reader is invited to question exactly what the salami is constituted of and then presented with an illustration of the salami-bound pig in question feeding on the entrails of an earlier assassin's victim. Certainly a case of what goes around comes around.